26 MIDWESTERN FOLKLORE

2

THE GREAT TURTLE HUNT

The 1949 events that concerned the town and the nation revolved around a man’s quest for a remarkable monster. The animal under consideration was a fresh-water inland snapping turtle. According to testimony and tradition, it had a shell “as big as an old-fashioned dining room table” and weighed from four hundred to five hundred pounds. While the world’s largest leatherback sea turtles attain such size in maturity, herpetological literature reports much smaller sizes for the two extant North American snapping turtle species. The common American snapper, found throughout the temperate continent, has a carapace averaging from nine to thirteen inches in length and between eight and twenty pounds in weight. The largest common snapper on record weighed eighty-six pounds after fattening in captivity. The less common alligator snapper, restricted primarily to the southeastern states’ river systems drained by the Gulf of Mexico, averages in maturity a carapace fourteen inches long and a weight from fifteen to twenty pounds. Recognized as the largest freshwater turtle in the United States, the alligator snapper frequently exceeds one hundred pounds in the wild. The largest alligator snapper on definite record weighed two hundred thirty-six pounds after fattening in Chicago’s Brookfield zoo. Churubusco’s turtle hunters, ambivalent about their monster’s zoological species, say that it was a snapper; herpetological authorities assume that it might have been an alligator snapper? In either case, the perceived turtle would be astonishingly gigantic. The idea of a pretematurally large turtle and kindred chelonian traditions have firm roots in American folklore. As early as the seventeenth century, colonial America marvels at the peculiarities of its sea turtles, their enormous size, their three hearts, their medicinal and culinary value.2 The turtle of colonial travelers’ tale and legend continues to thrive in frontier and modem day tall tales in which its enormity, aggressiveness, and penchant for devouring livestock are reported in New England, the Ozarks, Kentucky, Texas, and Indiana.3 Currently, the folkloric alligator snapping turtle enjoys a fearsome reputation for both snapping broom handles with one bite of its powerful jaws and dismembering human swimmers.4 The most outrageous of these fictions are closely paralleled by historical testimony in Churubusco. Additionally, a body of American turtle lore has developed, related in part to ancient worldwide beliefs associating the turtle with immortality, healing, happiness, stability, and fortune.5 Americans say these things about turtles: If you kill a turtle, it will not die till sundown. If you cut its head off, its body will live for nine days. If you kill a turtle, you will have bad luck or the turtle will haunt you. It is bad luck to have an old turtle shell in the house, but it is good luck to have a live turtle in the home. It is also good luck to carry a turtle bone in your pocket. If a turtle bites you, it will not let go until sundown or until it thunders. If you put a live coal on its back, a turtle will crawl out of its shell and never return. If you carve your initials on the underside of its shell, a turtle will never leave the locality. If you cut your initials on its back, you will have hard luck. If it crawls to high land, that is a sign of rain. The turtle contains the meat of all animals, or it has nine different kinds of meat. Eating its heart is good for bravery. Eating turtle eggs is a good aphrodisiac. Catching a diamond back terrapin brings bad luck and makes the wind blow. THE BEAST O F ’BUSCO 27

Of these American traditions,6 Churubuscoans generally know that there are seven different kinds of meat in a turtle. It is said that Oscar Fulk carved his initials on Oscar the Turtle’s shell. Though no reason is given, this act may explain why the monster turtle inhabits Fulk Lake.7 The turtle image figures prominently in Native American traditions. Myths, legends, and folktales assign to the turtle both cosmogonic and mundane roles? That Native American tradition may have some bearing upon the Churubusco turtle legend is a distinct possibility. The strongest evidentiary basis for a tribal influence resides in McClung’s Miami Indian Stories Told by Chief Clarence Godfroy. One of the entries in this collection of local Indian narratives, ‘The Story of an Immense Large Turtle,” relates how a gigantic turtle in an unnamed lake assisted the Miami in capturing fish and provided the Indians with a moving, living dock for their fishing? The Miami presence in the Churubusco area, the name of Little Turtle, and Oliver Godfroy’s title, “Chief Swimming Turtle,” further support linkage suggested in Clarence Godfroy’s story.10 However, since the tale text, which does not suggest an oral style, was published in 1961, it could have been derived from the Euro-American tales already circulating in Churubusco. Without ethnic texts predating 1949, determination of ultimate Native American origin remains an uncertainty. Whether or not a ceremonial Indian basis existed for it, Fulk Lake had been invested with an aura of mystery prior to the events of 1949. Children had been warned to stay away, sometimes for fear of being swallowed up in the lake’s murky depths, sometimes for fear of something terrible that lurked there. Pat Isay has lived in Churubusco for all his seventy-one years and heard, early in life, of Fulk Lake’s strangeness.

We had neighbors lived next door to us, a very old family in the community. Their Mrs. was raised on the old McDuffey farm, up here close to what became the Gale Harris farm. And she said her father—and this would go back a hundred years or more—always warned her not to go near that lake. Traditionally there was som ething very dangerous about it. Whether they had a monster in mind I don’t know, but she said she was forbidden to go near that lake.”

Pat Crooks says that years before Harris began his turtle hunt his mother had told him about a huge turtle in Fulk Lake.12 Those who knew Oscar Fulk say he had been telling of a big turtle fifty years before the hunt of 1949.13 In I94S Gale Harris appeared on the scene, and the vaguely suspended Fulk Lake traditions became crystallized. Both before, during, and after the events of 1949, Harris had an established reputation in Churubusco as a strict Nazarene Christian who did not drink, smoke, or lie. When I met him, during the summer of 1971,141 easily understood how this industrious electronics worker and upstart farmer, who admitted that he was never cut out for farming, came by his reputation for honesty. Bom in 1919 at Etna, west of town, Gale Harris spent his youth in Waynedale on the outskirts of Fort Wayne. His grandfather, a Methodist minister, preached in Merriam, where Samuel Wilson and Marvin Kuhns are buried. His father operated a barbershop and served as trustee for the Methodist church in Waynedale. Without heeding his father’s expectations that he follow barbering as a career, nor his advice to finish school, Gale Harris left Waynedale a year before graduation, seeking new experiences in Camden, New Jersey. 28 MIDWESTERN FOLKLORE

During his Camden stay, Harris worked at the local R.C.A. plant and developed an interest in electronics. For three years he took R.C.A. correspondence courses, hoping to pursue a career in the electronics field. Both career plans and job were eliminated when the depression struck, forcing Harris to return home with his wife, Helen, the farm girl he had married before leaving Waynedale. Back in Fort Wayne, Harris found work at the General Electric plant, and Helen patiently waited for the time and circumstance when she could persuade her husband to take up farming. The opportunity arose shortly after World War n , when the Harrises located a home at a small lakeon Route 33 outside of Churubusco. Three years later, Gale, Helen, and their son Vaughn moved north of Churubusco to a one hundred twenty acre farm on the Allen-Noble county line. The farm, with its seven acre lake, had remained in the Fulk family15 ever since it was titled to John Faulk (sic) in 1871. The first Fulks moving west from Virginia had pioneered the area in the 1830’s. Harris acquired the property deed on November 14, 1947, from O.E. Jones and his wife Grace Fulk Jones. One of the first things Harris learned as he began working the farm was that a very huge turtle lived in the lake. Harris heard this from Oscar Fulk and heard about the turtle a second time from his brother-in-law, Ora Blue, who saw it on July 27, 1948, Blue’s birthdate, which had been celebrated by a fishing expedition to Fulk Lake with Charlie Wilson. Blue reported:

We saw the big waves a-rolhng and up came that turtle. I’ve never seen one so big. I saw that big head sticking up and the waves going away like it was a submarine.16

In early fall, Harris saw it. When I asked him how it all began, he calmly related the following narrative.

And I and our minister that we went to church with, the Nazarene Church in ’Busco, and he was a contractor, and I and him was upon the roof. We was patching the roof. And he happened to look up and he says, “What’s that going on across the lake?” And I looked down there and I seen this big head. It was just like a big head and I said, “Oh, it just must be something, I don’t know what it is.” So we just passed it off that day, you know. And we went on with the work. Then the next day he come out and this was in the morning, pretty early in the morning. And the same thing happened. He come across from the other direction. And so I told him, “Let's go down and investigate this thing and see what it is.” So we got down off the bam. I expect we had to walk a half mile or so, and by the time we got down there we didn’t see anything. So I told Reese that we was gonna find out what that thing was. So we got in the boat and we seen something in the water. And he was looking down on that side of the boat and I was looking on this side of the boat [Harris is seated at the end of a table approximately six feet long, three feet wide. He begins gesturing with his hands as if the table were the boat]. And he says, “Here it is over here.”[Arm gesture to right.] And I said, “No, here it is over here,”[Arm gesture to left.] “Weil,” he says, “it can’t be.” And I says, “Well, it is, right there it is. There’s its tail.” He says, ‘There’s its head right over there.” We had the boat right over it then and that turtle was that size then. You know, you look down on this side of the boat [arm gesture to right side of table] and see it here and on this side [arm gesture to left of table] it’s a pretty good sized turtle.17

Later in our interview, we would return to the question of the turtle’s size. THE BEAST OF ’BUSCO 29

JG: So how big would you say that thing was?

Harris: How big?

JG: ' Yeah.

Harris: I would say this table right here, what we’re looking at [six feet by three feet]. It would be a little wider than this I think. Maybe about that much wider [places his hands approximately one foot beyond width of table]. But the length and oblong—if this was just turned out aroundlike this [spherical arm gesture]. That would just about be the size o f it.

JG: This must be about six feet long!

Harris: I would say something like that.

JG: Is it then what they say it was: as big as an old-fashioned dining room table?

Harris: That is true.

JG: Well, how big was an old-fashioned dining room table, six by five, six by four?

Harris: I would say something like that, six by five, six by four. And its head was as big as a baby’s head. When it would come up and surface and stick its neck out of its head, it looked as big as a baby’s head.

JG; So how many times did you see it?

Harris: How many times? More times than I can count, I expect.

JG: Like every other day?

Harris: Oh, sometimes you would. Sometimes you would see it every day. And then, other times, you wouldn’t see it for a week, two weeks, It seemed like when there was activity down at the lake, you wouldn’t see it. But then when the activity would die down and people would stay away, and then it would surface and then you could see it.1K

So Harris and the Reverend Reese decided to let the matter rest. Later, during the fall of 1948, Harris and his son Vaughn spotted the turtle again while they were out bringing in the cows. Having sent Vaughn to the farmhouse so that he might bring back his mother and aunt to see the incredible creature, Harris stepped into his rowboat, rowed out to the turtle, and grabbed it by the tail hoping to maneuver it ashore. The turtle heaved up from the water and capsized Harris’s boat. When Mrs. Harris arrived, all she saw was her husband forlornly clinging to a tree limb to keep from drowning.19 The tale of the capsized rowboat, as reported in the Churubusco and Fort Wayne newspapers, had been broadcast on a local radio show by Phil Phillips, a bait man from Churubusco. As a result of the broadcast, two men claiming to be representatives of the Cincinnati Zoo approached Harris, offering him a large sum o f money for the turtle. A few local fanners then joined Harris in intermittent, inconsequential searches for the turtle, one of which was reported in the local paper. Nothing else noteworthy occurred until the lake began thawing the following year. For two weeks in late February and early March, Harris, Kenny Leitch, the Churubusco mechanic who had become Harris’ partner, a handful of farmers, and a score of 30 MIDWESTERN FOLKLORE

Churubusco Conservation Club members began the search in earnest. Word spread that they had trapped the turtle in shallow water. The Churubusco turtle affair might have remained localized, eventually fading into obscurity, were it not for sudden, widespread mass-media intervention. This involvement began with the local newspaper’s intention to inform and amuse the community with word about the townspeople’s participation in the unusual activities and with the rival local newspaper in Columbia City seeking to inform and titillate the area population at the expense of Churubusco. The national media, sensing a human-interest story appealing to the general American public, seized upon the activities at Fulk Lake immediately. The media interrelations at this point were explained by Jim Kirtley, editor of the Churubusco Truth?® Kirtley, who felt the pulse of the community, had an eye and an ear for a good story and a mind foil of playfulness. He had known about the monster hunt since the previous fall, had reported it in his paper on November 18th, and had now decided that, since the talk and tales were growing, the time was right for a special “Turtle Edition" of his newspaper. The special edition was filled with historical facts, tall tales, tongue-in-cheek statements, and photographs, all connected with the Fulk Lake terrapin. Since he had just sent the March 3rd edition to press, there would be a week’s delay before the March 10th Turtle Edition. Kirtley decided to let Cliff Milnor of the Fort Wayne Journal Gazette in on the merriment. Milnor, who would dub the turtle the “Beast of ’Busco,” became Kirtley’s willing accomplice. Both agreed to hold their stories until the March 1 Oth edition of their papers. But neither newsman had foreseen the possibility of Columbia City involvement, an incident which would provoke Kirtley to rage.

Cliff and I were just gonna have a lot of fun. And I told him “For Godsakes, don’t break it Thursday,” I says. “You break it Thursday ’cause I’m coming out Thursday and we’ll hit it together. W e’ll have a circus.” And whaddaye know but the Columbia City paper over there! It was a real dull day and someone from here went over to the courthouse and was telling ’em about this thing what happened. And Charlie White—he was county auditor, he was an ex-newspapeiman and he immediately saw the fun in the thing, and he ran right down to the Columbia City Post and Mail and told ’em about this thing—and even wrote the story! And it was just a big fabrication. He was just kiddin’ these guys. It broke on Wednesday and Cliff and I were holding everything back ’til Thursday. Well, it appeared in the Columbia City paper on Tuesday. The girl in the UP office in Fort Wayne saw it in the Columbia City paper. They had a UP wire service in Columbia City, so she was privileged to pull anything out of that paper. She thought, “This is pretty good” [laughs], so she sent it out on the press wire and it went nationwide. And so Cliff and I got scooped on our own story [infectious laughter]. Scooped. By the time I could break it, the Chicago Tribune was here. Everybody was here. I’ll never forget that, I was never so mad in my life.21

United Press International spread the story from Boston to Los Angeles. Lowell Thomas added to the national coverage with a network radio broadcast on March 10th. Even Jack Armstrong was heard to speculate about the “Beast o f’Busco.” Reporters from all comers descended upon the town to place the small town of Churubusco on the nation’s journalistic map. The original news story penned by Charlie White appeared in the Columbia City Commercial Mail, Evening Edition, dated Monday, March 7,1949, and headlined, “Five Hundred Pound Turtle Would Make Lots of Good Turtle Soup.” THE BEAST OF ’BUSCO I

Plate 2. Gale Harris, his wife Helen, son Vaughn, and friend listen to the Lowell Thomas broadcast. Fort Wayne News Sentinel photo, 1949.

Ever see a five hundred pound turtle? Ever see a water weasel? Residents o f Eel River Township, Allen County, have located a 1949 model turtle said to be as big as a car top, a dining room table top or a ten-man poker table. The huge tortoise has caused a mild sensation around Churubusco since it was seen in a small five-acre lake located on the Fulk farm two miles northeast of Churubusco near state road 205. Reports have it that a hurtling concern from Cincinnati, Ohio has placed a top price o f $ 1800 on the animal, dead or alive. The reptile has been variously described by native residents as “too big to go through a door,” “as thick as a sack of clover seed,” aud “a head as big as a man’s.” Yesterday prospectors probed the lake’s edge with twenty foot fish poles and lowered cages made of chicken wire, but the turtle refused to budge from his muck rest on Sunday. The hurtling concern warned the workers not to try to lift the turtle by its shell since file shell would probably tear loose under fiie weight o f the body. One character brought an animal known as a water weasel in his coat pocket to locate the turtle, but the water weasel merely took a dip in the water and came up smiling like a motorist looking for a drinking fountain in Death Valley. One bystander said, “If Campbell’s Soup Company could catch this animal, they could remove mock from their turtle soup label.”

On March 8th, the Columbia City Commercial Mail continued its exclusive coverage. The paper editorialized skepticism concerning turtle tales and reported that the thirty or forty men now hunting the turtle had managed to attach a log chain to the turtle’s hind leg; . but the turtle managed somehow to slip out of its bonds. The paper further reported: 32 MIDWESTERN FOLKLORE

One person told us that a former owner of the farm had prize black Angus cattle. He began missing the cattle and built a fence between them and the lake. Then no cattle turned up missing.

On March 9th, the Columbia City Commercial Mail reported that due to unreliable sources, the turtle story was “a dead issue as far as this paper is concerned.” That same day the Fort Wayne Journal Gazette issued its first story about the Churubusco turtle headlined, “Busco’s Behemoth Turtle (400 Pounds and 400 Years Old) Roams 10 Acre Lake,” and sub-headlined, “Midwest Mammoth Monster.” This account included a brief history of Gale Harris’s early sightings, mentioned that the Cincinnati Zoo had located the turtle the previous winter, rumored that the zoo had offered Gale Harris $1800 for the turtle, and contained Harris’s denial that livestock had been devoured by the beast. The story began, “Let Scotland have its Loch Ness Monster, Churubusco has Gale Harris’ Turtle.” It concluded, “Already we know how Little Turtle got his name. By comparison.” Charlie White had not been to the lake and knew nothing of the turtle. He needed an informant. And as John Fulk, Ed Gilbert, and many others, including the Truth itself (March 17, 1949), agree, he could have found none better than Lew Geiger, Smith Township trustee and notorious tale teller. During our lengthy interview, Geiger admitted that he told White everything, but that he himself had heard about it himself from Merl Leitch, the Churubusco grocer.

Charlie always claimed credit for startin’ that; well, he didn’t know nothin’; only what I told him because he was never over there. My folks and the Fulks were neighbors. I was over in Smith township. I’ve been here eighty-five years and better.... The Mrs. and I would go to ’Busco on Saturday nights, she’d stop at Andersons and I’d go down with the boys and, oh, I’d have a bottle of beer.... I went there to Walker’s and in come Merl Leitch, the grocery man and set down beside of me and he went to tell me about the turtle. And he was a busy man and he’d been out there on Friday and Saturday. This was Saturday night, see, and he went to tell me about that turtle and how big it was. They’d had to build a silo and they had him in there and they’d had a measurement on him. He measured about eighteen, nineteen inch raise from the outside of the shell. And they figured he was as big as a dining room table. Well I laughed so much I had to take my coat off and hang it up. I was sweatin’. And to think Merl would tell me such a story—he’s an honest guy—you’ll remember I mentioned the guys in ’Busco were good, honest guys. Well, most of them was. And Merl was tellin’ me about that turtle, you know, and the crowd gathered around us, and they was gonna get a diver. One day I was a little late to dinner and a man set down aside of me and he started in about the turtle. “Well,” he says, “I wouldn’t believe anything about it, but our grocery man is such a nice honest fellow and he was up there and took the aitplane over that lake and he seen that turtle and it was big as any dump truck you ever seen.” I told Charlie the story and it came out in the paper and here comes Johnny Adams editor of the Columbia City Post and Mail—cripplin’ along. I seen him cornin’ down the sidewalk there. And he says, “Would you tell me the way to the lake?” I told him the way to the lake. He says, “You got a story?” “Well,” I says, “I always got a story. “Now,” I says, "the former owner of the place raised black Angus cattle,’’ I says, “they come up missing till they put a fence around the lake and they didn’t lose no more.” I didn’t say anything about the turtle.. .. So I went back to Columbia City and in the treasurer’s office they’d gathered there, and the fellow from Chicago had called, and they said, “Yes, he’s cornin’ up the steps now.” And they ail gathered over there to hear. THE BEAST OF ’BUSCO 33

He asked me if I just got back from the lake. “Yeah.” I says, “They’ve hired a diver to dive for it.” He says, “How is he gonna handle a turtle five hundred pounds?” I Says, “He’s gonna pump him full of air and he’ll come to the top.” And the one girl in there, I bet she jumped three feet and squealed and laughed. I should of thought he could of heard it. He said, “We’re cornin’ out tomorrow.” This was a cloudy day and windy up there. I says, “Now don’t come.” I says, “That turtle won’t come out til the sun shines.” Well, they cam e.. . .

JG: I read Charlie’s first story and he said there was such a thing as a water weasel?

Geiger: I told him that. I says they put him in a hole—I forget just what I said. I told him that. And there ain’t such a thing. Yeah, I told Charlie all of it, and, “As big as a dining room table,” and it wouldn’t go through a door. All that stuff I told him. He hadn’t been over there. He wasn’t raised there or nothing’. But I don’t know if feat’s a good story or whether I should be proud of it or not. Had lots of fun over it22

Geiger’s narrative is interesting on several accounts. It is an entirely artificial construction of a text about other texts—grocer Leitch’s and journalist White’s. It is not the tall tale virtuoso’s customary production but an anthology of tall tale motifs that imply several real stories told by Geiger over the years. These would include the turtle’s size (big as a dining room table, big as a dump truck), the turtle’s behavior (devours a cow, won’t move till the sun shines), and strategies for capture (silo, airplane, diver, air pump, water weasel). Moreover, Geiger’s text glosses this medley of narrative motifs with illustration of the social context of storytelling. The importance of audience reaction, the role o f tale teller, tall tale strategy, and his own skill in manipulating both text and audience. Remarkably, twenty-two years after the fact, this eighty-six year old raconteur preserves a focus on the essential, original story documented in the Columbia city newspaper of : which he indirectly speaks. So the events of 1949 originate in the individualistic response o f fanner Harris to his perception of a natural phenomenon colored by local tradition. Modem mass media both publicize and intensify this incident through the direct actions of a local traditional storyteller (Geiger) and an equally talented local journalistic narrator (Kirtley). As the event complex develops, the expressive stage broadens, the dramatis personae increase. Churubusco plays to a national audience. Still, imaginative focus and creative control . remain communal. To pursue the complex events of 1949 further requires some historical and narrative simplification. What follows is a practical chronology o f incidents reported in the Churubusco Truth, the Fort Wayne News Sentinel, and the Fort Wayne Journal Gazette. These newspapers offered the most extensive and the most consistent coverage of matters , that will become the themes and ideas for building the community’s traditions.

March 10

The News Sentinel headline reads, “The Tale of the Turtle Gets Top Billing: Production May Win Oscar.” Throughout this piece “Oscar” is employed as the name of the turtle. This is the name’s first appearance in print. Cliff Milnor of the Journal Gazette coins the term "Beast of ’Busco.” Thereafter both names become journalistic and folkloric 34 MIDWESTERN FOLKLORE THE BEAST OF ’BUSCO 35 commonplaces- The papers indicate that the turtle has maneuvered itself out of the March 12 chicken-wire net which had encircled it on Saturday, March 5th. Harris reveals plans to pull the turtle from the lake with a team of horses and a mule sled, then to display Oscar The turtle is located in shallow water. Leitch invents a turtle trap using quarter inch pipe at Kenny Leitch’s garage in Churubusco. Admission fee is to be twenty-five cents. Leitch held in a circular position by old buggy wheel rims. Leitch calls the contraption “a young constructs grappling hooks for dragging the turtle from the water. Carl Sheldon of silo.” Harris announces that Oscar may not be as huge as formerly believed but that the Churubusco begins airplane reconnaissance of Fulk Lake. The curator of reptiles at the beast’s size is difficult to determine when looking through fifteen feet of water. Three Chicago Museum of Natural History quotes the record weight of inland snapping turtles thousand spectators jam the lakeshore. as eighty-six pounds. March 13 March 11 Oscar escapes from the “young silo.” Oscar is relocated and Leitch’s cage is re-positioned. At the suggestion of News Sentinel photographer Richard Deuter, Kenny Leitch devises Farmers break down a fence and drive fence rails around the “young silo” as a second line an underwater viewing apparatus from a length of pipe and pieces of glass. The tool, of defense. The crowd at the lake is estimated at five thousand. named the “Deuterscope,” becomes commonplace in the News Sentinel but does not enter folk tradition—the term “periscope” being preferred. Harris vows, “I’m gonna get this March 14 daggone turtle out if I have to drain the lake, I’ve been called a liar long en ou gh .” The Churubusco Community Club holds a meeting, votes to assist Harris, provides boats, lumber, pipe, and whatever is needed for capture of the turtle. The Community Club announces both a warning to outside promoters and its own intention to provide a home for Oscar in Churubusco. A Turtle Committee of prominent citizens is appointed. Deep- sea divers from Indianapolis and Fort Wayne offer their services, but neither have gear. The Indianapolis diver indicates that he will go down with a harpoon because snapping turtles fight like alligators. The Fort Wayne diver plans to use a rope net. The Indiana Society for the Prevention of Cruelly to Animals protests harpooning but does not decide to intervene. The Community Club Turtle Committee nominates the Fort Wayne diver, Woodrow Rigsby. The turtle again escapes confinement.

March 16

A truck from Chicago races to Fulk Lake with Navy surplus diving gear, courtesy of the Chicago Sun Times. All prepare for “T” day, when Rigsby will commence “Operation Turtle.”

March 17

The Sun Times diving suit turns out to be merely a helmet. A complete suit is located in Rome City. “T” day. is postponed until tomorrow.

March 18

Rigsby descends into the lake wearing frill diving gear. He immediately ascends as water pours into his helmet. The gear is sent to Fort Wayne for repairs. “T” day is postponed Plate 3. Harris has corailed Oscar in a “young silo,” a photograph commonly cited until Sunday, March 20th. A bonfire is built at the lake and coffee and hot dogs are sold to confirm the turtle’s size. Fort Wayne News Sentinel photo, 1949. on Harris’s back porch. The crowd is estimated at seven hundred and fifty people. Unusual truancy is reported in area schools. 36 MIDWESTERN FOLKLORE

March 20

Rigsby disappears. Leitch improves the “Deuterscope” by attaching automobile headlights, thereby providing for nighttime surveillance of the turtle.

Plate 4. Fort Wayne diver, Woodrow Rigsby, preparing for “Operation Turtle” on “T Day.” Fort Wayne News Sentinel photo, 1949.

March 22

Hams engages the services of Walter Johnson from Chesterton, Indiana. Johnson, a Great Lakes diver, spends two and one half hours at the lake bottom. Harris rescues Johnson when he sinks into the muck up to his chest. Johnson advises that the turtle first be located before using a diver and places himself on call in the event that Oscar is found. THE BEAST O F’BUSCO 37

March 30

. Harris travels to Indianapolis with a Churubusco delegation in order to ascertain nghts to c' capture and exhibit the turtle. The Indiana Conservation Department informs Harris that there are no restrictions on turtles.

March 31

Harris signs a contract with two turtle hunters from Tennessee. The contract provides that no payment will be made and that all trapping operations will cease if the turtle is not captured by April 16th. Harris bars all spectators horn the lake for two weeks.

April 4

The turtle trappers from Tennessee, R.V. Butler and C.C. Butler, presently residing in Fort Wayne, Indiana, complete work on a funnel shaped wire trap, seven feet by five feet at the entrance. The trappers bait the trap with fish and with rabbits.

April 7

The Tennessee trappers change the position of the trap.

. April 14

The Tennessee trappers abandon the hunt in despair. Harris vows that he will capture the turtle if he has to borrow a diving suit and go after it himself.

April 16

Divers Rigsby and Johnson return to the lake. Rigsby’s diving suit is now equipped with a communication device. After an hour and a half under the water, the divers surface having seen nothing.

April 20

Harris decides to use large commercial fishing nets.

April 21

Leitch pitches a tent on the lakeshore and plans a twenty-four-hour vigil when he Ieams that turtles must surface at least two times per day.

April 24

Harris’s fishing net entangles Oscar at the bottom of the lake. 38 MIDWESTERN FOLKLORE

April 27

The turtle tears through the net to freedom. Leitch is joined at the lake location by Walter Johnson. They begin experiments with a recently captured thirty-five pound turtle. The two believe that by tying a line to the turtle’s shell they can observe the animal for prolonged periods and acquire knowledge of turtle habits useful for capturing Oscar.

Plate 5. One of many turtle traps employed by Harris. Fort Wayne News Sentinel photo, 1949.

May 5

Harris announces that he may act on his early threat to drain the lake dry.

May 9

A 225-pound female sea turtle is placed in the lake to allure Oscar. A small hole is drilled in the sea turtle’s outer shell edge and a length of chalk line is tied to a jug and affixed so that the turtle’s movements may be observed. The sea turtle, obtained from Key West, Florida by Charles Rayhill of Huntertown, seems ill at ease in Fulk Lake. THE BEAST OF ’BUSCO 39

May 12

.. Hams judges that the female turtle has not aroused Oscar’s amorous instincts and admits the project’s failure. He resumes the use of nets.

May 19

The turtle hunters abandon nets and begin dragging the lake bottom with hooks. Leitch has welded nine long hooks into a two-foot length of pipe. This instrument, fastened to a rope, is pulled behind a rowboat whenever the turtle is sighted. Mrs. Harris substitutes for her husband at the “Deuterscope” when Harris complains of eyestrain.

■ May 26

An eye specialist orders Harris to rest and warns him that he risks serious eye damage, even blindness, if he continues use of the “Deuterscope.”

June—July

Little activity is reported as Harris recuperates from eye injury and attempts to get some fanning done. Leitch and Johnson abandon their twenty-four-hour vigil in early July. But on July 9th, Harris, armed with a home-made harpoon tied to a line, hooks Oscar. The turtle proceeds to pull Harris’s boat toward shallow water where, obtaining sufficient leverage, it breaks the line. After this Harris announces the sighting of a second huge turtle traveling in the company of Oscar. On July 18th, Johnson reports seeing the beast for the ... first time when Oscar attacks a pen of live ducks that had been placed over a turtle trap.

September 14

Having experienced a summer of total frustration and having faced too many accusations of dishonesty, Harris begins to drain the lake dry. After obtaining permission from the State Conservation Department in Indianapolis and a centrifugal pump, pipe, and hoses from Fort Wayne, Harris connects the pump with his tractor engine and starts pumping water from Fulk Lake into a drainage ditch leading to White Lake. The crowds increase again.

September 21

As pumping continues around the clock, day and night, the depth o f Fulk Lake is reduced . from sixty-five feet to twenty-five feet.

September 22

The lakeshore is gradually sinking, the banks are caving in, and deep fissures are opening in the land around the shore. A pickup truck on shore sinks into the muck as the shoreline 40 MIDWESTERN FOLKLORE THE BEAST OF ’BUSCO 41

lowers. The seven-acre lake is now reduced to two acres. Crowds estimated at five evening, Harris, along with a Chicago reporter and others, narrowly averts death. Alone hundred people watch operations. after refueling his tractor engine, Harris falls shoulder-deep into a crevice filled with mucky water. Unable to extricate himself, his cries for help go unheeded for thirty September 24 minutes. Finally, his wife, Helen, after hearing a commotion, comes to the hole and frees him. A Chicago Tribune reporter barely escapes death when he falls into a twelve foot deep crevice on the receding shore. As he lies buried in muck, five fanners form a human chain November 17 to pull him out. Harris is the victim of an automobile accident. Both he and the other driver, a Fort Wayne September 29 man, are uninjured, although both cars suffer considerable damage. Pumping continues day and night. The water in the lake has become so shallow that the state Conservation Harris captures a fifty-two pound turtle in a trap baited with beef lungs. This near-record Department is beginning to remove the bass, bluegills, and other game fish. size reptile suffers by comparison to Harris’s prey. The hunt for Oscar continues. November 20 October 2 As Fulk Lake is reduced to a sixty foot diameter, Gale Harris suffers an attack of With Fulk Lake reduced to one acre and to a depth of twenty feet, Harris’s tractor breaks appendicitis. He is rushed to the Fort Wayne Methodist Hospital where a successful down. Pumping is temporarily halted. appendectomy is performed.

October 9 December 1

Harris again harpoons Oscar with a shark hook, but loses hold as his boat is nearly Harris returns from the hospital insisting that his hunt will continue, even though autumn overturned. The average lake depth is now five feet. rains are causing the lake to refill.

October 20 December 15

A seventeen-ton crane with a sixty-foot beam is positioned on shore by the Fort Wayne Harris inspects the frozen Fulk Lake for a surface hole which might betray Oscar’s Dredge Company in order to raise Oscar from the muck, with steel nets from Saugatuck, position. Michigan. Kenny Leitch’s garage is readied for Oscar. Crowds are now estimated at one hundred during the week and two thousand on weekends. A new “T” day is set for January 5, 1950 Sunday, October 23rd. The dam holding the pumped-out water in the ditch gives way. Pipes, boats, traps, and October 23 tractor now are partially submerged as water rushes into Fulk Lake. Harris abandons the hunt. Pumping continues. Fulk Lake is reduced to one half acre. Attempts to maneuver the crane fail. August 22,1950

November 3 A turtle trap is listed among farm machinery sold at auction at the Gale Harris farm.

Pumping is temporarily suspended when engine bearings bum out. To Harris’s own thinking, one simple idea motivated his stubborn devotion to duty and his endurance of constant privation and tribulation. The idea was financial gain, the same November 7 motive that induced Barnum to display countless prodigies and oddities and which, in American fantasy, inspired Alger’s reembodied Ash lad to show his pluck and courage. En route home from Chicago, Harris is arrested in Gary, Indiana, and fined $16.75 for speeding. New York Zoo officials are reported in town to negotiate with Harris. Late this JG: What kept you going all that time? Was it the fun of it or the publicity of it? 42 MIDWESTERN FOLKLORE

Harris: I thought that we could catch the turtle and we could make some money off i t ... If we could catch it we was going to exhibit it at fairs and stuff like that, put it on show.

JG: Some people say that you could of become a millionaire if you caught it

Hams: That’s right

JG: Do you really think that?

Hams: That’s right. That is right.

JG: Because it was that big a discovery?

Hams: It was that big and it was that much publicity about it, I don’t know. I won’t say maybe a millionaire, but I’d have a way lot more than I got today.23

As of 1971, Harris retains amuted enthusiasm for the Oscar affair and a steadfast belief that the Beast of ’Busco freely roams a Hoosier Lake—somewhere.

JG: What, do you flunk, happened to the turtle?

Hams: What do I think happened? I think, and people say, and guys from zoos say, that there’s an underground current coming into that lake and that he got into that and went to some other lake.

JG: So it’s quite possible that he’s alive and kicking somewhere?

Harris: Very much possible. Very much. Very much. There have been people contacted me that thought they’d seen it and wanted me to come out and try to identify it but I just couldn’t do i t . . . But as far as my enthusiasm I still feel that. I still feel today— someday, something is gonna be made of this thing, and it hasn’t made more than it really has. I think someday somebody’s gonna hit on something, and it’s really gonna go over big again.24

Harris’s reasons for terminating the turtle quest concern the two things dearest to him, his religious conviction and his wife. These reasons also provide an understanding of additional motives for pursuing the hunt in the first place.

Harris: But so many people got mto the thing that wanted a guy to be dishonest. And I just couldn’t do it [here he is referring to public appearance offers from representatives o f alcoholic beverages and cigarette companies and outside promoters who wanted to plant a turtle in the lake]. I just couldn’t. I feel there’s a hereafter and I intend to make it, and I don’t think a guy can make it when he knows he’s doing something that isn’t right.

JG: Really, it wouldn’t have hurt anybody to do what they were asking, would it?

Harris: It wouldn’t hurt anybody, but in my own conscience I knowed it wasn’t right. I knowed that I’d be telling lies. And that’s the thing I just couldn’t do....

JG: I read somewhere that you refused to hunt the turtle on Sundays?

Harris: Well, that’s one of the things that led up to this turtle, o f us forgetting about it, because we felt we wanted to live a Christian life in the Church, and we couldn’t live a Christian life and work, out there on Sunday.... We felt it was more important to make heaven our home than it was to have a turtle out there. THE BEAST OF 'BUSCO 43

JG: Did it ever cross your mind when you were in the hospital that this might be a sign from up above, that you should stop?

Harris: Definitely, definitely. That’s the thing that you’d find out all along; when I came out of the hospital I said, that was it Definitely, when I laid up there on the verge of death, that’s when I made up my mind that this thing was gonna stop. Because I was not going to go ahead and get laid up, might die or something and lose my soul. . .. And ever since I came out of that hospital we never done a thing out there on Sunday. I did before, but after I came out of the hospital I did not.25

In a later interview, Harris’s wife, Helen, corroborated her husband’s explanations for continuing, then ending the search;

I didn’t think too much about it really. I thought, oh, it was just a bunch of men wanting to do something for sport, you know, for the fun of it. I didn’t pay much attention to it. But then he got neglecting his farm work, chores, and everything else, and I was having more to do all the time. Then I began to wonder what was going on. So I kept telling them all along that they was wasting their time and money. But the reason that I finally decided I would go along with it, and I would, we would, try to do everything in our power to find it was because the public thought it was just a publicity story—wasn’t anything to it. Well, in my way of thinking, it was the same as calling us bars. And I didn’t like that because I was a Christian and had tried to be truthful and honest in everything I had ever done. And I said, “I don’t care whether we get a penny out of it, if we can just prove to people that we are telling the truth.” And it got to the place where we couldn’t have any family life whatsoever. No peace. And it got to the point where we couldn’t even go to church on "Sunday and leave the farm because what might happen while we were gone? And I said then, “It’s gone too far, there had to be a stop to it.”26

In 1971, the Harrises lived on Loon Lake near Gale’s birthplace. Harris commuted to Fort Wayne, where he worked as night maintenance supervisor at the Indiana University Purdue University extension. His leisure time was spent fishing from his Lake Loon pontoon. Harris’s contest with the legendary monster, his tenacious, monomaniacal obsession with its capture, and his ultimate failure bring to mind Ahab’s struggle with the white whale in the great American novel Moby Dick. There are obvious differences between fiction and fact, the mystical and the practical, the cosmic and the local, the pagan and the Christian, destruction and capture. Still, it is not difficult for an American mind to see something of the indomitable heathen prince of the seas, plying the Atlantic astride the Pequod’s quarterdeck, in the small-town Christian farmer patrolling Fulk Lake in his rowboat, both in quest of the mythical beast. Essentially, what Melville imagined and what Harris performed coincide thematically with a folklore pattern based upon traditional quest motifs involving the unique, marvelous, remarkable, and dangerous animal.27 That this pattern is firmly anchored in American consciousness is indicated by its omnipresence in American tradition on all levels, elite, popular, and folk. As early as 1817— 1819, the three traditions interrelate local fishermen, popular press, and academic academy in the quest for the Gloucester Sea Serpent in Massachusetts.28 Hemingway’s Old Man and the - Sea, Faulkner’s The Bean, and other lesser elite compositions29 perpetuate the quest pattern into the twentieth century. So does the contemporary parody of Moby Dick, Peter . Benchley’s Jaws, which in paperback and film versions became a national sensation for 44 MIDWESTERN FOLKLORE

a decade in the late 70s and early 80s. The monster movie remains a staple of American popular culture, as witnessed by the 1976 rebirth of the 1933 American classic King Kong. the transformation of folk experience into film beginning with the Legend o f Boggy Creek series, and the comic and sentimental treatment of Bigfoot in Harry and the Hendersons (1987)?° To appropriately contextualize the American case, the international provenance and Old World origins of these themes and symbols deserve notice. Wild, extravagant, and fantastic animals have engaged the human imagination the world over as fitting symbolic representation of the universal need to conceptualize and order the categories of nature and culture?1 From ancient times, the quest for the mythical animal has provided a foundation for the most popular, most widely recorded and investigated of international folktales—the dragon slayer.32 Similarly, monster motifs have recurred continuously in world heroic literature as attested by the confrontation between Theseus and the Minotaur, Heracles and the Hydra, Jason and the Gorgon, Sinbad and the Rukh, Beowulf and Grendel, Sigurd and Fafhir, Lemminkainen and the elk of Hiisi. Nevertheless, an American imaginative tradition, especially on the folk level, does distinguish itself through its nurture and emphasis on the quest for mythical animals from the nation’s beginnings up to the present day. During the European era of Reformation and Enlightenment, with its humanism and rationalism, the colonists who came to the New World found an environment eminently hospitable for perpetuating and elaborating the declining creatures of a European lower mythology. Marvels and prodigies of God, the Devil, and nature circulated freely among common folk, learned churchmen, reputable governors, and literate travelers in a strange new land, which could be viewed alternately as a fertile garden or a frightful “howling wilderness.”33 In such a land, even ordinary wild animals have acquired a mythic dimension for Americans needing ambiguous symbols for thinking about their own problematic experiences in a pluralistic society. Gillespie and Mechling argue that animals like the turkey, rattlesnake, alligator, armadillo, bear, fox, and coyote help Americans to understand and overcome the anxieties and conflicts related to being different and alone in an often confusing and complicated social environment?4 A wild animal like the legendary white stallion of the American plains has served American pioneers of the West with a vehicle for mediating their confrontation with the nature-culture contradiction. Rosenberg sees “the white steed of the prairies”-—Melville’s term and symbol of cosmic awe, analogous to the white whale—as a fundamental expression of American values. As Americans attempt to control the forces of nature and tame the wilderness, the elusive, untamable white mustang becomes a characteristic American symbol of freedom and independence as well as the attraction of loneliness in the wild?5 Dorson’s recapitulation of stories, legends, and traveler’s tales from early New England printed sources confirms the wide distribution and enormous popularity of monster-prodigy traditions in colonial America. Germane to this study, Dorson traces sea monster traditions from sightings in 1641 through the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and for the nineteenth century can conclude:

The sea serpent fable burgeoned forth into a thousand fragmentary tales. The creature was sighted in many waters, even in inland lakes; his shapes, colors, limbs, and movements received detailed THE BEAST OF ’BUSCO 45

description; periodic visits to New England shores brought in their wake flooding rumors, scientific speculations and organized expeditions to effect his capture.36

By the late nineteenth century sea-serpent stories had deluged newspapers as far as the Pacific Northwest. Donald Hines’s compendious survey of these sources indicates the popularity of marvels, the supremacy of the sea-serpent story, and, interestingly enough, a common source for these monsters in the Great Lakes interior region.37 With the expanding frontier and the frontier mentality of brag and individualism, the tall tale form came into its own, even though it would continue to overlap with the marvelous legend, and it provided American folk tradition with characteristic form and subject matter. It is precisely in those motif categories that govern or relate to the tall tale that Baughman would have to modify Thompson’s international Motif-Index, o f Folk Literature in order to accommodate American tradition.38 Modification was needed for an American pantheon of imaginary creatures such as the ziphus, swamp dodger, hide behind, tripodero, will-am-alone, dingball, haggletopelter, gwinter, and assorted side hill animals and reptiles.39 American tradition would exaggerate and lie about the enormity of virtually every common creature. Baughman lists motifs concerning monstrous size alone, for the ant, dog, bear, squirrel, chipmunk, mouse, rat, rabbit, hog, cow, fish hawk, hummingbird, turkey, gullnipper, tick, bee, potato bug, cockroach, spider, caterpillar, fish, snake, frog, earthworm, tapeworm, and turtle.40 In Man and Beast in American Comic Legend, published posthumously in 1982, Richard Dorson restated his theory for American folklore for the last time, arguing that a National comic bestiary demonstrates that the conditions of American history have shaped the character of American folklore. In this case, his own bestiary consists of ten nominations for “zoomythological stardom” in an “American Hall of Fearsome Critters.” The nominees are; the Windham frogs, the guyuscutus, the sidehill dodger, the Hugag, the Hodag, the jackalope, the hoopsnake, the sea serpent, Bigfoot, and the Beast of ’Busco. Unlike creatures of higher and lower mythologies throughout the old world, Dorson’s American bestiary contains a comic mythology of “fearsome critters” less subject to belief and dread, more prone to exaggerations, hoaxes, tall tales, pranks, and amusements.41 The events of 1949 can be viewed as an actualization of American cultural tendencies. The frill folkloric manifestation of these tendencies in a characteristically American style will be described and interpreted in the next chapter.