The Great Turtle Hunt

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.

Load more