The Lake Monster of Manitoba: A Personal Encounter with Manipogo
Lake Manitoba is a leftover from the massive glacial Lake Agassiz. It’s big but shallow and has a chalky bottom that makes it appear Caribbean-like turquoise on sunny days. It was on one of those days that I parked myself in the sand and waited for the sunset at St. Ambroise beach. Truly, the surface was like glass after a sweltering day of no wind. Not a creature was stirring, I thought to myself, staring into the western sky.
Then, all of a sudden, a creature WAS stirring! A massive, rumbled-back thing broke the surface, its muddy brown body seemingly endless. Startled beyond logic, I stumbled to my feet, ready to run, but keeping an eye on the thing, counting out, “one, two, three, four, five…” in a vain attempt to judge its length, its girth. With my heart smashing into my ears, it slipped back into Lake Manitoba soundlessly, leaving my mind racing.
Had I just seen the legendary Manipogo?
Scotland has the Loch Ness Monster. British Columbia has Ogopogo. And Manitoba has Manipogo!
In Anishinaabemowin, the language of the Anishinaabe, the creature is called gichi ginebig, and it means giant snake. It figures prominently in storytelling, often associated with water and the underworld. Its mythological rivals are the Thunderbirds, said to hunt the serpents to maintain balance between sky and water. In fact, on Lake Manitoba, there’s a thunderbird nest designated as an Historic Site of Manitoba. A plaque at the site explains that a thunderbird is a mythical creature capable of transforming from an eagle to a human. It eats serpents and is the guardian of humanity against the great horned serpent of the underworld.
It was in 1909 that the first report from a settler surfaced. Hudson’s Bay Company fur trader Valentine McKay saw the creature in the lake. CF Ross, a timber inspector, saw it in 1935. In 1948, a man says the creature rose up from the lake and emitted a loud cry that sounded like a dinosaur. In 1960, an astounding 17 eyewitness account surfaced of several creatures swimming in the Toutes Aides area, the northwest corner of Lake Manitoba.
Then in 1963, commercial fishers Richard Vincent and John Konefell spotted the creature and gave chase, resulting in the only known photograph. By then, the creature had an English name, Manipogo, a play on British Columbia’s Ogopogo, the monster of Okanagan Lake.
In 1961, Manipogo Provincial Park, north of Toutes Aides was established, offering swimming, boating and camping on the west shore. And perhaps sightings of Manipogo.
While sightings continue to trickle in decade by decade, so does a scientific explanation of my experience on the beach over a quarter of a century ago. Let’s talk about the tricks of light. I’ve seen a six-metre-long whitefish boat crossing Lake Winnipeg near Berens River that looked more like a 300 metre-long ocean liner. It was early fall, while the lake was still warm but the air had cooled enough to bring an early-season snowfall.
I’ve seen a pair of women, seemingly floating far out on Lake Manitoba, thanks to a scorching stretch of 30 C days. When I walked closer, they were standing on the shoreline. And in northern Manitoba, I’ve witnessed the Fata Morgana, a mirage that creates distorted, stacked and magnified images in polar and desert regions. On the shore of Hudson Bay, it appeared as a row of intricate Greek columns on the horizon.
So did light have something to do with my experience? Likely.
The question then becomes, what did I see breaking the surface of the water? Lake sturgeon, probably. Manitoba’s largest freshwater fish can live up to 150 years. The largest on record weighed a whopping 185 kilograms (over 400 pounds). They have five rows of bony plates across their backs that become smoother with age, a toothless, sucker-like mouth and a shark-like tail. Interestingly, they never stop growing, so fish that reach over four metres are not uncommon. They are truly prehistoric in both appearance and biology. While they don’t unusually move in schools, they can gather during migration to spawning sites.
Is the myth busted? Perhaps. But like the northern lights that are scientifically a result of solar storms, I prefer to revel in the magic, imagining ancestors playing a ball game in the night sky. If Manipogo is a school of travelling sturgeon, brought into focus by tricks of light and atmosphere, that’s okay too. But it’s way more fun to believe in stranger things.
