Manipogo -- Manitoba's Own Nessie

The lake may be only 8 meters deep, but it holds secrets and mysteries that keep locals enthralled and bars and party kitchens stocked with stories. Lake Manitoba, it seems, has its very own Loch Ness monster. More correctly, it has Manipogo, the serpent monster of the lake. Manipogo shares its lore with Bigfoot, recently spotted in Berens River on Lake Winnipeg and Carrot River near The Pas. Carrot River and OCN First Nations also lay claim to sightings of a Pterodactyl, observed by a local contruction worker and a minister on the same day. Yet, Manipogo has the most sightings, and even a portrait of sorts.

Like everything in this province, Manipogo seems passive, non-confrontational. A 1962 photo taken by two fishermen shows what is described as a 60-foot serpent-like creature, unafraid of the boat and outboard motors, but disinterested in making contact with the two. A day earlier, picnickers had spotted the creature a distance from shore in what is now named Manipogo Park.

The most recent sightings include numerous appearances in 2011 around Marshy Point, Delta Beach and Twin Beaches on the south end of the lake. The last reported sighting was in 2012 at Twin Beaches. The earliest sightings date back to the turn of the 20^th century, with a sighting in 1882 and one in 1909.

Manipogo may have a cousin, Winepogo, a resident of Lake Winnipegosis. However, if either exist, they may be one and the same, since Lake Manitoba and Lake Winnipegosis are connected, and there have been numerous sightings at their junction – The Narrows.

In typical Manitoba fashion, Manipogo is the perfect reason for a party. Actually, just about anything is reason for a party in the western Interlake, and, with winter starting in Octoer and ending in April or May, a mid-March party is a great way to disrupt the monotony of long, cold dark days. So, the Metis community of St Laurent holds its annual Manipogo Festival in the first week of March.

Manipogo may be a myth, may be real, or may be a misinterpretation of something more benign than a monster, but the truth is irrelevant. It is a great story, and an ideal opportunity to explore near-ghost stories. Like the discovery of gold in Bissett, it may be a treasure just waiting to be uncovered. Or it may be that Manipogo, like Bigfoot or Sasquatch, simply is too shy to ever be encountered up close. Even though its home is an extremely shallow, elongated lake formed from an old glacier, Manipogo adds a rich depth to the waters it calls its own.

Invasive Homesteading: Garlic, Hawthorne & Horseradish

When European settlers arrived in Canada, they brought more than their families, and the landscape, flora and fauna of North America has been changed forever.

We often think of scourges like smallpox when we think of early Canada’s history. Even though many Europeans continued to die of the disease, many had developed a limited immunity and became carriers. The North American native tribes had no such immunity, and the price for being in contact with, and often helping the white arrivals cost the First Nations people tens of thousands of deaths.

But smallpox has had, comparatively speaking, a minor impact on our western environment. Ships brought over numerous other stowaways, including almost every variety of sparrow. Most of the sparrows – one of the most numerous birds on this continent – actually are not native to the country, but are of European origin. Carp, found in all three of Manitoba’s great lakes, are also non-native, but have taken over our slow-moving waterways. Each spring, kids and many grownups spend days dip-netting these bottom feeding fish as they work their way up streams to spawning beds. This massive “kill” does little to control the carp population, and few locals eat the slimy-tasting fish (even though they are a staple on many European tables).

Dandelion, too, is non-native to our continent, but now is one of the most prolific and common weeds in the northern and western hemisphere. 1600s-era Europeans actually cultivated dandelion, using the flowering plant for medicinal and culinary purposes, drinking a coffee substitute made from its roots and steaming the greens. Every turn-of-the-century immigrant in the mid-1900s knew how to make excellent dandelion wine!

But other plants, introduced by settlers into their gardens, chose to stay “close to home” where they were planted. Hawthorne is one of those homebodies. The berries were much sought after by the settlers for their winter stores, but when the old homesteads decayed, large farms took over the small plots and the owners moved into the cities or died off, the houses and sheds decayed and collapsed, while the hawthorne shrubs thrived.

Two other staples of the European settlers’ diet were garlic and horseradish. Both continue to grow wild around the old footings and foundations of homesteads long disappeared. The plants propagate slowly, but sufficiently fast to maintain a continual supply of these dietary supplements. A wild harvester is sure to find her years’ supply of late-season hawthorne berries, garlic bulbs and horseradish tubers wherever an 1800s rural house once stood. 

The Moosehorn Statues of Armand Lemiez

Manitobans have a penchant for constructing statues and monuments to mark their community, but none reach the levels of obsession, and, often, creativity, of those in the Interlake.

From a giant curling rock in Arborg to a massive concrete Viking in the Icelandic community of Gimli, we do them odd and we do them large. Komarno, a community of fewer than 100 people, boasts the largest mosquito in the world. Nearby, Inwood brags about its hundreds of thousands of red-sided garter snakes with a stone and mortar creation of intertwined snakes. Petersfield has the newest statue – a twenty-foot mallard duck on the wing, while Poplarfield features a giant “King Buck” deer. Selkirk’s catfish, Ashern’s sharptail grouse, Lundar’s Canada Goose and Stonewall’s stone quarry edifice are among others in this microcosm of the province. But Armand Lemiez, a lifelong bachelor farmer in the Moosehorn area in the mid 1900s, outdoes them all.

A prolific oils painter in his spare time, Armand turned his attention to concrete statue building in the 1960s and 1970s, hoping to immortalize himself and his community with his innovative statues. The statues were formed on rough metal frames constructed of scrap material, then the concrete was mixed, poured and shaped by hand. Over a decade, he produced approximately two figures per year. One approaches fifty feet in size. They consisted of lifesize (or larger than life-sized) human, mythological and prehistoric creatures.

In 1980, at the age of eighty-five, Armand began attempting to have his art memoralized, and approached the Canadian and provincial governments to have his works officially recognized. He failed, being told that his works had no significant cultural value. While it is true that they do not appear artistically refined, his statues reflect a unique cultural take on rural living and speak of the imagination of this solitary farmer from the Interlake. Ironically, after his death, a few of the remaining relatives attempted to keep people from visiting the remote farm to view the statues, as they feared both lawsuits and damage to the property.  While the frequent school outings to visit the site were terminated, the community did make an effort to restore some of the decaying art, but were unsuccessful.

Armand Lemiez died in 1984, and his legacy, too, is returning to dust. Vandals and nature have undone much of what he had attempted to achieve, but evidence of his spirit still remains. He may be the pioneer of the Interlake’s statue building zeal, and Moosehorn can lay claim to being the birthplace of the region’s explosion of concrete memorials and markers.