If you drive about two hours east of Vancouver, British Columbia, and, rather than taking the more popular Coquihalla Highway into the Cascade Mountains, keep on the old Trans-Canada Highway, you’ll come to a rugged stretch of the Fraser River known as the Fraser Canyon – a region which some historians regard as the birthplace of the province of British Columbia. Back in 1858, when most of BC was part of a Hudson’s Bay Company district called New Caledonia, this narrow passage through the Coast Mountains was invaded by hordes of Californian prospectors drawn by news of a gold strike made at the confluence of the Fraser and Thompson Rivers. This Fraser Canyon Gold Rush spawned a small but brutal conflict between American miners and local natives called the Fraser Canyon War; gave birth to a lawless boomtown called Hill’s Bar; and transformed the Hudson Bay Company’s Fort Yale into a miner’s metropolis de facto governed by American gangsters whose rule challenged British authority in the region. With the HBC having recently relinquished its so-called Columbia District, which encompassed much of what is now Washington and Oregon, to the United States as the resolution to the so-called ‘Oregon Question’; and painfully aware of the rising popularity of Manifest Destiny– the philosophy that the United States was destined to expand throughout all of North America; the British government knew that it had to affirm its sovereignty in the Fraser Canyon if it hoped to prevent its falling into the hands of the United States. On August 2nd, 1858, the British government officially declared New Caledonia a crown colony, and dispatched a contingent of the Royal Engineers to the Fraser Canyon to establish British law and order. On the recommendation of Queen Victoria herself, this new protectorate of the Empire was dubbed the Colony of British Columbia.
Long before prospectors dipped their pans into its gold-bearing bed; before even North West Company explorer Simon Fraser, for whom the Fraser River was named, first braved its treacherous waters in 1808; the Fraser Canyon was the domain of two different First Nations. Most of the Canyon, from its head at Lytton, BC, through the ancient southerly village of Spuzzum, is the traditional territory of the Nlaka’pamux, or Thompson Indians, an Interior Salish people.
The Canyon’s southern end, from the ghost town of Yale to the canyon’s southern terminus at Hope, BC, is the historic homeland of the Tait Indians, a Coast Salish people. Although none of the Fraser Canyon stampeders, of which this author is aware, made any mention of the fact in their letters and memoirs, both of these First Nations firmly believed in the existence of wild giants, whom they claimed could sometimes be seen flitting through the mountains beyond the canyon’s walls.
Anthropologists have divided the Thompson Indians into two general divisions: the northerly Upper Thompsons, who controlled the arid Stein Valley and the spectacular Thompson Canyon; and the southerly Lower Thompsons, who dominated much of the Fraser Canyon and the northern Cascade Mountains. The only section of the Fraser Canyon in Upper Thompson Territory is that which surrounds Lytton, BC, a village located at the confluence of the Fraser and Thompson Rivers, where the gold that launched the Fraser Rush was first discovered; which tragically burned to the ground on June 30th, 2021, at the height of a severe heatwave. Incidentally, a short video of Lytton which this author shot in the spring of 2021 may constitute some of the last surviving footage of the village before it was destroyed by fire.
As is the case with most Interior Salish folklore, one of the best sources on the Thompson Indian giant tradition is the work of the prolific James Alexander Teit, a Scottish immigrant and Canadian anthropologist who lived among the Thompson in the late 19th and early 20th Centuries, working under the direction of his friend and colleague, the famous German-American anthropologist Franz Boas. Teit fell in love with the Thompson people, and on March 15th, 1904, married a Thompson woman named Susanna Lucy Antko.
In his 1900 ethnological treatise on the Nlaka’pamux, published in Volume II of the Memoirs of the American Museum of Natural History, Teit wrote that the Upper Thompson believed that giants about thirty feet tall inhabited the territory of their easterly Okanagan neighbours, and were quite numerous in their own territory until the 1850s and ‘60s, around the time of the Fraser Canyon Gold Rush. These huge people clad themselves in bearskins, and hunted large game by running them down and strangling them. They made their homes in cliffside caves difficult for men to reach. Every once in a while, they descended from their alpine abodes to steal fish from the Indians, often snatching their piscine plunder right from under the Thompson’s noses; somehow, the giants had the ability to overwhelm native fishermen with drowsiness, which power they exercised before helping themselves to their catch. “They can be recognized at a great distance by their strong and disagreeable odor,” Teit wrote, “and even their tracks, and branches of trees which they have touched while passing, smell for a long time after they have gone by.”
The Lower Thompson Indians had a slightly different conception of their neighbourhood giants than their Upper Thompson cousins. They claimed that, while such creatures did not live in their own country, they often visited it, making their way into the North Cascades and the Fraser Canyon from either the Interior Plateau to the east, or from the territory of the Upper Thompsons to the north. “They dress in bear or dog skins,” Teit’s Upper Thompson informants told him. “Some wear long black robes, while others again go almost naked. Sometimes they chase or steal people. They are not known to have any weapons.”
A clue as to the giants’ physical appearance appears in Teit’s 1895 article “The Salishan Tribes of the Western Plateaus,” published in the Annual Report of the Bureau of American Ethnology to the Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution. Thompson men who claimed to have seen or dreamed of giants sometimes painted themselves in their likeness. Mixing charcoal with grease, the painter would stain his forehead and nose black, and add a black horizontal bar beneath each eye, and below the mouth. Next, he used red ochre to paint the rest of his face red. “The red on the face,” Teit explained, “was probably either in the nature of an offering or was protective for the purpose of counteracting the large amount of black used, or to prevent harm accruing to the person who dreamed of giants.”
After colouring his face, the native cosmetologist would paint most of his body black, leaving only his upper chest, a small section on both shoulders, and his thighs bare. The paint was supposed to symbolize bearskin leggings, bearskin sleeves, and a bearskin shirt held up by straps over the shoulders, which the natives believed the giants wore. The painter sometimes added three black points to his feet, which represented toes, many Thompson being under the impression that the giants had three toes on each of their feet.
Teit detailed several traditional Thompson giants stories in his various academic works. In his 1900 treatise, he related a tale told to him by Upper Thompson storytellers. “Once,” the story goes, “a giant is said to have chased two hunters, who sought refuge in a large fir-tree. Presently this giant was joined by two very tall friends, who tried in vain to reach the hunters. The latter shot at the giants, who caught the arrows in their hands and broke them. After a while one of the giants discovered that he had lost his dogskin apron, and seemed very much concerned about it. They all concluded to go in search of it, and left the hunters, who then came down from the tree, and went home.”
In his 1917 article, “Folk-Tales of the Salishan and Sahaptin Tribes”, published in Volume XI of the Memoirs of the American Folk-Lore Society, Teit included a story about two girls who were abducted by a giant in Upper Thompson Country. “Once some people were camped on the hills near Lytton,” he wrote, “and among them were two girls who were fond of playing far away from the camp. Their father warned them against the giants, who infested the country.”
Heedless of their old man’s admonition, the sisters continued to gambol throughout the country. One day, they were spotted by a pair of giants, who easily caught them, tucked them beneath their arms, and carried them away.
The giants took the sisters to their home on a distant river island. There, they treated them kindly, giving them plenty of grouse, rabbits, and other small game to eat. When they learned that the girls enjoyed venison, they began to bring them deer, the hides of which the girls tanned to make buckskin. “The giants were much amused when they saw how the girls cut up the deer,” Teit wrote, “how they cooked the meat and dressed the skins.” Although the girls were initially overwhelmed by the giants’ foul odour, they eventually got used to the smell.
The giants kept the girls for four years, often carrying them across the river to dig roots and gather berries on the mainland. One summer, the giants brought the sisters to a place where huckleberries were numerous, and left them to pick to their hearts’ content while they themselves embarked on a hunting trip. Recognizing the berry patch as a place they had visited as children, located a few days’ walk from Lytton, they decided to flee home. When the giants finally returned from their excursion, they found the girls’ tracks leading into the forest, and followed them.
The sisters soon discovered that the giants were hot on their trail. Recognizing that they had no chance of outrunning their huge kidnappers, they climbed up a tall tree and hid themselves in its canopy, securing themselves by tying their tumplines, or carrying straps, to the trunk.
The giants quickly caught up with the girls. Finding that their tracks had disappeared, the huge men correctly suspected the sisters’ plan and began shaking the tree in which they were hiding. When the girls did not tumble out, the giants resumed their search, scouring the forest floor for any sign of the little escapees.
For days, the giants and the girls played a game of cat and mouse, the latter slowly and carefully inching their way toward Lytton, stopping once to hide in a hollow log. After what seemed like an eternity, the sisters stumbled into a Thompson hunting party in the mountains, which the giants dared not approach. Their moccasins worn out and their clothing in tatters, the girls told the hunters about their strange adventure.
Like their Okanagan cousins to the east, who believed in both the so-called “Big Men of the Mountains” and hairy preternatural monsters called Sonnie-appoos, the Thompson appear to have made a distinction between the above-described wild giants and hairy manlike creatures resembling the Sasquatch of Coast Salish tradition. According to Thompson elder Annie York, in a May 23rd, 1970 interview with Canadian anthropologist Andrea Laforet, published in the latter’s 1998 book Spuzzum: Fraser Canyon Histories, 1808-1939:
“The Indians claim that Sasquatches are human beings because they are the people who practiced to be medicine men when they were young. When boys or girls are young and want to be medicine men, their father or grandfather takes them up to the mountains and leaves them with very little to eat. They had to sleep and pray and stay alone, and some of them never returned. They got wild in the woods and never came home again. The Indians claim that that is where the Sasquatch came from.”
The Thompsons’ differentiation between the mountain giant and the Sasquatch mirrors an observation made by cryptozoologists – scientists who believe that the legendary wildmen of First Nations tradition are members of some rare and elusive species of primate native to the North American wilderness. In their 1999 book The Field Guide to Bigfoot, Yeti, and Other Mystery Primates Worldwide, cryptozoologists Loren Coleman and Patrick Huyghe proposed a classification system for the various wildmen which populate folkloric traditions throughout the world, operating on the premise that some of these legendary creatures are or were real flesh-and-blood animals. Coleman and Huyghe placed the Sasquatch of the Pacific Northwest into a taxonomic class called “Neo-Giant,” a term introduced by cryptozoology godfather Ivan T. Sanderson in his 1961 book Abominable Snowmen: Legend Come to Life. Another of the nine taxonomic classes proposed in The Field Guide is that of the ‘True Giants’ – a term invented by cryptozoologist Mark A. Hall – into which Coleman and Huygue placed various legendary wildmen from every continent but Antarctica.
“If there were ever giants on this Earth,” Coleman and Huyghe wrote in their description of the True Giant class, “they existed long, long ago. Or so goes prevailing opinion on the subject. But by the late 1960s, some researchers began to realize that something bigger than Bigfoot was out there being seen and leaving enormous tracks nearly 2 feet long. One of these researchers, the Canadian John Green, had noticed from the accounts he had collected in North America that a whole group of ‘giants’ existed who were clearly bigger than the Sasquatch of the Pacific Northwest. Green was convinced that the evidence supported their existence, because he had talked to the witnesses who were very certain as to what they had seen.”
The cryptozoologists went on to explain that True Giants were generally described as being 10 to 20 feet tall, with lean, lanky bodies. These manlike creatures were covered with dark or reddish hair which was longer on the head and thinner on the arms. Their feet, judging from the footprints they left behind, typically measured about 10 inches in width and at least 21 inches in length, and had four visible toes. Some of the characteristics which Coleman and Huyghe ascribed to the True Giants eerily evoke the big men of Thompson legend. “True giants occasionally wear primitive clothing,” they wrote, “especially in colder climates… Reports suggest that they live in caves with concealed entrances and sleep in depressions they make in the ground…”
Although both the Thompson Indians and cryptozoologists like Coleman and Huyghe appear to have regarded the Sasquatch and the True Giant as distinct and separate entities, the giant of Thompson legend and the Sasquatch of modern eyewitness accounts share many of the same strange attributes. For example, the stench which the giants purportedly emitted, which Teit’s informants claimed lingered in their footprints and on tree branches they touched, is one of the most common elements of modern Sasquatch encounter stories. As Ivan Sanderson put it in an unpublished draft of his article, “Some Preliminary Notes on Traditions of Submen in Arctic and Subarctic North America,” an abridged version of which was later published in 1963, in the journal of Rome, Italy’s public research university La Sapienza:
“… There is a constant and potent reference… to the overpowering and nauseating stink given off by these creatures. This is not just a commonplace but now an almost invariable concomitant to all reports made by persons all over the world who say they have been in close proximity to one of these creatures.”
Sanderson went on to propose that this stench, which he suspected the Sasquatch exuded from their epidermal glands, was responsible for the strange hypnosis under which many Sasquatch witnesses claim to have fallen at the time of their sighting – another striking similarity between the Sasquatch of modern eyewitness accounts and the fish-stealing giants of Thompson legend.
Other commonalities between the Thompson giant and the Sasquatch of modern cryptozoology include a propensity to steal fish and abduct humans; habitation in well-concealed caves in the mountains; and bodily hairiness, which the Thompson attributed to the bearskin shirts they believed the giants wore.
Throughout the 19th and 20th Centuries, sightings of mysterious wildmen were made throughout traditional Thompson Indian territory in the Fraser Canyon and beyond. The aforementioned Thompson elder Annie York described one such encounter in an article in the February 4th, 1959 issue of the Chilliwack Progress, which cryptozoologist Chad Arment included in his 2019 book The Historical Bigfoot.
Sometime in the latter half of the 19th Century, York’s story goes, a Thompson elder named Chief Dick went on a hunting trip in the mountains east of Spuzzum. He followed a nameless creek to its source: a small horseshoe-shaped lake in a heavily timbered area not far from a mountain ridge. While plodding silently through the gloomy forest on the lake’s shore, musket at the ready, he saw a large manlike creature rear up from the lakeside foliage.
“Chief Dick’s eyesight was unfailing,” York wrote, “and his nerves were solid as a boulder, and he wasn’t a man given to imagination… The animal, human or whatever it was, appeared to sense the presence of the hunter. This did little to pacify his fears and for full minutes, ‘Chief Dick’ prayed and pondered whether to retreat or shoot. Despite his great anxiety and agitation he noted that the other being resembled a human or man with generally gray medium hair covering it from head to feet and displaying a massive width of shoulders with long powerful arms. The face, he states, was hairy and wide and the eyes piercing and searching in their probing efforts to locate his position. A slight movement on the part of the hunter climaxed the suspense, and as Chief Dick watched as he never had before, the great creature faded silently from sight and was soon lost among the shadows of the timber.”
Old Chief Dick returned to Spuzzum and related his adventure to his friends and relatives. The following day, he and several armed companions returned to the scene of his sighting to investigate. “On arrival at the [mystery] lake,” York wrote, “Chief Dick and his companions found humanlike footprints on the water’s edge which they said appeared to be half again as long as their own…
“The old people,” York concluded, “made no claim to any unnatural or dramatic happenings out of their experiences… Having for many years gained the ability to detect all mountain beasts for what [they] were on sight… they made simple and straightforward statements without fear or criticism.
“They furthermore had no desire to discuss these events with outsiders, and to a certain extent attached some reverence and respect for what they never quite understood.”
Chief Dick’s was not the only 19th Century wildman encounter to take place in the territory of the Thompson Indians. The July 9th, 1884 issue of the Victoria British Colonist contains an article written by Reverend John Booth Good, an Anglican missionary who founded the Lytton Indian Mission in 1866. Writing from his new Vancouver Island residence – the rectory of an Anglican church in Nanaimo – Good revealed that members of his Thompson Indian flock had several run-ins with mountain-dwelling wildmen during his Fraser Canyon tenure from 1866-1882.
“On three different occasions in successive years,” Good wrote, “and in entirely different points of observation, the most startling reports were circulated far and wide, that when camping out for purposes of hunting, fishing, gathering wood and berries, certain of our Indians had been visited in the dead of night by something that seemed half man half-beast, which had come into the tents whilst sleeping or prowled around their encampment, producing the greatest consternation and amazement.
“The idea prevailed that certain wild men of the woods were at large in the less frequented parts of the country, and were exceedingly dangerous and might one day invade the settlements.”
In 1939, another wildman encounter took place on the opposite side of the Fraser River, in the Lillooet Mountains west of Spuzzum. According to the aforementioned Sasquatch researcher John Green, in his 1973 book The Sasquatch File, a man named Burns Yeomans, who hailed from the village of Deroche, British Columbia, just northwest of the city of Chilliwack, saw something unusual while hunting with a partner in the mountains between Spuzzum and Harrison Lake. Upon ascending a ridge and looking down into the valley below, Yeomans and his companion saw a group of dark-colored creatures running about and wrestling. “They frequently threw each other to the ground,” Yeomans told Green, “but always got right up again on two legs, never went on all fours.”
The year 1969 saw a flurry of wildman reports in the traditional territory of the Upper Thompsons. The first of these took place near the city of Merritt, BC, located about 34 miles east of the Fraser Canyon at the confluence of the Coldwater and Nicola Rivers, the latter being a major tributary of the Thompson. Green included this report in his 1970 book Year of the Sasquatch and his 1973 books On the Track of Sasquatch and The Sasquatch File. On May 18th, 1969, several army cadets under the command of one David Ludlam spotted a large hairy man loitering around their campground at Lily Lake, about seven miles southwest of Merritt. While participating in a drill in broad daylight, one 14-year-old cadet reported seeing a large hairy man in the woods, which he estimated to be about 10 feet tall. At dusk, while marching back to camp, several more cadets saw the same creature walking parallel to them through the forest. Later that night, while the cadets sat around a campfire, the beam of an errant flashlight lit upon their mysterious camp follower, who stood silent in the forest, watching them from the darkness just beyond the reach of the firelight.
David Ludlum, who told Green the story, also claimed that, four months after the cadets’ sightings, in September 1969, an anonymous informant told him that he saw a white Sasquatch near Merritt.
Roughly two months after the second Merritt sighting, a man named Ivan Wally had his own strange experience in the breathtaking Thompson Canyon just east of Lytton. “On the night of November 20th,” wrote John Green in both Year of the Sasquatch and On the Track of Sasquatch, “at about 10 p.m., Ivan Wally of Vancouver, B.C., was driving on the Trans-Canada Highway above the Thompson River, about three miles east of Lytton. As he was going up a hill he saw a creature on the road ahead. It was about seven feet tall, with long legs and weight 300 to 400 pounds. It was covered with short grey-brown hair. Mr. Wally’s dog, riding with him in the cab of the pickup, ‘just about went crazy’, and the creature loped off the road on its long legs. Mr. Wally turned his truck around and drove back to Lytton, where he reported the incident to the Royal Canadian Mounted Police.”
John Green subsequently obtained the incident report from the RCMP, written by officer M.E. “Jerry” Pringle, which inaccurately placed Wally’s encounter “five miles north of Lytton on [the] Trans-Canada Highway,” near the Skihist Provincial Park Campground. The campground in question is actually located six miles east of Lytton. On the subject of Wally’s sighting, the report reads, “Its legs were quite long and it had enormous muscular arms. The face was similar to that of a wizened old man.”
The Mounties were impressed by Wally’s apparent sincerity, and the undeniable agitation of his dog, which, according to the report, “practically tore the cab of the truck apart trying to get out” upon seeing the wildman, and “was still very excited on arrival of our member”. They searched the site of the encounter on the night of the incident, and on the following day, but were unable to find any footprints in the roadside gravel.
Green referenced Wally’s sighting later on in Year of the Sasquatch, but curiously dated his experience to November 22nd, 1969, rather than November 20th.
The southernmost end of the Fraser Canyon, from a few miles south of Spuzzum to the town of Hope, British Columbia, is the traditional territory of the Tait Indians, a Coast Salish people. The Tait belong to an indigenous group called the Upper Stalo – a division of the Upper Halkomelem, which, in turn, is one of the eight divisions of what anthropologists call the Central Coast Salish.
Like their Thompson neighbours to the north, and all their Coast Salish cousins to the west, the Stalo have a strong wildman tradition, which Canadian archaeologist and anthropologist Wilson Duff described in his 1952 article The Upper Stalo Indians of the Fraser Valley, British Columbia. “Up in the mountains, deep in the forests, and in certain bodies of water,” Duff began in his introduction to the extraordinary animals of Upper Stalo tradition, “lived all manner of strange unnatural creatures, which were called skalakums… The term ‘slalakum’ is used both as a noun and as an adjective to describe anything unusual that might be seen… In former days, the sight of one of these powerful supernatural creatures was apt to cause soul-loss sickness, unconsciousness, and an upset stomach.” Duff went on to explain how some of the better-known slalakum of Upper Stalo folklore included a giant two-headed snake, an underwater bear, and two varieties of wildmen, namely the Cannibal Woman and the famous hairy giant whom the Upper Stalo call Sasquatch.
One of the Tait natives from whom Duff acquired his information was a 55-year-old man named Edmond Lorenzetto, who hailed from the village of Katz just west of the town of Hope. “Although the youngest of my principal informants,” Duff wrote, “Edmond has always taken a deep interest in the old culture, and he proved to be my best source of information on the Tait. A gentle, patient, and reflective man, Edmond embodies many of the most attractive attitudes of the old culture: pacifism, generosity, respect for age.”
Lorenzetto told Duff that the Tait referred to the Cannibal Woman of the woods, one of the two varieties of wildmen in which his people believed, as O’u’xia (pronounced ooh-HEE-yah). His description of her strongly evokes the Dzunukwa, the so-called “Basket Ogress” of Vancouver Island mythology, as well as the antagonist of a traditional Interior Salish story typically portrayed as a monstrous female owl. According to Lorenzetto, the O’u’xia was a short, stout woman who ate children. When approaching her prey, she affected a maternal demeanor, soothing her victims by affectionately calling them her grandchildren, and telling them that if they closed their eyes she would give them a surprise. When she came within reach, she would snatch the children, smear wood tar over their eyes, throw them in her basket, and take them home to eat.
“The most famous slalakum, however,” wrote Duff later in his piece, “was the hairy giant or sasquatch… This one has been seen repeatedly in recent years, and has become well known locally among Indians and whites alike…
“Sasquatches are usually seen singly. They are described as men, covered with dark fur, more than 8 feet tall, who leave footprints about 20 inches long.”
Duff then proceeded to reproduce a Sasquatch story told to him by Edmond Lorenzetto’s wife, the daughter of a Tait Indian nobleman and a highborn woman from the Lummi tribe, whose members once ruled the islands off Washington’s Puget Sound.
“One day,” Mrs. Lorenzetto began, “the women of American Bar (a few miles above Hope) were out picking berries in the hills. One of them disappeared. The hunters found big tracks and followed them up the mountain until they disappeared. They then had to give up, saying, ‘The skalakums got her.’
“A couple of years later the same thing happened. My friend’s grandmother was taken away by a sasquatch. As soon as it touched her she lost consciousness, and when she came to again she found the woman who had disappeared earlier, her own relative. The woman told her that she, herself, would never go home again because one of the sasquatches was her man and she now had a small son. However, she would help her to escape. They had flour and other foods around, which the woman said the sasquatches had stolen for her and her son.
“The next day the sasquatches went off to hunt and steal food. They also wanted to get a wife for the third one. The women prepared a lot of bread, and the the other woman led my friend’s grandmother part way home. When she got to the creek at American Bar, my friend’s grandmother caught sight of some of her people who were still out looking for her. She went unconscious because she had been with the sasquatches and wasn’t like a person any more. The people found her and took her home. She couldn’t speak their language any more, and hair had started to grow all over her body. They got some Indian doctors to work on her, and after a long time she became normal again.
“Many years later the American Bar people heard a loud yelling at that same creek. They went there and saw three sasquatches yelling. The woman tried to talk with them, but she couldn’t remember their language. So they never found out why they had come. They thought maybe the woman had died or that one of the sasquatches was her son. My friend always tells [my husband] and the other hunters never to shoot the giants because they might be her relations.”
James Teit, whose name has no connection with that of the Tait Indians, described a traditional Thompson giant story set in Tait Country in his 1917 article. This tale takes place on Union Bar, a gold-bearing sandbar in the Fraser Canyon about four kilometres north of Hope.
“Once a giant came to Union Bar,” Teit wrote. “The people were living in a large wooden house. The giant leaned his back against the side of the house, and shook it violently. Some men ran out to see what was the matter, and saw a man who was exceedingly tall. The people were afraid, but he did not harm them.”
In a footnote, Teit wrote that the natives called this giant “saskets or slaleqam”.
In the process of creating this series, this author discovered that classic Canadian Sasquatch stories typically fall into one of two categories: native legends detailed in the works of 19th and 20th Century anthropologists, and eyewitness accounts collected by pioneering Sasquatch researchers like J.W. Burns, John Green, Ivan Sanderson, and Peter Byrne. The former are typically set in mythical prehistory, or in the early to mid-1800s, when the only non-natives in British Columbia were Scottish, French-Canadian, and Hawaiian fur company employees who manned far-flung outposts and guided canoes up and down the waterways of New Caledonia. Classic eyewitness reports, by contrast, are usually set in the 20th Century or the late 1900s, almost never overlapping with their older native counterparts. There is one remarkable story from the lower Fraser Canyon, however, which defies this general pattern, featuring prominently and repeatedly in both anthropological essays and classic Sasquatch books. This story is the controversial tale of Jacko, the gorilla of British Columbia.
In his 1978 book Sasquatch: The Apes Among Us, John Green designated the Jacko story one of the three classic cases in the field of Sasquatch investigation, the other two being the story of Ape Canyon and the abduction of Albert Ostman. “‘Jacko’ has been around the longest,” he wrote, “and has suffered the most from modern enquiry – although he has also picked up a certain amount of supporting testimony. So long after the event (or non-event), it will certainly never be possible to settle the status of the story beyond dispute.”
Green proceeded to reproduce a now-infamous account of the event which appeared in the July 4th, 1884 issue of Victoria BC’s Daily British Colonist. At the time the story aired, the western half of the Canadian Pacific Railway (CPR), Canada’s very first trans-continental railroad, was being built across British Columbia’s Interior Plateau. Under the direction of American construction contractor Andrew Onderdonk, thousands of underpaid and malnourished Chinese coolies had spent the previous two years blasting tunnels through the cliffs of the Fraser Canyon, and had laid the last of the canyon’s railroad ties at Lytton no more than half a year prior. Ever since, CPR trains laden with freight, passengers, and mail made regular trips between Lytton and the West Coast, connecting the railway camps of the western interior with the outside world.
According to the article in the Daily British Colonist, on Monday, June 30th, 1884, a Canadian Pacific Railway train was making one of its routine trips from Lytton when engineer Ned Austin came upon an alarming sight. Upon approaching the CPR’s fourth Fraser Canyon tunnel, located about twenty miles north of the town of Hope, Austin spotted what he thought was a man lying on the ground a short distance from the tracks. Eager to avoid an accident, Austin blew the train’s whistle and applied the brakes, bringing the locomotive to a complete stop. At that moment, the sleeping figure sprang to his feet, uttered a sharp, quick bark, and began to ascend the precipitous section of canyon wall through which Tunnel No. 4 runs.
Since the train was running ahead of schedule, Conductor R.J. Craig decided to chase the figure, whom he presumed was a native who had gone mad. He was accompanied by his baggagemen and brakemen, as well as one Mr. Costerton, an employee of the British Columbia Express Company, which had delivered freight, passengers, and mail through the Fraser Canyon by stagecoach since the 1860s. “After five minutes of perilous climbing,” the article contended, “the then supposed demented Indian was corralled on a projecting shelf of rock where he could neither ascend nor descend.” Hoping to capture the man alive, Mr. Craig crawled on his hands and knees along a rock shelf until he was about forty feet above him. That accomplished, he took a small piece of rock and dropped it directly onto his quarry’s head, rendering him unconscious.
The railway employees wasted no time in rescuing the senseless object of their pursuit and lowering him down the cliff with ropes, during which process they discovered that he was no ordinary man. As the article put it, “Mr. Onderdonk’s employees… succeeded in capturing a creature which may truly be called half man and half beast. ‘Jacko’ as the creature has been called by his capturers, is something of the gorilla type standing four feet seven inches in height and weighing 127 pounds. He has long, black, strong hair and resembles a human being with one exception, his entire body, excepting his hands (or paws), and feet are covered with glossy hair about an inch long. His fore arm is much longer than a man’s fore arm, and he possesses extraordinary strength, as he will take hold of a stick and break it by wrenching or twisting it, which no man living could break in the same way…
“After firmly binding him and placing him in the baggage car ‘off brakes’ was sounded and the train started for Yale. At the station a large crowd who had heard of the capture by telephone from Spuzzum Flat were assembled, each one anxious to have the first look at the monstrosity, but they were disappointed, as Jacko had been taken off at the machine stops and placed in charge of his present keeper.
“Since his capture he is very reticent, only occasionally uttering a noise which is half bark and half growl. He is, however, becoming daily more attached to his keeper, Mr. George Tilbury, of this place, who proposes shortly starting for London, England, to exhibit him. His favorite food so far is berries, and he drinks fresh milk with evident relish. By advice of Dr. Hannington raw meats have been withheld from Jacko, as the doctor thinks it would have a tendency to make him savage…
“The question naturally arises, how came the creature where it was first seen by Mr. Austin? From bruises about its head and body, and apparent soreness since its capture, it is supposed that Jacko ventured too near the edge of the bluff, slipped, fell and lay where found until the sound of the rushing train aroused him.”
The article went on to state that Mssrs. Thomas White, C.E. Gouin, and Major, who ran a small store about a half mile west of the tunnel for the previous two years, informed the press that railway navvies had told them stories about a strange creature seen between two particular work camps in the Fraser Canyon.
“Who can unravel the mystery that now surrounds Jacko!” the article concluded. “Does he belong to a species hitherto unknown to this part of the continent, or is he really what the train men first thought he was, a crazy Indian!”
In his commentary on the story, John Green stated that, long before the Daily British Colonist article came to his attention, probably through its reprinting in Ivan Sanderson’s 1961 book Abominable Snowmen: Legend Come to Life, the extraordinary tale of Jacko had been investigated by Canadian journalist, novelist, and historian Bruce Alistair McKelvie. Green reached out to McKelvie, who told him that the only fact he could determine about the case was that the characters mentioned in the piece were all real people.
In 1974, Green came across several contemporary articles in the archives of the University of British Columbia which covered the Jacko story. One of these appeared in the July 9th, 1884 issue of the Mainland Guardian, a newspaper based out of New Westminster, a town located at the mouth of the Fraser Canyon. This piece, written by a journalist named Rex, flatly repudiated the story published in the Victoria newspaper, claiming that no unusual animal had been captured near Yale, and expressing astonishment that his journalistic counterparts on Vancouver Island had been taken in by the yarn.
Three days later, another New Westminster newspaper, the Columbian, published a story describing a rumour which held that Jacko, following his capture, had been transported to New Westminster and locked up in the local jail. As this tantalizing report circulated throughout the town, more than two hundred curious locals descended upon the frontier prison, hoping to catch a glimpse of the now-famous Yale wildman. “The only wild man visible,” the article concluded, “was Mr. Moresby, governor of the gaol, who completely exhausted his patience answering enquiries from the sold visitors.” The rumour, apparently, was a false one.
Chad Arment included several more contemporary newspaper articles on the Jacko story in his 2019 book The Historical Bigfoot. One of these was published in the July 12th, 1884 issue of the Gazette, a paper based out of Port Moody, British Columbia, just north of New Westminster. This piece lambasted the Victoria newspaper for printing the original Jacko story, dismissing it as a “low practical joke,” and excoriated it for a line in its July 6th, 1884 issue, under a local gossip column, which held that Jacko had been brought to Victoria, and was being kept at the post office. “Does the editor of the ‘Colonist’,” the article concluded, “suppose that the readers of that journal are all gorillas? It appears that rants suit them better than reason. A newspaper edited by a lunatic would circulate in the capital as fast as a scandalous report. The taste of the modern editor is not a good taste, but he must please the palate of the uneducated.”
An article in the August 23rd, 1884 issue of New Westminster’s The British Columbian stated that one of its own correspondents from Chilliwack, BC, wrote the paper a letter stating that Jacko had been brought to the town of Centresville, in northern British Columbia, where he was to be exhibited to the public. “We suppose there is a good point in this joke,” the article remarked sarcastically, “but we are really not able to discover it, and we are afraid our readers might be equally unfortunate.”
The Jacko story came full circle on August 24th, 1884, when Victoria’s Daily British Colonist, the publication which first printed the controversial tale, ran with an article claiming that they had received a letter from the man said to be in possession of Jacko – presumably the Mr. George Tilbury mentioned in the original article, who supposedly had plans to exhibit Jacko in London. The anonymous letter writer declared that the Jacko story was a fabrication, and that ever since its circulation, he had received letters from various circuses and zoological gardens offering to purchase the supposed ape man he had in his possession. “He feels kind of mad about it,” the article concluded. “Mad because he has not the wild man in stock – and wishes to inform the curiosity hunting public that he is not open for any offers.”
Taken together, the contemporary articles on the Jacko story paint the picture of mischievous railway employees who played a clever prank on the populace of the Fraser Valley, or perhaps of a fun-loving Yale-based correspondent of Victoria’s Daily British Colonist who concocted the story out of whole cloth, perhaps in a desperate attempt to drive newspaper sales, in the hope of making fools out of his employers, or simply as a means of generating some fun and excitement in his own sleepy corner of British Columbia, recently bereft of the railroad camps that had brought it so much commerce and commotion in seasons past. As John Green succinctly put it, “the sum total of contemporary evidence… doesn’t look good for Jacko.” Today, dismissal of the Jacko story as a harmless prank seems to be the prevailing position in the cyber world, the story even appearing under the headline “Jacko Hoax” on that arbiter of internet truth, Wikipedia.
Despite the claims of the Mainland Guardian and the Columbian, there were many contemporary residents of the Fraser Valley and the Fraser Canyon who firmly believed in Jacko’s existence. One of these was an elderly Tait Indian man named August Castle, who had lived in Yale his whole life, and had been a child or teenager at the time Jacko was supposedly caught near his hometown. Castle told John Green that he vividly recalled the excitement that followed the creature’s capture, but admitted that he never actually saw the wildman, as it was in the possession of a white man.
Another Yale resident who appears to have believed in Jacko’s existence was James Zacchaeus Choate, a building and bridges engineer for the Canadian Pacific Railway who later served as a circuit judge for the County Court at Yale. In a 1970 letter to American anthropologist and Sasquatch researcher Dr. Grover Krantz, Choate’s grandson, a hunting guide named Chilco Choate, claimed that James was living in Yale at the time of Jacko’s capture. “He was there when this ‘Ape’ was brought in and kept at Yale,” he explained. “‘Ape’ was the word my Dad says his Dad called the captive. The Ape was kept in Yale until the owner loaded it crated onto a train heading east. The story goes that he was taking it to London, Eng. to set up a side show with it and make his fortune. That was the end of the story as nobody heard of either of them again. It was either my Grandfather’s opinion or Dad’s opinion that the Ape must have died on the trip and was probably disposed of in any way possible. Personally I would imagine it probably died at sea and would have simply been thrown overboard.”
It must be mentioned that there are several potential holes in Choate’s story which cast doubt upon its veracity, or at least upon Choate’s memory of his grandfather’s tale. Specifically, the Canadian Pacific Railway was not completed until November 1885, precluding any possibility of Jacko’s having been transported east by train. There is also some evidence which seems to indicate that James Zacchaeus Choate was probably not living in Yale at the time of Jacko’s capture. Although a discussion of that evidence is beyond the scope of this piece, this author would invite any researcher interested in exploring the topic to compare the contents of Choate’s letter with that of amateur historian Denys Nelson’s unpublished 1927 manuscript Place Names of the Delta of the Fraser River, which can be found in the Provincial Archives of BC.
A third contemporary Yale resident who recalled the local furor which accompanied Jacko’s alleged capture was Adela Bastin, who was a young girl in 1884. Sometime after the Jacko incident, Bastin attended a school in Yale called All Hallows in the West, which was run by Anglican nuns from Ditchingham, England. In a letter to John Green, Bastin’s daughter, Mrs. Hilary Foskett of Ucluelet, BC, claimed that her mother “recalled stories of Jacko at Yale. She was probably eight or nine when she started school there and local inhabitants were still talking about the ‘wild man’, and the good sisters at the school took care in shepherding the pupils from school to chapel or church. In spite of this local ‘fear’ in her later years at the school, Mother climbed Mt. Leakey behind Yale with a group of local young people.”
In his 1961 book Abominable Snowmen: Legend Come to Life, Ivan Sanderson stated that “a reporter in 1946 interviewed an old gentleman in Lytton, B.C. who remembered having seen” Jacko. Unfortunately, Sanderson failed to specify the name of the reporter, the paper for which he worked, and the identity of the elderly Lytton gentleman.
And in The Historical Bigfoot, Chad Arment mentioned a story evoking the Jacko saga presented by Canadian journalist Larry Standwood in a piece for the Victoria Daily Times. According to Standwood, the famous Squamish chief and medicine man August Jack Khatsahlano told Sasquatch researcher Rene Dahinden that he had seen a nine-foot-tall female Sasquatch which had been captured sometime in the 1880s. Chief Khatsahlano allegedly told Dahinden that the creature was caged and exhibited for 10 cents a peek in New Westminster, before being transferred to Victoria for exhibition. In that island capital of British Columbia, the Sasquatch starved to death, refusing to eat the food her captors brought her.
As mentioned, the Jacko story, unlike most of the reports detailed in classic Bigfoot literature, is also referenced in formal academic works on First Nations history and culture. The informants from whom such references derive all seem to have thoroughly believed in Jacko’s existence, and offered straightforward explanations as to the fate of that mysterious wildman from Yale. For example, Edmond Lorenzetto’s neighbour and step-father, an octogenarian of both Tait and Vancouver Musqueam descent, told Wilson Duff that Jacko was really a female O’u’xia, one the Cannibal Women of Tait tradition. “She lived in a very smelly cave above Yale,” he said. “Some say that white men came with a big iron cage and caught her. There was a picture of her in a cage in the newspapers about fifteen years ago (i.e. in the mid-1930s); at least the old people said it was her.”
In her May 23, 1970 interview with Andrea Laforet, Annie York told her own version of the Jacko story, which differs slightly from that recounted in Victoria’s Daily British Colonist. She recalled that a Lower Thompson chief named Pelek, whom James Teit’s informants described as a great prophet and medicine man, was the most prominent native in the Fraser Valley at that time of the incident. “When the CPR was laying its track through this area,” she said, “there was a construction camp up at the long tunnel above Spuzzum. The contractors who lived in the camp used to miss a lot of their stuff from the outside meathouse. Two cowboys had an idea about what to do. They took some long rope, the two of them, and they stayed up all night to watch this meathouse.
“Along came a sasquatch to the meathouse to take the food away. ‘So there,’ the cowboys thought to themselves, ‘that’s the chance for us to catch that monster that’s been taking our food away.’ So they lassoed him, and of course when they lassoed him they had the string around his neck. Then he jumped, and he snapped his neck and died.
“One of the Indians above the tunnel there, from the reservation, came along and saw these whites looking at this monster lying on his back. The man came all the way down from there to Spuzzum to the chief and told the chief what had happened to the monster, which the Indians call ‘sasquatch.’ So the chief called together his retainers, his warriors. He put his robe on – his robe is made of weasel, and his banners were made of buckskin with beautiful pictures on them. He took these things and went with his warriors to the construction camp. When he got there his interpreter asked what they had done with the sasquatch. ‘Oh well,’ said one of the men, ‘we’ll do something about it. ‘We’ll bury it.’
“The chief insisted he would claim the body because the Indians have always reverenced these sasquatches. The Indians claim the sasquatch is a human being, and they always claim the body, and they bury it or put it on a scaffold, if they have that kind of system. So finally these men gave up, and they gave him the body. He took the body all the way from the tunnel right down to Spuzzum. He gave it is blessing and buried it as a human being.”
Whatever truth lies behind the Jacko story, wildman sightings continued to take place in the lower Fraser Canyon throughout the 20th Century. The best documented of these is the report of Stanley Hunt, an auctioneer from the Okanagan city of Vernon, British Columbia, who claimed to have come across a weird sight just south of Yale. On the morning of Friday, May 4th, 1956, while driving on the Trans-Canada Highway near the community of Flood, BC, Hunt spotted two strange figures up ahead, one of them standing in the ditch and the other in the process of crossing the street. According to an article in the May 9th, 1956 issue of the Chilliwack Progress, which appears in The Historical Bigfoot, both creatures were about seven feet tall had grey complexions which reminded Hunt of the colour of a horse. They were covered with thin hair which Hunt described as being “not matted like an animal.” Although the article stated that the creatures “walked like a bear,” another passage clarified that the figure which crossed the road did so “walking upright”. “But the creatures weren’t stocky like a bear,” the article explained. “‘Gangly’ was the adjective he used… Mr. Hunt didn’t stop to investigate further but continued on his trip to Vancouver.”
The details of Stanley Hunt’s encounter differ in various retellings of the story which appear in classic Bigfoot books. In Abominable Snowmen: Legend Come to Life, Ivan Sanderson stated, probably erroneously, that Hunt’s experience took place at night, and on May 17th, 1956, more than a week after the story was published in the Chilliwack Progress. By contrast, John Green, in The Sasquatch File, claimed that Hunt told him personally that his sighting occurred “very early in the morning.”
The last lower Fraser Canyon Sasquatch story to appear in classic Bigfoot literature is that furnished by Mrs. Eileen Yerxa of Hope, British Columbia. In The Sasquatch File, John Green stated that Yerxa wrote him a letter in which she claimed that fourteen-inch-long tracks with a stride of 30 to 36 inches were found in deep snow about fourteen miles east of Hope. Several local men attempted to follow the tracks without snowshoes, but sank so deep into the snow that they had to be helped out by their companions.
The Fraser Canyon Gold Rush
McGowan’s War (2003), by Donald J. Hauka
Claiming the Land: British Columbia and the Making of a New El Dorado (2018), by Daniel Marshall
Native Inhabitants of the Fraser Canyon
“Thompson,” by David Wyatt, in Volume 12 of the Handbook of North American Indians: Plateau (1998)
The Nlaka’pamux or Thompson Indians
“Thompson,” by David Wyatt, in Volume 12 of the Handbook of North American Indians: Plateau (1998)
Thompson Giant Legend Related by James Teit
“The Thompson Indians of British Columbia” (April, 1900) by James Teit, in Volume II of the Memoirs of the American Museum of Natural History
“The Salishan Tribes of the Western Plateaus,” by James Teit, in the 1895 issue of the Annual Report of the Bureau of American Ethnology to the Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution
Giant Chases Hunters
“The Thompson Indians of British Columbia” (April, 1900) by James Teit, in Volume II of the Memoirs of the American Museum of Natural History
The Lytton Girls Who Were Stolen by the Giants
“Folk-Tales of the Salishan and Sahaptin Tribes” (1917), published in Volume XI of the Memoirs of the American Folk-Lore Society
Thompson View of the Sasquatch
Spuzzum: Fraser Canyon Histories, 1808-1939 (1998), by Andrea Laforet and Annie York
The Difference Between True Giants and the Sasquatch
The Field Guide to Bigfoot, Yeti, and Other Mystery Primates Worldwide (1999), by Loren Coleman and Patrick Huyghe
Abominable Snowmen: Legend Come to Life (1961), by Ivan T. Sanderson
“Some Preliminary Notes on Traditions of Submen in Arctic and Subarctic North America,” by Ivan T. Sanderson, in both Volume 19 of the Universita degli Studi di Roma ‘La Sapienza’ (1963), and in an undated, typewritten draft from the old Society for the Investigation of the Unexplained archives, courtesy of Dr. Michael Swords and Will Matthews
Chief Dick’s Encounter
“Tales of Spuzzum: What Did Indian Chief See By Mystery Lake?” by Annie York in the February 4th, 1959 issue of the Chilliwack Progress
The Historical Bigfoot (2019), by Chad Arment
Reverend John Good’s Testimony
The Historical Bigfoot (2019), by Chad Arment
“Indian Tradition,” by Reverend John Booth Good in the July 9th, 1884 issue of the Daily British Colonist (Victoria, BC)
1939 Sighting West of Spuzzum
The Sasquatch File (1973), by John Green
Merritt Sightings of 1969
Year of the Sasquatch (1970), by John Green
On the Track of Sasquatch (1973), by John Green
The Sasquatch File (1973), by John Green
Ivan Wally’s Sighting
Year of the Sasquatch (1970), by John Green
On the Track of Sasquatch (1973), by John Green
The Cannibal Woman of Tait Indian Tradition
“The Upper Stalo Indians of the Fraser Valley, British Columbia,” by Wilson Duff in Memoir No. 1 of Anthropology in British Columbia (1952)
The Sasquatch of Tait Legend
“The Upper Stalo Indians of the Fraser Valley, British Columbia,” by Wilson Duff in Memoir No. 1 of Anthropology in British Columbia (1952)
A Thompson Story Set in Tait Country
“Folk-Tales of the Salishan and Sahaptin Tribes” (1917), published in Volume XI of the Memoirs of the American Folk-Lore Society
The Tale of Jacko
Sasquatch: The Apes Among Us (1978), by John Green
“What is It? A Strange Creature Captured Above Yale: A British Columbia Gorilla,” in the July 4th, 1884 issue of the Daily British Colonist (Victoria, BC)
The Fraser Canyon Story (1983), by Donald Ender Waite
“Railroad Intelligence: The British Columbia Sections of the Canadian Pacific – Notes,” in the January 8th, 1884 issue of The Gazette (Montreal, Quebec)
On the Track of Sasquatch (1973), by John Green
Spuzzum: Fraser Canyon Histories, 1808-1939 (1998), by Andrea Laforet and Annie York
Abominable Snowmen: Legend Come to Life (1961), by Ivan T. Sanderson