Opinion & Comment

Man-Eating Catfish In Our Lakes & Streams

APPALACHIAN NOTEBOOK - Steve Oden

Mark Twain’s “Life on the Mississippi” tells of the exploration of North America’s greatest river system. Twain was the pen name used by “Tom Sawyer” and “Huckleberry Finn” author Samuel Clemons, who was at one point in his life a river boat pilot on the mighty Mississippi. He had a lifelong love of and fascination with the “Big Muddy.”

Chapter 1, “The River and Its History,” tells of a gigantic catfish that collided with the canoe of an early explorer, Marquette, who had been warned by Indians that the river was full of “demons” that could “engulf” humans. Twain reflects that during his days on the river, he saw catfish weighing up to 250 pounds.

Today, tales of giant catfish still proliferate on the Mississippi, Ohio, and Tennessee rivers. It is surprising how similar these accounts have become.

I’ve ranged up and down Appalachia’s largest rivers, studied the river basins and drainages, and jotted down the folk tales and stories connected to landmarks and events. Floods and yellow fever epidemics, riverboat disasters, Indian-settler skirmishes, Civil War battles, economic busts and booms, ghost towns, and river “monsters” are common threads in the verbal and written histories of these major tributaries of the Mississippi.

The most peculiar, I call “river legends.” Like older word-of-mouth urban legends – the hook-handed murderer, phantom locomotive, haunted hotel room, etc. – these legends are told up and down the rivers, wherever boatmen, fishermen, or lock-and-dam workers gather.

Most river legends deal with strange things on and in the water. One I’ve heard repeated from Guntersville Dam on the Tennessee River all the way to the Robert C. Byrd Lock and Dam on the Ohio River is about the giant, man-eating catfish lurking in the deep water at the bases of the dams.

The tale is always told in the same frame of reference: divers are sent down to repair a lock mechanism or hydroelectric generating turbine. They come back to the surface in a panic, clamber out of the water, and refuse to re-enter the river to complete their work.

Giant catfish, with gaping mouths large enough to eat humans and whiskers the thickness of cables, are waiting down there, according to the divers.

The first telling of this river legend I heard was as a boy. I got it from an uncle, who I believed at the time told the unadulterated truth. He had labored for a Tennessee Valley Authority cement contactor who performed construction work on the reservoir dam system in the 1930s.

Last week, I heard the same river legend retold at a barber shop in the Ohio River village of Gallipolis. Only the location had changed. The divers supposedly had spied monstrous underwater denizens while exploring beneath the flood walls of the nearby lock and dam. This was over 500 miles away from the apocryphal Tennessee River sighting. Those giant catfish certainly get around in Appalachia.

I have seen some 100-pounders, might even have hooked one or two. Down in the Mountain Lakes area of Appalachia, around Wheeler and Wilson dams on the TVA system, the blue catfish grow large. In 1996, angler William McKinley set a new world record by catching a 111-lb. blue catfish. I fished for years in the same locale and can attest to the size and number of lunker catfish, but I never saw or heard of one large enough to eat a man. Certainly, a 100-pounder couldn’t do it.

McKinley’s whopper has been eclipsed several times, the latest record-buster coming from the Mississippi River around St. Louis, Mo. The fishermen, Tim Pruitt, reeled in a 124-lb. blue catfish after being towed down river one-half mile. It was 58 inches long and had a 44-inch girth.

But, it still wasn’t big enough to eat a human.

Then there came international news reports of a true behemoth caught by village fishermen in a remote part of Thailand. The Mekong giant catfish weighed 646 pounds, a new world record for any type of freshwater fish. And, yes, it might have swallowed a man or made a good effort, so great was its size… except that the Mekong giant catfish is more partial to eating vegetable matter on the bottoms of deep rivers. It is also an endangered species and revered by the people of Southeast Asia.

So, have man-eating catfish ever existed? In Poland, a river legend is told of the “Obra Water Monster,” an aquatic denizen said to consume children, dogs, and large water birds. European folklorists believe this legend is probably connected to a real creature: the wels, or European catfish. Today, this type of catfish tips the scales at over 600 pounds, but historical records indicate the species might have featured much larger specimens, perhaps up to 15 feet in length, several hundred years ago.

A 15-foot-long, 1,000-lb. catfish would seem plenty large enough – and probably be voracious enough, too – to qualify as a potential man-eater. Perhaps there were such monsters swimming in the rivers and lakes of the New World before its discovery, settlement, and colonization by Europeans.

This might connect the river legends still told and re-told today. Actual creatures, not myths, could have been at the root of these tales.