Caddo Lake is Texas’ only recognized natural lake. The addition of a dam to accommodate oil well drilling operations in 1914 turned it into a partially natural lake. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers built the Caddo Lake Dam in Louisiana from 1968 to 1971. It forms Caddo Lake’s easternmost border.
Most of Caddo Lake is entirely natural and the dam construction barely touched its beauty. The Ramsar Convention designated the Caddo Lake National Wildlife Refuge as “A Wetland of International Importance, Especially as Waterfowl Habitat”.
The Ramsar Convention is an intergovernmental treaty with over 150 member nations, along with Bird Life International, the World Wildlife Fund, the International Water Management Institute, Wetlands International, and the World Conservation Union.
Caddo Lake has an extremely complex ecosystem that provides habitat for thousands of species of flora and fauna. Caddo Lake’s history and aura birthed legends and secrets. Indeed, Caddo Lake is a mysterious conglomeration of nature with its flooded bald cypress forests draped in Spanish moss and bathed in misty wafts above shallow waters.
How Was Caddo Lake Formed?
The first legend about Caddo Lake references to how it was formed. One theory is that the three New Madrid Earthquakes from December 1811 to February 1812 created Caddo Lake. The New Madrid Seismic Zone (NMSZ) is located in southeastern Missouri, northeastern Arkansas, western Tennessee, western Kentucky and southern Illinois.
Seismologists estimate that these earthquakes reached a 7.0 magnitude or possibly larger. There is scientific evidence that the New Madrid Earthquakes created Tennessee’s Reelfoot Lake. However, this is not the prevailing theory of how Caddo Lake formed.
Most geologists follow the theory that the Great Raft was eventually responsible for Caddo Lake’s creation. The evidence that primarily supports the Great Raft theory is the discovery of present day cypress trees with growth rings of 400 to 600 years.
Cypress tree seeds will not root in dry soil, so these trees suggest that Caddo Lake is much older. The Great Raft was an estimated 160-mile long, natural logjam on the Red River, which floated in a series of rafts. The Freeman-Curtis Expedition, commissioned by President Thomas Jefferson, in 1806 discovered the Great Raft, which was cleared by the 1890s.
The origins of the Great Raft remain unclear, but the most eminent theory is that floodwaters from the Mississippi River surged into the smaller mouth of the Red River and forced a huge volume of driftwood upstream. Scientists believe this flooding occurred around 1,000 A.D.
The Native American Caddo Legends
Before European discovery, the Caddo Indians living in the Red River/Caddo Lake region denominated the logjams there as sacred. The Caddos centered their lives around the spring floods and the logjam deposits of soil and nutrients. The Great Raft was a living ecosystem and constantly changing when logs drifted away and newer debris replaced them.
As the rafts of logjams shifted around, it cleared fertile fields for Caddoan crops. During floods, nutrient-filled silt settled on either side of the river banks. The Caddos grew their crops around the seasons and state of the logjams. The Great Raft provided protection from enemy tribes.
The Caddos hold a spiritual belief that a great flood clogged the Red River and created the Great Raft. A Caddo legend tells us that a Caddo chief did not obey the Great Spirit, who caused an earthquake that resulted in a flood that formed Caddo Lake around 1812.
The Great Caddo Lake Pearl Rush
The era of the first oil boom began in the first decade of 1900 in many areas of the U.S. The first oil rig at Caddo Lake was completed in 1911. The crews building the oil rigs operated much like a military unit with a support staff like cooks, etc.
The Great Raft had been cleared by the turn of the 19th century. This almost destroyed the Caddoan culture because the removal of the logjam took away their livelihood. Cypress Bayou feeds Caddo Lake. The steamboats rolled from New Orleans on the best travel route into Oklahoma, western Arkansas, and north Texas via Caddo Lake. The Great Raft removal began in 1873.
Turning Basin was a bustling port in Jefferson, Texas, where the big ships from New Orleans would turn around until the raft was cleared and called the Gulf-Red River Trade. The last steamboat entered Turning Basin in 1903. Clearing the raft also killed Jefferson’s trade route business. By 1909, oil had been discovered in the region.
As oil rig crews migrated to the Caddo Lake region, an oil rig cook named George Murata at Turning Basin was preparing a mussel to use as catfish bait in the summer of 1909. He found a pearl in that mussel. A few days later, he found another one. He sold them for $1,500 each and word spread.
Soon, a tent city popped up with pearl hunters with farmers, fishermen, and workers. Men abandoned their farms, boats, and jobs to search Caddo Lake and Cypress Bayou for freshwater pearls. The pearl rush lasted until 1912 because the oil men began building Caddo Lake’s first dam that year.
Years after the Pearl Rush, Caddo Lake and surrounding waters became popular mussel harvesting sites again. In the 1970s to the 1980s, mussel shell buttons were popular, and cultured pearl brokers used North American freshwater mussel shells to implant cultured pearl nuclei for cultured pearl development. By 1991, price wars had broken out, and this depleted the mussel population in the Caddo Lake region.
Prices to shell buyers rose to over $10 a pound for smaller shells and $40 a pound for larger specimens. The second Caddo Lake pearl rush ended by the late 1990s as the mussels became rarer and the imported Japanese pearl oysters died off. Today, Louisiana and Texas laws protect mussel harvesting.
The Mittie Stephens Steamboat Caddo Lake Disaster
The Mittie Stephens, a steamboat built in 1862, first plied the Missouri River until the Civil War broke out. Union Forces confiscated the Mittie Stephens to carry dispatches, troops, and supplies in the Red River campaign. She then worked the Mississippi River on the Gulf-Red River route.
The Mittie Stephens employed side paddlewheels, not the iconic ones mounted on the stern, to power herself through rivers. With Captain Homer Kellogg at the wheel on February 5, 1869, the Mittie Stephens began her last fateful journey from New Orleans to Shreve’s Port to Mooring’s Port in Louisiana to Turning Basin in Jefferson, Texas, on Caddo Lake.
She carried passengers and cargo on this trip. Her cargo included 274 bales of government consigned hay and a $100,000 payroll for Union troops stationed in Jefferson, Texas. Union troops were facilitating Civil War Reconstruction in Texas in 1869.
Captain Henry Miller Shreve is Shreveport, Louisiana’s namesake. After leaving Shreve’s Port, the Mittie Stephens steamed up Twelve Mile Bayou to get to Turning Basin on February 11. She stopped briefly at Mooringsport in Louisiana on the southeastern shore of Caddo Lake.
When the Mittie Stephens was approaching Swanson’s Landing inside the Texas border on Caddo Lake’s southwestern shores around midnight, a crewman found smoke coming from a bale of hay. The hay fire spread incredibly fast. Panicked mayhem ensued, and 64 souls died.
This fire trapped passengers. The one launched lifeboat quickly became overloaded, and many of those aboard drowned. Other passengers jumped overboard to escape a fiery death, the side paddlewheels sucked them in, and drowning overtook them as well.
Salvaged relics from the Mittie Stephens include its most valuable ship’s bell, which the Jefferson Historical Museum exhibits today. For some reason, Mittie Stephens’ hull laid exposed in Caddo Lake for years, but no one sought to salvage it.
From Mittie Stephens historian, Ron Holloman:
“It was almost midnight, but the captain wanted to make Jefferson by morning. He ordered the fire baskets lit. These big wrought iron baskets stuck out; it lit the way, big burning torch on the front, a spark ignited the bales.”
The 20-Foot Caddo Lake Monster
J.L. Wilson, a writer for the Shreveport Times in March 1969, broke the story of a 20-foot monster allegedly seen in Caddo Lake. Wilson reported his source, who saw this monster as “…very reliable…who doesn’t drink…is pretty sharp and not easily fooled.”
Without photographic evidence proving the existence of said monster from a reliable source, countless locals also notified Wilson that they had seen this thing. His original source, a 35-year Caddo Lake fishing veteran and friend, were fishing near Swanson’s Landing.
The sources “spotted a dark colored creature they estimated to be from 18 to 20 feet long, moving slowly along the surface of the water with approximately 6-inches of its back and head above the surface.” With all the hoopla soon surrounding the monster, the locals named her Cypress Cindy. We do not know how they knew this creature was a female.
Wilson’s “source” reported, “that at first he thought it was a boat with its bottom turned up but they kept watching and it started to move.” a Mr. and Mrs. Thomas McLeod of Shreveport, told Wilson that they had tied their boat to a tree while fishing for white perch near Fred Miller’s old boat launch in Buzzard Bay.
Then this creature ran into the McLeod’s boat, capsized it, and spilled them into the water. But to solve the mystery, as we humans love to do, scientists asked, “Could Cypress Cindy have been a lone manatee?” But manatees rarely grow over 13-feet long. No one has solved Cypress Cindy’s origin.
Still, the “source” who did not drink said Cypress Cindy looked like a bottomed-up old boat at first, which is common in Caddo Lake. A large manatee’s back in murky dark waters could be mistaken for a small fishing boat’s bottom. Manatees regularly appear in Florida freshwater lakes.
If You Liked These Caddo Lake Stories…
The Caddo Lake region is home to the stuff that creates legends. So many more Caddo Lake stories are low-hanging fruit to be picked and republished. Let us know if you’ve heard any stories!
