Giant Catfish Kin

Perhaps the best information we can learn about the mysterious 30-foot catfish of the Ohio River comes from its primordial last of kin, the upriver Monongahela River catfish. While these catfish are smaller and much more agile than our subject, it stands to believe that it is from their lineage that the Ohio River catfish evolved. Imagine with me if you will, many epochs ago, perhaps when dinosaurs were still roaming the Earth, when a subsect of the Monongahela catfish population began expanding in size and menace to the extent that they were forced to break off from their kind and pursue deeper bottoms and wider channels downstream in the Ohio. As the more athletic of the blue catfish forged on to the warmer climes of the Mississippi River delta, the largest and most disgusting surely settled right around Cincinnati, in the murkiest nooks, where a sedentary lifestyle and foul diet allowed them to grow larger still as millions of years passed and they remained undetected, swelling to unfathomable proportions, fading from legend to myth...

But humanity has still witnessed subtle ties to the creatures, occasionally having chance to glimpse a peak inside the world of the gigantic Ohio River catfish through the irregular surfacing of their Monongahela ancestors:

In the late 1880s there was an attack near Morgantown. A coal miner and his wife - with their baby daughter - were fishing near the old bridge across to Westover and a train went by (the coal train from the Fairmont Field upriver headed for Pittsburgh). The pair turned to wave at the engineer, when they heard a piercing squeal. They turned back toward the river to see their baby, who had been wading in the river, go down screaming, pulled away into the river by some force beneath the surface. The father acted quickly and fearlessly and jumped into the river and grabbed the child by the tips of her little fingers just as she was about to disappear into the depths. He saved the child and reported that he had seen a fish on the other end of his gurgling daughter and identified it as a great catfish because the "whiskers" around its massive jaws were visible.

Even in those relatively calm and shallow West Virginia waters the pigmy kin of our subject often reach well in excess of 10 feet and 100 pounds. One of 157 pounds was caught in 1936 near Uffington, upriver from Morgantown, the year of the famous St. Patrick's Day flood. It is true, according to fishermen on the river, that the big cats are often seen coming to the surface, agitated, it seems, by vibrations from passing trains (which shake the banks frequently today as in decades past). This vibration goes into the water and alerts the catfish to the potential presence of locomotive hobos and boxcar children.