The Lobo Girl of Devil's River

May 1835. A rider on a reeling horse reached a Mexican goat ranch on the Pecos Canyon, asking for help with a birth. A bolt of lightning struck the messenger dead. The next morning the ranchero and his wife found the woman, Mollie Pertul, dead and alone at a camp where Dry Creek runs into Devil's River. No child was visible. Wolf tracks lay thick around the brush arbor. The ranchero suspected lobo wolves had devoured the infant.

Mollie had eloped with the Georgia trapper John Dent in April 1834. From Galveston she had written: "The Devil has a river in Texas that is all his own and it is made only for those who are grown."

1845. A boy at San Felipe Springs, now Del Rio, reported a pack of lobo wolves attacking a herd of goats. With them was "a creature, long hair half covering its features, that looked like a naked girl." The story was ridiculed. But it spread back among the settlements.

Not more than a year later, a Mexican woman at San Felipe saw two big lobos and a naked girl devouring a freshly killed goat. She got close before they saw her. Then they all three ran. The girl ran at first on all fours, then rose up and ran on two feet, keeping in company with the wolves. Indians reported barefoot tracks in sandy places along the river, sometimes with hand prints.

A hunt rode out, made up mostly of wild-riding Mexican vaqueros. On the third day two riders jumped the girl near a side canyon. She cowered at first like a rabbit. Then she spat and hissed like a wildcat, clawing and biting. A monster he-wolf rushed at her captors and was shot dead with a pistol. The wild girl sank into a silent faint. She was excessively hairy, her hands and arms muscled in an extraordinary manner, but otherwise a normally formed human female.

They carried her to the nearest ranch and shut her in a room with one boarded window. She refused covering, food and water. She backed into the darkest corner. After dark her screamish howls were answered by wolves from all sides. The pack rushed the corrals, attacking goats, milk cows and saddle horses. In the pandemonium the Lobo Girl wrenched the cross plank from the window and got out. The next day not a track of her could be found.

1852. Frontiersmen seeking a better-watered route to El Paso reached a sharp bend of the Rio Grande far above the mouth of Devil's River. On a sand bar sat a naked young woman, two wolf whelps at her breasts. In an instant she was on her feet, a whelp under each arm, dashing into the breaks at a rate no horse could follow.

Everything rests on one text. L. D. Bertillion wrote it for Straight Texas, published by the Texas Folklore Society in 1937 and edited by J. Frank Dobie, some ninety years after the events. No record from the period has turned up, and no informant is named. Bertillion's frame story also places a Dolores colony on Devil's River, while John Charles Beales's real colony stood on Las Moras Creek. Brian Haughton says it "reads more like a Texas folktale than a real feral child case."

Later retellings moved the capture to Espantosa Lake, gave the girl long blonde hair and added soldiers at Camp Hudson hearing howling and cries at night. Alvin Schwartz retold her as "The Wolf Girl" in Scary Stories 3 in 1991.