The Sturgeon Lake monster chases the steamer Ogemah, with later sightings on Cameron Lake near Fenelon Falls

The Kawartha Lakes of central Ontario were working water in the 1870s. Timber was driven down to the mills, and paddle steamers carried passengers and towed lumber between the towns. Sturgeon Lake sits at the heart of it, Y-shaped and about 25 km long, with Fenelon Falls at the northwest arm, Bobcaygeon at the northeast and Lindsay to the south. One of the boats on these waters was the Ogemah. James Wallis of Fenelon Falls launched her in 1853 to tow lumber from his sawmill to Port Perry.

1872. The Bobcaygeon Independent carried a startling report. "A strange fish of most monstrous size had been seen in Sturgeon Lake."

The paper described it as "as large as a saw log, with horns two feet long, a prodigious snake-like neck, and a gigantic head resembling a swan's." It did not keep its distance. It chased the steamer Ogemah "with extreme fierceness and voracity." Two canoeists met it too. They fled for their lives.

One night a local party went after it with guns. They fired. They apparently missed. The surviving accounts do not name the canoeists, the shooters or the captain of the Ogemah, and they do not give the day.

The creature did not go quietly. Through the 1870s and 1880s the reports kept coming, most often from Cameron Lake. It is a smaller lake right beside Fenelon Falls, and it drains into Sturgeon Lake through the Fenelon River.

It was said that the steamer Coboconk was the only one with the nerve to draw near. That detail carries its own puzzle. A sidewheel Coboconk was built at Fenelon Falls in 1876 and burned at the Rosedale lock in 1887. If that was the same boat, its approach belongs to one of the later sightings, not to 1872. The modern retellings run the episodes together.

People at the time reached for every answer they could: a sea serpent, a reptile, an escaped circus animal, a whale, an alligator. Others were blunter. "Some thought that the famed monster was nothing more than a saw log." On lakes crowded with timber drives, it was a reasonable guess, and the witnesses themselves had compared the creature to one. A journalist offered a drier verdict, writing that "one result of the carrying of prohibition in Canada will be the disappearance of the sea-serpents."

Then, around 1890, W. E. Ellis, a prominent Fenelon Falls resident, gave the final report. The animal, he said, was "a great spawning sturgeon." Lake sturgeon are native to the region and can exceed 2 m. They gather and roll at the surface near rapids to spawn in spring. Sturgeon Lake is named for them. After Ellis spoke, the monster seems to have disappeared.

The story survives today through a short local history piece. The Maryboro Lodge Museum published "A Monster in the Kawartha Lakes???" in 2021, and Explore Fenelon Falls republished it as one of its 150th anniversary features. Both frame the creature as Ontario's own lake monster, half a century before Loch Ness became famous. The original 1872 report still sits on microfiche at the Bobcaygeon Public Library. No book or documentary has taken up the case. For now, the Sturgeon Lake monster remains a strange small chapter from the steamboat days of the Kawarthas.