In 1835, a group of American colonists, led by Dr. Charles Beale, were camped at Lake Espontosa, a renowned haunted location near what is now Carrizo Springs in southwest Texas. Half a mile away from the Beale group, John Dent and his pregnant wife Mollie Pertul Dent, both from Georgia, had built a brush cabin. Dent had come to trap beaver in the Devil's River area, north of the present day Del-Rio, but was also on the run from the law for the murder of a fellow trapper in Georgia. The Dents were to prove fortunate in their choice of a site distant from the lake. A band of Commanches raided the main Beale camp and massacred most of the inhabitants, afterwards throwing the bodies of the victims and their carts into the lake.
A Haunted Location
Even at this time Espontosa
Lake had acquired a reputation for ghostly goings-on, this incident adding to
the store of ill-luck and sorrow centering on what, to this day Mexicans
consider a haunted location, the name Espantosa meaning 'frightful'.
As Mollie was approaching
the end of her pregnancy, the couple were reluctant to travel despite the
danger of hostile Indians. One night in May 1835, there was a severe
thunderstorm and Mollie went into labor. She appeared to be having problems
with the birth so Dent decided to ride westwards for help. He arrived at a
Mexican goat ranch on the Pecos Canyon, and told them desperately about his
wife's condition, begging for someone to ride back with him.
But as the Mexicans prepared
their horses to leave there was a furious crash of thunder and a bolt of
lightning struck Dent from his horse killing him instantly. After a
considerable delay the goat herders mounted up and followed Dent's directions.
However, darkness fell before they had got over the divide to Devil's River, thus
delaying the search. Finally, at sunrise the next morning they located the
Dent's isolated cabin.
But what they found outside
the cabin, in an open brush arbor, was Mollie Dent lying dead, alone. She had
apparently died in childbirth, but there was no trace of the baby anywhere. The
child was never found, but fang marks on the woman's body and numerous wolf
tracks over the area made the goat herders naturally assume that the infant had
either been devoured or carried off by lobo wolves.
First Sighting of the Wolf
Girl
But this was just the
beginning of the story. Ten years later, In 1845, a boy living at San Felipe
Springs (Del-Rio) reportedly saw 'a creature, with long hair covering its
features, that looked like a naked girl' attacking a herd of goats in the
company of a pack of lobo wolves. The story was ridiculed by many, but still
managed to spread back among the settlements. Around a year after this
incident, a Mexican woman at San Felipe claimed she had seen two large wolves
and an unclothed young girl devouring a freshly killed goat. She approached close to the group, she said,
before they saw her and ran off.
The woman noticed that the
girl ran initially on all-fours, but then rose up and ran on two feet, keeping
close to the wolves. The woman was in no doubt about what she had seen, and the
scattering of people in the Devil's River country began to keep a sharp watch
for the girl. There were similar reports by others in the region during the
following year and Apache stories told of a child's footprints, sometimes
accompanied by hand prints, having been found among wolf tracks in sandy places
along the river. A hunt was organised to capture the 'Lobo (or Wolf) Girl of
Devil's River' as she had now become known, comprising mainly Mexican vaqueros.
On the third day of the hunt the naked girl was sighted near Espantosa Lake
running with a pack of wolves.
The cowboys managed to
separate the girl from her wolf companions and cornered her in a canyon, where
she fought like a wildcat clawing and biting frantically to keep her freedom.
They finally managed to lasso her to keep her still, but while they were tying
her up she began to make frightening, unearthly sounds somewhere between the
scream of a woman and the howl of a wolf. As she howled, the monster he-wolf
from whom she'd become separated appeared and rushed at her captors.
Fortunately one of the cowboys reacted quickly and shot it dead with a pistol,
at which the wolf girl fell into a faint. Securely bound, the men were now able
to examine the girl and noted that despite a body covered in hair and her wild
mannerisms, her appearance was human. Her hands and arms were well muscled but
not out of proportion, and she lacked the ability to speak, only making deep
growling noises. She moved smoothly on all fours, but was rather awkward when
made to stand up straight.
The girl was put on a horse
and taken to the nearest ranch, an isolated two-roomed shack amid the desert
wilderness. She was put in one of the rooms and unbound, the cowboys offering her
a covering for her body and food and water, but she refused, cowering in the
darkest corner. They then left her alone for the night, locking the door and
posting a guard outside. The only other opening in the room was a small boarded
up window.
Ghostly Cries
But as night fell the
cowboys heard terrifying howls coming from the wolf girl's room. The strange
cries carried through the still night air, unsettling her captors and soon
finding answers from among the wolf pack in the wilderness beyond the shack.
Soon there were long deep howls coming from all sides as the pack drew closer
to the house, and occasionally strange howling screams from the girl answering
them from inside her dark room. Suddenly the large pack of wolves charged into
the corrals, attacking the goats, cows and horses and bringing the cowboys
outside shooting and yelling to drive them away. In all the confusion the wolf
girl managed to tear the planks from the window and escape into the night. The
howls soon abated and the wolves crept back into the wilderness. The next day
not a trace of the girl could be found.
Though there were a few
unverified reports in the following years of a young hair-covered girl being
seen with a wolf pack in the area, no one ever came in close contact with her.
Meanwhile gold had been discovered in California and westward travel had
increased significantly. In 1852 a surveying party of frontiersmen searching
for a new route to El Paso were riding down to the Rio Grande at a bend far above the mouth of Devil's River.
They were almost at the water's edge when they saw at close range, sitting on a sand bar, a
young woman suckling two wolf cubs. Suddenly she saw them, quickly grabbed the
pups and dashed into the breaks at such a rate that it was impossible for the
horsemen to follow.
The girl would have been
seventeen years-old that year. After that she disappeared into the wilderness
forever. It is impossible now to know what became of Mollie Dent's daughter,
presuming that's who the wolf girl was. There were subsequent reports of 'human-faced'
wolves in the area right up until the 1930s, and author L.D. Bertillion (see
sources below), wrote in 1937, 'during the past forty years I have in the
western country met more than one wolf face strongly marked with human
characteristics'.
The Ghost of Devil's River
The story of the Wolf Girl
of Devil's River reads more like a folktale than a real feral child case, and
the large amount of evidence for what
happened is all anecdotal. She does, however, seem to live on in a more subtle
form; her 'ghost' has apparently been seen in the old San Felipe Springs area
beside the banks of Devil's River. In 1974 (the same year as the Delphos wolf
girl in Kansas), a hunter in this area claimed to have seen her again, in the form of a white apparition
which vanished before his eyes.
Back in the autumn of1835,
when John and Mollie Dent had newly arrived in Texas, Mollie wrote her mother
an odd letter. It said merely -
'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'.
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