Wyoming has its own Loch Ness monster. His name is Smetty.
“The terrifying sea monster lived in the murky depths of Lake De Smet,” explained William Kenneth “Hi” Cole in 1938. “At various times it had swallowed Indians, road graders, missionaries, and various other delicacies.”
Cole, manager of the Sheridan Flour Company, went fishing for the sea serpent. Legend had it the monster roamed the lake's depths and even Father Pierre-Jean De Smet was said to have seen it.
Cole claimed he was “out on a limb” to prove the monster was real after flour brokers, “living a soft life in the effete east without even a hankering for the raw adventure to be found in the west,” scoffed at him when he mentioned the monster living in the lake.
Cole offered a $100 award for the creature's capture, but when no one claimed it he decided to go after the monster himself.
His fishing story was a real whopper, according to Ida McPherren, who interviewed Cole. But she said the story belonged in the annals of Smetty.
Cole claimed to have landed the serpent, and the tale exploded when he brought the monster to shore.
Wyoming’s Sea Serpent
Throughout the years, eyewitness accounts kept in The Wyoming Room at the Sheridan County Fulmer Library have described Smetty as a gargoyle, a flying fish with claws, an alligator-like creature, a giant seahorse, and as “a blob that upsets fishermen’s boats.”
Lake De Smet is in a basin 7.5 miles from Buffalo. According to McPherren, the water had a cold, slimy, unnatural feel to it, a green, ghoulish appearance, and it tasted bitter and acrid.
“Millions of crawling, writhing water dogs squirmed about in the shallow water of the lake’s edge,” McPherren wrote. “Red barrenness in close proximity lent a touch of desolateness to the surroundings and the absence of wild or domestic animals near its waters gave it a reputation of being haunted and inhabited by strange creatures of the air and water.”
This “holdover from the Jurassic” has reputedly terrorized the dark depths of the region’s most famous lake for centuries.
One legend from the records of The Wyoming Room tells of a band of Native Americans camped on the shores. During the night, they heard the strangest ruckus shattering the silence.
The next morning, a young warrior dove into the water. From the shore, his tribe watched in horror when something rose from the depths and the churning water turned into froth in his desperate efforts to reach safety.
He slipped beneath the waves before his horrified friends, never to be seen again.
In December 1911, 11-year-old Mary Olga Moore of the Meadow Ranch self-published a chapbook on the history and lore of Lake De Smet. She told of an encounter by Father De Smet that has been handed down through her family.
“Suddenly, the silence was broken by the roar of many waters and the heretofore calm surface of Lake De Smet was lashed into myriads of mighty waves, as a tawny body plowed its way through the seething, swirling waters,” Moore wrote.
Moore also shared a tragic Native American legend in which a mother, excited to show her baby’s swimming prowess to her newly returned, battle-gloried husband, set the babe in the water and ran downstream to catch him.
Before his horror-stricken parents, an unknown beast took the babe in its jaws to a watery grave.
Father Pierre-Jean De Smet, namesake of Lake De Smet, was also said to have spotted the monster in the 1800s. American Indians camping alongside its shores also told stories of the great water beast that is now affectionally called “Smetty.” 
Father Pierre-Jean De Smet, namesake of Lake De Smet, was also said to have spotted the monster in the 1800s. American Indians camping alongside its shores also told stories of the great water beast that is now affectionally called “Smetty.”
The Sightings
The reported sightings continued through the years. An account from 1892 was from three ranchers who witnessed an “enormous shadow which closely resembled a sea serpent.”
In 1924, Frank Krout claimed he saw a creature resembling a “wet bay mare” rise in the middle of the lake.
Edward Gillette, namesake of the town of Gillette, chronicled an incident involving the Barkey family in his 1925 book, “Locating the Iron Trail.”
While fixing fence on the banks of De Smet, the Barkeys bore witness to two sea serpents resembling “a long telephone pole with lard buckets attached” making a commotion in the water for nearly 15 minutes. They would leap out of the water as they chased each other.
Gillette said the Barkeys had lived near the lake 25 years and had never believed the monster stories before that day.
Several weeks later, another rancher, Arthur Senff, who lived a mile north of the lake, went down to the water on a “perfectly calm” day.
“He had the thought that conditions would be good to view a sea serpent if there was such a thing in the lake,” Gillette wrote. “As if in answer to this thought, a sea serpent raised its head about, what seemed to him, six feet out of the water, and rushed down the lake making a wake or waves which might swamp a small boat.”
Gillette concluded that “some specimens of a supposed extinct species of water animal” were in the lake in view of the testimonies from thoroughly reliable people familiar with the country.
Another account from the archives of The Wyoming Room was that of Mrs. Oliver Townsend of Sheridan. She wrote of an incident involving one of her family’s ranch hands when she was a little girl.
The man, a Missouri native who was an avid fisherman, came charging back from his morning fishing trip, face blanched in panic. He had seen “a 30- to 40-foot-long serpent, about a foot and a half thick, with a bony ridge on his back close to the head with resemblance to a horse’s mane.” He described the creature “of a brownish black in color and swam with his head held high out of the water with motions of a snake swimming.”
According to Townsend, a different rancher was working his horses on the lake banks when they startled, rolling their eyes toward the lake. A second later, they bolted away from the shore. The rancher then noticed a serpent swimming toward him and followed his horses’ flight.
Sneff, a civil engineer, worked a great deal in the vicinity of Lake De Smet. He planned to run pleasure boats on the lake until the day he saw a sea serpent rise and splash waves large enough to swamp a rowboat.
A Whopper Of A Fish Tale
McPherren said it was all these sightings, and more, that convinced Cole that the sea serpent was real and resulted in his ill-fated fishing trip in 1938.
At the Sheridan Flouring Mill, Cole claimed they had constructed a special tank and were prepared to fatten the monster on Tomahawk feed.
“I was even experimenting with a special laying mash, in the hope that I could produce some baby monsters to be given to the brokers for pets,” Cole told McPherren.
The reason that he was certain that the monster was real was because it had been seen that spring by Art Hufford of the Sheridan Meat Co. Hufford saw the sea serpent breach the lake water but was worried about being late for his Rotary meeting so didn’t stop.
Cole took then managing editor of the Sheridan Press, L. L. MacBride, and Walter Harris, staff photographer, on his boat to demonstrate how he was going to use Tomahawk feed to capture the sea monster.
“My line snapped taut, my reel began to sing, and the boat was tossed around like a chip on the ocean,” Cole said. “Thirty-forty-fifty-sixty miles an hour we cut through the water.”
They had exceeded the speed limit when a great monster leaped out of the water, hooked on the line. A desperate struggle commenced.
“That desperate ten-hour struggle still seems to me like a nightmare,” Cole said. “We gyrated, twisted, turned, and sometimes the boat was actually sailing through the air a foot above the water, now churned to blood-red foam.”
After hours of fighting, the beast whirled around in the water straight for the boat.
“It was a tense moment—our lives or his,” Cole said. “Mac, who claims to have been raised on a farm, grabbed the pitchfork lying in the bottom of the boat and struck out blindly.”
The blow was fatal and the battle was over.
“We managed to pull the huge carcass up on the shore and then a curious thing happened,” Cole said. “The monster exploded!”
Littering the shore was “12 horseshoes, the wheel of a road grader, Father De Smet’s Bible, 13 Indian scalps, a backless bathing suit, a piece of track from the North and South railroad, and an outboard motor.”
Ida McPherren, who chronicled the event, explained that the capture was most likely satirical but the explosion was real.
The Legend Lives On
A researcher at the Wyoming Room found modern-day eyewitness accounts, proof that the legend lives on.
In the 1950s, a sighting was said to occur during an ice fishing trip. The monster was said by the terrified fisherman to have burst through the lake’s frozen hide. The following day, people found a 50-yard rip in the 3-foot-thick ice.
Another account gathered by the Wyoming Room researcher in 2017 was from the early 1990s during a fishing derby. While setting up their camper, a pack of derby contestants saw something large move through the water, rise up, then descend back into the lake.
McPherren said that there are many who discredit these stories of sea serpents in Lake De Smet. These naysayers claim that it is an illusion caused by a bird that was once native to the area.
“These birds swarmed in masses that resembled a huge form,” McPherren wrote. “They would rest upon the lake all night and with the dawn they would rise en masse and disappear into space.”
She said that to someone viewing the birds at a distance with their view obstructed by hills and trees they could instead see what they thought was a huge animal rising up out of the water, writhing in midair and then sinking back into the water.
McPherren added that the descriptions to her sounded like Wyoming had a prehistoric relic swimming in Lake De Smet. Its very own Loch Ness.
Jackie Dorothy can be reached at jackie@cowboystatedaily.com.
