The lower portion of British Columbia’s Fraser River, from the head of the Fraser Canyon at Lytton, BC, to its mouth at Vancouver, serves as the dividing line between two great mountain ranges: the Pacific Ranges of the Coast Mountains, which dominate the southwestern corner of the province; and the southeasterly Cascade Mountains, a long, narrow range which stretches from Lytton all the way down the Pacific states to northern California. The northernmost tip of the North Cascades, which lies within southwestern British Columbia, is a beautiful and mysterious country abounding with fascinating native legends, the spookiest of which allege that a variety of strange and dangerous creatures haunt its desolate heart. In this piece, we’ll take a look at both traditional native stories and 20th Century eyewitness accounts of the wildmen of the North Cascades.
Before we proceed, it is with great pleasure that I introduce you to the sponsor of this video.
The Canadian Cascades and the southern shores of the Fraser River beyond are the traditional territories of several divisions of the Stahlo, or Upriver Halkomelem, the latter being a subset of the Central Coast Salish. The North Cascades themselves were the domain of both the Chilliwack tribe and the Thompson Indians, the latter being an Interior Salish people with whom the Chilliwack sometimes clashed. Beyond the mountains, on the southern side of the Fraser Valley, lies the homeland of four Stahlo nations: the Pilalt, who built their longhouses at the upper end of the broader part of the valley; the Sumas, who dominated the area surrounding the now-vanished Sumas Lake between Chilliwack and Abbotsford; and the Matsqui, whose traditional homeland lies near what is now the city of Abbotsford.
There are precious few written sources on the traditional folklore endemic to the North Cascade Mountains. As American anthropologist Allan Hathorn Smith put it in his 1988 piece Ethnography of the North Cascades, “The ethnographic and ethnohistorical data relating specifically to the Chilliwack are very limited… Our knowledge of the aboriginal and early postcontact life style of the Chilliwack is singularly meager.” Perhaps the best source on North Cascade oral tradition is the work of Norman Lerman, an American anthropologist who ventured beyond the confines of scholarly journals to publish his findings in a book intended for mass consumption.
In the summer of 1950, while still a young student working on his master’s thesis in anthropology at the University of Washington, Lerman made contact with some of the oldest native elders in the Lower Fraser area and compiled one of the few collections of traditional Chilliwack and Matsqui stories to ever be put down on paper. In 1976, with the help of editor Betty Keller, he converted his field notes into a book entitled Legends of the River People – an extremely rare publication now almost impossible to find.
“My informants that summer were marvellous story-tellers,” Lerman wrote in his book’s introduction, “and often their children and grandchildren would join us to listen. Some of the younger people had heard the stories before; some had not. But the obvious enjoyment was reflected in the faces of everyone there.”
The first elders Lerman contacted were Mr. and Mrs. Harry Uslick and Bob Joe, who lived in the community of Sardis on the south side of Chilliwack. “Harry Uslick was then seventy-nine,” Lerman wrote, “totally blind and partially deaf. He had been born at Sardis and had been a trained woodcrafter. He spoke little English, and the stories he told me were interpreted to me by his wife. She was three years younger than he, and had also been born at Sardis. She had been educated at the Methodist Mission School there, but the minister in charge of the school had respected the Indian culture and had not discouraged her participation in the traditional life. The stories that she related to me were, therefore, both her own and those of her husband.”
Bob Joe, the third of Lerman’s primary informants, was seventy-seven years old at the time of his field trip, and was still physically active, working his own farm and hiring himself out as a day labourer.
Other informants included 65-year-old Agnes James, who hailed from the village of Matsqui south of Mission, BC; James’ translator, Mrs. Frank Reid; and 65-year-old Mrs. Louis George, a proud Matsqui native born into Coast Salish nobility.
Unlike most ethnological works on First Nations culture, which are typically formatted as dry academic-style essays, Legends of the River People is structured like a storybook, revolving around a fictional Stahlo feast held to celebrate the construction of a traditional Coast Salish longhouse. This hypothetical event, which lasts several days, is punctuated by several storytelling sessions conducted by a number of different elders who appear to represent Lerman’s real-life informants. “In an effort to retain as much as possible of the colourful dialogue and marvellous character detail that enlivened the telling,” Lerman explained in his book’s introduction, “the tales as they are presented here are often combinations of several versions told by different story-tellers. But the language is exactly as I recorded it.”
Most of the stories in Legends of the River People are tinged with an air of the fantastic, imbuing them with a chimerical quality reminiscent of One Thousand and One Nights and Grimm’s Fairy Tales. A few of them bear striking resemblances to famous Western fairy tales – a coincidence rendered especially bizarre in light of the fact that many of Lerman’s informants knew very little English.
Several of the stories in Legends of the River People feature different wildmen of Chilliwack, Matsqui, Pilalt, and Sumas tradition. The most recognizable of these is the Sasquatch, the famous hairy giant of the Pacific Northwest. “Legends concerning them,” wrote Lerman in a note near the back of his book, “usually tell of those who sight them becoming ill or dying, because of the aura around them.”
This powerful aura which the Sasquatch are said to exude is exemplified in a certain Chilliwack Sasquatch story which appears in Canadian archaeologist Wilson Duff’s 1952 treatise on the Upper Stalo Indians. Duff heard this story from Robert Joe, a 70-year-old resident of Sardis, B.C., of both Chilliwack and Pilalt heritage and probably a relative of Lerman’s informant Bob Joe, whom Duff explained was his only Chilliwack informant.
“One winter night about twenty years ago,” Joe told Duff in 1952, “about 10 p.m., just about three or four nights after my sister’s little boy had died, I heard something scratching outside along the corner of the house. I looked out into the moonlight and saw a huge manlike creature standing in the snow about 10 yards away. It was a [Sasquatch] (giant) covered with long bushy hair.” Joe closed the door. No sooner had he done so than his head was filled with a strange song, which sensation he struggled to resist. Duff explained that, according to Chilliwack belief, Joe was on the cusp of being possessed by the Sasquatch, which was trying to teach him its ‘spirit song’.
“The next night,” Joe continued, “my brother felt his house shake. The door opened, and this creature came into the lighted kitchen. My brother had a fit in which a song came to him.” Having learned the Sasquatch’s ‘spirit song’ through this unsolicited possession, Joe’s brother was ever after obliged to sing this tune at tribal ‘spirit singing’ sessions, which performances he accompanied with a special dance in which he sometimes leapt high into the air.
The only Sasquatch story in Legends of the River People actually appears to be a variation of one of the most prevalent ‘basket ogress’ tales in Salish tradition, the ‘basket ogress’ being a monstrous, dim-witted wildwoman who throws kidnapped children into her basket and carries them back to her mountain lair to devour them. As Lerman observed in a note near the back of his book, this story bears remarkable resemblance to the German fairy tale Hansel and Gretel.
The story is set on the shores of Sumas Lake, the historic domain of the Sumas Indians west of Cultus Lake, which was drained in the early 1920s in order to prevent the flooding of adjacent farmland. As is often the case with Salish folklore, this story is set in mythological prehistory, during a time when all animals were essentially human beings which could resume or cast off their proper bestial forms by donning or shedding their skins. The protagonist of this particular tale is Humpback Salmon, whom the narrator refers to as ‘Humpy’.
Long ago, Humpback Salmon and a group of young people went for a picnic and swim at Sumas Lake. When it was time to eat, the group passed around some dried fish they had brought with them. Humpback Salmon was allotted the fish tails, the toughest part of the animal. Outraged, he began to scream, attracting the attention of a nearby Sasquatch. Seizing a large basket woven from snakes and frogs, the giant headed down to the lake and stole upon the youths. “He grabbed Humpy first,” Lerman wrote, “and put him in the basket. Then he grabbed another person and put him in. But whenever the giant put someone else in, Humpy would climb up to the top of the basket again.
“On his way home, the giant happened to pass a branch that was just a little low. He stopped to get under it but the basket caught on the tree and little Humpy caught hold of the branch and got out. When the giant got home, he told his children, ‘Oh, I’ve got something extra special for you today!’
“… And he started taking the young people out one by one. He was looking for Humpy, you see, but Humpy was gone. Then Sasquatch got to thinking about it, and he remembered bumping that limb and figured that must have been when Humpy got out.”
The giant returned to Sumas Lake and saw the distant form of Humpback Salmon paddling away in a canoe. He hurled large rocks at the fleeing youngster, but was unable to hinder his progress. Cutting his losses, the Sasquatch returned to his lair, kindled a fire in his huge fire pit, and placed rocks atop the glowing embers. “That’s the way they used to do their cooking,” Lerman’s informant explained. “Now before he went to chase Humpy, he told his children to put pitch on the young people’s eyes and behind their knees so they couldn’t see or run away. When the giant’s children were putting on the pitch, the young people closed their eyes tightly so the pitch wouldn’t hurt their eyes and they could open them again afterwards. When the rocks were ready, the giant started doing the Feast Dance. The people let him dance until he got worked up and wasn’t expecting anything. At last when he danced close to the fire, the bigger boys and girls shoved him into it!
“They shoved him in there, put in more dried wood and burnt him! When he was burning, the giant cried out, ‘I guess I won’t be killing or eating anybody else.’
“The young people said, ‘We’ll not finish you altogether. We’ll save something to remember you by.’
“So the leader of the young people said to the sparks as they were going up, ‘You’ll be mosquitos!’ And to the bigger sparks he said, ‘You’ll be sandflies!’”
The second basket ogress story in Legends of the River People identifies the monstrous antagonist as Thookia, a huge old woman whom the storyteller distinguishes from the Sasquatch of Sumas Lake. “This cannibal woman,” Lerman explained in a note in the back of the book, “is most probably a direct development from the character ‘Tsonoqua’ of the Kwakiutl [the Kwakiutl or Kwakwaka’wakw being a First Nation native to northeastern Vancouver Island]. The Chilliwacks describe her as big and stout, normally gathering up children in her basket to take them home to eat.”
The Chilliwack story of Thookia, which shares many commonalities with the Little Red Riding Hood fairy tale of Western Europe, revolves around a young girl named Squirrel. In this story, Squirrel got permission from her grandmother to pick wild crab apples in the forest on the condition that she refrain from singing while she foraged. The girl promised that she would keep quiet while she harvested, and so her grandmother let her go.
“She climbed up a tree,” Lerman wrote, “and there were so many nice, ripe crab apples that she was happy, and before she knew it she was singing. She kept picking and singing until suddenly she heard a thumping sound on the ground and she realized that she had disobeyed her grandmother. It was Thookia making the thumping! Now Thookia is a big old woman with a basket made of snakes, and when she hears naughty children cry, she gives them dry bark instead of salmon to eat. She can eat lots of kids at a time, and that’s why grandmother had told Squirrel not to sing. She just knew this old woman would come!
“Squirrel could see it wasn’t her grandmother so she just kept singing away. She didn’t throw down any crab apples, and pretty soon she changed the song she was singing. She sang to Thookia, ‘You have grey hair, and my grandmother hasn’t! You have grey eyes, not like my grandmother’s!’”
Angry that Squirrel had seen through her deception, Thookia began shaking the tree, hoping that the little girl would tumble out. “Little Squirrel hung on,” Lerman wrote, “then ran out onto one of the branches, and started jumping from tree to tree. She finally got far enough away so that she could run down a tree. Thookia got winded from shaking the tree and couldn’t follow.”
Squirrel ran home in a panic. Hammering on the door of the smoke house where her grandmother lived, she begged to be let inside. Her grandmother, knowing that Squirrel must have disobeyed her and attracted the attention of Thookia, quickly drew her inside and hid her in a clam shell near the door, urging her to keep quiet.
“Pretty soon they heard Thookia come,” Lerman continued. “She walked in and asked if the granddaughter was there. The grandmother said no, but Thookia knew that Squirrel had run this way. She thought of a trick to make little Squirrel giggle, so she could find out where she was. Thookia told granny that she was going to use stinging nettles to sting her seat! When little Squirrel heard that, she burst out laughing so that Thookia found her in the clam shell. That old woman threw her into the fire and stayed right there until she was all burned up!”
When the ogress finally left, the grandmother collected her granddaughter’s charred bones and put them in a basket. Using wild medicine she had gathered in the forest, she brewed a potion which brought Squirrel back to life.
Another type of humanoid monster to make an appearance in the book are preternatural mermen said to inhabit Cultus Lake, a large body of water in the mountains just south of the city of Chilliwack which legend says is “bottomless”, its bed being connected to an underground river which leads to the Pacific Ocean. According to British-Canadian folklorist Charles Hill-Tout in his 1902 Report on the Ethnological Survey of Canada – which, incidentally, contains one of the only published ethnological works on the Pilalt Indians – the Chilliwack believed Cultus Lake to be “the abode of Slalakum (i.e. supernatural water people who lived at the bottom of lakes).” In a footnote later on in his piece, he stated that the word ‘slalakum’ was difficult to translate directly into English, writing, “A slalakum is not a ghost or spirit, but a being of a different order from a mortal. They inhabit mountains and forests as well as lakes.”
According to Norman Lerman’s informants, the mysterious aquatic men and women who live in Cultus Lake are the transmogrified remnants of an ancient Indian tribe whose village once stood in the Cultus basin before the lake existed. Long ago, a member of that tribe skilled in the manipulation of water, as retribution for ridicule he received at the hands of his fellow tribesmen, diverted the course of an underground river and flooded the basin, wiping out the village and creating Cultus Lake. Ever since, survivors of the flood, transformed into aquatic beings through some mysterious preternatural power inherent to the place, have inhabited a certain section of the lake where two large rocks once stood.
Chilliwack tradition contends that strange things sometimes happen at Cultus Lake near the home of the water people. According to Lerman’s informants, two Thompson Indian youths who were training to become medicine men decided to investigate the place to see if they could avail themselves of the lake’s mysterious power. “They built a raft,” Lerman wrote, “and made a long rope out of cedar branches. One of the young men tied the rope around himself under his armpits. Then he tied two heavy rocks to this rope so he could go down to the bottom of the lake. When he was ready he said, ‘If I want to come up, I’ll jerk on the rope, and you can pull me up.’
“He jumped from the raft and the other young man paid out the rope. When he had paid it all out, he sat down and waited for the other to jerk on it.
“Time went by and he watched the rope moving around, but didn’t feel a jerk on it. He began to worry that it was about time that the other young man came up, so he began pulling on the rope. The water was very clear for a long way down and as he pulled the other end of the rope came in sight.
“There was a skeleton tied to it!
“The flesh and hair had been plucked clean. At last he pulled it onto the raft and paddled to shore. There he laid the bones near the two big rocks, and went to tell the people what happened. But the people didn’t pay much attention, because they felt that these young men had to take the consequences for what they had done.”
Although Charles Hill-Tout, in his retelling of this tale in his 1902 article, claims that the young medicine man-in-training “had been devoured piecemeal by the fish of the lake,” Lerman’s informants seem to have implied that the young trainee’s strange fate was attributable to the strange power inherent to Cultus Lake, or to the work of the merman who dwelled within it.
Another story in Lerman’s book tells of another prospective medicine man who attempted to replicate the same exploratory dive which claimed the life of the young trainee, this time clad in spiky armour consisting of a bearskin suit studded with long wooden stakes. With the help of his brother, who dropped him off in a canoe, the man sank to the bottom of the lake and entered the home of the underwater people. These people, he learned, were all ill, covered with saliva that Indians had spat into the lake while passing over it in canoes. He cleaned the mermen with cedar bark, effectively healing them, and was given a large magic clam shell in return, which had the power to heal people from sickness. The explorer returned home, where he became a great medicine man who, until his death by old age, was respected and feared throughout the country.
The last humanoid monster in Lerman’s book is a man-eating tree-dwelling wildman who is, perhaps, intended to be perceived as nothing more sensational than a crazy human being living alone in the wilderness. In this story, which is somewhat evocative of the Norwegian fairy tale the Three Billy Goats Gruff, long ago, four brothers lived together in Chilliwack country. While out hunting, the eldest brother was forced to take shelter from a storm beneath a large cedar tree, the canopy of which, unbeknownst to him, was inhabited by a wildman. That evening, the wildman hollered at his uninvited guest, and the brother, none the wiser, hollered back. The wildman proceeded to slink down the tree, cut out the boy’s heart, and swallow it whole.
When the elder brother did not return from his hunting trip, the second eldest brother went out in his stead, hoping to secure some meat for his two hungry siblings, and perhaps find his elder brother in the process. He stopped by the same large cedar tree, and was dealt a similar fate by its heart-swallowing inmate.
When the third eldest brother subsequently vanished during his own hunting trip, the youngest brother was sure that he and the others had been killed by the same mysterious predator. “He started out the next day,” Lerman wrote, “and it started to rain again. He came to the same tree, and he saw where there had been fires before.
“He thought to himself, ‘Well, that’s where my brothers were killed!’
“It wasn’t long after he had a fire going that he heard someone call, and he answered. He fixed up his bow and arrow and all his clothes so that it looked just like a person lying by the fire. He went behind another tree, and when the wild person hollered again he didn’t answer. The person sat on the other side of the fire than the one the boy was on. The boy shot him with his bow and arrow and killed him right there. Then he went to work, opened him up, and found his brothers’ hearts in this fellow’s stomach. He looked around, and saw his brothers lying there, side by side, not very far from where he had the fire. He knew which one was his oldest brother’s heart and he put it back in his body. Then he took his other brothers’ hearts and put them back, tipped his brothers over four times, and they all came to life. That’s the end of that story.”
If 20th Century eyewitness accounts are to be believed, the wildmen of Chilliwack, Matsqui, Pilalt, and Sumas tradition live not only in the tales of elders like Harry Uslick and Bob Joe, but also in the wilds of the North Cascades, where they occasionally make themselves known to unsuspecting motorists and outdoor adventurers. One classic Bigfoot sighting in the North Cascade Mountains is the 1915 experience of Charles Flood, a resident of New Westminster, British Columbia. Flood’s own 1957 sworn statuary declaration in which he described his experience appears in several classic Sasquatch books, including Ivan T. Sanderson’s seminal 1961 tome Abominable Snowmen: Legend Come to Life; and John Green’s books The Sasquatch File 1(1973), Sasquatch: The Apes Among Us (1978), and Encounters with Bigfoot (1980), which follows:
“I, Charles Flood of New Westminster (formerly of Hope) declare the following story to be true:
“I am 73 years of age and spent most of my life prospecting minerals in the local mountains to the south of Hope, toward the American boundary and the Chilliwack Lake area.
“In 1915, Donald McRae and Green Hicks of Agassiz, B.C. and myself, from Hope, were prospecting at Green Drop Lake twenty-five miles south of Hope, and explored an area over an unknown divide, on the way back to Hope, near the Holy Cross Mountains.
“Green Hicks, a half-breed Indian, told McRae and me a story, he claimed he had seen alligators at what he called Alligator Lake, and wild humans at what he called Cougar Lake. Out of curiosity we went with him; he had been there a week previous looking for a fur trap line. Sure enough, we saw his alligators, but they were black, twice the size of lizards in a small mud lake.
“A mile further up was Cougar Lake. Several years before a fire swept over many square miles of mountains which resulted in large areas of mountain huckleberry growth. While we were travelling through the dense berry growth, Green Hicks suddenly stopped us and drew our attention to a large, light brown creature about eight feet high, standing on its hind legs (standing upright) pulling the berry bushes with its one hand or paw toward him and putting berries in his mouth with the other hand or paw.
“I stood still wondering and McRae and Green Hicks were arguing. Hicks said ‘it is a wild man’ and McRae said ‘it is a bear.’ The creature heard us and suddenly disappeared in the brush around 200 yards away. As far as I am concerned the strange creature looked more like a human being, we seen several black and brown bears on the trip, but that ‘thing’ looked altogether different. Huge brown bear are known to be in Alaska, but have never been seen in southern British Columbia.
“I never have seen anything like this creature, before or after this incident in 1915, in all my days of hunting and prospecting in British Columbia.”
In October 1962, nearly half a century after Charles Flood’s adventure with Donald McRae and Green Hicks, another B.C. resident claimed to have had a run-in with a Sasquatch near the city of Chilliwack. According to John Green in The Sasquatch File, a bus driver from the city of Abbotsford, BC, between Chilliwack and the Greater Vancouver area, was obliged to take a circuitous route home one rainy night after dropping some passengers off at a rural property outside Chilliwack. Somewhere on the Vedder Mountain Road between Vedder Crossing and Yarrow, between the Chilliwack River and Cultus Lake, the driver came upon what he first took to be a large man in a fur coat standing on the side of the road. “He slowed down,” Green wrote, “then the form moved across the road and he realized it was not a man, but something at least eight feet high and covered with long, dark-brown hair.
“The creature had an apelike face, with eyes that reflected a reddish glow. It was somewhat stooped and had long arms and a short neck. It took the road in strides of about five feet and jumped up a six-foot cutbank, effortlessly, from a standing position.”
The creature’s red glowing eyes is an interesting detail which evokes the legend of the Nakani, the predatory man-eating wildman of subarctic tradition, which were said to have red eyes that glowed in the night.
Two years later, on July 3th, 1964, a couple of teenagers from Vancouver went on a car camping trip to Cultus Lake. That night, at about 2:30 a.m., while driving on a dirt road near the lake looking for a place to park for the night, four bright points appeared on the road up ahead. These lights proved to be the eye shine of two huge humanlike creatures covered with dark shaggy hair. The creatures stood about seven feet tall, and one of them was noticeably burlier than the other. “They stayed on the road as the car went by,” wrote John Green, who covered the incident in his book The Sasquatch File, “but stepped into the woods when the driver turned around.”
Thoroughly spooked, the teens returned to the main road and made the 20-minute drive to Chilliwack, where they spent the night in a schoolground.
One year after the Cultus Lake sighting, on May 31st, 1965, a woman named Seraphine Jasper claimed to have spotted a Sasquatch near her home on Nicomen Island, a large island in the Fraser River between Chilliwack and Mission. According to John Green, who included the report in The Sasquatch File, the creature appeared in broad daylight in a field between Jasper’s home and the Trans-Canada Highway. “It was tall,” he wrote, paraphrasing Jasper, “and covered with black hair. It kept moving around and the cows tended to wander over and stare at it. It scared [Jasper] to keep watching it, and she did not see it leave.”
Introduction
“Ethnography of the North Cascades,” by Allan Hathorn Smith, in the 1988 journal of the Center for Northwest Anthropology, Washington State University
Legends of the River People (1976), by Norman Lerman
The Sasquatch Spirit Song
Legends of the River People (1976), by Norman Lerman
“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 Sumas Lake
Legends of the River People (1976), by Norman Lerman
The Mermen of Cultus Lake
Legends of the River People (1976), by Norman Lerman
Report on the Ethnological Survey of Canada (1902), by Charles Hill-Tout
B.C. Folklore, Issue 1 (1995)
Thookia
Legends of the River People (1976), by Norman Lerman
The Heart-Eating Wildman
Legends of the River People (1976), by Norman Lerman
Charles Flood’s Sighting
Abominable Snowmen: Legend Come to Life (1961), by Ivan T. Sanderson
The Sasquatch File (1973), by John Green
Sasquatch: The Apes Among Us (1978), by John Green
Encounters with Bigfoot (1980), by John Green
Sighting on Vedder Mountain Road
The Sasquatch File (1973), by John Green
The Sasquatches of Cultus Lake
The Sasquatch File (1973), by John Green
Sasquatch Sighing on Nicomen Island
The Sasquatch File (1973), by John Green