folklore — All Things Fish — Wildlife History

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No one heard the group of kids slipping into The Big Muddy River near Murphysboro, Illinois. It was past midnight on August 6th, 1886. Thick air hung over the water. The river didn’t offer much relief from the hot, muggy Midwest night. The kids were just trying to enjoy the last days of summer before school and harvest took over their time. The Reynolds brothers were splashing around in a deep pool when something grabbed 12 year old Marshal. The catfish took off like it was struck by lightning. It pulled Marshal 30 or 40 yards before someone killed the 51 pound fish and took it to market.[1]

I, like the original reporter of this story, am doubtful this event actually happened. Catfish here in the United States don’t generally attack people. So, why did stories like this even get told in the first place? Like land based predators, half-truths obscure true facts about an animal. As an example, people accused coyotes for declining deer herds because they found deer in coyote scat. In the 1930s and 40s, ecologist Adolph Murie discovered most of the deer that coyotes ate were carrion.[2] For catfish, people had scary experiences in the water and blamed catfish. The myth of a man-attacking catfish were reinforced by real widely reported stories of catfish eating dead bodies.

On the Mississippi River, a catfish solved a murder mystery. The story was reported in the Cincinnati Enquire (reprinted in the KC Star) on June, 1885. The article started by establishing the “man eater” size of catfish. The writer claimed they routinely saw cats over 400 pound and nine plus feet long. No catfish in North America gets that large, but the rest of the story is believable. At some point in the 1840s and 50s, the owner of a large plantation woke up and discovered a slave disappeared overnight. A month or so later, another person vanished. He didn’t know what was happening, but, it turns out, a catfish swallowed the evidence.

After a party at the plantation, some gentlemen decided to get out and have some fun on the river. They were ready to head in for dinner when one of the men hooked an “enormous catfish that was so game that it towed the boat about for an hour or so before they finally killed and got it ashore.” The paper claimed the fish was nearly 10 feet long and “bulky as a big steer.” Like all fisherman at one time or another, they wanted to know what the giant was eating and cut into the belly. They were horrified at what they found. As the Enquire told it, “Nothing more or less than the head of the girl that had disappeared the day before, and further investigation showed that the fish contained the entire body, that had been cut into four pieces.” Upon examination, investigators discovered the owner’s wife poisoned the girls.[3] Sadly, another catfish swallowed a child just a month after the previous report.

In Alabama, a child lived along the Alabama River with his mother. He enjoyed playing in the river. In September 1885, he went missing. A few days later, some men found a very large catfish in the river. According to the local paper, the men needed small boats and a seine to land the “monster” fish weighing 187 pounds. They took it a butcher in Burton, AL. The unsuspecting man started cleaning the fish and made a gruesome discovery. He found “a pair of small shoes, a hat, and what appeared to have been a pair of pants and shirt.” The boy’s mother identified the clothing. He drowned and the catfish ate the body.[4]

A Yellow Bullhead Catfish just peaking out to say hi from the USFWS

These stories even reached an avid angler named President Grover Cleveland. He was on a trip to the Adirondacks with an unknown doctor friend of his when the President caught a surprising fish. A bullhead! As an aside, I know bullheads aren’t man eaters but we’ll get back to larger catfish in a moment. I guess bullheads weren’t common in New Jersey and upstate New York because the President claimed the bullhead “felt a little like a bass” and the newspaper article described the catch as follows the President caught the fish “with a sweep which nearly broke his road he landed on the beach a fish about eight inches long and with a head big enough for a young shark.” As a Midwesterner who’s caught to many bullheads to count, I don’t think I’ve ever come close to breaking a rod catching one. It must have been a different bullhead species then I’m familiar with because it had “a pair of horns, the eyes of demon, and a mouth with an expression about it which suggested murder in cold blood.” Personally, the only murderous thing about a bullhead is their freaking spines. Any who, I’m writing about much larger catfishes.

After Cleveland caught his monster, the doctor regaled the president with a catfish story. The doctor visited St. Louis, Missouri where he had the pleasure of experiencing Midwest catfish culture. St. Louis lies at the juncture between a small regional river named the Mississippi and the mighty Missouri River. Catfish abounded there as the doc found out. At the Union market he could “fairly feel catfish in the air” and he saw catfish over seven feet long. Cleveland didn’t believe him and told the good doctor “when you lie why don’t you lie reasonably and artistically?” The other man went on to list everything a butcher pulled out of one giant fish. The fish ate a “gold bracelet, a setter dog, a pair of buckskin gloves, a baby, and seven copies of the city ordinances.” It was six feet nine inches and weighed 210 pounds. It’s steaks sold for nine dollars each. The whole story sounded so ridicules to Cleveland he thought the doctor was drunk.[5]

The doctor was in fact telling a plausible story. Catfish that size do exist and they do eat anything they can fit in their mouths. Go on Youtube and search catfish eating stuff for confirmation. Between the huge stomach and unusual looks, it’s easy to see why people’s imaginations ran wild. In his book Beautifully Grotesque Fish of the American West author Mark Spitzer described flathead cat (the likely culprit behind the Murphysboro “attack”) as “truly the most grotesque catfish in the American West, or anywhere on this continent. With those beady little eyes and those large, flat, extraterrestrial-looking heads equipped with heavy-duty lower jaws, these top predators have been reported to reach weights of over 150 pounds.”[6] Even I, a lover of unique animals, have to admit President Cleveland was on to something. My biggest catfish was a relatively small 15 or so pound channel cat in a small neighbor hood pond behind my old house. That fish was pretty wild to haul on land. You can’t really blame the people of Murphysboro, Illinois for believing a big cat dragged a kid through a river.

[1] A Doubtful Fish Story, Kansas City Star, 08/10/1886.

[2] Ecology of the Coyote in the Yellowstone, Adolp Murie, US National Parks Service, 1940.

[3] The Giant Cat Fish. Kansas City Star, 06/15/1885.

[4] A Black Jonah Reasons for the Belief that a Boy Was Swallowed by a Catfish. Kansas City Star, 10/3/1885.

[5] A Catfish Story. How the Doctor Tries to Impose on President Cleveland’s Credulity – A Sample Story, Kansas City Star, 09/04/1885.

[6] Spitzer, Mark, Beautifully Grotesque Fish of the American West, pg 111.