Post by Morgan Sierra on Feb 10, 2011 23:58:53 GMT -6
The Wolf-Girl of Devil's River
Can a human child, abandoned at birth in the wilderness, be adopted and raised by a pack of wolves? Most people would not give such a ridiculous question a second thought, yet the theme seems to be a common one throughout historical folklore.
Tarzan was raised by a family of apes. Mowgli, the hero of Rudyard Kipling's The Jungle Books was nurtured by a pack of wolves, as were Romulus and Remus, the fabled founders of Rome. Even Pecos Bill, that tallest of Texas tales, had a feral connection.
The story goes that as an infant, Bill was rescued by a family of coyotes after he fell out of a wagon near the Pecos River. He was nurtured and raised by the animals as one of their own. They adopted him into the pack and taught him to run, hunt and howl at the moon. He learned to speak the coyote language and could converse with other animals as well. It was a wonderful, carefree life completely devoid of human intervention.
Bill was happy with the coyotes. He would have stayed with them forever if a trapper had not come along and pointed out the fact that Bill had no tail, therefor he could not possibly be a coyote. Faced with that bit of irrefutable logic the wild-man had no choice but to leave his four-legged family and join the humans.
The legend of Pecos Bill was created in the late 1800's at cowboy campfire sessions throughout the Southwest. As the stories were retold the tales grew taller and became more embellished with fanciful exaggerations. Soon the saga had Bill doing everything from riding lightening to roping the moon. Pecos Bill was credited with inventing cowboys, rodeos, lariats and lassos. He levelled mountains, dug the Grand Canyon and cleared the staked plains of buffalo and trees. He built the first ranch and laid the rails for the Southern Pacific Railroad. While all of these details are equally fictitious it is Bill's animal upbringing that remains the most intriguing.
Where exactly did the yarn-spinners get the inspiration for that particular part of the story? When Bill was "born" Burroughs and Kipling had scarcely put pen to paper, and it seems unlikely that a largely illiterate bunch of range-riders and loners would be familiar with classical Roman fables. Rumors of a captured "wolf boy" in Germany had existed as far back as 1344, but it is extremely doubtful that so distant a tale could have had any effect on American folklore in the 1860's.
Perhaps the idea originated a little closer to home.
A few decades earlier there was a similar story floating around Texas and Mexico of a child raised by a pack of wolves. The strange tale, related by Mexican vaqueros and rancheros along the border seems at first totally unbelievable, but unlike the legend of Pecos Bill, which has been impossible to prove as anything other than fiction, the story of the wolf-girl of Devil's River appears to be based on facts.
L. D. Bertillion with the Texas Folk-Lore Society was the first to trace the origins of the tale. He trailed the story like a true hunter but fell short of any definitive conclusions. The results of his investigation were published in the Society's Straight Texas in 1937.
According to Bertillion the tale had its beginnings in Georgia on April 13, 1834. That was the day that young Mollie Pertul eloped with her lover, John Dent. Dent was a trapper who was on the lam for killing his former partner, Will Marlo, in a fight a year earlier. Apparently he fulfilled his vow to return for his sweetheart, and together they absconded into the wilderness.
Six months later the elder Mrs. Pertul received a letter that made her believe her daughter was living in Texas. The letter was postmarked in Galveston and read:
"Dear Mother,
The Devil has a river in Texas that is all his own and it is made only for those who are grown.
Yours with Love--
Mollie."
The Devil's River was originally the San Pedro, which flows through Val Verde county and empties into the Rio Grande near present day Del Rio. In 1835 a group of English colonists founded the town of Dolores near the junction of the two rivers. The settlement was short-lived, being first harried and crippled by indians then finished off by an invading Mexican army during the revolution.However, living apart from the settlement and escaping the massacre was the grizzled trapper, John Dent.
Dent had spent the early part of 1835 on the upper reaches of the Devil's River. Trapping was good and he had acquired a vast haul of beaver pelts, enough to bring in a healthy income. He needed the money to support a burgeoning family, for his young bride was in the last stages of pregnancy. Just a few more pelts and they would return to civilization to start a home and a family. Unfortunately, they waited just a bit too long.
One day in May Mollie suddenly went into labor. Her panicked husband quickly saddled his horse and rode for the nearest settlement, a Mexican goat ranch forty miles away. By the time he got there a ferocious thunderstorm had closed in on him. The wind was howling and thunder growled across the darkened skies. The Mexican rancher was surprised to see a rider approaching in such a storm but after hearing the desperate plea for help he and his wife promised to do what they could. They began saddling their mounts but before they were ready to leave a bolt of lightning struck John Dent, killing him instantly. This slowed the Mexican couple considerably. They knew the general area of the trapper's camp but not its exact location. The darkness and the storm hindered their search even more and it was morning before they finally arrived.
They found Mollie dead under a brush arbor. Apparently she had died giving birth but their was no sign of the child. A search of the area revealed nothing except numerous lobo wolf tracks leading the rancher to believe that the wolves had devoured the infant. Mollie's body remained untouched. The Mexicans then searched Dent's sparsely furnished cabin and found a letter that Mollie had written her mother several weeks earlier. They took it with them to help spread the story of the Dent family's demise.
Ten years later people would have reason to recall the tragic story. Reports had begun filtering through the area of a strange creature running with the local wolf pack. The creature looked almost human in form, and though it usually moved on all fours it was capable of raising itself almost erect.
In 1845 a boy living in San Felipo Springs claimed that he had seen the creature with a pack of wolves attacking a goat. He described the thing as looking like a naked girl, though covered with long hair.
A year later a Mexican woman in the same area reported seeing the naked girl with two wolves devouring a freshly killed goat. Seminole scouts from Fort Clark added credence to the story by claiming to have found human hand and foot prints mixed with wolf tracks on the sandy banks of rivers and water holes. Other indians confirmed the sightings.
People began to wonder if the stories were true. Maybe the missing child had not perished after all but had been nursed and raised by the wolves. Was such a thing possible?
A hunting expedition was organized to find out. Mexican vaqueros and trackers set out to capture the lobo girl of Devil's River. After searching a few days they found their quarry running with a large wolf and herded them into a box canyon. The wolf tried to fight but was shot dead. The girl also fought back, biting and clawing, baring her teeth and snarling, but after seeing her companion killed she sunk into a morose faint.
The vaqueros bound the girl and carried her to a small cabin where they turned her loose in an empty room. Upon examination the wolf-girl proved to be a very normal human female. She was covered with exceedingly long hair, and the muscles of her hands and arms were extraordinarily developed, but she was human in all respects.
All attempts to tame the girl were immediately rejected. She cowered in the shadows in the back of the room and snarled savagely at anybody who entered. Later that night she began making horrific howling and wailing noises. Her screams were a mixture of human and animal and chilled the blood of those listening. The calls did not go unnoticed.
From the surrounding hills first one, then another, then a dozen wolves all howled in unison. Their cries were heard by others in the area and soon a large pack began to converge on the small ranch. Huddled inside the cabin the Mexicans could see a ring of wolves closing around them. It seemed as if every lobo in the desert had joined in the ruckus. They began attacking the farm animals and the frantic screams of sheep and horses brought the men running, rifles in hand, firing wildly into the darkness. The ranchers finally succeeded in driving the predators away but upon returning to the cabin they found it empty. Sometime during the confusion the girl had managed to pull a plank from across a window and had made her escape. Later searches were unable to locate her and not even a track could be seen on the ground. It seemed as if she had just disappeared.
In the years that followed the story of the girl began to fade. The only other documented sighting occurred in 1852 near the junction of the Pecos River. A party of explorers were scouting along a bend in the Rio Grande when they spied a naked girl sitting on a sandbar. She had two wolf pups nursing at her breasts. Upon catching sight of the humans she leaped to her feet, grabbed the pups under each arm and disappeared into the wilderness, never to be seen again.
Bertillion ended his story there but added a peculiar footnote. For years thereafter men often made claims of coming upon individual wolves which bore a marked human resemblance. Rumors of these so-called "human-faced" wolves continued well into the beginning of the twentieth century and were imagined to be the offspring of the wolf-girl who had once inhabited the area. Scientists and historians scoff at the idea of a wolf-human hybrid and to them even the story of the girl sounds like nothing more than campfire fodder, just another tall tale that eventually lent its influence to the Pecos Bill legend. Still, is it beyond the realm of possibility?
In 1920 two young girls were found living in a wolf den near the village of Midnapore in eastern India. The girls, aged seven and two, had apparently been adopted and raised by the animals. They ran on all fours, ate raw meat and carrion, and howled as much like wolves as human vocal chords would allow.
Reverend Joseph Singh. who administered an orphanage in the area, captured the two wolf-girls and began the slow process of humanizing them. The younger girl, named Amala by the priest, died just a year later, but the older girl, Kamala, lived for another nine years. During that time she learned to walk upright, to speak a rudimentary language, and to acquire a liking for cooked food. She never completely fit into human society though.
In 1972, also in India, a hunter found a boy who had been raised by a bear. The child was taken to a convent where he lived with the nuns until dying at the age of eighteen.
Other accounts of feral children exist as well. A boy was found living with monkeys in Sri Lanka in 1973, a tiger-man was captured in India in the late 1800's, and other wild humans have been rumored to exist in both Russia and China. Most of these stories are dismissed as frauds or hoaxes, or the results of children abandoned by their parents due to autism or mental retardation. Autistic children develop behavioral patterns very similar to these so-called wild children, and this animal-like behavior could easily convince a casual observer that he was seeing a child that had been raised by animals.
There is, however, one documented observer who could not have been so easily fooled, or dismissed. This is the highly respected French anthropologist Jean-Claude Armen, who in 1970 witnessed "a naked human form...slender and with long black hair, galloping in gigantic bounds among a long cavalcade of white gazelles." Subsequent observations showed a boy of about ten years of age who had adapted so completely to life as a gazelle that he could run and leap with such grace that he hardly left a print on the ground. The boy, though studied at length, was never captured.
Do these accounts prove the existence of the West Texas wolf-girl? Maybe...but then again, maybe not. Texas may be young by historical standards but it has had more than enough time to develop its folklore. Pecos Bill and the wolf-girl of the Devil's River rank right up there alongside Tarzan and Mowgli as prime examples of historical legend. Whether or not they contain any truth remains to be proven.
Until then, the tales will continue to grow. They will evolve and change and stretch taller and taller every time a group of people gather around a roaring campfire to share lurid tales of the Converse "werewolf," The East Texas "Manimal," or the wolf-girl of Devil's River...and somebody glances into the darkness to see a wolf watching them through human eyes.
Can a human child, abandoned at birth in the wilderness, be adopted and raised by a pack of wolves? Most people would not give such a ridiculous question a second thought, yet the theme seems to be a common one throughout historical folklore.
Tarzan was raised by a family of apes. Mowgli, the hero of Rudyard Kipling's The Jungle Books was nurtured by a pack of wolves, as were Romulus and Remus, the fabled founders of Rome. Even Pecos Bill, that tallest of Texas tales, had a feral connection.
The story goes that as an infant, Bill was rescued by a family of coyotes after he fell out of a wagon near the Pecos River. He was nurtured and raised by the animals as one of their own. They adopted him into the pack and taught him to run, hunt and howl at the moon. He learned to speak the coyote language and could converse with other animals as well. It was a wonderful, carefree life completely devoid of human intervention.
Bill was happy with the coyotes. He would have stayed with them forever if a trapper had not come along and pointed out the fact that Bill had no tail, therefor he could not possibly be a coyote. Faced with that bit of irrefutable logic the wild-man had no choice but to leave his four-legged family and join the humans.
The legend of Pecos Bill was created in the late 1800's at cowboy campfire sessions throughout the Southwest. As the stories were retold the tales grew taller and became more embellished with fanciful exaggerations. Soon the saga had Bill doing everything from riding lightening to roping the moon. Pecos Bill was credited with inventing cowboys, rodeos, lariats and lassos. He levelled mountains, dug the Grand Canyon and cleared the staked plains of buffalo and trees. He built the first ranch and laid the rails for the Southern Pacific Railroad. While all of these details are equally fictitious it is Bill's animal upbringing that remains the most intriguing.
Where exactly did the yarn-spinners get the inspiration for that particular part of the story? When Bill was "born" Burroughs and Kipling had scarcely put pen to paper, and it seems unlikely that a largely illiterate bunch of range-riders and loners would be familiar with classical Roman fables. Rumors of a captured "wolf boy" in Germany had existed as far back as 1344, but it is extremely doubtful that so distant a tale could have had any effect on American folklore in the 1860's.
Perhaps the idea originated a little closer to home.
A few decades earlier there was a similar story floating around Texas and Mexico of a child raised by a pack of wolves. The strange tale, related by Mexican vaqueros and rancheros along the border seems at first totally unbelievable, but unlike the legend of Pecos Bill, which has been impossible to prove as anything other than fiction, the story of the wolf-girl of Devil's River appears to be based on facts.
L. D. Bertillion with the Texas Folk-Lore Society was the first to trace the origins of the tale. He trailed the story like a true hunter but fell short of any definitive conclusions. The results of his investigation were published in the Society's Straight Texas in 1937.
According to Bertillion the tale had its beginnings in Georgia on April 13, 1834. That was the day that young Mollie Pertul eloped with her lover, John Dent. Dent was a trapper who was on the lam for killing his former partner, Will Marlo, in a fight a year earlier. Apparently he fulfilled his vow to return for his sweetheart, and together they absconded into the wilderness.
Six months later the elder Mrs. Pertul received a letter that made her believe her daughter was living in Texas. The letter was postmarked in Galveston and read:
"Dear Mother,
The Devil has a river in Texas that is all his own and it is made only for those who are grown.
Yours with Love--
Mollie."
The Devil's River was originally the San Pedro, which flows through Val Verde county and empties into the Rio Grande near present day Del Rio. In 1835 a group of English colonists founded the town of Dolores near the junction of the two rivers. The settlement was short-lived, being first harried and crippled by indians then finished off by an invading Mexican army during the revolution.However, living apart from the settlement and escaping the massacre was the grizzled trapper, John Dent.
Dent had spent the early part of 1835 on the upper reaches of the Devil's River. Trapping was good and he had acquired a vast haul of beaver pelts, enough to bring in a healthy income. He needed the money to support a burgeoning family, for his young bride was in the last stages of pregnancy. Just a few more pelts and they would return to civilization to start a home and a family. Unfortunately, they waited just a bit too long.
One day in May Mollie suddenly went into labor. Her panicked husband quickly saddled his horse and rode for the nearest settlement, a Mexican goat ranch forty miles away. By the time he got there a ferocious thunderstorm had closed in on him. The wind was howling and thunder growled across the darkened skies. The Mexican rancher was surprised to see a rider approaching in such a storm but after hearing the desperate plea for help he and his wife promised to do what they could. They began saddling their mounts but before they were ready to leave a bolt of lightning struck John Dent, killing him instantly. This slowed the Mexican couple considerably. They knew the general area of the trapper's camp but not its exact location. The darkness and the storm hindered their search even more and it was morning before they finally arrived.
They found Mollie dead under a brush arbor. Apparently she had died giving birth but their was no sign of the child. A search of the area revealed nothing except numerous lobo wolf tracks leading the rancher to believe that the wolves had devoured the infant. Mollie's body remained untouched. The Mexicans then searched Dent's sparsely furnished cabin and found a letter that Mollie had written her mother several weeks earlier. They took it with them to help spread the story of the Dent family's demise.
Ten years later people would have reason to recall the tragic story. Reports had begun filtering through the area of a strange creature running with the local wolf pack. The creature looked almost human in form, and though it usually moved on all fours it was capable of raising itself almost erect.
In 1845 a boy living in San Felipo Springs claimed that he had seen the creature with a pack of wolves attacking a goat. He described the thing as looking like a naked girl, though covered with long hair.
A year later a Mexican woman in the same area reported seeing the naked girl with two wolves devouring a freshly killed goat. Seminole scouts from Fort Clark added credence to the story by claiming to have found human hand and foot prints mixed with wolf tracks on the sandy banks of rivers and water holes. Other indians confirmed the sightings.
People began to wonder if the stories were true. Maybe the missing child had not perished after all but had been nursed and raised by the wolves. Was such a thing possible?
A hunting expedition was organized to find out. Mexican vaqueros and trackers set out to capture the lobo girl of Devil's River. After searching a few days they found their quarry running with a large wolf and herded them into a box canyon. The wolf tried to fight but was shot dead. The girl also fought back, biting and clawing, baring her teeth and snarling, but after seeing her companion killed she sunk into a morose faint.
The vaqueros bound the girl and carried her to a small cabin where they turned her loose in an empty room. Upon examination the wolf-girl proved to be a very normal human female. She was covered with exceedingly long hair, and the muscles of her hands and arms were extraordinarily developed, but she was human in all respects.
All attempts to tame the girl were immediately rejected. She cowered in the shadows in the back of the room and snarled savagely at anybody who entered. Later that night she began making horrific howling and wailing noises. Her screams were a mixture of human and animal and chilled the blood of those listening. The calls did not go unnoticed.
From the surrounding hills first one, then another, then a dozen wolves all howled in unison. Their cries were heard by others in the area and soon a large pack began to converge on the small ranch. Huddled inside the cabin the Mexicans could see a ring of wolves closing around them. It seemed as if every lobo in the desert had joined in the ruckus. They began attacking the farm animals and the frantic screams of sheep and horses brought the men running, rifles in hand, firing wildly into the darkness. The ranchers finally succeeded in driving the predators away but upon returning to the cabin they found it empty. Sometime during the confusion the girl had managed to pull a plank from across a window and had made her escape. Later searches were unable to locate her and not even a track could be seen on the ground. It seemed as if she had just disappeared.
In the years that followed the story of the girl began to fade. The only other documented sighting occurred in 1852 near the junction of the Pecos River. A party of explorers were scouting along a bend in the Rio Grande when they spied a naked girl sitting on a sandbar. She had two wolf pups nursing at her breasts. Upon catching sight of the humans she leaped to her feet, grabbed the pups under each arm and disappeared into the wilderness, never to be seen again.
Bertillion ended his story there but added a peculiar footnote. For years thereafter men often made claims of coming upon individual wolves which bore a marked human resemblance. Rumors of these so-called "human-faced" wolves continued well into the beginning of the twentieth century and were imagined to be the offspring of the wolf-girl who had once inhabited the area. Scientists and historians scoff at the idea of a wolf-human hybrid and to them even the story of the girl sounds like nothing more than campfire fodder, just another tall tale that eventually lent its influence to the Pecos Bill legend. Still, is it beyond the realm of possibility?
In 1920 two young girls were found living in a wolf den near the village of Midnapore in eastern India. The girls, aged seven and two, had apparently been adopted and raised by the animals. They ran on all fours, ate raw meat and carrion, and howled as much like wolves as human vocal chords would allow.
Reverend Joseph Singh. who administered an orphanage in the area, captured the two wolf-girls and began the slow process of humanizing them. The younger girl, named Amala by the priest, died just a year later, but the older girl, Kamala, lived for another nine years. During that time she learned to walk upright, to speak a rudimentary language, and to acquire a liking for cooked food. She never completely fit into human society though.
In 1972, also in India, a hunter found a boy who had been raised by a bear. The child was taken to a convent where he lived with the nuns until dying at the age of eighteen.
Other accounts of feral children exist as well. A boy was found living with monkeys in Sri Lanka in 1973, a tiger-man was captured in India in the late 1800's, and other wild humans have been rumored to exist in both Russia and China. Most of these stories are dismissed as frauds or hoaxes, or the results of children abandoned by their parents due to autism or mental retardation. Autistic children develop behavioral patterns very similar to these so-called wild children, and this animal-like behavior could easily convince a casual observer that he was seeing a child that had been raised by animals.
There is, however, one documented observer who could not have been so easily fooled, or dismissed. This is the highly respected French anthropologist Jean-Claude Armen, who in 1970 witnessed "a naked human form...slender and with long black hair, galloping in gigantic bounds among a long cavalcade of white gazelles." Subsequent observations showed a boy of about ten years of age who had adapted so completely to life as a gazelle that he could run and leap with such grace that he hardly left a print on the ground. The boy, though studied at length, was never captured.
Do these accounts prove the existence of the West Texas wolf-girl? Maybe...but then again, maybe not. Texas may be young by historical standards but it has had more than enough time to develop its folklore. Pecos Bill and the wolf-girl of the Devil's River rank right up there alongside Tarzan and Mowgli as prime examples of historical legend. Whether or not they contain any truth remains to be proven.
Until then, the tales will continue to grow. They will evolve and change and stretch taller and taller every time a group of people gather around a roaring campfire to share lurid tales of the Converse "werewolf," The East Texas "Manimal," or the wolf-girl of Devil's River...and somebody glances into the darkness to see a wolf watching them through human eyes.
Is this a true story? i don't believe the part about the girl having wolf babies but is the rest of it true? That would be freaky! A person raised by wolves? Wow if it is true.
Hope all is well with everyone. I see there are some new members , thats good. So good to see your names on threads and be back!