NATIVE CRYPTID ENCOUNTERS
Welcome to Canada, a land of vast wilderness and forgotten history. Within its endless forests, beneath its Great Lakes, across its lonely prairies and empty tundra, and in the shadows of its many mountains, lies a shadowy realm of ancient mystery and lost lore. For centuries, Canada’s Native peoples have told stories that walk the hazy boundary between myth and reality – tales of evil spirits and monstrous animals that were as real to them as the buffalo and the beaver. In this series, we will explore some of these legends as told by native elders of the 19th and 20th Centuries, from tales of the ravenous Wendigo through stories of the elusive Sasquatch to narratives of obscure creatures whispered of in dusty ethnologies and the campfire stories of the most remote reserves. Join us as we uncovered the Secrets of the North: Canada’s Native Monster Legends.
The Sasquatch of Harrison Lake
Of all the unusual creatures to inhabit the shadowy haunts of indigenous Canadian folklore, the best known is undoubtedly the Sasquatch, the hairy mountain-dwelling giant of the West Coast. The legend of the Sasquatch was first brought to public awareness by an Irish-born Indian agent named J.W. Burns, who described contemporary wildman sightings by his Chehalis Indians wards near Harrison Hot Springs, British Columbia, in his famous April 1929 article for Maclean’s Magazine. Burns’ subsequent pieces on the subject chronicled Sasquatch sightings in the vicinity of Harrison Lake, a large body of water in the Lillooet Mountains surrounded by lush rainforest, pervaded by a sleepy atmosphere redolent of enchantment and ancient secrets. The Indian Agent’s writings lent an intriguing epithet to Harrison Hot Springs, a small town nestled on the southern shores of Harrison Lake, namely “The Sasquatch Capital of Canada.’
Burns wasn’t the only ethnologist to document the traditional Chehalis belief in British Columbia’s most elusive resident. In his 1952 treatise on the Upper Stahlo Indians, the Stahlo being a division of the Upriver Halkomelem Coast Salish, Canadian anthropologist Wilson Duff included several Sasquatch stories told by August Jim, an octogenarian of both Hope Tait and Vancouver Musqueam descent who hailed from the village of Katz just west of the town of Hope, B.C.
“Within the lifetimes of present informants,” Duff wrote in his introduction to the wildman subject, “the giants have been seen many times, especially in the Chehalis-Harrison Mills area. These encounters, which no longer cause sickness, usually occur on moonlit nights. The person sees the giant and runs; the sasquatch follows, just walking, but keeping up. Finally it drops behind. Sometimes the giants raid gardens or storehouses, but usually they just seem curious.”
The first tale told by August Jim is a horror story which deviates from this typical pattern. This startling piece of oral lore describes an ancient Sasquatch attack on the villagers of Agassiz, a historic Chehalis settlement located between Harrison Hot Springs and the Fraser River.
“A long time ago,” Jim told Duff, “six women and their children went from the village at Agassiz to gather roots. They camped at the foot of that mountain on the left as you go to the Hot Springs. Just at dark they heard somebody holler. Everybody was quiet and they heard that same hollering again. Most of them didn’t want to answer, but some thought it might be the men looking for them, and called out. Then a big man, 8 or 9 feet tall, hair all over his body, came into the firelight. He grabbed one of the women, pulled open her breast, and took the heart out.
“A little girl got scared and ran away, following the trail back 3 or 4 miles to the village. The people armed themselves and went right back to the camp. They found all the women dead, the children crying, unhurt. The men followed the tracks of that big man up over that high mountain and down the river, but they lost him.”
Jim’s next tale is no less remarkable, being one of the few Canadian stories to reference the discovery of Sasquatch bones.
“A Chehalis man,” Jim said, “hunting bears on the gravel-bar on Harrison River one fall, heard a loud crackling noise up the side of the mountain. He thought it might be a bear, but a big man came out. His canoe wasn’t very far away so he ran for it, and the big man followed, just walking, but getting closer. He reached his canoe and launched it. The big man stopped and stood right at the edge of the water. The man took his rifle and shot the big man, saw him drop.
“The next fall he and his friend were hunting at the same place and saw some big bones. He told his friend, ‘That’s the one I shot.’”
Duff included a third story in his piece set in the Harrison Lake area, told by Jim’s neighbour, Edmond Lorenzetto, who lived a few miles further up the Fraser River. This story is commentary on the wildman sighting at Ruby Creek – a classic Canadian Sasquatch story made famous by Canadian Bigfoot researcher John Willison Green. In 1941, a Chehalis man named George Chapman lived with his wife Jeannie and their three children in a cabin on the Fraser River not far from Ruby Creek, between Harrison Hot Springs and Hope. One day, while George was at work on the railroad, a giant strode out of the woods and approached the Chapman children who were playing outside. Using a blanket to shield her little ones from the Sasquatch’s gaze, which was supposed to cause sickness, Jeannie herded her children to her father-in-law’s house on Ruby Creek, leaving the giant to ransack her and her husband’s storage shed.
“George Chapman’s kids saw it,” said Lorenzetto of the Ruby Creek Sasquatch, “and pointed it out to his wife, Jeanny. She got scared and ran to Ruby Creek, and would never go back. It almost made her sick. She traded houses with her sister-in-law and stayed at Ruby. That thing had squeezed itself through a door to steal dried fish. It left red fur on the door frame.”
Duff concluded his segment on the Sasquatch of Harrison Lake by writing, “Sasquatches are said to have been seen by whites as well as Indians in recent years. Five or six years ago, for example, a party of white loggers are said to have seen one ahead of them on a road near Harrison Lake.”
The Wendigo of Lakes Timiskaming and Temagami
Far to the east, across the Rocky Mountains and the Canadian Prairies, the rocky forests of the Canadian Shield are said to be haunted by a monster of another kind. According to the Anishinaabe of Northern Ontario, the wilderness north of the Great Lakes is the abode of an evil spirit called the Weetigo, Windigo, or Wendigo, which possesses those who indulge in cannibalism. Victims imbued with the spirit of this northern demon are said to develop an insatiable hunger for human flesh, and to gradually transform into gaunt, grey-skinned giants that roam the forest in search of human prey.
In his 1915 article for the Canada Department of Mines Geological Survey, American anthropologist Frank Gouldsmith Speck included Windigo legends told by the Algonquin of Lake Temagami, north of Lake Nipissing, Ontario, and the Ojibwa of Lake Timiskaming, further to the northeast. He classified the Windigo of Timiskaming Algonquin folklore as:
“A man-eating creature who roams through woods devouring luckless victims. He is believed to have commenced as a hunter who became lost in the bush, and lost all his provisions and clothing. Then he preyed upon anything he could find, like an animal.”
Later in his article, Speck included an Ojibwa Windigo story he heard on the shores of Lake Temagami. This story involves a medicine man named Buzzing Noise, his wife, Medicine Woman, and their children, who once encamped on the shores of some nameless lake. West of this lake, at the end of a long portage trail, was another lake dotted with many islands.
One evening, while sitting alone in his tent, Buzzing Noise was suddenly and unaccountably overcome by a wave of dread – a formless premonition that something evil was heading his way. Having long since learned to heed his instincts, the medicine man gathered his family, ensured that they had enough blankets to stave off the chill of the night, and piled them into his canoe. The family paddled out into the lake and went to sleep, bobbing silently within sight of their camp.
The next morning, the medicine man returned to shore and discovered that his tent had been destroyed – doubtless the work of a Windigo, or cannibal monster. Knowing that it was not safe to linger in the area, Buzzing Noise sent his wife and children down the portage trail to the westerly lake, telling them that he would follow behind them with the canoe. Heeding a dream he had had the previous night, he warned them that if a whisky jack, or Canada jay, flew over their heads, the Wendigo was close behind them.
The family reached their destination without incident and built a wigwam on one of the lake’s many islands. “They were safe there,” Speck explained, “as the Windigo, having no canoe, could not cross.”
Once his family was settled into their new home, Buzzing Noise told his wife, “I am not yet satisfied. I must beat that Windigo, because he will bother us all winter, and then we will starve, for I cannot hunt while staying at camp all the time, watching out for you and the children.”
Rather than combatting the Windigo the conventional way, the medicine man decided to engage him using the tools of his trade. He proceeded to build a shaking tent or conjuring lodge – a cylindrical wigwam made from seven poles covered with bark, by which medicine men across the country attempted to commune with both human and inhuman spirits for purposes of clairvoyance. He crawled inside the structure and commenced singing his medicine song. Soon, the tent began to shake with unearthly violence, and a choir of uncanny voices could be heard wailing inside, accompanying the singing shaman.
Buzzing Noise told his wife that the spirit of the Windigo had arrived in the shaking tent, and that he intended to grapple with him and send him back west where he came from. Suddenly, a terrible noise like a thunderclap erupted inside the tent. The medicine man’s children fainted, knowing that their father was still inside.
The shaking tent suddenly fell silent, and its violent gyrations ceased. Medicine Woman waited in an agony of suspense, knowing that her husband’s spirit was struggling with that of the Wendigo’s far away. After what seemed like an eternity, the wigwam shook again – an indication that the shaman’s spirit had returned from its journey. Buzzing Noise announced, “We will be all right now. I took him back west. He is very sick from his fright but he will stay there now.”
Sometime later, Buzzing Noise learned that another medicine man was encamped a day’s journey from the island at the time of the ritual, and had witnessed the Wendigo’s expulsion from the country, hearing its tortured moans as it flew across the sky.
The Windigo North of Lake Superior
Another series of Ojibwa stories featuring this boreal ghoul appears in the 1916 article “Ojibwa Tales from the North Shore of Lake Superior,” written by American anthropologist William Jones, a member of Oklahoma’s Fox Nation. One of these rather nebulous tales makes a clear distinction between the Wendigo and another more mysterious forest-going giant – perhaps a wildman more akin to the Sasquatch of the Pacific Northwest. The story references other fantastic monsters of Ojibwa mythology as well, including, apparently, a sort of giant beaver which appears in other folkloric traditions across the country; a giant lake fish, which is a staple of Ojibwa lore; and “manitou woman”, or female demon.
“A Windigo once came to a family,” Jones wrote. “He was feared all the while he was there; yet he was gentle with the children, letting them dance on the palms of his hands, and singing to them. He hunted beavers with the man, driving the great beavers out of the mountains. Then he went away, warning them that he would return if ever they ate the musk-glands. The sound of him could be heard a great way off, on the farther shore of the sea, where he fought with a manitou woman.
“A hunch-back who had been despised by the people was called upon for help against a Windigo woman that was coming to destroy the village. He spurned the gifts that were offered him, but nevertheless went to meet the Windigo woman, and slew her.
“Two men driven by the wind came to a shore, where they became alarmed at the sight of the huge footsteps of a giant. While in his keeping, there came a Windigo who desired them. A quarrel arose, whereupon the giant had his dog come from beneath a wooden bowl and slay the Windigo. This dog he gave to the men to take home, and it became the first dog among men.”
Jones included one more story set in the forests north of Lake Superior. Although it makes no mention of the Wendigo, it may not be out of place to include it here.
“Mashos, the giant” Jones wrote, “lived with his two daughters and their husband. He tried in vain to dispose of his son-in-law. He once left him to the mercy of gulls on a lonely island; another time he left him to be devoured by eagles; again he caused him to fall into the water to be seized by the Great Sturgeon; on a hunt in the winter he tried to prevent the youth’s return home by burning his moccasins; trying it a second time, he burned his own, and, in his effort to get back home, was frozen to death.”
The Windigo of Lake Nipissing
In his summer 2000 article published on the website of the Nipissing First Nation, folklorist Wayne M. Couchie included several Ojibwa Wendigo stories endemic to Lake Nipissing, the northeastern shores of which are overlooked by the city of North Bay, Ontario. The first story, told by Mike Restoule, characterizes the Wendigo as a shapeshifter that is half man and half devil. “They have the power to change to the forms of different beasts,” Mike said. “In this story, the Windigo is half man and half wolf.”
Mike went on to relate how, one winter day long ago, an old man was tending his trapline in the forest with his granddaughter. At sunset, the old man told his granddaughter to return to camp, while he himself proceeded up the trapline alone.
The girl obeyed her grandfather’s wishes and headed back down the trail. Her progress was hampered by the long dress she wore, the hem of which began to accumulate a thick crust of ice, and before long, it was getting dark. The eeriness of the gathering gloom was amplified by the mournful howls of a distant wolfpack which seemed to grow louder with the waning light.
Suddenly, the girl heard the distinct sound of footsteps crunching in the snow behind her. She whirled around, and the sound stopped. There was no one there.
“The young girl continued walking,” Mike said, “and again the sound of footsteps came. Once more, the young girl stopped, and once more the footsteps ceased. She looked back on her trail, but it was too dark to see anything. The young girl became frightened for deep insider her, she knew it was… a Windigo! She began to run, and likewise the footsteps behind her quickened.”
Realizing that her diabolical pursuer would overtake her, the girl ran off the trail and climbed a tall tree. No sooner had she done so than a Wendigo emerged from the darkness and stopped at the base of the tree, gazing in apparent bewilderment at the terminus of the girl’s footprints.
“The Windigo,” Mike said, “being a very stupid creature, wasn’t smart enough to look up into the tree. But the Windigo did know that the young girl was somewhere close by, so it gathered up some sticks and birch bark and made a fire near the bottom of the tree. Then, as the young girl looked on in horror, the beast took a knife from its ragged clothing, sliced a chunk of its own stomach off, and stuck the chunk of meat onto the end of a stick! Then the Windigo roasted the meat in the fire, and ate it.”
The girl huddled in the tree all night while the Wendigo kept his vigil. Despite her fear, she eventually fell asleep, and woke up the next morning to find that the Wendigo had gone. With relief, she climbed down the tree and returned to camp.
Mike’s next Windigo story is set on the shores of Dokis Bay, a section of the Upper French River near the southerly mouth of Lake Nippissing.
“One time,” he said, “there was an Indian man who went to the rapids near Dokis Bay to do some fishing. While setting up camp by the water, the man began to sense something in the air. So, he moved his camp to a rocky cliff that was a good [vantage] point and a more defensible position.
“The man had a feeling it was a Windigo that was coming, and there was nothing he could do but wait for it. So the man waited. A long time went by, and eventually he became tired and fell asleep.”
The man awoke to see a Windigo stealing silently away from his camp. Conceiving the notion that the creature had discovered him, and was returning to its lair in order to retrieve a bag in which to carry his body, the fisherman dove into the river and swam ahead of the monster. Then, seizing a stick, he ambushed his would-be murderer and clubbed him to death.
The last Windigo stories in Couchie’s article were told by one Elize Restoule, presumably Mike’s relative. In the first story, which Elize learned from her mother, a man ascribed with mystical powers lured a pack of Wendigos into deep water, where they drowned. The creatures in this story barked and growled like dogs. In the second of Elize’s stories, an old man wrestled with a Windigo all night long, finally killing it at sunrise and incinerating its body in his campfire.
The Windigo West of Lake Superior
References to the Ojibwa Windigo legend west of Lake Superior appear in the 1962 book Ojibwa Myths and Legends by Sister Bernard Coleman, Ellen Frogner, and Estelle Eich. “The story teller… explained that a windigo is a giant that eats people…” the authors wrote, citing their Ojibwa informant. “We heard that a man or woman might be changed into a windigo during times of severe cold and hunger. Such a transformation could also result from dreaming about a windigo. An antidote for these transformations was to have the individual affected consume hot tallow.”
The authors went on to reference the story of a Windigo medicine man that lived at the bottom of Lake Windigo, an insular lake on Star Island, which lies in Cass Lake, Minnesota, which, in turn, lies within both Chippewa National Forest and the Leech Lake Indian Reservation. The many unexplained drownings on this strange body of water were attributed to the machinations of this cannibalistic shaman.
The authors then related a Wendigo fairy tale which their informant described as an Ojibwa “Jack and the Beanstalk” story. In this tale, set in the distant past, men of a certain native village began to disappear while hunting in the woods. The villagers soon determined that the hunters were being killed and eaten by a giant Wendigo that haunted the forest beyond their camp. One brave young boy resolved to kill this monster and set out in search of it.
The Wendigo saw the boy wandering in the woods and captured him, bringing him back to his lair with the intention of fattening him up so that he would make a more suitable meal. In order to achieve his grisly purpose without the boy suspecting his design, he challenged his little prisoner to an eating contest, telling him that he would kill him unless he managed to match him in appetite. Wise to the Wendigo’s wiles, the boy tricked the giant by inconspicuously slipping the food placed before him into a hidden buckskin bag. Then, pretending that the bag was his stomach, the boy slit it open with a knife and dared his captor to try the same. Loathe to be bested by the child, the dim-witted giant slit open his own belly and inadvertently killed himself.
Thanks for watching! Join us in the next segment of this series for more of Canada’s Native Monster Legends.
Part 2
The Little People of Northern Yukon
There is a notion common to folkloric traditions all over the world which holds that certain special places are inhabited by little elusive people endowed with preternatural power. As we have established in two previous pieces, this motif plays an important role in the oral traditions of the Inuit, Dene, and Cree of Northern Canada, who maintain that the mountains and riverside cliffs of the boreal forest and the high arctic are home to what ethnologists have translated as elves and dwarves. The Gwich’in of northern Yukon – also known as the Kutchin and the Loucheaux – are no exception to this pattern.
One of the first ethnologists to document the Gwich’in believe in little people was Father Emile Petitot, a French Oblate missionary who lived among the Dene of Great Slave and Great Bear Lakes, in Canada’s Northwest Territories, in the mid-late 19th Century. In his 1886 French-language book Traditions Indiennes du Canada Nord-Ouest, or Indian Traditions of Northwestern Canada, Petitot wrote that the natives of the frozen forests believed that they shared their country with little entities they called rata-yan.
“The rata-yan,” he wrote in French, “were very small men who swarmed in the country they inhabited. It was very difficult to get rid of them because, when you wanted to get rid of them, they covered themselves with a large shield under which they disappeared.”
Petitot went on to relate an old Gwich’in tale in which a young bearded man, tormented by his cruel parents, left home and set out for the land of the pygmies. In that foreign country, he came upon a little skin tent in which he decided to seek shelter.
Inside, the young man found an elderly pygmy whom he solicited for a drink. Pleading infirmity, the wizened old dwarf asked his wife to tend to his guest, which she did with all courtesy. The pygmies’ otherwise impeccable hospitality was dampened by their strange insistence on calling their guest “the stranger,” despite his repeated insurances that he planned to remain in their country indefinitely.
The young man made himself at home in that strange land, soon killing enough caribou to make his own lodge. No sooner had he done so than the pygmies declared their intention to move camp, asking the young man to travel ahead of them and choose a spot that he thought suitable. Wary of this strange petition, the traveller nonetheless packed up his belongings and left his new neighbours behind him. After some time, he arrived at a highland and pitched his tent atop one of the mountains there.
True to their promise, the pygmies had followed the bearded protagonist, albeit in secret. Careful to conceal themselves from the tall stranger, they made their hidden abodes on the mountain slopes all around him. They then began to pester the man, performing a variety of tricks on him which Petitot’s informants did not enumerate. These annoyances eventually drove the man to weave a huge ball from thorns, which he rolled down the mountain. This operation had the desired effect of shredding the pygmies to death.
The Pygmies of Great Bear Lake
Another Dene tribe with a traditional belief in little people are the Sahtu Dene, or Hare Indians, whose ancestral homeland lies on the western shores of Great Bear Lake. In his book, Petitot recorded that one of the monsters of Sahtu legend are the Rata-yan, or Pygmies, whose name the priest translated as “Little Elks.”
One old Sahtu tale, which Petitot learned from a Gwich’in elder at Fort Good Hope, on the Mackenzie River, in 1870, tells of an arctic war fought long ago between pygmies and an ancient Dene nation. The pygmies, whom the storyteller called the ‘Little Enemies,’ were led by a chief named Nakkan-tsell, while the Dene were headed by a warrior named Man Without Fire. The war was fought for the sake of Man Without Fire’s wife, a beautiful woman named Latra-sandia, whom the pygmy chief had stolen. In his quest to rescue his stolen bride, Man Without Fire discovered that the pygmies lived in a mountainous area at the edge of the sea, making their homes in underground caves.
Blackfoot Thunderbird Stories
Another ubiquitous native tradition is the legend of the Thunderbird, a huge eagle endowed with the ability to create thunder and lightning. From the Pacific to the Atlantic to the Arctic, stories of these colossal raptors picking up humans and big game and carrying them off to their enormous nests were once staples of campfire conversation.
Thunderbird tales appear in the folklore of the Blackfoot Confederacy, a powerful agglomerate of four nations which hunted buffalo on the prairies of what is now southern Alberta and the plains of northwest Montana. Some of these traditions were recorded from 1934-1969 by Dr. Claude Everett Schaeffer, an American ethnologist who conducted fieldwork among the Blackfoot, Kootenai, Flathead, and Pend d’Oreille of the Northern Plains and the Rocky Mountains.
Some of Schaeffer’s handwritten fieldnotes on Blackfoot belief can be found in Calgary, Alberta’s Glenbow Archives. Five leaves from this collection tell the tale of a Thunderbird which assumed human form and walked the earth. This shapeshifter took a fancy to a married native woman, kidnapped her, and brought her to his lair atop a high mountain.
Eager to retrieve his wife, the bereaved husband solicited the services of two white crows, who divined the location of the Thunderbird’s nest by conducting a clairvoyance ritual. The crows found the Thunderbird and asked him to return the woman. When he refused, a magic battle ensued, in which the Thunderbird attempted to crush the crows with rain and hail, and to strike them with lightning. Withstanding these attacks, the crows conjured a blizzard by flying around the Thunderbird in circles. When the raptor became too cold to move, he released the girl and allowed the white crows to return her to her human husband.
Another page from Schaeffer’s notes describes a Blackfoot elder’s eyewitness account of a giant eagle carrying off a bison calf – a phenomenon evocative of the Thunderbird legend. The event took place at Medicine Hat, a city in southeast Alberta which owes its remarkable name to an old multifarious Blackfoot and Cree legend we explored in a previous piece, one version of which involves a giant preternatural water snake that made its home in the South Saskatchewan River. This area once served as the unofficial border between Cree and Blackfoot territory, and the sandstone cutbanks which overlook the river there were once a favourite haunt of eagle trappers.
“Eagle Carrying Bison Calf to Nest,” Schaeffer wrote as the title to this anecdote. “Dog Gun related an incident of this, which he had witnessed as a child. It happened at Medicine Hat. On the flat across the river from the town were located some large trees. A bald eagle had built a nest in the top of one of the largest of these trees. One day, the family of nesting eagles were heard whistling about the tree. People ran over to see what was going on. Dog Gun, then a child, went over. Upon the ground below were all kinds of bones, remains of the birds’ feasts. Looking up, a live bison calf, less than a year old, could be seen in the nest.”
The Two-Headed Serpent of the Coast Salish
Another legendary monster eerily universal to the folklore of Canada’s First Nations is a giant horned serpent which lives underwater. This creature is often said to be the mortal enemy of the Thunderbird, and to be saturated with dangerous preternatural power.
In Canada, this monster is perhaps best known as the Sisiutl, a name given by the Kwakwaka’wakw of northwestern Vancouver Island to a huge two-headed snake supposed to live in the Pacific Ocean, often depicted in paintings and carvings with a humanoid face at its centre. This creature also appears in the traditions of the Central Coast Salish, whose ancestral homeland sprawls across British Columbia’s Lower Mainland, northwestern Washington, and the southeastern end of Vancouver Island.
American anthropologist Wayne P. Suttles heard the Coast Salish version of this legend from an elderly informant named Julius Charles. After describing the significance which various regional animals held for his people, Charles said the following in reference to the encyclopedia in which the animals were listed: “There’s another animal you haven’t got in there. They used to be around here, but they’ve become pretty scarce and the white people have never caught one and put it in a zoo. It had a big body in the middle and two heads, one at each side. It lived in swamps where it swam about.
But it could turn into a couple of mallards and fly away. It had three kinds of noises – one was like the laugh of a loon, one like the hoot of a hound, and one like the hissing of a mallard drake. It was a great thing to get so you’d become an Indian doctor.”
“This ‘animal’,” Suttles explained, “was called a [Sino’tlkai]. Such fierce and powerful things that were seen by men ‘training’ to become ‘doctors’ (in anthropological jargon ‘questing for shamanic visions’) were [slalacum]…
“Evidently to Julius,” he continued, “the two-headed serpent [Sino’tlkai] was just as much a ‘real animal’ as the rest of those on my list… For Julius, as for other Coast Salish I have worked with since, a distinction between ‘real’ and ‘mythical’ or ‘natural’ and ‘supernatural’ beings just is not there. Thus a description of Coast Salish culture that is truly ‘emic’ – that is, organized by Native categories – should describe whales and bears, Sasquatches and two-headed serpents, all under the same heading as part of the ‘real’ world of the Coast Salish.”
Sino’tlkai of the Squamish
According to American ethnologist Homer G. Barnett in a 1938 paper, the Coast Salish generally regarded the double-headed serpent as a tremendously powerful and dangerous entity, from which especially skilled shamans could draw potent medicine. When the medicine man received the power of the serpent, he would bleed from every bodily orifice.
One story featuring this risky operation appears in the traditions of the Squamish, the northernmost of the Central Coast Salish nations, whose ancestral territory surrounds Howe Sound and the Squamish River, north of Vancouver, British Columbia, on the Sea to Sky Highway. In his 1900 report on these people, British-Canadian ethnologist Charles Hill-Tout included an old Squamish story about a young man named Qoitcita’l, who was solicited to perform this perilous feat on his wedding night. Qoitcita’l was the son of a chief from the ancient village of Stawamus, which lies at the mouth of the Stawamus River, at its junction with Howe Sound.
“The night following the marriage,” Hill-Tout wrote, “just before daybreak, the old people heard the cry of the Sino’tlkai (a huge double-headed water-serpent) as he passed from one side of the mountain to the other. The old people woke up the young people who were sleeping together by throwing cold water over them, and told the young man that he ought to get up and go after the Sino’tlkai.” About some grumbling, the newlywed decided to heed the elders’ wishes, leaving his bride to return to sleep as he seized his seized his bow and blanket and set out into the wilderness.
“When he came upon the creature’s trail,” Hill-Tout wrote, “the stench which it had left behind it in its passage was so terrible, and the buzzing of the flies which the smell had attracted so annoying, that he was obliged to keep some distance off.” The ethnologist makes a point to state the great frequency with which the young man bathed in cold lakes and streams during his pursuit, these ablutions perhaps being necessary cleansings by which the sylvan paladin prepared himself, both physically and spiritually, for his eventual encounter with the monster.
In time, the groom came upon the serpent, which had sprawled itself across a small lake, resting its head on one shore and its tail on the other. It appeared to be testing the lake to see if it would make a suitable permanent home. Knowing that the water of the lake was unsafe to touch, the man went out into the woods and found another pool at which to bathe. After washing himself, he returned to the larger lake and watched the monster for what seemed to him a period of two days. Unbeknownst to the groom, the snake exuded a power which warped the fabric of time. What seemed to him two days was in fact an entire year.
On the second day, the snake wriggled out of the lake and resumed its journey through the coastal rainforest. It dragged its immense body to a succession of small lakes, which it respectively tested and deemed unsuitable for habitation. All the while, the creature was followed by the young man, who continued to bathe himself throughout the course of his pursuit.
“At last,” Hill-Tout wrote, “the serpent came to a lake large enough for it to swim about in. Into this the Sino’tlkai dived. On the edge of the lake Qoitcita’l built himself a house and watched the serpent, which from time to time came to the surface of the water to disport itself.”
One night, the young man dreamed that he was out on the lake in a large canoe, armed with two heavy spears fashioned from resinous pine wood. The serpent surfaced, and the young man drove his weapons into its heads with all his might, killing it. When he awoke, Qoitcita’l decided to build the canoe and spears from his dream. When he had accomplished those tasks, he launched his big vessel and, equipped with two heavy spears, paddled out into the lake.
“The serpent was not visible at the time,” Hill-Tout wrote, “so he allowed the canoe to drift about as it would. By and by, the serpent came to the surface again at some little distance from Qoitcita’l. He at once paddled quietly towards it. The serpent’s two large heads were now raised in the air with its great mouths agape. When it opened its mouths it was like the opening of two fiery ovens; and the cries it made on these occasions were exceedingly terrifying.
“Qoitcita’l paddled towards the nearest of the heads and struck it just at the junction of the neck with one of his spears which remained sticking in it. He then hastily paddled towards the other and did the same with it, and the serpent sank to the bottom of the lake.
“Qoitcita’l thereupon went into a trance and remained in that condition for some time. While he was in this state the water of the lake rose up and carried him to the top of a high mountain. When he came out of his trance, in which he had learnt many secrets and much strange knowledge, he looked intently at the water, which immediately began to sink, and in a little while the whole lake was dry.”
The groom descended the mountain and found the great serpent’s bones lying in the lake’s dry bed. “These were now clean and free from flesh,” the ethnologist wrote, “and some of them were curiously shaped. Some had the form of swords, and some of blanket pins or brooches. He took possession of two of these – one of the sword kind and one of the brooch kind – and returned to his house on the edge of the lake. Having now accomplished his task, he determined to return home.”
On his homeward journey, Qoitcita’l discovered that he could kill an entire herd of mountain sheep by simply waving his snake-bone sword at them, and that the power he had received enabled him to easily carry the many skins of those sheep on his back. He later came to a strange village and killed all its inhabitants by waving his sword at them, causing them to die and shrivel up like dead leaves. Then, using the occult knowledge he had received in his trance, he concocted a potion from the herbs of the forest and restored the villagers to life. Out of fear and gratitude, the villagers presented Qoitcita’l with a new wife.
The medicine man repeated this procedure at all the villages that lay between him and his home, collecting a small harem in the process. He did the same to the villagers of Stawamus when he reached that village at the end of his journey. Upon learning that his first wife had taken another husband in his absence, he refused to bring her back to life. Hill-Tout records that Qoitcita’l went on to become a great chief of the Squamish, and that his people never went hungry on account of the ease with which he could hunt with his snake-bone sword.
Katzie Serpent
Tales of the double-headed serpent also appear in the folklore of the Katzie, a division of the Downriver Halkomelem whose traditional homeland lies in the vicinity of Pitt Lake, Pitt River, and the Fraser River near Pitt Meadows and Maple Ridge. In a 1955 essay, the aforementioned anthropologist Wayne Suttles included two Katzie stories featuring this serpentine monster. The locations referenced are New Westminster, a British Columbian city in the Greater Vancouver area which lies between Burnaby and Surrey, and Herring’s Point, the former residence of New Westminster pioneer Samuel Herring which, according to a website dedicated to this very subject, lay on the southern banks of the Fraser River not far from Surrey’s Bridgeview Park.
“A youth from New Westminster,” Suttles wrote, “went to Herring Point and set up a blind of fir-boughs for shooting ducks. As he lay in the blind that evening, something that quacked like a mallard came skimming over the water. He shot it in the neck with his arrow. Instantly it raised its body; it was not a mallard, but a two-headed snake nearly 20 feet long and as thick as a large log. The youth fell to the ground, his body twisted into a coil by the snake’s power, and he lay there unconscious until early morning, when his people carried him home. Through his contorted lips he then told them what medicines the snake had taught him as he lay unconscious.”
With the aid of this occult knowledge, the band’s medicine man cured the young man of his affliction. Ever after, the two-headed snake served as the youth’s guardian spirit, allowing him to cure others of paralysis.
Two-Headed Snake of the Chilliwack
Further up the Fraser River, the story of the two-headed serpent can be heard among the campfire stories of the Upriver Halkomelem, the easternmost of the Central Coast Salish. In his 1952 treatise on the Upper Stahlo, the Stahlo being a broad division of the Upriver Halkomelem, Canadian archaeologist Wilson Duff wrote, “The si’xqi was described almost as a double headed snake.” He proceeded to quote a 70-year-old man named Robert Joe, a man of both Chilliwack and Pilalt descent, the Chilliwack being an Upriver Halkomelem nation that hunted and fished in the valley of the Chilliwack River, and the Pilalt being a related tribe endemic to the upper part of the Lower Fraser Valley.
“It comes to the surface of small lakes,” said Joe of the two-headed serpent, “and shoots a head out each end. Its body is a black sphere about 4 feet in diameter. The heads are round, about 6 inches in diameter, with round ears and red circles on the top. The farther it sticks its heads, the smaller the central body part gets. It makes a noise like a duck, but much louder… If you saw that animal in the water, you daren’t turn around, because if you did you’d keep twisting until you were dead.”
Joe went on to claim that a friend of his saw one of these creatures in a small lake near Lihumitson Creek, a tributary of the Chilliwack River which plunges over a precipice on the Lihumitson Canyon northeast of Cultus Lake, forming an enchanting waterfall. His friend estimated the creature to be 200 feet long, with half its body basking on the shore and the other half in the water. “Its body had a big lump in the middle, like a barrel,” Joe said. “Fast as a wink, it pulled back into the lake.”
Robert Joe elaborated on the double-headed serpent in an interview with Oliver N. Wells, a Fraser Valley farmer and rancher who recorded the traditional tales of his native neighbors from the 1950s until his death in 1970. In 1987, his daughter, Marie Weedon, published transcripts of her father’s interviews in a book entitled The Chilliwacks and Their Neighbors. In one of his interviews with Wells, Joe affirmed that the Chilliwack name for the monster is seelkee, and claimed that it was supposed to haunt the swamps outside the city of Chilliwack, British Columbia. He elaborated on the animal’s physical appearance, stating that it often emerged from the water in the form of a round black ball. Slowly, one head would emerge from one side of the ball, and then the other would do the same. As the twin serpents extend, a red and white pattern appears on their serpentine backs, the form of which Joe likened to those worn by diamondback rattlesnakes, with ovals in place of diamonds.
Joe went on to tell Wells a fantastic seeklee story which he neglected to tell Duff. In this tale, his own grandfather, George, went with about twenty other men to cut hay for a local rancher named Isaac Kipp. While they worked, Kipp noticed that one of his pregnant cows had gone missing, and asked George to help him find it.
When they reached a swamp near the present site of the Chilliwack Fairgrounds, near the intersection of the Trans-Canada Highway and Lickman Road, Kipp and George saw what they first took to be a big duck emerge from the water. To their amazement, the duck, which proved to be a dark round object, rose up into the air. Even more incredibly, the water level seemed to rise simultaneously.
“Don’t turn around,” Kipp told George. “If you do, you’ll get sick.” Slowly, the pair backed up, climbing a rise in the earth until the ball was out of sight. Despite this precaution, Kipp declared that his guts were in a knot. George suggested that each of them swallow a plug of chewing tobacco, which remedy they promptly administered. Predictably, the two men became violently ill. “And what they threw up,” Joe said, “was little chunks of stick, what you find in the bottom of a pond. How’d that come in there?”
Another Chilliwack elder whom Wells interviewed was a man named Albert Louie. Louie claimed that, when he was a boy, his grandfather, Chief Joe, forbade him from visiting a certain pond, telling him that a big snake with two heads lived there. “Don’t go there,” he said, quoting his grandfather. “If you ever see it… you just twist around like that and you die from it.” Later in the interview, Louie hinted that this pond might have been the swamp near the Chilliwack Exhibition Grounds, the same place where Robert Joe’s grandfather and Issac Kipp encountered a seelkee. Louie claimed that two brothers had also spotted a two-headed serpent at that same pond while on a quest to become medicine men.
Louie later claimed that he saw the creature himself one day when he was hunting ducks at the edge of a lake. He saw the animal breach the water in the middle of the lake and recalled that it had a long snout, long ears like a horse, teeth like an alligator, and eyes like fire. “I didn’t get crazy from it,” he told Wells, in reference to the traditional belief that those who saw slalacum, or preternatural animals, went crazy or became paralyzed after their experience. “I wasn’t looking for the thing, you know,” he explained. “I guess he knows I wasn’t.”
The final story Louie shared with Wells, which the latter included in his 1970 book Myths and Legends of the Staw-loh Indians of South Western British Columbia, was a tale told to him by his grandfather, Chief Joe, which has strong parallels with the fantastic tale that Robert Joe heard from his own grandfather, George. The old man told his grandson that he had been hunting east of Chilliwack, at a pond near what is now Prest Road, when he heard a sound like a flying duck heading in the direction of the water. “When he got to that lake,” Louie said, “he found out it wasn’t a duck. He said it was just like a big tub floating.” Chief Joe stared in horror as a head emerged from this flying tub and began quacking like a duck. Soon, another head emerged from the other side.
“How that thing could fly, I don’t know,” Louie admitted. “But the Indians said that thing could fly from lake to lake. I don’t understand, but that’s a great thing, you know. If you tell a white man, he wouldn’t believe it, you know, but my grandfather, Chief Joe… saw it twice. It came right over him and it came down onto the lake just like a boat. He said it was just like a tub – then one head came up and it started talking [like a duck] – then the other head came up, like a duck’s head on a long neck. That’s a seelkee. That’s what they called it.”
Sources
Part 1
“The Upper Stalo Indians of the Fraser Valley, British Columbia,” by Wilson Duff in Memoir No. 1 of Anthropology in British Columbia (1952)
“Ojibwa Tales from the North Shore of Lake Superior,” by William Jones, in the July-September 1916 issue of the Journal of American Folk-Lore
Ojibwa Myths and Legends (1962), by Sister Bernard Coleman, Ellen Frogner, and Estelle Eich
Some Legends and Myths of the Nipissing Tribal Indians (Summer 2000), by Wayne M. Couchie, Introduction and Computer Type Up by Daniel M. Stevens
“Myths and Folk-lore of the Timiskaming Algonquin and Timagami Ojibwa,” by F.G. Speck in Memoir 71 of the Canada Department of Mines Geological Survey (1915)
Part 2
Traditions Indiennes du Canada Nord-Ouest (1886), by Emile Petitot
Glenbow Archive, Claude E. Schaeffer Fonds
“Notes on the Skquomic of British Columbia, a Branch of the Great Salish Stock of North America,” by Charles Hill-Tout in the 1900 Report on the Ethnological Survey of Canada
“The Coast Salish of Canada,” by H.G. Barnett in the January-March 1938 issue of the American Anthropologist
“On the Cultural Track of Sasquatch,” in Coast Salish Essays (1987), by Wayne P. Suttles
“Katzie Ethnographic Notes,” by Wayne Suttles in Memoir 2 of Anthropology in British Columbia (1955)
“The Upper Stalo Indians of the Fraser Valley, British Columbia,” by Wilson Duff in Memoir 1 of Anthropology in British Columbia (1952)
The Chilliwacks and Their Neighbors, (1987) by Oliver N. Wells and Marie Weedon
“Canadian ‘Black Alligators’: A Preliminary Look,” by Chad Arment and Brad LaGrange in the April 1999 issue of the North American BioFortean Review
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