Monster legends event news12/24/2023 The manuscript is preserved on microfilm in the Draper collection at West Virginia University Library, series JJ., v. Lough cited an account of the “uncommon animal” described in the late 1700s by a youth stationed at Fort Harmer, at present-day Marietta, Ohio, in a letter to his parents in Connecticut. The tale of the Ogua continues to be one of the most firmly established and long-lived Monongahela legends. The tale of the Ogua has never quite died away and has since been joined by the tale of Monongy and the more recently “discovered” Riversville River Monster. “The Ogua… was altogether a mythical beast, used first by the Indians as a threat against all white people, then used later by the white people, especially the Indian-traders, soldiers, and early visitors in the western wilderness, to impress the folks back home-easterners who were ever anxious to believe any wild tale concerning things, people, and events that had to do with the land of deepest mysteries-the Monongahela-Ohio Country.” In his 1969 history of Marion County, titled “ Now and Long Ago,” Lough wrote of the lore of one such river monster, the Ogua, which he didn’t accept as fact. They were later taken up by the thousands of immigrants who arrived in the valley to work at mines and factories along the river in such places as Fairmont and Morgantown. Historian Glenn Lough once postulated that monster tales out of the Monongahela were first invented by indigenous peoples to frighten Europeans and were then recycled by settlers to impress. So it’s hardly surprising that the river has inspired more than its fair share of lore-including monster lore. Several of its tributaries cascade out of old forests through which only the most intrepid hunters tread. Ripples appear on the surface of the Monongahela River in Marion County, West Virginia.įar from the city lights that shimmer about its mouth at Pittsburgh, the Monongahela River descends out of some of the most remote reaches in the Appalachian Mountains.
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