On the waterLore

Lore

Three stories this lake carries. One is a tradition still held by the people whose tradition it is. One has been told for two centuries with nothing found to confirm it. One has a documented history in which the most-quoted part is a fabrication. Each says at the end what it rests on.

Odzihozo, and the rock in the bay

Off Shelburne Point, a mile or so out from the Burlington shore, a bare rock stands out of the water with a light on it. Charts call it Rock Dunder. In Abenaki tradition it is Odzihozo, and the lake is his.

Odzihozo was made before he was finished, and he made himself. He had very short legs and long arms, and he shaped the country by hand — pushing up the mountains, dragging himself across the land because he could not walk, and opening the valleys and the rivers where he dragged. The lake was the last thing he made and the thing he was proudest of, and when it was done he put himself into the rock in the middle of it so that he could go on looking at it. He is there now. People left tobacco on the rock going past, and a satisfied Odzihozo meant a quiet crossing.

Abenaki tradition, recounted here from Vermont's state archaeologist Jess Robinson, who describes him as “not ‘the’ creator, but an ancient being that was known to have had very short legs and long arms”, who “made the hills and the mountains around here by forming them with his hands”, and who then “transform[ed] himself into Rock Dunder … so that he could admire his creation”. This is a living tradition and not a folk tale that has been finished with, which is why it is written here in the present tense.

Carleton's Prize

Between Stave Island and Providence Island there is a steep-sided rock about thirty feet out of the water with a level top. At a distance, in poor light, its profile is the profile of a hull.

On the night of 11 October 1776 Arnold's fleet slipped past the British line at Valcour in the dark and ran south. The story is that the next morning, in fog, Carleton's ships found a vessel lying in the channel ahead and fired into her for the better part of an hour before the fog lifted enough to show them they had been bombarding a rock. The rock has been called Carleton's Prize ever since — the prize he took.

Told in local histories for two centuries. No contemporary British or American account has been found that confirms the bombardment. The rock is real, the name is real and on the chart, the battle is real and is on History; the hour of gunfire is the part nobody can produce a source for.

Champ

Something has been reported in this lake for a long time. What the reports come to, nearly every time, is the same three things: humps in the water, a wake, and then nothing. There is no specimen, no bone, and no photograph that settles it. The best known is Sandra Mansi's, taken in 1977 — and the negative was thrown away and she could not afterwards say where she had been standing, so there is nothing in it to measure.

The story is taken seriously as a story. Port Henry keeps a sighting board and a Champ Day on the first Saturday of August. In 2019 the William G. Pomeroy Foundation put a marker up on Cumberland Head Road in Plattsburgh, under a programme called Legends & Lore, reading “Champy — legendary lake monster lives here. Over 300 sightings reported since 1819. Up to 200 feet long. NYS law protects this regional icon.” A marker in a folklore programme is a record that the legend exists, which is exactly what it claims to be.

The part that is not true is the oldest-sounding part. Champ is routinely said to have been seen by Samuel de Champlain himself in 1609, described as a twenty-foot serpent, thick as a barrel, with a head like a horse. Champlain wrote nothing of the kind. The quotation first appears in the summer 1970 issue of Vermont Life, attributed to him, and no one has since found it in anything he wrote.

What he did write is on this site. On leaf 309 of his Voyages, at his page 216, he describes a fish the people of the country called chaousarou: eight or ten feet at the very largest, the ones he saw about five feet and as thick as his thigh, the head the size of his two fists, a snout two and a half feet long with a double row of teeth, a body shaped like a pike, scales a dagger would not go through, and silver-grey. The 1878 editor's own footnote on that page names it — the bony-scaled pike. It is a longnose gar, it is still in the lake, and anybody who has caught one knows how it got into a story.

The sightings are what they are: reports. The 1609 attribution is traced to Vermont Life, summer 1970. Champlain's own passage is quoted from the Prince Society edition this site carries, leaf 309, page 216, with the editor's note at 348.