The Lake Manitou Monster (Meshekenabek), Fulton County, Indiana, 1838

Lake Manitou was not old. In 1827 a dam was raised beside what is now Rochester, Fulton County, to power a grist mill the US government built for the Potawatomi under the 1826 treaty. Several smaller lakes flooded into one sheet of water of about 775 acres.

The Potawatomi called its inhabitant Meshekenabek. According to historian Ray E. Boomhower, they warned settlers that if the mill were built, the monster would "rush forth from his watery dominions and take indiscriminate vengeance." The Logansport Telegraph called the place "Lake Man-i-toe, or the Devil's Lake", where "the Evil Spirit, dwells in its chrystal waters."

Summer 1838. Men named Robinson were out fishing. Something moved through the water, swimming rapidly. By their reckoning it "must have measured sixty feet." They made "a hasty retreat to the shore, much alarmed."

Mr. Lindsey, a well known local, was riding near the edge of the lake. He saw the animal at a distance of 200 feet. It raised its head "three or four feet above the water surface." He watched for many minutes. It "disappeared and reappeared three times in succession." His description was precise. A head "about three feet across the frontal bone." A tapering neck, "having the character of the serpent." Its colour "dingy, with large bright yellow spots."

The Telegraph's first monster story ran on 21 July 1838. On 11 August the paper printed a picture of the creature on its front page, and the Indiana Democrat in Indianapolis carried the story too. The English-born artist George Winter passed through Rochester that year and heard much talk of recent sightings. He noted that the Potawatomi would not fish in the lake, and that soundings had never found the bottom. Winter called for action. "Boys! Up with your harpoons and to the Lake Man-i-too."

A public meeting gathered on 11 August 1838 at the Eel River and Cass County Seminary in Logansport to plan an expedition. It never set out. The organisers blamed the "sickly season, combined with other circumstances."

Not everyone believed. The rival Logansport Herald insisted the real "Lake Man-i-too" was Cedar Lake, now Bass Lake, where bones of a monster "killed on its banks" had been found. Critics joked that the witnesses "saw the monster through glass, the glass of a whiskey jug." The Telegraph's editor was John Brown Dillon, later called the "Father of Indiana History", who had earlier run an April Fool hoax. Boomhower reads the whole campaign as probable satire by Dillon and Winter. In 1946 the historian Donald Smalley called the articles "a curious compound made up in nearly equal proportions of the legends of the Potawatomi … and the literary and scientific resources of pioneer Logansport."

Others pointed to big fish. In 1849 Winter wrote "The Monster Caught at Last", describing a catch of "several hundred weight." In 1888 a 116 lb spoonbill catfish was pulled from the lake and shown for 10¢ in Rochester and Logansport. Much later, locals spoke of a giant bass.

No tracks. No remains. No photographs. Only newspaper columns, an expedition that never sailed, and a name. In 1964 the Fulton County Historical Society erected a historical marker for Lake Manitou and Tiptonville. Meshekenabek still surfaces in podcasts and in roundups of Indiana's cryptids. Serpent, fish or editor's joke, the question has never been settled.