Along North America’s Continental Divide, straddling the border between British Columbia and Alberta (Canada’s westernmost provinces), lies one of the most spectacular natural areas on the planet: the Canadian Rockies. Every year, tourists from all over the world flock to Canada’s Rocky Mountains to take in the breathtaking vistas of Banff National Park; to marvel at the emerald waters of Yoho National Park; to hike the historic trails in Jasper National Park; or to shred the powder at Fernie.
Of all the many attractions the Canadian Rockies have to offer, among the most sensational are their large and dangerous wild animals, which occasionally wander out from their wilderness abodes to startle locals and entrance tourists. During peak tourism season, it is not uncommon to see visitors from Japan, Germany, and other Old World countries standing on the side of a Rocky Mountain highway taking snapshots of alarmingly proximate bull moose, grizzly bears, or bighorn sheep.
If modern eyewitness accounts and centuries of oral tradition are to be believed, Canada’s Rocky Mountains are home to another large and dangerous animal seldom mentioned on tourism brochures. For as long as human beings have braved the mountain passes and rugged trails of the Canadian Rockies, stories have been told of a huge, elusive, man-like creature that haunts the slopes. Though scarcer and more obscure than its famous West Coast counterpart, this mysterious alpine monster has nonetheless found its way into foundational ethnological treatises on Canada’s First Nations, and into seminal works on the Sasquatch phenomenon. In this piece, we will delve into classic legends of and encounters with the wildman of the Canadian Rockies.
The southernmost segment of Canada’s Rocky Mountains, called the Continental Rockies, straddle the jagged border between what is now southeastern British Columbia and southwestern Alberta. Historically, this region was shared by three very different native tribes: the Kootenai, the Stoney, and the Shuswap.
In their heyday, the Kootenai dominated the watershed of the Kootenay River in the southwestern corner of the Canadian Rockies, from the mountains’ southeastern slopes at Waterton Lakes through the westerly Columbia Mountains, and up the heart of the mountain range from Kalispel, Montana, to Golden, British Columbia. Like many mountain tribes, the Kootenai were a people of two worlds. In the days before treaties and reservations, they spent most of their time living as mountain people in the valley of the Kootenay River; ice fishing in the winter and netting waterfowl, gathering berries, and hunting alpine game in the summer. Once a year, however, usually in the late summer or early autumn, courageous Kootenai bands put aside their canoes, left the safety of their mountain fastnesses, and ventured east onto the prairies on horseback or snowshoe, into the territory of the powerful Blackfoot Confederacy. If no Blackfoot could be found to resist them, the Kootenai helped themselves to buffalo in Plains Indian fashion and returned to their alpine abodes with as much pemmican as they could carry, that prairie staple being a nutritious and imperishable food made from dried and pulverized bison meat and rendered bison suet.
One of the best textual collections of Kootenai stories and legends is the 1918 book Kutenai Tales, written by celebrated German-American anthropologist Franz Boas, whom some consider the father of modern anthropology. In his book, Boas included several stories which demonstrate a traditional Kootenai belief in dangerous man-eating giants who once prowled the Rocky Mountains. Most stories indicate that these giants were dimwitted, and could be killed through artifice and deception.
One of the stories in Boas’s book purports to explain how the giants came to be. According to this legend, a young and skilled Kootenai hunter once headed into the Rocky Mountains to look for mountain sheep. One night, while encamped on the mountainside, the hunter was overcome by a sudden fit of madness and began to eat his own flesh. This bizarre act of self-cannibalism initiated his transformation into a ravenous skeletal giant whose only desire was to devour his friends and relatives.
After eating several of his brothers, who had gone to look for him when he had failed to return to camp, the giant began to stalk and eat his fellow tribesmen. Through simple trickery, the Kootenai lured the giant into a trap on a particular cliff overlooking Kootenay Lake. When the giant reached the desired spot, a Kootenai hunter, who had concealed himself in a hole in the cliff face, kicked him in the legs, sending him plummeting to his death in the water below.
In recent years, the southern Canadian Rockies have been the scene of several publicized Sasquatch sightings. In his 2000 book In Search of Giants, for example, researcher Thomas Steenburg described an alleged midnight encounter between four campers and a hairy humanlike giant in the Crandell Mountain Campground in Waterton Lakes National Park. On the night of May 22nd, 1988, the campers were driven from their campfire by a hairy humanlike giant with a height of about eight feet. Other unusual incidents which have taken place in the Waterton Lakes area over the past four decades, including the discovery of large humanlike footprints and a motorist’s glimpse of a large hairy figure on the side of the highway, are chronicled in the online database SasquatchAlberta.com.
As might be expected, Sasquatch sightings in the southern Canadian Rockies appear in classic Bigfoot literature about as frequently as giant stories do in classic Kootenai ethnologies, which is relatively rarely. One such sighting appears in the 1972 book The Sasquatch File, written by pioneering Canadian Sasquatch researcher John Willison Green. On page 56 of his book, Green briefly referenced a sighting that took place near the hamlet of Lundbreck, Alberta.
Lundbreck lies on Alberta’s Crowsnest Highway, roughly halfway between the town of Pincher Creek and the Crowsnest Pass, at the edge of a stretch of Rocky Mountain foothills called the Porcupine Hills. In the spring of 1972, a man named Stan Fisher, who hailed from the northerly foothill town of Nanton, Alberta, wrote Green that he had discovered 10.5-inch footprints on a creek crossing about 30 miles north of Lundbreck. While Fisher’s own boots hardly left an impression on the soft soil of the creek bank, the mystery tracks sank to a depth of three inches, indicating that whatever left them was a creature of immense size. Like the Kootenai Indians of old, whatever had made the mysterious footprints had evidently wandered out from the safety of the mountains for a stroll upon the plains.
Interestingly, a subsequent succession of anomalous Sasquatch sightings far to the east hint that whatever left the tracks near Lundbreck may have continued its journey east across the prairie. In the fall of 1972, while playing in Strathcona Island Park in the city of Medicine Hat, Alberta, two local boys spotted a huge, hairy, humanlike creature walking unhurriedly up Seven Person’s Creek, not far from that waterway’s confluence with the South Saskatchewan River. About a year later, in October 1973, another boy spotted what he described as a heavy, seven foot tall woman covered with dark reddish-brown fur ambling along Seven Person’s Creek in the twilight, in Medicine Hat’s Kin Coulee Park, about two miles upstream from Strathcona Island Park. The creature appeared to be carrying something in its arms. Later that December, a rancher from the town of Seven Persons, which lies on the Crowsnest Highway east of Medicine Hat beside the waterway for which it was named, wrote to local Sasquatch researcher Leonard Edvardson that he had seen a hairy seven-foot-tall creature walking along Seven Person’s Creek one a moonlit night earlier that month. Like the giant spotted at Kin Coulee in October, this creature held one of its arms tightly to its chest, almost as if it were carrying something. The day after his disturbing encounter, the rancher returned to the spot where he had seen the creature and discovered fifteen-inch-long humanlike footprints beside the creek, each track separated from its neighbour by a distance of six feet.
North of Kootenai territory lies the traditional homeland of the Stoney or Nakoda Nation – military allies and trading partners of their southerly neighbours; whose Plains Indian ancestors are believed to have left the prairies for the mountains in the late 1700s. A branch of the Assiniboine tribe, which, in turn, is an offshoot of the Sioux, the Stoney ruled the Rocky Mountains and their appendant eastern forests from the headwaters of the Oldman River, through Banff National Park, to the Little Smokey River to the north. Although alpine game like moose, mountain goats, and bighorn sheep made up a significant portion of their diet, they lived in the style of their prairie-dwelling forefathers, pitching Plains-style teepees in the mountains, relying heavily on horses for transportation, and waging ferocious war against their eastern enemies, the Blackfoot.
Likely due to the influence of Methodist missionaries like Robert Rundle, and Reverends George and John McDougall, who worked tirelessly throughout the 19th Century to convert to Stoney to Christianity, information on traditional Stoney belief is scant. As Canadian explorer Walter Dwight Wilcox succinctly put it in his 1900 book The Rockies of Canada, “they have few traditions.”
Despite the paucity of material on Stoney legend, there is one excellent book which makes up for all the folkloric material absent from formal academic works on Stoney ethnology. Sebastian Chumak’s 1983 anthology The Stonies of Alberta: An Illustrated Heritage of Genesis, Myths, Legends, Folklore and Wisdom of the Yahey Wichastabi, commissioned by the Alberta Heritage Foundation, includes traditional Stoney stories featuring all sorts of legendary monsters, including werewolves, dwarves, mermaids, the Thunderbird, and giant water serpents. On the subject of mountain-dwelling giants, however, the book is curiously silent.
Of all the material on Stoney history and culture, there is only one work (of which this author is aware) which implies a traditional Stoney belief in mountain-dwelling giants. In his 1969 book Tatanga Mani: Walking Buffalo of the Stonies, Canadian academic and politician Grant MacEwan included a chapter on the adventures of Twist-in-the-Neck, a legendary Stoney hero. One passage from that chapter reads:
“Just as there were ‘little men’ living in caves under the mountains, so there were hairy monsters, probably the ancestors of the British Columba Sasquatch of later times. These big creatures appeared to have been the Rocky Mountain version of the Abominable Snow Man. Stonies did not hide their fear of the eight or nine feet tall giants. When a party of white men traveling in the mountains disappeared at the beginning of the nineteenth century, Stonies blamed the monsters, and when one of the beautiful Stoney girls disappeared, it was easy to lay the blame on the same evil creatures.”
Although tales of mountain-dwelling giants may not have been a mainstay of Stoney campfire conversation, traditional Stoney territory is nonetheless the setting of several classic Sasquatch encounters. One of the earliest of these is a vague account which John Green heard from a woman from Regina, Saskatchewan, who travelled by bus from her home town to Vancouver, British Columbia, in about 1955. Somewhere on the Trans-Canada Highway west of Banff, Alberta, two of her fellow passengers caught a glimpse of what they described as “a huge man covered with light-colored hair standing by the road watching the bus go by.”
The years 1968 and 1969 saw an unprecedented surge in wildman reports across North America, and the Rocky Mountains were no exception. As John Green explained in his 1970 book Year of the Sasquatch, “What amounts almost to an explosion of information is happening not because more has been going on, but because there has been a great improvement in communications and because public and even scientific attitudes are changing. As a result people who saw something themselves or who heard reports from others in former years, as well as those involved in things happening now, have been getting in touch with investigators.”
The first incident to touch off the Rocky Mountain sightings of the late 1960s took place in March 1968. According to John Green in his 1973 book The Sasquatch File, an employee of B.C. Hydro, British Columbia’s main energy supplier, phoned Swiss-Canadian Sasquatch researcher Rene Dahinden to tell him about large tracks he found in the mountains east of Golden, BC.
Five months later, in August 1968, Dr. Gerald Martin and his family, who had left their home in Kalamazoo, Michigan, to holiday in Banff National Park, spotted something unusual walking on the first mountain ridge northeast of the Columbia Icefield. The figure was large and black, and although it strode on two legs like a man, Dr. Martin and his family felt it was too large, and moving too fast to be human.
The next flurry of Rocky Mountain monster sightings were made less than a year later, about 25 miles away, by members of a Cree Indian band under Chief Joe Smallboys, who had left their reservation at Hobbema, Alberta, and relocated to a tent camp on the eastern feet of the Albertan Rockies not far from the hamlet of Nordegg, in a geographic region historically known as the Kootenay Plains. In March 1969, shortly after making camp at a place called Windy Point, near the confluence of the North Saskatchewan and Cline Rivers, on the northern shores of what is now Abraham Lake, a 62-year-old band member named Mark Yellowbird caught a glimpse of a huge, dark, hairy man flitting through the trees. Yellowbird had heard stories of such creatures from his Stoney friend, the late Chief Walking Eagle, former head of the nearby Bighorn reserve. “He told his friends of these things,” Yellowbird told reporters, “but he didn’t mention them to anybody else because he knew he would be laughed at.”
In the months following Yellowbird’s encounter, Cree campers would wake up in the morning to find huge footprints skirting the edge of their camp a few hundred yards from their tents and teepees. The tracks were made by at least two different creatures, one of them measuring 17 inches in length, and the other measuring 13.5 inches from heel to toe. A local Sasquatch researcher named George Harris, who had relocated to Nordegg from Lacombe, Alberta, the previous July, photographed the tracks and sent copies to John Green.
In June, Mark Yellowbird’s daughter, 16-year-old Edith Yellowbird, saw four strange figures on the slopes above Windy Point. “I think they had caught something,” she told reporters. “Two were bending down and the other two were just walking about nearby. They were as tall as good sized spruce trees on the mountainside on which they were standing.”
Shortly after Yellowbird’s experience, a native labourer named Alec Shortneck was clearing timber with a felling axe on the North Saskatchewan north of the Cree camp, at the site where the Bighorn Dam now stands, when he became aware of a huge, hairy, manlike creature standing about fifty yards away,k watching him. “I didn’t know what to do,” he told reporters. “I just went on chopping wood. It disappeared. I thought it best to just go about my business.”
On August 24th, 1969, while working at a pumphouse just north of the woodcutters sighting, a 17-year-old cement finisher named Harley Peterson, who hailed from Condor, Alberta, spotted a mysterious hairy humanlike figure, about twice or thrice the size of an ordinary man, watching him from a ridge overlooking the river. “It looked enormous,” he later told reporters. “Its head was bent slightly forward and it looked very hefty.”
Harley pointed the figure out to his father and fellow contractor, 46-year-old Stan Peterson. Soon, the father and son were joined by three more Albertan companions: 19-year-old Guy l’Heureux of Rocky Mountain House, a student at the Northern Alberta Institute of Technology; 46-year-old Floyd Engen, a backhoe operator from Eckville; and 21-year-old Dale Boddy of Ponoka, a student at the University of Saskatchwan. The five men stared at the creature for about half an hour, and the creature stared right back, ignoring their occasional shouts and waves. After sitting down for about ten minutes, the huge hairy figure stood up again, stared at the workmen for another fifteen minutes, and then walked along a ridge overlooking the North Saskatchewan River. “We watched it for about three quarters of a mile as it made its way around a ridge,” Harvey Peterson said.
“It was too tall and its legs too thin for a bear,” said Dale Boddy of the mysterious woodland resident, whose fellow workmen estimated its height to be between 12 and 15 feet. “And a bear couldn’t have walked that far on its hind legs – and not at that speed. It looked as if it was taking six-foot strides and covered the distance in less than two minutes.”
“I just didn’t believe it,” said Engen of the strange experience. “I had heard all sorts of stories and just didn’t believe them. I took off my glasses and looked again. But there it was. I knew I was wide awake. I jumped up on a tractor and waved my hat at it and yelled. It didn’t seem to notice.” Engen described the creature as being dark in colour, having round shoulders, and being covered with hair.
Less than a month later, an anonymous witness from Drayton Valley, Alberta, contacted John Green about his own strange experience which occurred on a prospecting trip near the Kananaskis Lakes, about fifty miles southwest of Calgary. At around noon, the informant and his two partners built a fire and began to heat up some cans of food for lunch. They had been sitting for about half an hour when one of the men said, “Hey, what’s that?”
“About 100 yards away,” the man wrote in his letter, “we saw what looked like a gorilla sitting on its haunches watching us… The animal sat like that for about five minutes, then it got up and sort of chattered its teeth like it was cold, and also moved its arms in an up and down movement. After the animal had gone we walked to the place it was sitting. We could not make out any tracks but we all agreed that it stood at least seven to eight feet tall.”
A drawing which the anonymous informant attached to the letter indicated that the creature was a female with black hair and long pendulous breasts.
In 1972, the Bighorn Dam was constructed on the North Saskatchewan River just south of the dramatic pump house sighting of August 24th, 1969, transforming the river below into an artificial reservoir called Abraham Lake. The Alberta Highway 11 – popularly known as the David Thompson Highway – was reconstructed to skirt the northern shores of this man-made body of water.
Two years later, on May 11th, 1964, 42-year-old Ron Gummell of Calgary, Alberta, came upon an unusual sight while driving east along Abraham Lake. According to various Canadian newspaper articles which covered the story, “He turned a bend in the road and there, standing in the middle of the road, were two Sasquatch.”
“They were so big,” said Gummell of the hair-covered giants, “they could have picked my car up and thrown it into the lake.” The startled motorist estimated that the creatures stood twelve feet tall, and described them as having flat faces. Gummell slammed on his brakes, and stopped within 30 feet of the giants. After staring in his direction for a few moments, the creatures sauntered into the woods.
Although Gummell had been skeptical of Bigfoot tales before his encounter, he assured reporters that he would be “the last to scream fake the next time Sasquatch stories are in the air.”
North of Stoney and Kootenai territory, from Jasper National Park to the McGregor River, which separates the Rocky Mountains’ Continental Ranges from the Northern Rockies, lie the traditional territories of two different First Nations. One of these, situated in the heart of the mountains in the vicinity of Jasper National Park, is the homeland of the Aseniwuche Winewak [oss-nee-WATCH-ee winn-ah-WALK-ee], or ‘Rocky Mountain People’ – a hybrid tribe descended from Iroquois, Cree, and Lake Nipissing Ojibwe employees of the Hudson’s Bay Company, who do not enjoy Indian status in Canada. The other, which overlaps and surrounds the land of the Rocky Mountain People, is the sprawling territory of the Shuswap, an Interior Salish nation whose ancestral hunting grounds stretch west into British Columbia’s Cariboo Country.
Although this author has been unable to uncover any stories or legends native to the Aseniwuche Winewak, the rich oral traditions of the Shuswap have been documented by explorers, anthropologists, and Shuswap natives themselves. Some of the best sources on Shuswap giant legends are the writings of James Alexander Teit, a Scots-Canadian anthropologist who immersed himself in the culture of the Interior Salish people in the late 19th and early 20th Centuries.
In his 1909 treatise on the Shuswap Indians, Teit wrote:
“A race of giants are believed to have been, until lately, quite numerous. They are great hunters and runners, and possessed of immense strength. The smallest ones are four or five times the height and strength of an ordinary man, while the largest are only comparable to trees. They are of a gray complexion; and probably on that account, and also because of their tallness, they are often called ‘bleached or gray trees’. They are also called ‘burned trees,’ probably because at a great distance they all look black. Their dress consists of cap, robe, belt, leggings, and moccasins, all of black-bear skin. It requires an entire medium-sized black-bear skin to make one of their moccasins. They are able to carry four large buck-deer on their backs at one time with the greatest ease, and it is said that one of them killed two black bears, and shoved them one into each side of his belt, as an ordinary man would do with two squirrels. They very rarely molested people, but sometimes stole fish, of which they are very fond.”
Later in his piece, Teit included a traditional story about a great Shuswap hero who went ice fishing in some nameless body of water long ago. He succeeded in spearing many fish, which he placed beside him on the frozen water. As he waited beside the hole he had made through the ice, the hero was approached by a giant, who made the earth shake whenever he took a step. These vibrations caused the hero’s fish to slip back into the water.
The hero asked the giant to stop stomping, but the giant carried on, much to the hero’s annoyance. When the last of his fish slid into the water, the hero decided to wrestle the giant. The two combatants grappled and rolled over each other on the ground, neither one managing to gain the upper hand on the other. When the two wrestlers were exhausted, they relinquished their iron holds on each other and went their separate ways. Tradition says that the hero headed into the mountains, and later lived with the giants.
Although James Teit’s Shuswap informants professed that the mountain giants that haunted their territory were much less numerous in the early 20th Century than they were in the ancient past, classic Sasquatch sighting chronologies like the works of John Green indicate that these legendary alpine denizens may still prowl the mist-shrouded crags of Jasper and the northern Continental Rockies.
Before we delve into classic 20th Century Sasquatch sightings in traditional Shuswap territory, it may behoove us to take a look at an older historical incident which some researchers believe may be related to the Sasquatch phenomenon. In January 1811, the celebrated Welsh-Canadian explorer David Thompson and his crew became the first white men to traverse the Athabasca Pass, a high mountain pass west of what is now the town of Jasper, Alberta. The previous year, Thompson’s employer, the North-West Company (NWC), had learned that the newly-established Pacific Fur Company was planning to bring the fur trade into the hitherto untapped watershed of the Columbia River. Hoping to check the success of their competitors, the NWC tasked David Thompson with reaching the mouth of the Columbia River before the Astorians (as Pacific Fur Company agents were known), necessitating a journey west across the Rocky Mountains. Unfortunately for Thompson, the Piegan Blackfoot of the prairies, angered by the North West Company’s trading relationship with their westerly Shuswap enemies, had blockaded the Howse Pass, an old Indian trail through the Rocky Mountains which Thompson and his crew had discovered back in 1807. Accordingly, Thompson and his men set out on snowshoe in search of an alternative southerly route through the Rockies.
In his various journals and memoirs, Thompson described a strange discovery which he and his men made on January 7th, 1811, just prior to their ascension of the Athabasca Pass. Historians have compiled and reworked Thompson’s various writings into flowing, comprehensive works like Joseph Burr Tyrrell’s 1916 book David Thompson’s Narrative of His Explorations in Western America, 1784-1812; Richard Glover’s 1962 book David Thompson’s Narrative: 1784-1812; Barbara Belyea’s 1995 book Columbia Journals; and Sean T. Peake’s 2011 book The Travels of David Thompson; each of them structured to read like a monolithic David Thompson journal. Taken together, these books provide a thorough description of the event of January 7th, 1811.
That day, Thompson and his men tramped south up the Athabasca River, down what is now the Icefield Parkway, on snowshoe. The explorer’s companions included four native guides and seven French-Canadian voyageurs. At about 3:00 in the afternoon, Thompson and company came upon the tracks of a large and mysterious animal which were clearly impressed in the 4-8 inches of snow that covered the ground. Whatever made the tracks appeared to have walked south for some time before heading into the forest. The natives, all of them expert trackers, estimated the tracks to be about six hours old.
Each print consisted of a large circular impression, which Thompson called the “ball of the foot,” crowned with four large toes tipped with short, thick claws. Using his folding ivory ruler, the explorer determined that the tracks measured fourteen inches in length and eight inches in width. The toes were between 3-4 inches long. The hind part of the animal’s foot, Thompson wrote, “did not mark well” in the snow.
Thompson’s native guides appeared to believe that the tracks had been made by a young woolly mammoth, claiming that those ancient elephants were known to frequent the headwaters of the Athabasca River. Those bulky mammals, they claimed, stood three fathoms high (three fathoms being equivalent to 18 feet, or about 5.5 metres), and slept standing up, leaning against large trees to support their weight. The natives suspected that their legs did not have joints, but had not had the opportunity to verify their suspicion, as none of them had managed to kill one. They indicated to the explorer that it would be futile and dangerous to pursue that particular specimen into the forest, as their musket balls would only succeed in wounding and angering it.
Thompson could not bring himself to believe in antediluvian monsters extant in the Canadian wilds, and suggested that the tracks were actually made by a large old grizzly bear whose claws had worn down – a theory which he himself did not fully believe. The natives simply shook their heads and tacitly expressed their desire to continue on –a wish to which the explorer reluctantly acceeded.
“The sight of the track of that large beast staggered me,” Thompson admitted in a later reminiscence, adding that in the thirty years that separated the incident from the time at which he penned the memoir, he had often cast his mind back to that strange winter day in 1811, puzzling over the mystery of the tracks.
Over the years, Sasquatch researchers have suggested that the tracks that Thompson and his companions came across were actually those of a Rocky Mountain Sasquatch. John Green hinted at this possibility in his 1994 book Encounters with Bigfoot, writing the following in response to a footnote in Glover’s Narrative which makes an argument in favour of the grizzly bear theory:
“Sasquatch investigators will find the tone of the footnote all too familiar. Here we have a report by a man whose experience and powers of observation are beyond question, describing a track so odd that he was still puzzling about it 30 years after he saw it. Obviously he was not at all satisfied that what he saw was a bear track. He did not say that the animal was two-legged, yet he describes only one type of track. A bear would have to leave the tracks of his front feet as well, and they would be much shorter. Moreover the Indians and French with Thompson would not accept it for a bear track. But the editor of this edition of the narrative, not having seen the track, has no trouble in deciding that it was made by a bear.
“It may be that there have been grizzlies with hind feet of this size, although it far exceeds their normal dimensions, but bears have five toes not four, and their toes are short.
“It is too bad that Thompson did not note a few more details or make a sketch of the track. As it is, it can never be identified, and I am not claiming it was a Sasquatch track. Some Sasquatch tracks show only four toes, and in a few the toes appear long, but I have never seen any claw marks at all, nor a track where the ball of the foot sank much deeper than the toes. The description fits a Sasquatch track at least as well as it does a bear track, but it doesn’t fit either very well. The point I want to make is that there is a record of an early explorer finding giant tracks that he could not identify, and this fact is far from being generally known.”
Whatever the nature of Thompson’s mystery tracks, there have been many more unusual discoveries in the northern Continental Rockies in the centuries succeeding the explorers’ strange experience, some of which appear in John Green’s books. In Year of the Sasquatch, Green included the account of a man whose name he was unable to decipher, who wrote to him in 1967. Back in 1918, the informant went on a hunting trip west of Jasper. In the vicinity of Mount Fitzwilliam, just west of the Jasper town site, the hunter came across an unusual track eight inches wide, and as long as the stock of his Winchester 30-30 rifle.
In both his 1968 book On the Track of Sasquatch and his 1978 book Sasquatch: The Apes Among Us, Green detailed the startling account of William Roe of Cloverdale, British Columbia, whose story he first heard in a radio interview. Hoping to obtain a more thorough account of Roe’s experience, Green wrote to Roe and asked him to provide him with a written narrative of his adventure. Roe did better, mailing Green a sworn affidavit which he drafted through the legal department of the city of Edmonton, Alberta, his new place of residence.
“Ever since I was a small boy back in the forests of Michigan,” Roe began in the opening paragraph of his testimony, “I have studied the lives and habits of wild animals. Later, when I supported my family in Northern Alberta by hunting and trapping, I spent many hours just observing the wild things. They fascinated me. But the most incredible experience I ever had with a wild creature occurred near a little town called Tete Jaune Cache, British Columbia, about eighty miles west of Jasper, Alberta.”
Roe was a construction worker, and back in 1953, he found work on the Yellowhead Highway, which was being built through the Fraser Valley at that time. “In October 1955,” Roe wrote, “I decided to climb five miles up Mica Mountain to an old deserted mine, just for something to do. I came in sight of the mine about three o’clock in the afternoon after an easy climb. I had just come out of a patch of low brush into a clearing when I saw what I thought was a grizzly bear, in the bush on the other side. I had shot a grizzly near that spot the year before. This one was about 75 yards away, but I didn’t want to shoot it, for I had no way of getting it out. So I sat down on a small rock and watched, my rifle in my hands.”
When Roe first spotted the animal, it was obscured by brush, giving him a clear view of its head and the top of one of its shoulders only. As he watched, the creature stood up on its hind legs and strode out into a clearing, shattering the hunter’s comfortable illusion.
“My first impression was of a huge man,” Roe wrote, “about six feet tall, almost three feet wide, and probably weighing somewhere near three hundred pounds. It was covered from head to foot with dark brown silver-tipped hair. But as it came closer I saw by its breasts that it was a female.
“And yet, its torso was not curved like a female’s. Its broad frame was straight from shoulder to hip. Its arms were much thicker than a man’s arms, and longer, reaching almost to its knees. Its feet were broader proportionately than a man’s, about five inches wide at the front and tapering to much thinner heels. When it walked it placed the heel of its foot down first, and I could see the grey-brown skin or hide on the soles of its feet.”
The creature walked over to the bush in which Roe had concealed himself and squatted down on its haunches within twenty feet of the hunter. It proceeded to eat the bush’s leaves, gripping them with its huge hands and pulling them towards its mouth. Roe stated that the wildwoman’s lips “curled flexibly around the leaves as it ate.”
Fascinated, Roe studied the animal’s features as it enjoyed its afternoon snack, apparently oblivious to his presence. “The shape of this creature’s head somewhat resembled a Negro’s,” the hunter wrote. “The head was higher at the back than at the front. The nose was broad and flat. The lips and chin protruded farther than its nose. But the hair that covered it, leaving bare only the parts of its face around the mouth, nose and ears, made it resemble an animal as much as a human. None of this hair, even on the back of its head, was longer an inch, and that on its face was much shorter. Its ears were shaped like a human’s ears. But its eyes were small and black like a bear’s. And its neck also was unhuman. Thicker and shorter than any man’s I had ever seen.” Roe also noted that the creature’s teeth were white and even.
Suddenly, the wildwoman glanced in Roe’s direction, apparently having caught his scent. “A look of amazement crossed its face,” the hunter wrote. “It looked so comical at the moment I had to grin. Still in a crouched position, it backed up three or four short steps, then straightened up to its full height and started to walk rapidly back the way it had come. For a moment it watched me over its shoulder as it went, not exactly afraid, but as though it wanted no contact with anything strange.”
Roe considered shooting the creature as it stalked back into the bush, keenly cognizant of the fact that one of the greatest scientific discoveries of the 20th Century was only a trigger’s pull away. “I levelled my rifle,” he wrote. “The creature was still walking rapidly away, again turning its head to look in my direction. I lowered the rifle. Although I have called the creature ‘it’, I felt now that it was a human being and I knew I would never forgive myself if I killed it.
“Just as it came to the other patch of brush,” Roe continued, “it threw its head back and made a peculiar noise that seemed to be half laugh and half language, and which I can only describe as a kind of whinny. Then it walked from the small brush into a stand of lodgepole pine.”
Roe stepped out into the clearing, hoping to catch another glimpse of the creature, and was rewarded with the sight of the wildwoman, now standing several hundred yards away, tipping her head back again to emit the same call she had made before. Having delivered her incomprehensible message, the creature disappeared into the trees.
Roe proceeded to examine the patch of trees from which the wildwoman had emerged and found five piles of scat, which did not appear to contain hair, shells, insects, or any other evidence of carnivority. He also found a patch of flattened grass on which he believed the creature had slept. Although the nights had been cool in the area for some time, the primitive campsite was absent of tools, makeshift shelters, and any sign of a campfire.
“Whether this was a Sasquatch I do not know,” Roe concluded. “It will always remain a mystery to me, unless another one is found.
“I hereby declare the above statement to be in every part true, to the best of my powers of observation and recollection.”
Signed, “William Roe.”
Green included two more proximate Sasquatch sightings in his books, both of which came to him through old-fashioned postal correspondence. As he explained in his book On the Track of Sasquatch, “there still are not a great many reports from the Rockies, from either the Alberta or the B.C. side, but there is no one in that part of the country working to dig them out. I have learned of two because the witnesses wrote to me, and that would indicate that there are probably lots of others.”
In Sasquatch: The Apes Among Us, he related that a story told to him by a teenager from St. Albert, Alberta. In his letter to Green, the young man declared that three people from Rocky Mountain House, Alberta, about fifty miles east of Nordegg, had seen “the head and shoulders of a hair-covered man eight to ten feet tall in a berry patch in a valley not far from the town.” Green described another 1972 Rocky Mountain House sighting – perhaps a different version of the event above described – in his book The Sasquatch File. According to this second hand report, which he received from John Geiger of Edmonton, Alberta, a woman was picking berries that summer about 12 miles from Rocky Mountain House when she saw, about 200 yards away, the head and shoulders of a tall, hairy man peering at her from partial concealment in the bush. The woman estimated that the figure stood from eight to ten feet tall, and claimed that everything but its face was covered with hair.
The last Canadian Rocky Mountain sighting to appear in Green’s classic Sasquatch books took place on September 1st, 1976. While hunting in the woods southwest of Caroline, Alberta- a village about twenty miles south of Rocky Mountain House – Green’s anonymous Calgarian informant claimed that he saw black ape-like animal standing in a fast-flowing river. The creature, which he estimated to be nine to ten feet tall, “waded to the far side of the river, climbed out on the bank, and looked at him” before vanishing into the bush.
Though less frequent than those of the Pacific Northwest, encounters with giant hairy wildmen continue to occur in Canada’s Rocky Mountains to this very day. To those familiar with the region’s rugged terrain and the utter isolation of its most remote canyons, this may hardly come as a great surprise. As journalist Edgar D. Smith put it in his article “Cavemen Roam the Rockies,” published in the August 24th, 1940 issue of the Winnipeg Free Press:
“Most of the Rocky Mountains is yet an impregnable barrier, a mighty, unsolved secret. What lies in some of those deep gorges, in some of those lonely valleys, awesome abysses, chasms and mist-wrapped mountain peaks? Not to speak of the silent depths of verdant forests. Will their impenetrable mysteries ever be made known to men?”
Kootenay Legends
Sasquatch Sightings in Canada’s Southern Rockies
Stoney Legends
Sasquatch Sightings in Banff National Park and Surrounding Area
Shuswap Legends
David Thompson’s Mystery Tracks
Sasquatch Sightings in the Jasper Area
William Roe’s Encounter
Other Rocky Mountain Encounters