In south-central British Columbia, Canada’s westernmost province, between the easterly Columbia Mountains and the westerly Coast Mountains, lies a dry, hill-covered region known as the Interior Plateau. Home to cities like Kelowna and Kamloops, this northern extension of Washington’s Columbia Plateau was the scene of an alarming number of unsolved disappearances which took place throughout the 20th and 21st Centuries – a fact rendered all the more unsettling by the native legends endemic to the area. For centuries, B.C.’s Interior Plateau has been inhabited by four Interior Salish nations, all of whom have traditional stories about wild giants with a penchant for kidnapping humans.
The eastern end of the Interior Plateau, from the Okanagan Highlands to the forests west of Okanagan Lake, is the traditional territory of the Syilx, or Okanagan Indians. One of the first people to write about the Okanagan wildman tradition was Susan Allison, a 19th Century Scots-Canadian pioneer who, incidentally, was also the first person to write about legendary Ogopogo of Okanagan Lake – a monster which she claimed to have seen with her own eyes.
In her 1892 article ‘Account of the Similkameen Indians of British Columbia,’ published in Volume 21 of The Journal of the Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland, Allison wrote about a traditional Similkameen Okanagan belief in preternatural monsters called Sonnie-Appoos, or ‘devils’. Although some natives described these frightening creatures as anthropomorphic deer with bat-like wings, one old chief named Tumisco, who claimed to have encountered one of these beings sleeping in the northern Cascade Mountains to the west, claimed that it looked like “a large black man covered with long silky hair.” The creature was purportedly so strong that, when Tumisco and his travelling companions attempted to bind its hands and feet, it woke up and shook them off “as if they had been mosquitoes,” howling as it did so with scornful laughter. According to author Mary Moon in her 1977 book Ogopogo: The Okanagan Mystery, Susan’s granddaughter, Mrs. Jim Sisson of North Vancouver, told her that when her grandmother wrote about the Sonnie-Appoo, “she really meant the Sasquatch,” often describing it as “a monster something like a huge ape.”
“There are numerous other stories that the old men are fond of relating while sitting round their camp fires,” Allison wrote later on in her 1892 article. “One in particular struck me (because the Chinese, whom they greatly resemble, tell a similar story of the mountains of Thibet). In the mountains there live certain huge men; these men are so large that a deer, hung by its neck in their belts, looks no larger than a chicken would do in a man’s. The earth trembles as it echoes their tread. They resemble white men with long beards, and seem to be kindly in disposition. They are sensitive to pain, and shed tears for a mere nothing. One of their favourite amusements is catching fish. An Indian affirms that he was once made a prisoner by these ‘big men’ and although they kept a close watch on him, he was petted and kindly treated.”
Allison elaborated on the captive’s tale in a dramatic short story she wrote based upon his experience, entitled ‘The Big Men of the Mountains’. The story is structured as the firsthand account of an elderly Okanagan patriarch, who, after some prompting, tells his grandchildren about a strange experience he had in the hills near Okanagan Lake.
When he was a teenager, the nameless protagonist volunteered to guard his father’s fish trap, from which fish had been mysteriously disappearing. He spent a night watching the trap without event, and near morning fell into a deep sleep fraught with troubling dreams. “I heard a shrill shrieking whistle,” the elder told his grandchildren, “and my senses were oppressed by a vile, suffocating odour. Suddenly I woke to a consciousness of being lifted off the ground. Upwards I was lifted until I found myself on a level with a monstrous face.
“I was too frightened to observe much, for a huge pair of jaws opened, and emitted a laugh that sounded like thunder. I expected every moment to be put into that huge mouth and devoured; but the great creature in whose hands I was, stooped down and lifted up my blanket which had fallen to the ground, and wrapping it carefully around me, placed me in the bosom of the goatskin shirt he wore. I struggled until I got my head into the air, for there was a fearful smell of garlic about this huge creature that nearly choked me.
“Soon he began to whistle. It was the same sound I heard in my sleep and thought was the north wind. The Big Man calmly filled the basket with fish out of my trap, then, slinging it onto his shoulders, began to ascend the mountain still whistling with all his might. Once he stopped and taking me out of his breast he took a fish and tried to cram it down my throat, but seeing me choke he desisted, and putting me once more in his bosom went on his way whistling.”
The giant took the storyteller to a large cave in the mountains, at the end of which a campfire crackled merrily. Meat, garlic, and other herbs hung from the cave ceiling, and soft furs were strewn across the floor. “Taking me out of his shirt,” the storyteller continued, “the Big Man tied me with a rope by the leg to a log that lay near the fire. There he stood looking at me, and then for the first time I had a good look at him… I was ever esteemed a large man, but standing by the Big Man my head was scarce level with his knees. His body was covered with garments of goatskin and was white, and he had a long bushy beard that hung down to his waist.”
Soon, the Big Man was joined by an equally gigantic companion, who announced his arrival by emitting a piercing whistle as he neared the cave. The newcomer, from whose belt depended three freshly-killed deer, was apparently delighted to see his kinsman’s human captive. The giants conversed for some time in voices like thunder, before roasting and eating the stolen fish. “They gave me a portion,” the storyteller said, “and seemed much amused to see me eat. Suddenly one of the Big Men gave a howl of pain, and moaning, held out his hand for his friend to look at. The other Big Man examined it tenderly and big tears of sympathy streamed down his cheeks. Standing on his knees I could see that a fishbone had run into this thumb and as their fingers were altogether too clumsy to remove it I seized the bone in my teeth and pulled it out. The Big Man smiled, looked grateful and soon dried his tears. I afterwards found that these Big Men were extremely sensative to pain, the least hurt would make them cry and moan.”
After they had finished their meal, the giants rolled a boulder over the mouth of the cave and handed their captive some furs on which to sleep.
The giants kept the storyteller for months, the kidnapper bringing him with him on his fish-stealing escapades. Although the Big Men treated their prisoner with kindness, the storyteller naturally longed to return to his family. One night, while the giants were alseep, he managed to squeeze through a space between the boulder and the cave entrance and escape into the wilderness. Completely lost, he wandered throughout Okanagan Country for months, living off of roots and berries, before finally finding his way back to his father’s camp.
Another valuable source on the Okanagan giant tradition is the work of James Alexander Teit, a Scots-Canadian anthropologist who lived among the Interior Salish of the Interior Plateau throughout the late 19th and early 20th Centuries. Although Teit wrote sparingly on the Okanagan giant legend in his 1930 treatise on the Salishan Tribes of the Western Plateaus, noting only that the Okanagan did believe in giants and regarded them in the same light as did their westerly Thompson Indian neighbours, his various writings on the Thompson contain several giant stories set in Okanagan Country.
In his 1900 treatise on Thompson ethnology, Teit wrote:
“According to the beliefs of the Upper Thompsons, giants about thirty feet tall inhabit the Okanagan country, and were quite numerous in the Upper Thompson country until forty or fifty years ago. They have no upper eyelids, and never sleep. They dress in bear and deer skins, and hunt game, which they run down. They can be recognized at a great distance by their strong and peculiar odor; and even their tracks, and branches of trees which they have touched while passing, smell for a long time after they have gone by. These giants are very powerful, and can carry a grisly bear or an elk on their backs with the greatest ease. Their homes are in caves situated in precipitous rocks. They never harm people, but are believed to have run away with women from the Nicola and Okanagan. They are fond of fish, and sometimes go to the river or lakes when the Indians are fishing, causing a sleepiness to fall over them while they are helping themselves to the fish.”
In his 1912 report on the Mythology of the Thompson Indians, Teit related a story about a giant who once stole fish from a band of Okanagan Indians. “A large number of men followed his tracks,” his informants claimed, “and the following day came upon him asleep with his eyes open. They surrounded him, forming four rings with a considerable space between them.”
One of the men plunged his spear into the sleeping giant, waking him up. “When he jumped up,” Teit wrote, “the people shot arrows at him, and threw spears; but he jumped over them and escaped. He had many arrows in his body, and was badly wounded; he kept pulling the arrows out as he ran, and soon disappeared.”
In his report, Teit included two more giant stories set in Okanagan Country, both of which involve the abduction of a woman. In the first story, a giant clad in grizzly bear skins kidnapped an Okanagan woman and brought her to his cave at the base of a cliff, the entrance of which was concealed by the stump of a large and ancient tree. Inside was a narrow passageway which miraculously dilated at the giant’s approach. The tunnel led deep into the mountain, to a lofty and spacious cave which the giant made his home.
“After some time,” Teit wrote, “the captive woman gave birth to a boy, who grew up to be a man of very large stature and of great strength, and who had the power of changing himself into the appearance of a grisly bear at will. He afterwards travelled over the country, performed many wonderful feats, and had many strange adventures. He was particularly fond of assuming the form of a grisly bear and frightening people.”
According to Teit’s informant, the boy owed his uncanny abilities to a grizzly bearskin robe which his giant father had gifted him – the same sort of garment which allowed his father to traverse the otherwise impassible passageway which connected his lair with the outside world.
The third and final Okanagan giant story in Teit’s 1912 treatise begins in Keremeos, an ancient village on the Similkameen River about 23 miles southwest of Okanagan Lake. Sometime in the 1800s, the story goes, a giant stole a woman from Keremeos and carried her all night long through the forest. At dawn, the giant curled up to sleep, tucking his captive securely beneath his arm.
The abductor resumed his trek at dusk and plunged through the woods in a southeasterly direction, eventually arriving in a country where his kind were numerous. The giants, the woman soon learned, were nocturnal, hunting at night and sleeping in the daytime with their eyes open. In order to help her adapt to their lifestyle, the giants performed a crude operation on the woman, pulling some tiny object out of her eyes which allowed her to sleep like them.
“In the giants’ country there was no fire,” Teit’s informant claimed, “for they knew not how to make it. They ate all their food raw. Neither did they know how to catch fish, although they were very fond of them. They did not care much for water, and never washed themselves.”
During the course of her captivity, the Okanagan woman taught the giants how to make fire, and how to catch and cook fish. In return, the giants taught the woman their language, and treated her as one of their own.
“After living in the giants’ country a few years,” Teit wrote, “she desired to see her own lands and friends. She told her husband he need not fear her people for they were very nice, and would treat him well. He took her on his shoulders, and, travelling every night, they soon reached [Keremeos].”
“The giant hid in the bushes while the woman went to the houses, and made herself known to her friends, who had thought her dead. She called her husband the giant, who came forward in great fear. She told him the people would not harm him. They built a very high lodge for the giant and his wife, who dressed in b earskins, like all giants. They made buckskin clothes for them, and persuaded them to discard their bearskins, and burn them.”
The giant lived among the Okanagan for some time, bringing them deer and bears which he caught and strangled on his nightly hunts, as well as huge trees which he knocked down in the forest and carried into camp with the greatest ease. In return, the Okanagan gave the giant plenty of fish and birds to eat.
After some time, the giant announced that he would return to his own country and bring his kin to Keremeos to live with the Indians. Fearing that their huge guest might take his wife with him and never return, however, the natives attacked the giant during the day while he slept, hacking him with tomahawks and peppering him with arrows and spears.
“Although he was badly wounded,” Teit wrote, “he jumped up and escaped. They never saw him again. The woman had no children by him, and died not so very long ago.”
In a footnote, Teit added that a 70-year-old Okanagan woman who lived on the Nicola River near the town of Spences Bridge claimed that her father was living at Keremeos at the time of the giant’s visit, and was one of several young Okanagan men who had accompanied him on his nightly hunting trips. Her father was also one of the warriors who attempted to kill the giant during his last day in the village. “He said this giant had a strong odor,” Teit wrote, “as if of burning hair…”
The theme of a rank aroma akin to that of burning hair appears in another Okanagan wildman story related by historian Hester E. White, and published in 1962, in the 26th Report of the Okanagan Historical Society. White heard the tale from an Okanagan Indian named Susap, whom she described as “a wonderful man” whom she was proud to call friend. Back in 1872, when he was a young man, Susap had worked for an English rancher and trader named Barrington Price, who had purchased the small Hudson’s Bay Company post at Keremeos. In 1888, he relocated to the town of Osoyoos, south of Okanagan Lake on the B.C.-Washington border, to work for White’s father, Judge Haynes.
“He came to see me one Christmas in Penticton,” White wrote, “and related the following tale.
“Stenwyken, the hairy giant who smelled of burning hair, left large tracks near the Indian caches from which he helped himself to the dried meat, fish, roots and berries stored for the winter.
“He was often seen at the mouths of creeks catching fish. He was a peaceful man and never harmed the Indians.
“However, one day in the long ago at berry time a young Indian maiden disappeared; it was feared that Stenwyken had carried her away. After a long time she returned to her tribe and told the following tale. Stenwyken had seized her and carried her to a large cave, the floor of which was covered with skins of bear, deer and mountain sheep. She was given roots, berries, dried fish and meat to eat and was not molested or harmed in any way, but a large stone was rolled across the mouth of the cave making her a prisoner.
“When alone she made moccasins of some of the hides, hoping somehow, sometime, to escape. One night when the moon shone bright she noticed that the stone was not quite tight at the cave mouth and she slipped out. After travelling many miles and for a long time she found her people.”
The next of Susap’s stories which White related bears remarkable resemblance to an old Chehalis tale from Harrison Lake, British Columbia, which was recounted by an Irish schoolteacher and Indian agent named J.W. Burns in his article in the January 1940 issue of The Wide World: A Magazine For Men. Burns, Canada’s first serious Sasquatch researcher, and the man who introduced the Halkomelem word ‘Sasquatch’ to the English-speaking world, heard this disturbing tale from an 87-year-old Chehalis woman named Seraphine Long, who claimed to be the unfortunate protagonist around whom the story revolves.
According to Susap’s tale, some years after the Stenwyken’s abduction of the young Indian maiden, another native girl disappeared from her camp in northern Okanagan Country, and was eventually presumed dead. Three years later, the girl stumbled back into her village, emaciated and ill, with a hair-raising tale to tell. “Stenwyken had siezed her,” White wrote, “put pitch on her eyelids and carried her to a large cave. [Sometime] afterwards she gave birth to a baby but it died. In due time pitch was again put over her eyes and she was carried back to a spot near her people’s camp. There the pitch was removed and she was released. Stenwyken remained hidden and watched her safe arrival.”
White went on to explain how a particular cave near the city of Princeton, British Columbia, located at the confluence of the Similkameen and Tulameen Rivers, was said to have once been the lair of a Stenwyken. A Japanese miner working a claim nearby is said to have been visited by a Stenwyken one night. The creature approached his tent making supplicating gestures, apparently asking for something to eat. The terrified miner handed the giant some food, which it devoured on the spot. When it was satisfied, the creature disappeared into the night. Not long after, another miner from the village of Lumby, east of the northern tip of Okanagan Lake, is said to have reported an identical experience.
“No doubt the Susquatch of Harrison Lake and the Stenwyken of the Okanagan are one and the same,” the historian concluded. “As he has done no harm he deserves consideration and his freedom to roam at will.”
Although James Teit’s Thompson Indian informants claimed that the giants that roam their country began to disappear from the Interior Plateau in the mid 19th Century, sightings of large hair-covered wildmen evoking the Sonnie-Appoo, the Stenwyken, and the giants of Okanagan legend were reported in the area throughout the 20th Century. Cryptozoologist Chad Arment discovered one such report in the October 20th, 1907 issue of Victoria, B.C.’s Daily Colonist and published it in his 2019 book The Historical Bigfoot.
According to the article, residents of the city of Vernon, located on the northeastern shores of Okanagan Lake, discovered two 19-inch-long humanlike footprints on opposite banks of a 6-foot-wide creek not far from town, oriented in such a way as to leave the impression that the giant who made them crossed the creek in a single stride. “A resident was calmly sawing timber,” the article explained, “when a gentleman of the neighborhood came up to him and sprung the yarn on him so suddenly that he thought he had somebody from the New Westminster Institution to deal with. But the informant was perfectly sane, and produced a stick with the pedal particulars carefully marked. The footprint was down the hill there for anybody to see. No one certainly ever heard of the fertile Okanagan producing stray giants, but an old Indian gives color to the theory by averring that forty years ago there were what he terms giants who stole children and things…”
The article went on to explain that many of Vernon’s white residents, at the request of the area’s natives, lit their lanterns, shouldered their rifles, and joined their red neighbours in a nightly vigil at what was presumably either the Otter Lake or the Priest Valley Indian Reserve, held for the purpose of discouraging the neighbourhood wildman from committing any depredations. “Some have gone on the trail on horseback with magazine guns,” the article explained, “but few men even with a Maxim under each arm could stand the ordeal of confronting a hairy monster some thirteen feet high, judging by the feet… As there are no people around here to hoax and the Indians are too grave and occupied to manufacture footprints for sport, the story and the evidence are just as stated, the Indians themselves being the most concerned and serious over it.”
Thirty years later, in 1937, a woman named Jane Patterson may have come face to face with one of the Okanagan’s elusive giants on her family’s ranch near Bridesville, BC, the latter being a hamlet located about 13 miles east of Osoyoos, just north of the BC-Washington border. Patterson told her story to John Green, a pioneering Sasquatch researcher from Harrison Lake, BC, who assumed what cryptozoology godfather Ivan T. Sanderson, in his 1961 book Abominable Snowman: Legend Come to Life, described as “the mantle of Sasquatch research, nobly worn by Mr. J.W. Burns for so many years…”
Green reproduced Patterson’s story in his 1978 book Sasquatch: The Apes Among Us. Sometime in 1937, she told Green, she headed towards the garden of an old abandoned house on the ranch, where some wild rhubarb had taken root. “She ducked under a tree branch,” Green wrote, “and straightened up to find herself facing a creature that was sitting about ten feet away with its back against another tree. Her story is told with many a merry chuckle.” Green went on to reproduce Patterson’s own retelling of her experience, which follows:
“I said, ‘Oh, there you are.’ I don’t know what I was speaking to it for. It was sitting down. The house had sort of blown over so it leaned against a tree, and here it was sitting by this tree, you know, like you’d sit on the floor, and it had [its hands on its knees]. It was taller than me though, I would think. It looked just like a monkey to me…
“It just blinked its eyes. I suppose it was as surprised as I was. It wasn’t really a tan, but it wasn’t a brown. Maybe you’d call it a light brown.
“It never moved except to blink its eyes. I thought it was a big monkey.”
Green interrupted Patterson’s narrative to explain that she later told him the creature had eyes like slits, and that it was covered with thin hair. After exchanging pleasantries with the unusual creature, Patterson backed away from it and returned to the ranch house.
Assuming that Mrs. Patterson had the ability to distinguish monkeys from apes, her sighting seems more reminiscent of a creature which cryptozoologists call the ‘Devil Monkey’ than of North America’s various legendary wildmen. Often described as a large baboon like creature with a monkey-like tail, the Devil Monkey appears in the folklore of both the Ahtna Indians of Alaska’s Copper River watershed and that of modern-day Americans from the Appalachian Mountains.
John Green briefly described another Okanagan wildman sighting in his 1973 book The Sasquatch File. The sighting took place in 1959, near the northern Okanagan city of Enderby, BC. While camping on the outskirts of town, an anonymous lady from Lavington, BC, just east of Vernon, headed into the forest at dusk to gather firewood. When her bundle reached the desired size, she arose and made to return to her campfire when she spotted a six-foot-tall creature covered with shaggy beige hair, standing on two legs about 75 feet away from her. The terrified woman fled back to camp.
Okanagan Country is not the only corner of the Interior Plateau to produce wildman stories. Ancient native giant legends and 20th Sasquatch reports have come out of the traditional territories of the Shuswap, the Nicola, and the Thompson. In the last two installments of this series, we looked at wildman stories from the eastern frontier of Shuswap territory. In our next piece, we’ll delve into classic Sasquatch stories from the heart of Thompson Indian territory: the Fraser Canyon.
Okanagan Legends Related by Susan Allison
Okanagan Legends Related by James Teit
The Giant Who Stole the Keremeos Woman
Stenwyken
Giant Footprints Near Vernon, BC
The Bridesville Monkey