The Utah Lake "stove-pipe" serpent seen by Bishop William Price near Goshen, Utah (1871)

The Utah Lake monster tradition runs from 1864 to 1921. It began with frightening stories. In 1864 Isaac Fox said he was chased to shore by an animal with "wicked, black eyes" and a head like a "vicious-looking hound." In August 1868 Henry Walker of Lehi described "a large snake" with "the head of a greyhound."

The region was in the grip of a lake monster craze. Joseph C. Rich had made his Bear Lake report in 1868. Then, in September 1870, the Dallin family, commercial fishermen from Springville, found the upper left part of a large skull. It had tooth sockets "the size of an ox's" and a "five-inch-long tusk."

1871. William Price was the Latter-day Saint bishop of Goshen, near the southwest end of the lake. He was travelling south on the road west of Utah Lake. With him rode C. G. Webb and a third man whose name was never recorded. It was a clear, calm day.

About one mile from shore, the men saw something in the water. It was moving in the same direction they were. Price described it plainly. "It had a snakish appearance and stood several feet out of the water like a section of a large stove pipe." He estimated it was about 60 feet long.

No one recorded its colour. Or its head. Or any sound. No one wrote down how long they watched. There were no tracks and no photographs. Only three men on a lakeside road, and an upright shape heading south.

The Deseret News printed Price's account and gave it guarded support. "Men, whom we would readily believe upon any other subject, have stated that they saw a monster, and have described it with a minuteness that has left their hearers but little foundation to dispute them."

The Daily Corinne Reporter disagreed. Corinne was a non-Mormon railroad town, and its paper had its own joke running about a monster in the Great Salt Lake. "The story invented by Bishop Price, that our monster has changed his abode to Utah Lake, is a sheer fabrication. The big fish was at Monument Point last Monday." It reads as editorial mockery, not evidence. Price himself was described as "generally thoughtful, levelheaded and moderate in outlook and opinion." The town of Price, Utah, and the Price River are named after "Bishop William Price of Goshen," who explored the area in 1869.

Historian D. Robert Carter, who retold the case in the Daily Herald in 2006, noted Ute traditions of "Pawapicts or Water Babies." He wrote that some monster stories were "blatantly false," while others came from people who seem to have believed they had seen strange animals.

Writing in the Cedar Valley Sentinel in 2025, Mike Kieffer weighed the possibilities. Logs. Reeds. Birds. Optical illusions. River otters. Native folklore reframed by settlers. He concluded the legend is probably sincere frontier folklore rather than an admitted hoax. The Dallin skull, for its part, was probably a fossil mastodon.

The sightings did not stop with Price. In 1921 Frank Grasteit and others, between Goshen and Mosida, reported something "about four feet long, black in color, and shaped like a seal." In 2000 James Chase at Pelican Point described a creature "a little larger than a 'barrel drum'" and "shimmering silver." Yet the bishop's stove pipe, seen by three men on a clear, calm day, remains the best-attested sighting of them all.