There are few natural areas in Canada more magnificent than the Rocky Mountains, that succession of snow-capped ranges which run along the border of Canada’s westernmost provinces, Alberta and British Columbia. Every year, tourists from all over the world flock to the mountain towns of Banff, Jasper, and Lake Louise to hike, ski, or simply take in the sights of these jewels in the rugged crown of the Great White North.
Beneath its breathtaking exterior of emerald lakes, majestic peaks, and crisp coniferous forest, this northern stretch of the Americas’ Continental Divide harbours dark secrets best shared around the cherry glow of an evening campfire. Stories of ghosts, strange animals, lost gold, and Indian curses, these timeless tales transport us back through the region’s rich history, from the heyday of the grand railway hotels to a time when crystal waters reflected the hazy plumes of smoke-stained teepees. In this video, we will explore some of these forgotten legends of Canada’s Rocky Mountains.
Mountain Giants
The oldest stories endemic to the Canadian Rockies are the oral traditions of its First Nations, who have called the region home for centuries. Long before fur trade explorers first ventured into the mountain passes, native storytellers told tales about frightening animals that haunted the slopes, lurking atop lonely crags, in secluded valleys, and within glacial lakes.
One monster which native traditions says roves the Rocky Mountains is a hairy giant reminiscent of the Sasquatch of the Pacific Northwest. This creature appears in the folklore of the Stoney, or Nakoda, whose traditional homeland lies in the heart of the Canadian Rockies, encompassing Banff National Park and much of northerly Jasper National Park.
The Stoney are a branch of the prairie-dwelling Assiniboine tribe, whose Siouan ancestors are believed to have left the Great Plains for the Rocky Mountains in the late 1700s. Although they traditionally subsisted on alpine game like moose, mountain goats, and bighorn sheep, these mountain people retained much of their prairie heritage, relying heavily on horses for transportation and pitching Plains-style teepees in the mountains. Today, they are divided into three bands: the Bearspaw, the Chiniki, and the Wesley.
According to Canadian academic and politician Grant MacEwan in his 1969 book Tatanga Mani: Walking Buffalo of the Stonies, the Stoney believed that they shared their territory with hairy mountain giants. “These big creatures,” he wrote, “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.” MacEwan explained that when hunters, fishermen, or berry pickers mysteriously vanished in the mountains, their disappearances were often attributed to these elusive wildmen, who had a penchant for kidnapping both men and women.
Another Rocky Mountain tribe with stories about alpine giants are the Shuswap, an Interior Salish people whose sprawling territory, which stretches across British Columbia’s Interior Plateau, extends into the northwestern edge of the Canadian Rockies. Their traditional Rocky Mountain domain surrounds the homeland of the Aseniwuche Winewak, or ‘Rocky Mountain People,’ a hybrid tribe descended from the Mountain Cree, and from Iroquois and Lake Nipissing Ojibwe employees of the Hudson’s Bay Company, which lies in the heart of Jasper National Park.
Scots-Canadian anthropologist James Teit described the Shuswap giant legend in a 1909 article for the Memoir of the American Museum of Natural History. According to Teit’s informants, giants were quite numerous in Shuswap country until the latter half of the 19th Century. They were swift runners and excellent hunters whose powerful frames allowed them to easily haul black bear, deer, and other large game along the mountainsides. Contrary to the ideas of the Stoney, the giants of Shuswap tradition rarely bothered people, although they sometimes stole fish from nets and drying racks. “They are of a gray complexion,” Teit wrote, “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.”
Far from being relegated to the campfire stories of yesteryear, tales of mountain-dwelling giants persist in the Canadian Rockies to this very day, fueled by a handful of chilling 20th Century encounters which we will explore later on in this piece.
Mountain Dwarves
Other human-like creatures said to haunt to Rocky Mountains are the ‘little people’ – diminutive, dwarf-like men and women said to live in caves beneath the mountains. Grant MacEwan touched on the Stoney conception of these people in his 1969 book, writing, “Not many Indians actually saw them, but hunters often discovered tiny footprints and heard mysterious noises. Two Stonies told of pursuing a wounded bighorn sheep into a mountain cave and there hearing voices of ‘little men’ speaking from below, plotting to make war on the surface dwellers.”
Another exposition on the Stoney dwarf legend appears in Sebastian Chumak’s 1983 book The Stories of Alberta: An Illustrated Heritage of Genesis, Myths, Legends, Folklore, and Wisdom of the Yahey Wichastabi, provided by Stoney elder Jonas Dixon. Dixon explained that the ‘little people,’ whom he called the ‘macoyah debe’, were associated with the west wind, and were believed to be descended from bears who were transformed into tiny people as divine punishment for their mischievous antics.
“The Little People,” he said, “are very small persons. No bigger than a badger, these underground persons live deep within the earth where it is always the spring moon. They have their own underground country. They weave braided flowers and know very little sorrow. Their singing is like the prairie burning and flowering.”
One Stoney man who claimed to have seen the mountain dwarves was a hunter named Hector Crawler, a resident of Morley, Alberta, who spent much of the late 19th and early 20th Centuries roaming the Albertan Rockies in search of game. Crawler told his experience to Norman Luxton, one of the first prominent residents of Banff, Alberta, who earned himself the moniker “Mr. Banff”. Luxton was a colourful character who immortalized himself in Canadian history by sailing across the Pacific Ocean in a Nootka dugout canoe, and by playing a crucial role in saving the Plains bison from extinction. In 1902, he established a beloved week-long festival called Banff Indian Days, in which traditional Stoney culture was celebrated. The following year, he founded the Banff Trading Post – a curio store which still exists today, which houses a disturbing artifact that we will explore shortly. Luxton told Crawler’s incredible story to Canadian ethnographer Marius Barbeau, who published it in his 1960 book Indian Days on the Western Prairies.
“A certain time when he was in the mountains,” Luxton said of Crawler, “when alone, he saw that he called the little black men, describing them to me as elfish (not fairy) forms. He described them to me as elfs, wearing little plug hats and cut-away coats. And while he could not carry on a conversation with the elf, he was sure that it was out of the ordinary to have a vision of that kind. It was a rare novelty.”
Following his strange experience, Hector Crawler delved into the mysteries of his tribe, becoming a medicine man and healer of considerable renown. He spent much of his time in seclusion, hunting alone in the mountains, particularly in the Kootenay Plains west of Rocky Mountain House, Alberta – the site of another strange event we will touch on later in this piece.
Some Stoney today firmly maintain that the ‘little people’ who populate the legends of their forefathers still inhabit the Canadian Rockies and their easterly foothills. In his Halloween 2021 article for the Rocky Mountain Outlook, Canadian journalist Jordan Small stated that “elusive and benevolent wicha sta juthin min,” as his informant Daxter Amos described them, are still spotted from time to time in the Stoney town of Morley, Alberta, particularly near the schools. Every once in a while, while mopping the floors of the local high school after hours, custodians are said to catch glimpses of tiny people darting across the hallway before disappearing. And Stoney berry pickers have reported finding tiny ladders in the woods which disappear before they can be shown to others.
Giant Owl
Another monster said to lurk in the forests of spruce, fir, pine, and aspen that blanket Canada’s Rocky Mountains is a sort of giant predatory owl. Allusions to this ghostly nocturnal bird appear in the traditions of the Ktunaxa, or the Kootenay (also spelled Kootenai), the southernmost of the indigenous peoples in the Canadian Rockies, whose unique language has no demonstrable connection with any of its neighbours.
Before the institution of borders and Indian reserves, the Kootenay separated themselves into two separate groups. To the west, from Idaho’s Kanisku National Forest to the head of British Columbia’s Upper Arrow Lake, lies the historic domain of the Lower Kootenay. These people were fishermen who caught trout, sturgeon, and whitefish in the watershed of the lower Kootenay River, and plied the lakes of the Columbia Mountains in pine bark canoes. To the east, from Montana’s Kootenai National Forest through Canada’s Waterton, Kootenay, Yoho, and Glacier National Parks, lies the ancestral territory of the Upper Kootenay. These were a people of two worlds, who spent the spring and summer hunting mountain game, and the fall and winter venturing out onto the easterly prairies on horse or snowshoe to search for buffalo, risking a clash with the warlike Blackfoot.
There is an old Kootenay myth about a monstrous owl that lives in the woods, which kidnaps crying children and takes them to its nest. American politician and ethnographer Frank Bird Linderman, who trapped north of Flathead Lake, Montana, in the late 1800s, included a variation of this legend is his 1926 book Kootenai Why Stories. Other Kootenay versions of this story appear in German-American anthropologist Franz Boas’ 1918 book Kootenai Tales; and in Canadian anthropologist Alexander Francis Chamberlain’s 1893 article for the Memoirs of the International Congress of Anthropology.
This story contends that, in the mists of prehistory, Co-pee, the Owl, was a hulking man-eating monster that made its home in the deep woods. In Linderman’s story, and in one of the variations of the legend described by Boas, this creature is male, while in Chamberlain’s various versions, it is described as an old female. Drawn by the sound of crying children, Co-pee stole into native villages in the night snatched the little ones from their beds, carrying them off to his sylvan lair. Every evening, as darkness spread over the forest, fearful mothers hushed their children, listening with bated breath for the dreaded hoot at the edge of the firelight which told them that Co-pee was on the prowl.
Linderman went on to relate the story of Chipmunk, who narrowly evaded Co-pee’s hungry claws by scurrying up a tree. The dim-witted monster attempted to trick Chipmunk into climbing down, telling him that various of his family members, whom he had already eaten in years past, were calling for him to come home. Chipmunk finally dropped to the forest floor and made a frantic dash for the underbrush. Co-pee swiped at the fleeing rodent and grazed him with the tips of his talons, tearing two strips of fur from his back. Ever since, chipmunks have had white stripes.
Co-pee proved such a menace to men and animals that Old-Man, the benevolent Kootenay Creator, decided to mitigate his power. In other variations of this story, this task was undertaken by Coyote, a Kootenay hero and trickster figure who served as Old-Man’s constant companion. Not knowing the location of Co-pee’s nest, Old-Man assumed the appearance of a crying child, and was duly snatched up by the avian predator. In Boas and Chamberlain’s versions of the story, Coyote was carried away in a basket, woven from birch bark in the former, and from water snakes in the latter. After a long flight over the forest and across the mountains, the bawling imposter was deposited in a spacious nest, where more than a hundred children were held captive. He wiped at his tears as his feathered abductor spread his wings and glided silently away in search of firewood.
Old-Man learned from his fellow prisoners that Co-pee was preparing for a great feast. They despaired that they would be eaten that night or the following day. Old-Man laughed and told the children that they had nothing to fear as long as they did as he commanded.
When the giant owl returned from his wood-gathering excursion, he found his captives dancing merrily around a fire to the throb of his own drum, singing, “Co-pee likes us, Co-pee likes us…” Pleased that the children seemed to be ignorant of his true intentions, the yellow-eyed predator encouraged the revelry, and soon began to take part himself, joining the dancing circle.
Old-Man waited until Co-pee was thoroughly engrossed in the exercise before withdrawing his war-club and striking the giant owl dead. From Co-pee’s eyes he withdrew two smaller owls, which blinked at him in the firelight. He commanded these birds to never steal children like their wicked progenitor. The owls flew off, and Old-Man returned the kidnapped children to their families.
In Boas and Chamberlain’s versions of the story, the giant owl met his end when Coyote gummed his eyes shut with tree sap, rendering him blind. The trickster then pushed the monster into the fire, where he burned to death. The embers that issued from his burning carcass transformed into regular owls from which the modern members of the strigine species are descended. In another of Chamberlain’s versions, the captured children worked together to push the giant owl into the fire. Although the monster perished perished in the flames, her evil lived on in the form of mosquitoes, which arose from her ashes.
Incredibly, there is evidence that giant man-eating owls may be more than creatures of native legend. According to an article by journalist Jordan Small in his Halloween 2021 article for the Rocky Mountain Outlook, the Stoney believe that a giant owl resembling the legendary Co-pee of Kootenay mythology may still haunt the Rocky Mountains. This ghastly shape-shifting entity is called the Bah-tha, or ‘Howler’, and can sometimes be heard shrieking at night in the woods beyond Chiniki Lake. Quoting filmmaker Jarret Two-Young-Men, a Bearspaw Stoney native from Morley, Alberta, Small wrote, “It’s something a lot of people are afraid to talk about, even Elders, and especially at night.”
Although the Howler is supposed to have the ability to assume a variety of different forms, it most often appears to hapless witnesses as a large owl with the head of a man and the legs of a horse. It has been spotted looming in the forest canopy, scanning the forest floor with glowing yellow eyes. The sight of it is believed to cause temporary paralysis. Legend has it that the monster is the spirit of a Stoney Indian who became lost in the woods near Chiniki Lake, transformed into its hideous form by the sinister power which some say pervades the area.
Sometime in the early 21st Century, a Stoney filmmaker named Two-Young-Men claimed to have encountered the Howler while living alone in a house near Chiniki Lake. One night, after coming home from powwow practice, the filmmaker heard coyotes howling outside, and opened his window to let in the wild music. About ten minutes later, the coyotes abruptly stopped their yipping.
“Suddenly it just went silent,” the filmmaker told Small. “I remember it being silent. So I peeked out my window and it was dead silent and then I heard the screaming… coming toward my house. It was terrifying. It was a scream that I had never heard before, like a scream of an owl or something. It was the most terrifying screaming I had ever heard… I can’t describe it… So I got spooked. I shut the window and I grabbed my dog and just huddled under the window and just turned all the lights off…”
Thunderbird Stories
Giant owls are not the only avian monsters said to soar above the Rocky Mountains. Like other First Nations across the country, the indigenous peoples of the Canadian Rockies believed in the existence of giant horned eagles with the ability to create thunder and lighting, which made their nests in high cliffs, hunting large game and human beings. Although there are many names for these colossal raptors, ethnologists generally refer to them as Thunderbirds.
Franz Boas included several traditional Kootenay Thunderbird myths in his 1918 book Kutenai Tales. In one story, set in the ancient past, a band of primordial animal-people ambush a Thunderbird at its watering hole and kill it, hoping in vain that its feathers will give them the ability to fly. In another tale, two mythical heroes ride on the backs of two fledgling Thunderbirds after killing their mother with a spear.
Two more Kootenay Thunderbird myths appear in Frank Linderman’s 1926 book. In the first story, a young native hunter whose wife mysteriously vanished seeks the assistance of three Thunderbirds, who help rescue the woman from the giant mountain rattlesnake who captured her. The Thunderbirds in this tale are described as massive crows which take on the appearance of dark clouds when they prepare to make lighting. In the second story, which appears to be a variation of Boas’ second tale, Old-Man and Coyote accidentally end up in a Thunderbird nest, which they escape by riding on the backs of baby Thunderbirds.
The Stoney have their own Thunderbird legends, some of which appear in Sebastian Chumak’s book. According to informant Jonas Dixon, the Stoney called these preternatural beings Mu, and regarded them as powerful allies of humanity. In one of his stories, a Thunderbird battled a huge horned water snake near the Rocky Mountain Trench, not far from present-day Field, British Columbia.
The powerful Blackfoot, who lived in the prairies east of the Rockies, have traditional stories about Thunderbirds that lived in the high mountains, who sometimes left their alpine eyries to hunt bison and human beings on the plains. According to American anthropologist Dr. Claude Everett Schaeffer in a 1951 article for the Journal of the Washington Academy of Sciences, the Blackfoot called this creature “Omaxsapitau” – a word which means “Big Golden Eagle”.
One of Schaeffer’s informants, a Blood Blackfoot named Harry Under Mouse, told him an incredible story involving his own grandfather’s abduction by a Thunderbird. Harry’s grandfather was a Cree medicine man named White bear. Despite the animosity which existed at that time between the Blackfoot and the Cree, White Bear married a Blood Blackfoot woman and joined her band.
In those days, White Bear was a skilled eagle trapper. In order to catch an eagle, whose tail feathers played an important role in Blackfoot ceremonies, he first found himself a shallow pit. Next, he baited the pit with a stuffed animal. After camouflaging the decoy with grass and vegetation, he concealed himself within the pit and waited for an eagle to arrive. When the raptor finally sank its talons into the bait, White Bear grabbed its legs and trapped it.
In the winter of 1850, 28-year-old White Bear’s band camped south of Fort Edmonton, Alberta, an old Hudson’s Bay Company post on the North Saskatchewan River. Hunting had been poor the previous fall, and their pemmican stores were low. With fresh meat hard to come by at that time of the winter, the band was in desperate straits.
In a deviation from custom, White Bear and a handful of Blackfoot hunters wandered west into the Rocky Mountains in search of game. Mysteriously, hunters began to disappear from their party one by one. Undaunted by this disturbing development, the hunters decided to spit up in order to give themselves a better chance of finding food.
One day, while camped east of present-day Banff, Alberta, White Bear came across a deer. He brought the animal down and set to butchering it. When he had finished dressing the carcass, he packed the meat onto his back and headed west. Suddenly, he was surrounded by the shadow of an enormous bird. Before he knew what was happening, White Bear found himself rising into the air. With a thrill of horror, he realized that an Omaxapitau had grabbed hold of the meat he had packed and was carrying him off to its lair.
After a terrifying journey over the mountains, White Bear landed in an enormous nest built atop a high cliff. Bones of various animals lay about him. Some of these were unmistakably human – likely the last remains of the missing hunters.
Also in the nest were two baby Omaxapitau. Using the skills he had developed while hunting eagles, White Bear seized the birds’ legs and jumped out of the nest with thin. The baby birds flapped their wings furiously, slowing their descent, and White Bear landed on the ground unharmed. He plucked two arm-length feathers from the baby birds’ tails as souvenirs of his adventure and struck out east for the prairies.
Another Blackfoot Thunderbird story set in the foothills of the Rocky Mountains appears in an article by Schaefer’s mentor, Clark Wissler, and the latter’s colleague, D.C. Duvall, published in the September 1909 issue of the Anthropological Papers of the American Museum of Natural History.
“The Indians were moving camp,” the story begins. “They found that some of their young men and horses were lost, and did not know how this could have happened.” A white shepherd who lived in the area offered the natives his unsolicited advice, suggesting that the missing horses and their riders had probably been taken by a strange bird he had seen. He offered the kill the creature for a price.
“The Indians paid no attention to the White man,” the anthropologists wrote. “An Indian went out alone to fight the monster. He saw it flying; it looked like a large dark cloud. He shot at it, but could not hurt it. It caught him and flew home.
“The next day, two men went out with their guns. They separated at a little distance. When they saw the monster flying, they shot at it. Again the monster snatched them up and took them home. Then all the Indians said, ‘Perhaps the White man will kill it.’ They killed thirty head of sheep, took off their hides, and gave them to the sheep-raiser. He put them all on, took a stick and went looking for the monster bird.
“The giant bird swooped down on the White man and carried him home, but could not kill him. The black monster’s son came home and wanted to eat the sheep-raiser. The White man said, ‘You won’t eat me.’ Then he grasped his stick and knocked down father and son. He killed them both. The monster had a beautiful tail. The sheep-raiser cut off its tail feathers and brought them home.”
Like giant owls, alpine dwarves, and mountain wildmen, sightings of giant raptors evoking the Thunderbirds of native lore have been reported in the relatively recent past. In his 2004 book Thunderbird: America’s Living Legends of Giant Birds, cryptozoologist Mark A. Hall reproduced a story that he unearthed in Canadian naturalist Dan McCowan’s 1936 book Animals of the Canadian Rockies. According to McCowan, in 1925, hikers reported seeing an enormous eagle near the Tower of Babel, a mountain whose base lies just five miles south of Lake Louise, and a mere thirteen miles from the site of the legendary battle between the Thunderbird and the giant water snake. McCowan wrote that these outdoorsmen “saw an eagle flying at considerable height. As it neared the Tower… it came much lower and they observed that the big brown bird carried an animal of considerable size in its talons.” The bird subsequently dropped its prey, which proved to be a mule deer fawn weighing fifteen pounds (nearly 7 kilograms) –double the carrying capacity of the average golden eagle, the most powerful known raptor in the Canadian Rockies.
The Tragedies of Spirit Island
No exposition on the native legends of the Canadian Rockies would be complete without a nod to Spirit Island, one of Canada’s most iconic landmarks. This tiny picturesque isle, crowned with a cornet of spruce trees, lies at the centre of Malign Lake in Jasper National Park, amid pine forest and snow-capped mountains.
As its name suggests, this enchanting islet is associated with a haunting ghost story, the origin of which has long been lost to history. According to a popular iteration of this tale told to passengers of the Malign Lake Boat Cruise, which purports to be a traditional Stoney Indian legend, the island was the secret meeting place of two star-crossed lovers whose respective tribes were at war. When the girl’s father learned of the illicit romance, he forbade her from returning to the island, and kept a strict watch over her to prevent her disobedience. Sick with grief, the girl fell ill and died. The Romeo of this Rocky Mountain tragedy, unaware of these developments, waited for his Juliet in the shade of the island’s spruce boughs, and died there of a broken heart when it became clear she would not return to him. Today, the spirit of the young man haunts the island, waiting in vain for his lost love.
Another Stoney tale set on Spirit Island is what is perhaps best described as a werewolf story, told by Stoney elder Joe Kootenay and published in Sebastian Chumak’s 1983 book. This two-part tale revolves around a pair of orphaned brothers who were raised by wolves on Malign Lake after their mother was killed by a raider from the prairies. One of the brothers, named Scraping Wolf, took well to his new lupine lifestyle, while the other brother, named Star Robe, pined for civilized company.
One day, the brothers were visited by a medicine man named Braided Rawhide Necklace, who accidentally dropped four sacred blue stones in the water. When Star Robe retrieved these items from the bottom of the lake, the medicine man rewarded him by giving him his daughter’s hand in marriage. Star Robe left to live with his new wife, named White Hand, in the village of Braided Rawhide Necklace, while Scraping Wolf remained behind with the wolves. Eventually, after praying to the “night spirits” of Malign Lake, Scraping Wolf transformed into a wolf himself and went to live in the mountains with his lupine brothers.
The second half of the story begins with Star Robe’s return to Spirit Island and reunion with Scraping Wolf. Star Robe informs his brother that his wife and father were really preternatural entities which he called “evil walkers” or “snake people”, who had lured him from the island with powerful magic. After calling on the spirits of Malign Lake to transform White Hand into a pile of brown pebbles, Star Robe stole the blue stones from Braided Rawhide Necklace and returned to Spirit Island. When he found that Scraping Wolf’s lupine transformation was permanent, he used the blue stones to assume the form of a wolf himself, and resolved to never abandon his brother again.
Like the tale of the star-crossed lovers, this story ends in tragedy, with Scraping Wolf being eaten by water creatures after failing to heed a prophecy. The wolves of Malign Lake blame his death on Star Robe and confront him on Spirit Island, where the surviving brother successfully defends himself. The story ends with Star Robe heading east in search of his mother’s people.
Mammoths in the Athabasca Pass
The first white men to set foot in the Canadian Rockies were voyageurs under the command of David Thompson, a Welsh surveyor employed at the time by the great fur-trading syndicate the North-West Company (NWC). Concerned by the success of the recent Lewis and Clarke Expedition, in which a group of U.S. Army volunteers successfully marched across the continent, reaching the mouth of the Columbia River on the Pacific Ocean in 1805, the NWC hoped to find an efficient route to the upper Columbia so that it might establish a presence there before any American syndicates. Although NWC explorers Alexander Mackenzie and Simon Fraser had already made their way west across the Great Divide by way of the northerly Peace River, the company hoped to find a quicker passage through that great and treacherous barrier, the Rocky Mountains, and tasked David Thompson with its discovery. In 1806, Thompson and his crew crossed the Canadian Rockies by way of the Howse Pass, an old Indian trail east of present-day Red Deer, Alberta, and established a post near what is now the town of Invermere, British Columbia, on the upper Columbia River just beyond the Rockies’ western edge.
In 1811, the North-West Company learned that the Pacific Fur Company, a syndicate newly-established by the wealthy fur German-American fur baron John Jacob Astor, was planning to bring the fur trade to the watershed of the Columbia River so recently opened by Lewis and Clarke. Hoping to check the success of these new competitors, the NWC tasked Thompson with reaching the mouth of the Columbia River before the Astorians (as Pacific Fur Company agents were known), necessitating another journey west across the Rocky Mountains. Unfortunately for Thompson, the Piegan Blackfoot of the prairies, angered by the NWC’s new trading relationship with their westerly Shuswap enemies, had blockaded the Howse Pass. Left with little alternative, Thompson and his men set out on snowshoe in search of an alternative southerly route through the Rockies.
In his various writings, which several historians have since compiled and reworked into flowing narratives which masquerade as the explorer’s single definitive journal, Thompson described a strange discovery he and his men made on January 7th, 1811, just prior to their ascension of the Athabasca Pass west of present-day Jasper, Alberta.
At about 3:00 in the afternoon, Thompson, his four native guides, and seven French-Canadian voyageurs under his charge came across 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 back into the forest. According to the natives, all of them expert trackers, the strange prints appeared to be about six hours old.
Each track 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, and the hind part of the foot did not make a substantial imprint in the snow.
Thompson’s native guides believed that the tracks had been made by an animal which, from their description, could only be a young woolly mammoth, claiming that those ancient elephants could sometimes be found at the headwaters of the Athabasca River. Those huge herbivores, they claimed, stood about eighteen feet high, and slept standing upright, leaning against large trees. They suspected that their legs did not have joints, but had not yet 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.
An incredulous Thompson proposed that the tracks were actually made by an old grizzly bear whose claws had worn down – a theory which later admitted he himself did not fully believe. The natives simply shook their heads and tacitly expressed their desire to continue on, to which wish the explorer reluctantly acceded.
“The sight of the track of that large beast staggered me,” Thompson acknowledged in a later reminiscence, adding that in the thirty years that separated the incident from the time at which he penned his memoir, he had often cast his mind back to that strange winter day in 1811, puzzling over the mystery of the tracks.
The native believe that a population of woolly mammoths abode in the Athabasca River Country in the early 19th Century was attested to in the writings of Thompson’s contemporary, a Irishman named Ross Cox, who began his career working for the NWC’s aforementioned competitor, the Pacific Fur Company. Following the dissolution of the PFC in 1813, Cox, like many of his fellow Astorians, was hired by the NWC and dispatched to various posts throughout the so-called Columbia District in what are now the American states of Washington, Oregon, and Idaho. In his 1832 memoir Adventures on the Columbia River, Cox wrote:
“Some of the Upper Crees, a tribe who inhabit the country in the vicinity of the Athabasca River, have a curious tradition with respect to animals which they state formerly frequented the mountains. They allege that these animals were of frightful magnitude, being from two to three hundred feet in length, and high in proportion; that they formerly lived in the plains, a great distance to the eastward; from which they were gradually driven by the Indians to the Rocky Mountains; that they destroyed all smaller animals; and if their agility was equal to their size, would have also destroyed all the natives, &c. One man has asserted that his grandfather told him he saw one of those animals in a mountain pass, where he was hunting, and that on hearing its roar, which he compared to loud thunder, the sight almost left his eyes, and his heart became as small as an infant’s.
“Whether such an animal ever existed I shall leave to the curious in natural history to determine; but if the Indian tradition have any foundation in truth, it may have been the mammoth, some of whose remains have been found at various times in the United States.”
Expeditions Over the Mountains
Following its discovery by David Thompson, the Athabasca Pass became the North-West Company’s preferred route across the Rocky Mountains. When the North-West Company was absorbed by its great British-backed competitor, the Hudson’s Bay Company, in 1821, the pass became part of a major brigade route by which furs and supplies were transferred across the continent in great annual shipments called the York Factory Express and the Columbia Express.
Throughout the first half of the 19th Century, fur trade explorers and government surveyors explored alternative passages through the Canadian Rockies. In 1825, Hudson’s Bay Company agent James McMillan, with orders to find an alternative route to the headwaters of the Fraser River, traversed what would come to be known as the Yellowhead Pass under the guidance of a Metis frontiersman named Pierre Bostonnais, nicknamed “Tete Jaune”, or “Yellow Head,” for his blonde hair. For decades, the HBC used the trail to transport leather products like parchment, buffalo robes, back cords, and show shoe lines to its posts in New Caledonia, a fur trade district in what is now north-central British Columbia.
In the summer of 1841, during his great journey around the world, made for purposes of both business and pleasure, Sir George Simpson, the governor of the Hudson’s Bay Company, became the first white man to cross the Rockies by way of what would come to be known as Simpson Pass, southwest of Banff, Alberta. Simpson made the journey with the assistance of a French-Cree Metis guide named Louis Piche, also known as “the Wildcat”, who had made a name for himself in his younger years as a great warrior, horse thief, and trapper on the northern plains.
Around the same time, Metis settlers from Manitoba’s Red River Valley under the leadership of James Sinclair were making their way over southerly White Man’s Pass in Kananaskis Country, hoping to claim land on the West Coast that George Simpson had invited them to cultivate. They were guided by a young Mountain Cree warrior named Maskepetoon, or Broken Arm, who would go on to become a great chief and peacemaker. Four years later, the pass would be crossed by Lieutenants Henry Warre and Mervin Vavasour of the British Army, sent on a special reconnaissance mission to evaluate British and American military strength in what was known at the time as the Columbia District; and by Belgian Jesuit missionary Pierre-Jean de Smet in a gruelling journey from the Columbia Basin, made for the purpose of brokering a peace between the Flathead and the Blackfoot.
In the summer of 1858, members of the Palliser Expedition, sponsored by England’s Royal Geographical Society and the British Crown for the purpose of assessing the feasibility of pioneer settlement in Western Canada, explored three new passes through the Canadian Rockies. Palliser geologist Dr. James Hector explored the Vermillion Pass, across the Bow River from Castle Mountain, which he named for its beds of red ochre. He also explored the Kicking Horse Pass between Field and Lake Louise, which owes its name to an incident in which Hector was kicked in the chest by a packhorse and knocked unconscious. And naturalist Thomas Blakiston, who had disagreements with expedition leader John Palliser, struck out on his own and independently explored the South Kootenay Pass in what is now Waterton Lakes National Park.
These expeditions led white men into uncharted territory that had only felt the soft tread of Indian moccasins, into one of the most mysterious sectors of the Rocky Mountains, where ghosts still lingered and monsters still roamed.
Devil’s Head
For centuries, various First Nations across the Northwestern Plains, from as far south as the Missouri River, have recognized a certain Rocky Mountain landmark as being imbued with special otherworldly power. As early as 1792, agents of the Hudson’s Bay Company were aware of a sinister-looking peak which the natives called the Devil’s Head – a sharp protrusion of black limestone on which snow never seems to fall; a “craggy knob,” as Dr. James Hector of the Palliser Expedition put it, which looks out over the foothills northwest of present-day Calgary, Alberta.
The first white man to write about this diabolical mountain was HBC explorer Peter Fidler, who wintered with the Peigan Blackfoot in 1792. The entry in his journal for November 28th, 1792 reads, “A remarkable High Cliff of the Rocky Mountain called by our People the Devils head & by the Muddy River Indians (i.e. another North Piegan band)… Swans bill… a very high place but appears more so as the other parts all round near it are much lower. There are several places higher than this in other parts of the mountain to be seen but on account of all the adjacent parts being lower makes the Devils Head the more conspicuous & remarkable.”
Two years later, HBC cartographer Philip Turnor, who had trained both Peter Fidler and David Thompson in the art of surveying, included the Devil’s Head in his magnum opus – a grand map of charted territory in Canada and the northern United States. Another early map bearing the Devil’s Head was drawn up by a South Piegan Blackfoot Chief named Old Swan or “Feathers”, a regular visitor of Peter Fidler’s far-flung and short-lived outpost called Chesterfield House, built on the South Saskatchewan River near present-day Empress, Alberta. In 1801, Old Swan drew Fidler a map of the Rocky Mountains, at the northern extreme of which lay Devil’s Head.
Legend of the Ghost River
This infernal landmark serves as the guidepost marking the gateways to twin vales riddled with similarly ghoulish names like Devil’s Gap, Phantom Crag, Ghost Valley, and Deadman Hill. As explorer Walter Dwight Wilcox aptly put it in his 1900 book The Rockies of Canada, “What with a gap, a large lake, and a mountain a short distance to the north, called the Devil’s Head, named after him, his Satanic Majesty seems to have a mortgage on all this region.”
Along the southern foot of Devil’s Head runs the Ghost River, a tributary of the Bow River whose headwaters lie in the westerly Ghost River Wilderness Area. This mountain waterway owes its eerie name to an old Stoney legend which, like all good folktales, has a number of different versions. One iteration of the story was told by Stoney elder Madeline Young to folklorist Vernon Young in 2016, and published in the 2018 Watershed Report of the Ghost River.
According to this version of the legend, which Young learned from Stoney elder Enoch Baptist, long ago, the Stoney of the Rocky Mountains were embroiled in a bitter civil war which pitted band against band, and brother against brother. During this conflict, one Stoney band made camp on the northern shores of the Ghost River, pitching their teepees close together so that they might be better prepared to defend themselves in the event of a raid.
One night, these people heard a rumbling upriver, which sounded like a herd of bison stampeding toward them. The sound of snorts and beating heaves came closer and closer in an alarming crescendo, finally hurling past them with a deafening roar. In spite of the darkness, the Indians could clearly make out the hulking forms of buffalo racing along the riverbank.
Amid the flurry of horns and wool rode a naked Indian astride grey horse, who appeared to be driving the buffalo, a lone eagle feather mounted proudly in his hair. Determined to identify this shadowy madman, one Stoney warrior leapt onto his horse and galloped after the herd.
“The brave in pursuit pushed his horse faster and faster,” Young said. “He wanted to see the face of the rider of the grey horse. He wanted to find out who was chasing the buffalo and why he was stampeding them in the dark of night. When he finally rode up beside the grey horse, the rider and the buffalo herd disappeared into the mists of the night along the river. No one could ever catch them, because they were ghosts. That is why the river is called the Ghost River.”
Another more popular story tells of a great battle that was fought long ago between the Stoney and the Blackfoot on the banks of the Ghost River. Variations of this tale appear in the journal of Dr. James Hector of the Palliser Expedition; in a recording of folklorist B. Motherwell’s 2017 interview with Stoney elder Sykes Powderface; and in a 1965 essay, now housed in Calgary, Alberta’s Glenbow Museum, written by Canadian painter Roland Gissing, who lived on the Ghost River Ranch with his wife Alexandrina in the mid-20th Century.
According to Powererface, the battle resulted when a band of Blackfoot made an incursion into Stoney territory in a very uncharacteristic fishing trip, apparently being unable to find any buffalo on the prairie. Gissling placed the battlefield on “the east bank of the Ghost River north of its junction with the Bow,” writing that farmers and ranchers whom he knew personally, who owned property in the area, often unearthed human skulls, bones, and arrowheads in their fields. Dr. Hector wrote that many of the fallen warriors were later buried in a wooded area atop what is known as Deadman’s Hill – a rise in the land just northwest of Ghost Lake.
As Powderface put it, ever after the battle, “the voices of the slain could be heard from across the river during the night. Nakoda people were always anxious to get across the river and arrive home before nightfall.” Gissling echoed this statement in his article, writing, “I myself can remember, many years ago, seeing Stony Indians lashing their horses to a gallop to get across the river before sundown if they happened to get late and the sun was setting.”
Another spectre to rise from this ancient battlefield, according to Gissling, is the shade of a Blackfoot warrior who met his end by falling off a cutbank and drowning in the Ghost River. Ever since, the phantom of this unfortunate brave has been seen riding up and down the riverbank after sunset, seated backwards on his horse with a lance in his hand.
The Monster of Lake Minnewanka
Five miles southwest of Devil’s Head, and fifteen minutes north of Banff, Alberta, lies a 3-mile-long glacial lake called Lake Minnewanka. Like other lakes with similar-sounding names in North Dakota and Michigan, Lake Minnewanka’s wild-sounding appellation derives from an old Siouan Indian term (in this case, a Stoney word) which translates to ‘Spirit Water’. Before 1888, this body of water was generally referred to as “Devil’s Lake” or “Devil’s Head Lake,” owing its name to the storied mountain which overlooks it. And according to John McDougall, a Methodist missionary who tended to the spiritual needs of the local Stoney Indians throughout the late 19th and early 20th Centuries, this crisp glacial lake was once also referred to as Weendigo Lake, the Weendigo, or Wendigo, being an evil cannibalistic spirit of Cree and Algonquin tradition. The lake was given its present name by the Superintendent of Banff National Park (called at that time the “Rocky Mountains National Park”) for the probable purpose, as one reporter half-jokingly put it, of “[dispossessing] the devil before he acquires prescriptive rights to some of our topographical features through long usage of” his name.
The first white man to lay eyes on Lake Minnewanka was Sir George Simpson, governor of the Hudson’s Bay Company, who passed it by during his aforementioned 1841 circumnavigation of the globe. In his 1847 travel memoir An Overland Journey Round the World, Simson described his experience trekking over Devil’s Gap or the “Ween-di-go Pass,” as McDougall called it, which connects the Ghost River with Lake Minnewanka, writing:
“In the afternoon we emerged from the woods on a long, open valley, terminating in a high ridge, whence we obtained one of those majestic views found only ‘midst mountain fastnesses.’ As far as the eye could reach, mountain rose above mountain, while at our feet lay a valley surrounded by an amphitheatre of cold, bare, rugged peaks. In these crags, which were almost perpendicular, neither could tree plant its roots nor goat find a resting place; the ‘Demon of the Mountain’ alone could fix his dwelling there. On the strong bosom of the valley in question, we pitched our tents for the night… One of the overhanging peaks, from its bearing a crude resemblance to an upturned face, is called the Devil’s Nose.
“The path which we had been following, was a track of the Assiniboines, carried, for the sake of concealment, through the thickest forests. These Indians and Peechee were the only persons that had ever pursued this route; and we were the first whites that had attempted this pass of the mountains.
“In the morning we entered a defile between mountainous ridges… This valley, which was from two to three miles in width, contained four beautiful lakes, communicating with each other by small streams; and the fourth of the series, which was about fifteen miles by three, we named after Peechee, as being our guide’s usual home. At this place he had expected to find his family; but Madame Peechee and the children had left their encampment, probably, on account of a scarcity of game. What an idea of the loneliness and precariousness of savage life does this single glimpse of the biography of the Peechees suggest.”
Simpson’s guide, the Metis Louis Piche, was killed three years later by a pair of Blackfoot with whom he was gambling, right outside the tent of his friend, Reverend Robert Terrill Rundle. Reverend Rundle was a Wesleyan Methodist missionary who, at the invitation of Governor Simpson, preached the Word of God to natives throughout Rupert’s Land, the vast territory of the Hudson’s Bay Company; whose name was later given to the iconic mountain which looms over the Banff town site. In the summer of 1847, the visited Piche’s old haunt on the shores of Lake Minnewanka, becoming the valley’s second white visitor. His initial description of the lake, scrawled in his journal on June 29th, 1847, is terse, reading, “Scenery bold and interesting.”
Rundle elaborated on his impressions of this glacial body of water in a later reminiscence, writing, “This is the most interesting Lake I ever saw. Fish are in it; one kind very fine, salmon or trout… The water has at times a beautiful appearance, in part of it owing to something about light. Does it not look green?” Rundle ended this passage on a cryptid note, writing, “But I was not comfortable there, always respecting him.”
Like the grimly-styled landmarks that surround it, Lake Minnewanka is shrouded in an aura of mystery befitting its sinister name. One of the oldest and best-known legends surrounding this quiet hideaway in Banff National Park contends that the lake is home to some sort of monster. According to a widely-disseminated story which appeared in Canadian newspapers as early as 1924, “One of the first Indians who saw this lake did so from the summit of one of the highest mountains which surrounds it. In the lake he saw an enormous fish, so large that, from where he stood, it appeared to be as long as the lake…”
Another version of this lake monster legend can be found in the Banff Trading Post, the aforementioned historic gift shop established in 1903 by Canadian Renaissance man Norman Luxton. At the back of the shop is a glass case containing what appears to be the desiccated corpse of a merman. A note attached to this horrific exhibit describes an old Stoney story about a strange creature which lived in Lake Minnewanka which was half human and half fish. Every once in a while, the legend contends, visitors to the lake can hear voices and drumming coming from beneath the water, these mysterious noises ostensibly having some connection with the lake’s monstrous resident. It must be mentioned that the atrocity on display in the Banff Trading Post bears striking resemblance to the Fiji mermaid, a chimera-like abomination composed of the head and torso of a monkey sewn onto the body of a fish, which American showman P.T. Barnum exhibited in his museum in New York City.
There are other native legends from the Rocky Mountains describing monstrous mermen that inhabit the lakes and rivers. In her 1973 book Indian Legends from the Northern Rockies, American educator Ella E. Clark included an old Stoney story in which two brothers, one of them good and the other bad, are introduced to a monster called Wau-wau-kah after being flung by a tornado in the Rocky Mountains. “The creature had the head of a man,” she wrote, “though it was of monstrous size; out of it projected two horns as large as the largest trees. The body was that of a beast covered with long, black hair, its tail was like that of a large fish covered with scales, and it was endowed with a spirit.”
After a series of adventures, the monster is killed by the brothers and roasted in a fire. The bad brother tastes some of the creature’s cooked flesh, while the good brother does not. The bad brother soon begins to sprout coarse hair, horns on his head, and scales on his legs, eventually transforming completely into a Wau-wau-kah himself. Realizing that his personality is beginning to change, the bad brother begs his sibling to abandon him for his own safety, and slips into a Rocky Mountain river.
The Kootenay Indians of the southern Canadian Rockies tell similar stories about a horned monster which inhabits Kootenay Lake, in the Columbia Mountains west of the Rockies, and the northerly Shuswap have their own stories about powerful mermen who dwell in the lakes of the British Columbian Interior.
The Lost Lemon Mine
In the 1860s, the Rocky Mountains began to be invaded by white prospectors as part of the denouement of an easterly succession of gold rushes that had characterized the previous decade. Back in 1858, hordes of Californian prospectors descended upon British Columbia’s Fraser Canyon, drawn by news of a gold strike made at the confluence of the Fraser and Thompson Rivers. In 1861, at the tail end of his Fraser Canyon Gold Rush, news of a new bonanza to the northeast incited the Cariboo Gold Rush, in which thousands of British, Canadian, and Chinese prospectors flocked to fresh diggings in what is known as Cariboo Country. In 1864, a handful of Cariboo prospectors who had wandered east of the boomtowns of Barkerville and Williams Lake discovered gold on Stud Horse Creek, a tributary of the Kootenay River in the Columbia Mountains not far from the present cities of Kimberley and Cranbrook, BC. When the Wild Horse Creek diggings appeared to be played out, some prospectors ventured further east into the Rocky Mountains. There, they were joined by wolfers, whisky traders, and other hard characters who travelled north from the Montana frontier, many of whom had searched for the yellow metal in the hills outside Bannack, and were eager to try their luck in one of the last great gold rushes of the Wild West.
Some of the gold-seekers of the Canadian Rockies were colourful characters whose names would be remembered by posterity. In the summer of 1865, a handful of prospectors from Wild Horse Creek crossed Blakiston’s South Kootenay Pass from the west in a misguided attempt to reach Fort Edmonton on the North Saskatchewan River, where another minor gold rush was underway. Among their number was John George “Kootenay” Brown, an Irish adventurer whose incredible Wild West adventures would end with his tenure as the first park ranger of Waterton Lakes. In 1872, another veteran of Wild Horse Creek, Englishman Michael Phillipps, accidentally discovered the Crowsnest Pass west of Fort Macleod, Alberta, while searching for gold.
Two of the region’s most famous prospectors, responsible for what has been called the greatest mystery of the Canadian Rockies, are characters cloaked in enigma – an ill-fated pair known only as Lemon and Blackjack, the former giving his name to a legendary bonanza known as the Lost Lemon Mine. There are many versions of this legend, most of which were diligently compiled in geologist Ron Stewart’s 1993 book The Mystery of the Lost Lemon Mine. Some are tales of murder, madness, and Indian curses, while others tell of outlaws, robberies, and forgotten Indian massacres. In spite of their differences, all versions agree on one thing: that there is a wealth of lost gold hidden somewhere on the eastern slopes of Canada’s Rocky Mountains.
The best-known version of the legend is that told by Lafayette French, an American buffalo hunter, fur trader, and rancher who set up shop on the Highwood River near present-day High River, Alberta, sometime in the 1880s. French told the story to his part-time employee, carpenter Daniel Edward Riley, who would go on to become a senator for the province of Alberta. In the spring of 1946, two years before his death, Riley’s retelling of French’s tale was published in the Alberta Folklore Quarterly.
The late Canadian historian Hugh Dempsey, a foremost expert on the history of Canada’s Wild West, wrote an excellent commentary on French’s tale, reconciling it with hard historical evidence drawn from newspaper articles printed in 1870 and 1886. Dempsey believed that French learned his tale from Jean L’Heaureux, a French-Canadian seminary student with a reputation for strangeness, who fled to Montana after being involved in a scandal, and who lived among the Blackfoot for many years, performing the functions of priest and interpreter. Dempsey theorized that L’Heaureux heard the true story of the Lost Lemon Mine from Lemmon himself, and told it to French in 1877 at Blackfoot Crossing east of High River, adding embellishments and painting himself into the story. Dempsey’s article was published in a 1968 compilation of Lost Lemon Mine stories called Frontier Book #4.
A third sensationalized version of the story, which follows French’s narrative, was written by Philip H. Godsell, a Canadian folklorist and former HBC inspector who was an accomplished historian in his own right. His piece, entitled “Fatal Gold”, was published in the March 1950 issue of the magazine Adventure.
Together, these three sources paint a full picture of the events surrounding one of the most enduring mysteries of the Canadian Rockies.
There is some disagreement as to when the story begins. Dempsey dates the event to 1868, while French places it in the spring of 1870. Whatever the case, a 35-member prospecting party set out from the Tobacco Plains north of Eureka, Montana, in the valley of the Kootenay River, to pan the North Saskatchewan River for gold. Among them was a seasoned gold-seeker known as Blackjack, the very prospector who discovered the gold that launched the Cariboo Rush, and his partner, Lemon – according to Dempsey, Frank Lemmon, spelt with two ‘m’s. Dempsey believed that Lemmon’s partner was actually an American known as ‘Old George,’ whom L’Heaureux, in his retelling of the tale, replaced with the more famous Blackjack, whom he had met at Fort Edmonton back in 1866.
After some fruitless panning on the North Saskatchewan, Blackjack and Lemon decided to search for brighter prospects. For protection against the Blackfoot, who had no qualms about slaughtering Americans who trespassed on their territory, they joined a party of southbound half-breeds led by one Emil La Nouse. In some versions of the story, these Metis were headed for Fort Standoff, a whisky post built at the confluence of the Oldman and Waterton Rivers. It should be mentioned that Fort Standoff was established in 1871, a year after French’s story takes place, and three years after Dempsey’s historical dating.
Somewhere around present-day Nanton, Alberta, Blackjack and Lemon separated from the group and followed an old Stoney pack trail up High River and into the mountains, hoping to find a mountain pass that led to the Wild Horse Creek goldfields. Pioneer historian Freda Bundy proposed that this trail followed Racehorse Creek through the Racehorse Pass, eventually leading to the Elk River, a tributary of the Kootenay.
The partners left the trail to follow a creek which proved to be the confluence of three smaller streams. They panned these headwaters and discovered, to their delight, that their beds were rich in gold dust. After some additional investigation, they stumbled upon the source: a rock ledge streaked with solid gold.
That night, Blackjack and Lemon got into a heated argument over whether they should avail themselves of the gold immediately and take out as much as they could carry, or return to civilization to recruit miners to help them liberate the whole lode from its terrestrial prison. The exchange became so intense that the two prospectors nearly came to blows. Eventually, the livid partners, without resolving the argument, decided to retire for the night. Blackjack slowly nodded off while Lemon, wide awake, lay fuming. When he was sure that Blackjack was asleep, Lemon quietly slipped from his blankets, crept over to his sleeping partner, and split Blackjack’s head with an axe.
When he realized what he had done, Lemon was overwhelmed with panic. Resolving to abandon the camp at first light, he built a huge fire and started pacing back and forth, rifle in hand, brooding fearfully. As he did so, he began to hear ghostly moans, eerie whistles, and hideous lamentations faintly superseding the crackling of the fire. Horrified, Lemon feared that he was being haunted by the spirit of his murdered partner. The uncanny wails sent him on a slow descent into borderline insanity, a state from which he would never fully recover.
Unbeknownst to the terrified prospector, the ghastly wails were issued by two young Stoney braves, who tormented the unsuspecting Lemon from concealment in the brush. French identified these native prankers as William and Daniel Bendow, while Godsell called them “Calf Child” and “Medicine Owl”, perhaps using Anglicized forms of their Stoney names. The Indians had been stalking Lemon and Blackjack for some time, and had witnessed their discovery of the gold, their argument, and Blackjack’s subsequent murder.
At dawn, the half-crazed Lemon set out for the Tobacco Plains. According to Dempsey, the prospector actually headed to the “Jocko” or St. Ignatius Mission, a Jesuit mission church built about thirty miles south of Flathead Lake, Montana, and about 120 miles southeast of the Tobacco Plains. Upon his departure, the two natives took what valuables they could from the camp and headed to the Stoney village at Morley. The braves told their story to Jacob Bearspaw, chief of the Bearspaw band. Wary of the implications of a gold rush on Stoney land, the chief swore the two braves to secrecy.
After several days, Lemon arrived at the Tobacco Plains and sought out his friend, Father L’Heaureux. During his subsequent confession, he showed the priest a sample of the gold-rich rock from the mine he and Blackjack had discovered. According to Godsell, traders who later saw samples of this rock at Fort Benton, an American Fur Company trading post on Montana’s Missouri River, described it as resembling “a body of solid gold with a little rock shot into it.”
Immediately, the priest tasked a Metis frontiersman named John McDougall with finding Lemon’s mine and giving the murdered prospector a Christian burial. The mountain man found the location without much trouble and buried Blackjack’s remains, erecting a stone cairn over the grave. As soon as he left for Tobacco Plains, a group of Bearspaw men, who had been secretly keeping watch over the spot, destroyed the cairn and all evidence of human activity.
The following spring, a party of miners – one of their number being “Swiftwater” Bill Gates, who would later make a name for himself in the Klondike Gold Rush – having heard of Lemon’s find, convinced remorseful murderer to lead them to the mine’s location. Try as he might, however, the mentally fragile prospector was unable to retrace his steps. After a fruitless search, the miners began to believe that Lemon was deceiving them, and confronted him accordingly. In response, Lemon became violently unhinged, and had to be restrained and escorted back to Tobacco Plains. No longer able to function in civilized society, Lemon went to live on his brother’s ranch in Texas, where he remained until his death.
After the failed expedition, L’Heaureux took it upon himself to reclaim the mine. In 1872, he outfitted a party of miners who were to be led by John McDougall, the man who had buried Blackjack. The party headed to Crowsnest Lake and waited for McDougall, who was at Fort Benton at the time. When he had finished his business, McDougall set out to meet the party. En route, he stopped at Fort Kipp and indulged in the post’s most infamous commodity, a dangerous rotgut pseudo-whisky frequently sold to Indians. That night, McDougall drank himself to death, taking the secret of the mine’s location to his grave.
Undaunted, L’Heaureux spent the next two years organizing searches for the mine, even dragging Lemon from his self-imposed exile in Texas to take one last crack at the can. The first party was precluded from their objective by the charred remains of a forest fire, which rendered the terrain impassable. In the second expedition, Lemon became increasingly deranged the closer he got to the mine, forcing the party the abandon the project, and L’Heaureux to give up the search for good.
After another unsuccessful search in the spring, led by a man named Nelson who had panned with Blackjack and Lemon on the North Saskatchewan, Lafayette French arrived in Alberta and took up the torch. During his expedition into the mountains, French contracted some mysterious ailment and returned home, grievously ill.
For the next 30 years, French made sporadic treks into the mountains in search of Lemon’s lost mine. Despite the assistance he received from members of the previous search parties, and from members of the Metis band that had escorted Blackjack and Lemon from the North Saskatchewan River to the old Indian trail, French was ultimately unsuccessful. The longer he searched, the more he gained the impression that some sort of curse plagued those who sought the gold, or at least those who got close to finding it. This disturbing notion never presented itself more starkly than in a string of instances that began near Pincher Creek, Alberta, just east of the Crowsnest Pass, and ended in High River more than 70 miles to the north.
One cold winter day, a party of Stoney Indians led by William Bendow, one of the braves who had witnessed Blackjack’s murder and the discovery of the mine, took shelter on a ranch near Pincher Creek belonging to a pioneer named William Samuel Lee. French, who was coincidentally visiting the ranch at the same time, gave the hungry native and his followers some of his own beef. When he asked Bendow about the lost mine, the Stoney became uncharacteristically tight-lipped and refused to disclose any information.
That spring, French presented Bendow with 25 horses and 25 cattle, and promised to give them to the Stoney on the condition that he bring him to the Lost Lemon Mine. Initially, Bendow agreed, and it was arranged that the party would head out in the morning. That night, the Indian was racked by superstitious terror, and at sunrise, he reneged on the bargain.
In the winter of 1912, future senator Dan Riley outfitted French for another prospecting venture. On his way to the mountains, French crossed paths with Bendow a second time, finding the Indian on his way to Morley with a number of his friends and relatives. He made Bendow a generous offer, and the Stoney once again agreed to lead him to the lost gold.
That very night, Bendow died suddenly and mysteriously, in a fit of convulsions. Convinced that the Indian had brought bad medicine upon himself by agreeing to reveal the tribe’s secret, his kinsmen loaded his body into a Red River cart and brought it back to Morley for interment.
The Stoney superstition regarding precious metals, clearly exhibited by Bendow and other members of his band, is alluded to in Walter Wilcox’s 1900 book The Rockies of Canada. In that publication, the author relates a story featuring Joe Healy, an Irish-born adventurer and brother of the powerful whisky trader John J. Healy. While prospecting on the Bow River in 1864, Healy induced a Stoney man named Edwin to take him to a place where there was copper ore, bribing him with blankets, flour, and tea. “The other Indians shook their heads,” Wilcox wrote, “and said the spirits would be angry and that something would surely happen to Edwin for disturbing the minerals.”
Later that autumn, just prior to their scheduled expedition, Edwin suddenly fell dead beside his fire, apparently succumbing to a heart attack. To the elders, his death was no great surprise, being a natural consequence of his decision to “show the white man where there is money in the rocks.”
The same sentiments were felt by the Stoney of Morley, who attributed William Bendow’s sudden demise to preternatural forces. Their suspicions were confirmed when, on the night that Bendow’s body was returned to the village, the dead man’s son-in-law died in the same mysterious manner as his uncle. Despite these ominous developments, French decided to proceed with his planned expedition, and headed into the mountains alone.
Several weeks later, the treasure hunter stumbled into the famous Bar U Ranch in the Albertan foothills in an obvious state of excitement. Fumbling for a pencil and paper, he scrawled a cryptid letter to a friend at Fort Benton, stating that he had “found it”, and would explain everything when he had the opportunity. After entrusting the letter to the proprietor of the establishment, he rode further west, deciding to make camp at an old log cabin about two miles from the Bedingfield (or Edward Prince) Ranch in High River.
Sometime that night, the cabin mysteriously caught fire. French was severely burned, but managed to escape with his life and crawl two miles in the snow to the Bedington Ranch for aid. By the time of his arrival, it was morning, and the ranch hands were already in the field. Exhausted and in severe pain, the wounded frontiersmen crawled into the bunkhouse, hauled himself into one of the bunks, and passed out.
That evening, after supper, as the cowboys sat around playing cards in the bunkhouse, a weak voice emanated from one of the bunks: “A little less noise, gentlemen, please, there is a very sick man in this bunk.” The startled cowhands lowered the prospector from the bunk, bundled him into a wagon, and brought him to High River for medical attention.
By the time they reached their destination, French was in grave condition. The dying prospector requested to see Dan Riley, who arrived at his bedside as soon as he heard the news. “I know all about the Lost Lemon Mine now,” he whispered in his friends hear. French, who had lost much of his strength, promised to tell Riley the rest of the story in the morning. Unfortunately, he never had the opportunity. The prospector died that night, taking the secret of his discovery to the grave.
There have been many ideas put forth over the years as to the location of the Lost Lemon Mine. Most stories place it somewhere in the Livingstone Range, at the eastern edge of the Rockies between the Highwood River and the Crowsnest Pass. Another tale contends that the elusive lode lies in a valley in Red Lodge Provincial Park west of Sundre, Alberta, fifty miles north of Morley, where King Bearspaw, the disowned grandson of Chief Jacob Bearspaw, is reputed to have spent decades searching for it. And one fascinating theory developed by Stephen Wright, a resident of Alberta’s Bow Valley with whom I have been in contact for nearly a decade, whose hypothesis I hope to share in a future piece, places the hidden treasure near Mount Assiniboine on the Alberta-BC border, just west of the Spray Lakes. Wherever its location, the cursed gold of Lemon and Blackjack adds another layer of intrigue to the mystery that is the Canadian Rockies.
Jack Ladner’s Pocket Watch
Canada’s brief and fiery Wild West came to an end in 1874, when the government of the seven-year-old Dominion of Canada sent the North-West Mounted Police to the western plains to establish British law and order. Seven years later, labourers under the leadership of William Cornelius Van Horne began construction on the Canadian Pacific Railway (CPR) – the great iron thoroughfare that would connect the Atlantic Ocean with the Pacific.
In 1884, on the recommendation of surveyor and former U.S. Cavalry officer Major A.B. Rogers, the railroad was built through the Rocky Mountains by way of the perilous Kicking Horse Pass. After laying ties and rails over this divide, the CPR’s workforce of underpaid European navvies continued building the road along the northern roots of adjacent Mount Stephen, creating a steep and dangerous declivity which would come to be known as the Big Hill. Before it was replaced by the Spiral Tunnels in 1909, this “eight mile horror,” as historian Pierre Berton put it, was responsible for a series of deadly disasters, one of which is connected with an eerie Rocky Mountain mystery.
The July 1962 issue of the magazine Fate contains an article written by Julie C. Crawford, the daughter of a senior CPR locomotive engineer named Matthew Fulton Crawford. This essay contains three remarkable incidents of clairvoyance experienced by Crawford and his easygoing brother-in-law, fireman John “Jack” Ladner.
The last of Julie’s stories is set in January 1904, when both her father and Uncle Jack were working out of the city of Revelstoke, British Columbia, on an alpine route which stretched from that city to Laggan, Alberta, the site of present-day Lake Louise. This mountain passage was both beautiful and dangerous, consisting of a series of switchbacks that would through both the Albertan Rockies and BC’s Columbia Range, winding through Roger’s Pass and up the deadly Big Hill. In order to traverse this treacherous trail, locomotives required the assistance of an auxiliary engine, or pusher. Although the pusher job was monotonous, it paid well, and so jack Ladner opted to work exclusively in the auxiliary engines in order to provide his family with some extra income.
Matthew Crawford had spent the evening of January 21st, 1904 with his in-laws in Revelstoke. Knowing that he had to work in the morning, he kept his visit short. When the time came for him to say goodnight, Mrs. Ladner gave him a pair of hand-knit wrist-warmers and asked him to give them to her son, Jack, if he managed to see him at Laggan, or at the station in Field, BC, at the summit of the route.
“All the way east the next day,” Julie wrote, “Dad was glad his mother-in-law could not see the mountains as they looked in the intense cold, menacing, implacable. The track was in fair condition for the big rotary plough had preceded the passenger train and he was right on time when he pulled into Field station at the summit at 6:00 o’clock.”
Sure enough, Jack Ladner was present at the Field station at the time of Matthew’s arrival, and watched his train crawl into the station. No sooner had the locomotive come to a stop than Jack swung into the cab to give his brother-in-law a hearty hello. After exchanging news, Matthew gave Jack the wrist-warmers his mother had knitted for him, and showed him a new pocket watch he had purchased, of which he was very proud. “The case isn’t much,” he said, “but it’s 21 jeweled, the best works I could afford, and guaranteed to keep perfect time.”
After chatting for some time, the two men parted ways, Matthew to continue his journey to Laggan and Jack bound for Revelstoke with a load of heavy freight. As they departed, Matthew cautioned Jack to be extra careful going down the Big Hill, remarking that it was a bad night, and that slippery tracks could spell trouble for a heavy train. The younger man thanked his brother-in-law for the words of wisdom, concluding his farewell with the eerie statement that if he didn’t make it through the night, he found find a way to let Matthew know. This last remark was a reference to Jack’s oft-repeated insistence that, if he ever met a sticky end on the railroad, as he strongly supposed he would, he would do everything in his ghostly power to inform Matthew of his situation.
Matthew’s journey to Laggan was uneventful. When his work was complete, he headed to the station boarding house for a hot meal and an evening of banter and comradery with his fellow trainmen. In the midst of the after-dinner conversation, Matthew, eager to show off his new pocket watch, drew the timepiece from his pocket and showed it to the men with whom he was chatting, saying casually, “It’s not much to look at because I didn’t splurge on the case. But it keeps perfect…”
Rather than displaying the correct time, however, the watch was stopped at 7:56.
While the trainmen jokingly disparaged the jeweler who had sold the watch, Matthew attempted to move the hands ahead to the correct time. Bizarrely, they refused to budge, glued resolutely to 7:56. Suddenly, Matthew was struck by a hideous hunch. Pushing back his chair, he shrugged into his coat and set out for the station, ignoring the laughs and jeers of his fellow trainmen as he headed into the cold.
Halfway to the station, he ran into the operator, who had just searched for him at the bunkhouse. With a heavy heart, the operator informed him that Jack’s train had ran off the rails, having broken through two safety switches. It broke its descent by slamming head-on into a huge rock. Rescuers on the scene had yet to find any sign of Jack or his fireman.
Matthew spent the ensuing week working on the wrecking crew, searching for any sign of his missing brother-in-law on the mountainside. Three days later, Jack’s broken body was discovered beneath the twisted metal of the ruined engine. His own pocket watch had stopped at 7:56 – the exact same time as Matthew’s – as had the clock on the second safety switch through which the train had broken.
Although Jack’s pocket watch and the clock on the safety switch ran perfectly well once they were rewound, Matthew’s watch never worked again, its hands pointing obstinately to the very minute at which Jack had met his untimely demise. Jack Ladner, it seemed, had kept his promise, letting his brother-in-law know the exact minute of his last moment on earth.
Ghostly Tales of the Banff Springs Hotel
The mystery of Jack Ladner’s pocket watch is not the only Rocky Mountain enigma connected with the Canadian Pacific Railway. Back in 1888, William Cornelius Van Horne, the man who oversaw the construction of that trans-continental track, was appointed president of the CPR. With the dream of attracting wealthy European tourists seeking a luxury wilderness experience, Van Horne envisioned a castle in the Rockies – a grand railway hotel towering above the confluence of the Bow and Spray Rivers in the quaint mountain town of Banff. During the first-year of his presidency, he commissioned American architect Bruce Price with the construction of the Banff Springs Hotel – a world-class establishment that would become an icon of the Canadian Rockies.
Since its grand opening to the public, this magnificent Scottish baronial-style palace, rebuilt in 1910 from the limestone of Mount Rundle, has housed guests from all over the world, among them Marilyn Monroe, Queen Elizabeth II, and Helen Keller. According to a number of legends ostensibly born from the first-hand accounts of hotel patrons and staff, some of these guests never checked out.
The Fairmont Banff Springs Hotel is home to a number of ghostly stories, all of which the hotel official denies. At least one of the Banff Springs’ supposed ghostly guests is said to haunt the missing room 873 on the eighth floor. According to hotel lore, a man, while staying with his wife and young daughter in room 873, murdered his family before committing suicide. As the story goes, the spirit of the young girl – and, in some versions, the spirit of her mother – never left the room. Guests who stayed in room 873 after its reopening reported being awoken in the night by violent shrieks, and chambermaids who routinely cleaned the room would report finding bloody fingerprints on the bathroom mirror that could not be washed off. In response to the disturbing reports, hotel management sealed off the room. In spite of this, some say, the ghost or ghosts of 873 still haunt the vicinity of the room to this day.
Another of the permanent residents reported to walk the halls of the Banff Springs is the ghost of Sam McCauley, a beloved Scottish bellman who, before his death in the mid-late 1970s, swore to posthumously return to haunt his workplace. Incidents involving mysterious phantom lights, elevator doors opening and closing at random, and hotel guests being helped by an elderly Scottish bellman in an antiquated uniform have been attributed to Sam’s ghost.
Other alleged hotel spectres include a ghostly bartender who encourages inebriated patrons to go to bed, and a headless man who, despite his obvious handicap, somehow manages to play the bagpipes.
Of all the ghost stories associated with the Banff Springs Hotel, perhaps the best known is the tale of the phantom bride. According to legend, a young couple was married in Banff sometime in the early 1930s. It was arranged for their wedding banquet to be held in the Banff Springs Hotel, where the couple was rending the bridal suite. Before the banquet commenced, the newlywedbride ascended the marble staircase up to the Cascade Ballroom to join her husband, who was waiting at the top. As she did so, her wedding gown brushed against one of the candles that line the curved staircase and caught fire. In the panic that ensued, the bride tripped over her wedding dress, fell down the flight of marble stairs, broke her neck and died.
It is said that her ghost has haunted the hotel ever since. Over the years, various hotel patrons and staff have reported seeing a phantasmal bride dancing alone in the Cascade Ballroom, or ascending the marble staircase on which the tragic event is rumored to have taken place. Others have heard strange noises emanating from the bridal suite when the room was not in use. True or not, the tale of the ghostly bride of the Banff Springs Hotel is surrounded in an aura of mystery and romance that has become entrenched in the folklore of Canada’s Rocky Mountains.
Ghosts of the Chateau Lake Louise
Forty minutes up the Icefield Parkway from Banff, Alberta, is the hamlet of Lake Louise, named after an iconic glacial lake which lies at the foot of Mount Lefroy. Towering over the lake’s northeastern end is another of the CPR’s grand railway hotels, the Fairmont Chateau Lake Louise. Built around the turn of the 20th Century, this luxury establishment has ghost stories of its own, some of which were shared with me by a former employee named Katie.
Like the Banff Springs, the Chateau Lake Louise has an elevator that inexplicably opens and closes on its own. This rogue lift is located near the staff cafeteria at the back of the hotel, in an area with a crimson carpet known as the Red Room. Staff lore has it that, back in the 1920s or ‘30s, when the area was open to guests, a young boy fell into the open shaft while running after a rolling ball and died from his injuries.
Around the corner from the red is a corridor connected to the staff cafeteria, on which hangs a large mirror. While passing by the mirror, one of Katie’s fellow staff-members glanced at his reflection and saw an older man standing behind him, staring at him with a sinister expression. The staff member whirled around, only to find himself alone in the hallway.
Another purportedly haunted area is the hotel’s eighth floor, where one of Katie’s housekeeping supervisors was kicked squarely in the behind. Legend has it that this part of the Chateau Lake Louise is haunted by the ghost of a bride-to-be, who hanged herself in a guest room closet sometime in the 1930s, when she learned of her fiancé’s affair.
Another unusual incident occurred one night when a guest left the hotel for a nighttime stroll around the lake. When he tried to re-enter the door he had exited, the guest found himself locked outside. When he peered through to window to see if anyone was in the hallway, the face of an elderly woman in old-fashioned clothing suddenly appeared in front of him. Terrified, the patron walked around to the main doors and informed the concierge of his frightening experience.
Another interesting source on the ghosts of the Chateau Lake Louise is a post on TripAdvisor.ca, written by former hotel house officer P. Herman. One night while doing his routine rounds, Herman and another house officer named Robert walked the length of the Tom Wilson Room, a restaurant on the hotel’s seventh floor. “It was very late at night,” he wrote. “Dark of course, but for a few night lights.”
Herman and his partner strolled down the middle of the dining room, walking between rows of tables and chairs with their eyes peeled for anything out of the ordinary. When they had completed their inspection, they turned around to find every chair in the dining room moved to the middle of the isle down which they had just walked. “We heard nothing,” he wrote, “although there was a very noticeable chill. Of course, we chose an alternate route… through the kitchen, at a very brisk pace.”
Herman went on to relate another incident in which he walked past a woman in old-fashioned summer clothing one cold winter night while descending the grand staircase. The woman’s strange choice of attire caused the house officer to turn around for a second look, but by the time he craned his neck, the woman had vanished. Similar to his experience in the Tom Wilson Room, this incident was accompanied by an oppressive chill, which Herman likened to the sensation of opening a winter window without feeling a breeze.
“Of course, I made my report,” he wrote, “and it should be on file to this day, along with several others… including screams in empty rooms and other apparitions.”
The most famous spectral resident of the Chateau Lake Louise is that of Thomas Edmonds Wilson, the namesake of the aforementioned restaurant. Wilson was a frontiersman who worked as a North-West Mounted Police officer, a packer for Major A.B. Rogers, and an independent mountain guide in the Canadian Rockies, who became the first white man to lay eyes on Lake Louise in 1882. After his death in 1933, Wilson’s spirit is said to have returned to the place he loved best. Patrons have reported seeing a spectre bearing his likeness gazing out at Lake Louise from a window of the restaurant that bears his name, and staff claim to have seen his ghostly figure striding through the kitchen at night, his legs disappearing into the floor from the knees down. This detail adds authenticity to the sightings, as the kitchen floor was purportedly a foot lower than its present height when Tom Wilson walked the halls of the Chateau Lake Louise.
Ghostly Tales of the Prince of Wales Hotel
Tucked away in the southwestern corner of the Canadian Rockies lies Waterton Lakes National Park, a hidden tourist destination which has hosted thousands of sportsmen and outdoor adventurers since the days of its first ranger, Kootenay Brown. On a high windswept hill overlooking the Park’s eponymous lakes stands the magnificent Prince of Wales Hotel, the last of the grand railway hotels to be built on Canadian soil. In the summer months, this historic Swiss chalet-style landmark houses guests from all over the world, come to hike the perilous Crypt Lake Trail, cruise the Lakes by boat, or simply enjoy the breathtaking scenery of the Rockies’ smallest park.
In the fall and winter, the Prince of Wales lies desolate and abandoned, its windows dark, its doors boarded up, and the wind howling through gaps in its wooden exterior. In this eerie condition, the hotel appears more congruous with its many ghost stories – an attribute which all of Canada’s grand railway hotels seem to share.
The Prince of Wales hotel was built in 1926 at the behest of Louis W. Hill, president of the American company the Great Northern Railway. At that time, alcohol was outlawed in the United States, and many thirsty Americans made pilgrimages to the Great White North to indulge in their favourite beverages, Alberta having ended its own Prohibition in 1923. Hill, who had built several grand railway hotels in neighbouring Glacier National Park, Montana, hoped that a similar hotel in Waterton might entice American liquor tourists to visit southwestern Alberta, utilizing his railway and U.S. hotels on the journey north. It is somewhat ironic that Hill’s Waterton hotel, built for the express purpose of attracting liquor tourism, is located right beside the Mormon-heavy counties of Cardson and Warner – the only districts in Alberta where alcohol is still outlawed.
Named after the future, short-reigning King Edward VIII in a vain attempt to entice him to stay there during his 1927 royal tour of Canada, the Prince of Wales Hotel is said to house a number of permanent residents. One of these is the ghost of the unfaithful wife of a former hotel chef who lived with her husband on the premises. According to local legend, the chef and his wife disappeared from the hotel one night without notice. The chef reappeared sometime later in British Columbia, alone. Some say that the chef murdered his wife in Room 608 of the Prince of Wales Hotel on the night of his departure. Although he managed to dispose of his wife’s body, the spirit of the murdered woman remained in the room; every once in a while, patrons staying in Room 608 report being tucked into bed by unseen hands.
Although there is no historical basis for the tale of the ghost of the chef’s wife, another hotel ghost story may have some merit to it. The most frequently reported unexplained phenomenon to take place at the Prince of Wales Hotel is the inexplicable aroma of tobacco smoke which occasionally wafts through the Royal Stewart Dining Room. This phantom smell is said to be associated with the ghost of a well-dressed top hat-wearing gentleman who haunts the dining room and the basement, appearing to unsuspecting guests and staff as a reflection in windows and mirrors. Although some writers have attempted to connect this spectre with a construction worker who allegedly fell from some scaffolding to his death during the hotel’s construction, the image of a dapper tobacco smoker corresponds quite well with that of Captain Rodden S. Harrison, the hotel’s first manage – a pipe smoker who frequently affected a tweed suit. Captain Harrison is said to have taken great pride in his work, and had his staff furnish the tables in the Royal Stewart Dining Room with freshly-picked wildflowers every morning. Perhaps the Captain’s spirit resides in the hotel to this day, enjoying the occasional after-dinner smoke and periodically checking in on his guests.
Another of the Prince of Wales’ spirits is said to haunt the lobby, where hotel staff sometimes report hearing the heavy disembodied footsteps of a man in the middle of the night. One former staff member, in an internet chatroom, confessed that he broke into the hotel in the offseason in order to spend the night there. His intrusion apparently offended this invisible resident, who raced down the stairs from the fifth or sixth floor and across the lobby towards him, effectively chasing him from the premises.
The most famous phantom of the Prince of Wales Hotel is the Lady in White, a spectre of a young woman in a white gown said to haunt Rooms 510 and 516. This feminine phantasm makes her presence known by locking windows left open overnight, running the taps, taping on doors, turning the lights on, and blowing her icy breath down the next of hapless guests. Some hotel patrons have reported hearing disembodied footsteps in the hallways or on the balconies. Others claim to have been locked out of their own rooms, finding that someone, or something, had locked the door from the inside. One guest staying in Room 516 even maintained that the apparition of the young woman slipped into bed with him and his wife in the dead of night… before vanishing into thin air.
Popular legend attributes this phantom to the spirit of a young chambermaid named Sarah, who started working at the hotel shortly after its grand opening in 1927. Sarah was in love with a member of the hotel staff. When the man rejected her advances, Sarah lapsed into despair and threw herself from a window on the fourth floor. Her ghost remains in the hotel to this very day, haunting the site of her suicide.
It is likely that the legend of Sarah’s ghost is based on a tragic event that took place in 1977 – a particularly dark year for the Prince of Wales Hotel, on account of the death of a beloved hotel handyman and a disruptive government inspection. Perhaps the most tragic event to take place that year was the suicide of a 20-year-old seasonal employee from Dorval, Quebec, who worked in the hotel’s giftshop. The employee, named Lorraine, had fallen in love with Clifford Hummel, the handsome and athletic manager of the Prince of Wales Hotel. When Hummel, who was already in a relationship at that time, failed to reciprocate her affections, Lorraine was heartbroken. On Saturday, July 30th, 1977, the grief-stricken woman stripped naked and ran throughout the hotel before leaping to hear death from the balcony on the hotel’s sixth floor. Her broken body was discovered on the flagstone patio that overlooks the Waterton Lakes. Some say that, ever since, her restless spirit has roamed the halls of the Prince of Wales, searching for the love denied her in life.
William Roe’s Wildman Encounter
The completion of the Canadian Pacific Railway in 1885 allowed for the settlement of the western prairies and the British Columbian Interior. By the early 20th Century, outdoor adventurers from Alberta and British Columbia were regularly heading into the Rockies to hunt, fish, and mountain climb. Some of these sportsmen returned from their backcountry escapades with experiences they could not explain, which seemed to suggest that the old Indian legends of hairy giants in the Rocky Mountains might have some truth to them.
One of the best 20th Century wildman stories to come out of the Canadian Rockies is the testament of William Roe, a construction worker from British Columbia who had an incredible encounter in the autumn of 1855, when he was helping build the Yellowhead Highway west of Jasper. Roe sent a sworn affidavit to Canadian Sasquatch researcher John William Green in which he outlined his experience. Green, in turn, published Roe’s story in his 1968 book On the Track of Sasquatch, and in his 1978 book Sasquatch: The Apes Among Us, cementing its place in the annals of classic Bigfoot literature.
“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…
“In October 1955, 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.
The Wildmen of Kootenay Plains
Another series of Rocky Mountain monster sightings were made in the late 1960s and early ‘70s, at the Kootenay Plains south of Nordegg, Alberta, where Stoney medicine man Hector Crawler had spent much of his time hunting in the late 19th Century. In the March 1969, a Cree Indian band from Hobbema, Alberta, descended from the aforementioned Chief Maskepetoon set up camp at a place called Windy Point, near the confluence of the North Saskatchewan and Cline Rivers. No sooner had they settled in than 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, made by at least two different creatures.
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, 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 woodcutter’s 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; 46-year-old Floyd Engen of Eckville; and 21-year-old Dale Boddy of Ponoka. 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.
Motorist Sighting Near Abraham Lake
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.”
The silent vales and misty peaks of the Canadian Rockies hold many more secrets, from unsolved disappearances and obscure native legends to strange phenomena which surround the sites of terrible disasters. At this junction of the magnificent and the mysterious, where nature’s ancient parapets separate rugged luxury from hidden wilds where man’s shadow is seldom cast, history and legend beckon to the adventurous, daring the bold and the curious to probe the mysteries of Canada’s Rocky Mountains.
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“A-CA-OO-MAH-CA-YE,” by Hugh A. Dempsey, in Volume 8 of the Dictionary of Canadian Biography (1985)
Indian Legends from the Northern Rockies (1973), by Ella Elizabeth Clark
The Rockies of Canada (1900), by Walter Dwight Wilcox
“Lake Minnewanka,” by Rev. Prof. K.L. Jones in the July 22nd, 1890 issue of the Kingston Daily News
“Geographic Nomenclature,” in the July 6th, 1893 issue of the Manitoba Semi-Weekly Free Press (Winnipeg, Manitoba)
The Rundle Journals, 1840-1848, by Robert Terrill Rundle
The Papers of the Palliser Expedition, 1857-1860 (1968)
Peter Fidler: Canada’s Forgotten Surveyor, 1769-1822 (1966), by James Grierson MacGregor
An Overland Journey Round the World, During the Years 1841 and 1842 (1847), by Sir George Simpson
https://www.metismuseum.ca/media/document.php/11565.Alexis%20Pich%c3%a9.pdf
“FIDLER, PETER,” by Robert S. Allen in Volume 6 of the Dictionary of Canadian Biography (1987)
Journal of a Journey over Land from Buckingham House to the Rocky Mountains in 1793 & 3, by Peter Fidler
Ghost River: State of the Watershed Report (2018), from GhostWatershed.ca
“RUNDLE, ROBERT TERRILL,” by Fritz Pannekoek, in Volume 12 of the Dictionary of Canadian Biography (1990)
“Michael Phillips and the Opening of the West,” by Jim Cameron in the February 6th, 2015 issue of the Cranbrook Daily Townsman
The Mystery of the Lost Lemon Mine (1993), by Ron Stewart
Frontier Book No. 4: The Greatest Mystery of the Canadian Rockies – The Lost Lemon Mine (1968), by Dan Riley, Tom Primrose, and Hugh Dempsey
“Fatal Gold,” by Philip H. Godsell, in the March 1950 issue of Adventure
“DE SMET, PIERRE-JEAN,” by William L. Davis in Volume 10 of the Dictionary of Canadian Biography (1972; 2013)
The Last Spike: The Great Railway, 1881-1885 (1971), by Pierre Berton
“The Psychic Warning that Stopped the Train,” by Julie C. Crawford in the July 1962 issue of Fate
“Ghostly Tales of the Banff Springs Hotel” (2015), by Hammerson Peters on MysteriesOfCanada.com
“WILSON, THOMAS EDMONDS,” by Edward J. Hart in Volume 16 of the Dictionary of Canadian Biography (2014)
Private correspondence between Hammerson Peters and Katie M. in May 2022
https://dysarm.com/dead-brides-and-dishpigs-an-appreciation-of-the-canadian-rockies/
Glacier Ghost Stories (2013), by Karen Stevens
A Historical Handbook for the Employees of the Prince of Wales Hotel (May 2016), by the Glacier Park Foundation
“Woman Loses Arm in Wreck at Waterton: Cars Collide Near Hotel – Driver Has Three Ribs Broken,” in the August 10, 1928 issue of the Lethbridge Herald
“Aging Prince of Wales Buildings Under Inspectors’ Scrutiny,” in the September 15, 1977 issue of the Lethbridge Herald
“Labour Dept. Probing Waterton Park Hotel,” in the August 7, 1977 issue of the Lethbridge Herald
“Labour Dept. Probing Waterton Park Hotel,” in the August 7, 1977 issue of the Lethbridge Herald
“Hotel Worker Dead Following Waterton Jump,” in the August 2nd, 1977 issue of the Lethbridge Herald
On the Track of Sasquatch (1968), by John Green
Sasquatch: The Apes Among Us (1978), by John Green
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