Vancouver, British Columbia – the beating heart of Canada’s westernmost province. Sandwiched between Burrard Inlet and the north arm of the Fraser Delta, between the Pacific Ocean and the Coast Mountains, this coastal metropolis is renowned for its vibrant cultural scene, its ethnic diversity, and its elegant incorporation of natural beauty into its urban landscape. It has played host to some of Canada’s most cherished artists, including Haida sculptor Bill Reid and Vancouver Island painter Emily Carr, and has served as the whetstone on which some of Canada’s most beloved actors and comedians, from Colin Mochrie to Seth Rogan, honed their craft. Its streets and buildings are regularly used as sets for Hollywood movies, earning it the nickname ‘Hollywood North’.
Beneath its cosmopolitan charm and urban chaos, the so-called ‘Rain City’ has an undercurrent of primitive mystery, reflected by the totem poles, panel carvings, and cedar masks that ornament its parks and public areas – striking evocations of its storied past. Long before Spanish explorer Jose Maria Narvaez first sailed into Burrard Inlet, the local Coast Salish told stories about a frightening humanlike monster that haunted the surrounding rainforests. When white frontiersmen began to settle Canada’s southwest coast in the early-mid 1800s, dispatched by the Hudson’s Bay Company or drawn by the lure of gold, this figure of native myth occasionally crossed paths with them. Sightings of this mysterious wildman increased dramatically throughout the 20th Century, proportionate with a rapid increase in settlement, and in the number of white men who ventured into the wilderness by dint of recreation or occupational necessity. In this piece, we will explore classic Canadian Sasquatch stories from Vancouver.
Classic Sasquatch Stories from Vancouver
Musqueam Legends
The Greater Vancouver Area, or Metro Vancouver, stretches from the shores of the Strait of Georgia up the valley of the lower Fraser River to the historic village of Fort Langley, encompassing the western half of British Columbia’s Lower Mainland. This area lies entirely within the ancestral domain of the Downriver Halkomelem, a collection of Central Coast Salish tribes united by a common dialect.
Vancouver proper – and the Point Grey headland in particular – comprises the traditional home of the Musqueam, a First Nation which took its name from a mysterious grass which once fringed the Fraser River. According to Musqueam tradition, this grass grew from the droppings of the S’eethlku’y, an enormous two-headed serpent saturated with preternatural power, in which the natives of Canada’s West Coast universally believed.
Another unusual creature to haunt the mists of Musquam folklore was the wildman. American anthropologist Wayne P. Suttles expounded on this belief in his article ‘On the Cultural Track of the Sasquatch,’ which appeared in his 1987 anthology entitled Coast Salish Essays. “The term [saysquts],” Suttles wrote, “is well known at Musqueam as the name for a large, hairy, man-like creature that lives in the woods and mountains.” Another humanlike monster about which the Musqueam told stories was the [qulquleetl], or “evil seeker,” which Suttles’ informants identified as the cannibal ogress of Vancouver Island mythology. According to a Musqueam elder named James Point, the [saysquts] and the [qulquleetl] were members of the same species, the former being male, and the latter being female.
In 1963, 82-year-old Point told Suttles a traditional Musqueam story about the wild people, saying, “It must have been long ago when there were still only Indians here, and everywhere on up the river, too, there were only Indians. There were none of those who are called ‘White people,’ but only Indian people. According to the old people, walking in the woods, everywhere away from the water, were what are called the [lhpaytl]. They were big, resembling a person, but tall, far taller than the biggest people here. And it is said that their wives were what the people called the [qulquleetl].
“It must have been that… [qulquleetl] who was the one who came down to the shore when it became evening and was nearly dark, carrying on her back what was called a [lhpaytl] as a container for everything that she was getting in the ground as she roamed all over the woods. These were all sorts of lizards, frogs, and snakes, just all sorts of things like that. They were inside the basket that she carried on her back when she was going around doing that. Whenever it had become evening or nearly dusk, she went from one to another of the houses of that time, sort of sneaking after the people, when the Indians had nearly gone to bed. And sometime she would catch a small child who was still outside. She would quickly jump to grab it and put it into the basket that she carried.”
Suttles did not include the rest of Point’s narrative, stating only that the ogress spoke, danced, and sang under the possession of an evil spirit, and was ultimately roasted to death in her own firepit in a repetition of other basket ogress stories common to native traditions across British Columbia.
Interestingly, the [saysquts] and the [qulquleetl] were not the only wild people which the Musqueam believed haunted the rainforests of the Pacific Northwest. Later in his article, Suttles included a brief passage from the narration of Musqueam elder Andrew Charles, who, in 1960, described a strange event that occurred years earlier, during a hunting trip he undertook with two other men in the Gulf Islands which abut Vancouver Island’s eastern shore. While following a game trail through the forest, he and his fellow hunters heard a succession of peculiar noises in the distance, followed by the unmistakable sound of a Douglas fir crashing to the forest floor. The natives attributed the noises to creatures called [kwakwakwanutseels], which Andrew’s wife, Christine, translated as ‘The Little Choppers’.
“It’s supposed to be an animal that has the habit of knocking down dead trees,” Andrew explained. “It has only one leg and something in its hand to strike dead trees with. You could hear it. It’s gone out of existence. You don’t see them anymore.”
Tsawwassen Legends
South of traditional Musqueam territory, around the low-lying estuary of the South Arm of the Fraser River, from Richmond to Point Roberts, lies the ancestral heartland of the Tsawwassen First Nation, whose name means “land facing the sea.” Like their northerly neighbours, these Coast Salish people also believed that a race of wildmen dwelled in the forests beyond their villages. Scottish botanist Dr. Robert Brown, leader of the 1864 Vancouver Island Exploring Expedition, appears to have included some traditional Tsawwassen wildman stories in his 1873 book The Races of Mankind. One of these appears to be a Tsawwassen variation of the basket ogress legend so common among the indigenous traditions of British Columbia.
“Slal-acum-cul-cul-aith, the evil women of the Fraser River flats,” Brown wrote. “Once on a time – a long time ago – two bad… women lived on Fraser River. They are still remembered as Cul-cul-aith. They lived on young children, and travelled about from village to village, picking up their victims and pitching them into a basket woven of water-snakes, which they carried on their backs.”
Brown described how one of the evil women took her predations to a native village near Point Roberts. The men of this village routinely headed out to sea on fishing trips, and the women either occupied themselves hunting clams and berries, or napped in the longhouse, leaving their children to play unattended on the beach. “Cul-cul-aith came along,” Brown wrote, “and snatching up the children one after another, pitched them into her snake-basket, and before their cries could alarm the sleeping village on that sleepy summer afternoon, she had escaped into the woods with them, and lay concealed in its dark recesses until nightfall, when she lit a fire.”
The ogress proceeded to dig a pit and heat a quantity of stones. She intended to steam the children by placing them in the hole with the hot stones, pouring water over them, and covering the earthen oven with cedar bark mats. The children, having recovered from their fright, discerned the evil woman’s intentions and resolved to escape their hideous fates.
The ogress then ordered the children to shut their eyes and dance around her in a circle. The prisoners did as requested and began blindly capering around the monster. The littlest children, overwhelmed by fear and curiosity, frequently opened their eyes to see what the ogress was up to. When the hag perceived these infractions, she sealed the offending eyes with tree sap. The oldest children prudently kept their own peeking inconspicuous and infrequent, lulling the old monster into a sense of security, and sparing them from the handicaps imposed on their young companions.
At one point, the ogress stooped down to tend to the fire. The older children seized the opportunity and pushed her into her own pit, holding her there until she was reduced to embers. “But her evil spirit lived after her,” Brown concluded, “for out of her ashes, blown about by the wind, sprang the best of mosquitoes, which even now troubles mankind.”
Kwantlen Legends
East of Tsawwassen Country, from present-day Surrey to Fort Langley, lies the historic homeland of the Kwantlen, another Downriver Halkomelem nation with tales of wildwomen. Dr. Robert Brown included one of these stories in his aforementioned book – a sequel to the Tsawwassen legend of the Slalacum Culculaith.
Following the death of her kinswoman, the other ogress to terrorize the natives of the Fraser Delta went searching for human victims on the shores of Mud Bay, at the southern end of present-day Surrey. While prowling along the beach, she spotted a pair of young fishermen spearing salmon from their canoe and called out to them, begging them to ferry her to her home. Too terrified to deny her, the boys acceded to her demand and paddled to shore. On the pretext of keeping their passenger dry, they prepared a tall seat from cedar branches, which they piled to the gunwales. The ogress lay atop this bed, and the young men guided their craft out into the ocean.
When they reached deep water, the fishermen jerked the canoe violently, pitching their unwanted passenger into the sea. The monster clawed desperately for the canoe but was unable to reach it, and drowned in the waters of the Salish Sea.
“The Indian thinks that she yet lives at the bottom of the sea,” Brown wrote, “and devours drowned men. This story, in one form or another, is found among all the northern tribes, as far as the Queen Charlotte Islands, or further.” The botanist went on to explain how a certain Haida chief ordered one of his canoe mates to shoot him if it seemed inevitable that they would capsize, preferring the quick mercy of a musket ball to the appalling prospect of ingestion by the evil woman at the bottom of the sea.
The Cyclops of Fort Langley
Later in his book, Brown included another Kwantlen tale set in a native village near present-day Fort Langley, at the easternmost edge of the Greater Vancouver Area. The story revolves around a widow who lived with her three sons. One day, her eldest son decided to go on a vision quest – praying, fasting, and frequently washing himself with cold water in a remote corner of the wilderness in the hope of obtaining the guardianship of an inhuman spirit. He asked his mother for her permission to attempt this dangerous operation, and despite her fierce protests, eventually received her blessing. “So he went away and wandered through the woods,” Brown wrote, “until he came to a lonely lake surrounded by swampy marshes.”
There, the boy met a crane, who invited him to visit the home of his master on the other side of the lake. The boy acquiesced, and allowed the bird to ferry him across the water.
On the opposite shore stood a strange house, which the boy entered on the crane’s encouragement. No sooner had he passed the threshold, however, than the door slammed shut behind him. The boy peered into the darkness of the hut. Before him, he could faintly make out a hulking humanlike form looming in the shadows. As his eyes became accustomed to the gloom, the vision quester realized, with a thrill of horror, that the figure was glaring at him with a single eye set in the midst of its face. He had entered the home of Netsachen or Coquochem, a dreaded one-eyed giant.
The cyclops promptly killed the boy, tore out his heart, and placed it on a bench beside his body.
Back in the village, the boy’s mother knew that something terrible had befallen her son – a sentiment which was verified when the boy failed to return home from his vision quest within the customary period. Her second-eldest son resolved to find out what had become of his older brother, and received permission to do so from his reluctant grieving mother. Like his ill-fated predecessor, he found the lake in the swamp, was taken by the crane to the home of the cyclops, and had his heart removed and placed beside his body.
“Now the widow was very sorry at their not returning,” Brown wrote, “but still she could not oppose the wish of the last son when he wished to go after his two brothers. The same thing happened to him. He was ferried over the lake, and his heart taken out by the giant and laid beside his body on the bench where already his two brothers were.”
When her last son failed to return from his errand, the widow wept bitterly until her tears soaked the earth. Despite her grief, the woman had the presence of mind to clean up her tears lest some evil medicine man find them and use them to put a curse on her. Accordingly, she gathered some moss and wiped at the tear-soaked ground.
“Her eyes were very dim with weeping,” Brown wrote, “so that she could scarcely see, but as she looked down at the moss, she was astonished at seeing a little child lying where the moss was. So she took it up and laid it on her couch. Next day, he had grown up a big boy, and next day was a full-sized man. ‘Ah,’ said the people, ‘he is a great medicine man.’”
This unexpected gift did not assuage the woman’s grief, and she continued to weep for her lost sons. Seeing this, the ‘medicine child,’ as Brown’s informants called the mysterious creature, assured the widow that he would find her sons and bring them back. Donning a robe made from woodpecker skins, and arming himself with a sword made from elk horn, the medicine child set out into the forest on the trail of the three boys.
Like the widow’s sons, the medicine child found the swampy lake and accepted the crane’s invitation to visit his master’s home. When he reached the hut, however, he refused to go inside, insisting instead that the crane’s master meet him in the open air. The giant agreed to this, and made to exit his house. As he stooped in the doorway, the medicine child beheaded him with a single swing of his elk horn sword. He then entered the house, found the corpses of the three brothers, and returned their hearts to their chests, restoring them to life.
The boys returned home, to the inexpressible joy of their mother. Reunited once again, the family lived happily in their village on the Fraser River, accepting the ‘medicine son,’ as they called him, as one of their own. Over time, however, the family began to neglect the medicine son, making him despondent. One evening, when his mother forgot to call him for supper, the mystery boy sulkily curled up in his blanket and went to sleep. When the mother finally came to rouse him, she shook the blanket, and discovered that the boy had disappeared, leaving in his place “only the tuft of moss with the tears from whence he had sprung. Now they were all very sorry,” Brown concluded, “for they were no longer any better than other people; but he could not be recalled; the medicine-youth had disappeared as strangely as he came.”
The Legend of Siwash Rock
In the Strait of Georgia just off the northwestern end of Vancouver’s Stanley Park stands a striking outcropping known as Siwash Rock. According to Squamish legend, the Squamish being a Central Coast Salish nation endemic to northerly Howe Sound and the Squamish River, this unusual lithic formation is the petrified corpse of a man turned to stone in ancient times by demi-deities called Transformers.
On June 14th, 1939, a Vancouver pioneer named William Mackie told a story to Major James Skitt Matthews, the City of Vancouver’s first archivist, which hints at an old Squamish belief that Siwash Rock was once the abode of a wildman. This tale first appeared in Volume 5 of Matthews’ periodical Early Vancouver, and was reprinted in the archivist’s 1955 book Conversations with Khahtsahlano, 1932-1954.
William Mackie claimed that his uncle and namesake worked as a lumberjack at northerly Moodyville (now North Vancouver) on the northern shores of the Burrard Inlet, cutting masts for sailing ships. One day, the elder Mackie was obliged to pass by Siwash Rock in an Indian dugout canoe, accompanied by a young native boy. The boy fearfully urged the logger to steer clear of the landmark, telling him that it was home to slalacums, or dangerous preternatural entities like wildmen and two-headed serpents. Mackie paid no heed to the remonstrances, telling the boy that slalacums did not bother white men like him. This did little to reassure the boy, who dove to the bottom of the vessel and covered himself with a blanket, shivering with fear. Moved by his companion’s terror, Mackie called out to the rock in Chinook Jargon, telling the unseen spirits to leave them alone, and that there were only white men in the canoe. The pair passed Siwash Rock unmolested.
Several days later, back in Moodyville, the elder Mackie encountered his erstwhile canoe companion, who was accompanied by a native friend his age. The boy told his friend that the lumberjack had boldly defied the monster that haunted Siwash Rock, which he referred to as a “Big Teeth, Big Hair,” in Chinook Jargon.
The Rise of Vancouver
The City of Vancouver was born from the tangentia of the Fraser Canyon Gold Rush, a mad dash for the Lytton goldfields which began in 1858, and spread to northerly Cariboo Country in 1861. In order to serve the ever-growing throng of stampeders which trickled in from California, New York, Eastern Canada, and the British Isles, farmers and manufacturers began to set up shop along the Fraser Delta. Although initially concentrated in New Westminster, the springboard from which prospectors launched their British Columbian enterprises, some of these auxiliary industrialists began to plant their roots along the northerly Burrard Inlet, a deep natural harbour more accommodating to steamships, on which low-grade coal had been discovered. One such pioneer was Captain Edward Stamp, an English master mariner and veteran of the Crimean War, who, in 1867, established a sawmill that would come to be known as the Hastings Mill at the northeastern edge of what is now the district of Kitsilano. That same year, another English steamboat captain named John Deighton, nicknamed “Gassy Jack” for his talkative nature, established the Globe Saloon nearby, providing a much-needed watering hole for thirsty sailors and millworkers. A small settlement sprang up around the public house, whose residents dubbed it ‘Gastown’ in honour of the Globe Saloon’s garrulous proprietor. The town was officially surveyed in 1870 and christened Granville after the United Kingdom’s colonial secretary, Granville George Leveson-Gower, 2nd Earl Granville.
In the 1870s, Granville was selected as the terminus of the Canadian Pacific Railway, which would connect British Columbia with Canada’s eastern provinces. It was renamed Vancouver in honour of the British Royal Navy officer who charted the Burrard Inlet during his 1792 exploration of the Pacific Northwest. On June 13th, 1886, one year after the railway’s completion, and a mere two months after Vancouver’s incorporation as a city, a fire swept through the seaside settlement, destroying most of its wooden buildings. From the ashes of this Great Vancouver Fire, a modern city was built, which exploded in population throughout the late 19th and early 20th Centuries, initiating its transformation into the metropolis it is today.
Chief August Khatsahlano’s Account
As a general rule, historic wildman sightings typically occur in wilderness areas, far from the noise and activity of the big city. Despite this, Vancouver proper lays claim to a small handful of Sasquatch reports which lie scattered throughout classic Bigfoot literature. The oldest of these is the story of Squamish Chief August Jack Khatsahlano, a well-liked and respected figure who grew up during Vancouver’s early days, from whom a considerable portion of Squamish ethnographic information derives.
In a 1957 article for the Victoria Daily Times, journalist Larry Standwood included a brief description of a story that Chief Khatsahlano told 26-year-old Rene Dahinden, a Swiss-Canadian Sasquatch researcher who was planning an expedition into the Coast Mountains in search of the legendary wildman. Sometime in the 1880s, the chief claimed, a nine-foot-tall female Sasquatch was captured and put on display in New Westminster, then the main settlement in the region, which lies on the Fraser Delta just southeast of present-day Vancouver proper. “The old chief says he saw the creature in New Westminster where she was caged and exhibited ‘for 10 cents a peek,’” the journalist declared. “The captive, says the chief, was taken to Victoria for exhibition, but would not eat, and soon died.”
Despite some significant discrepancies, Khatsahlano’s tale strongly evokes the story of Jacko, a juvenile wildman supposedly captured by Canadian Pacific Railway workers in the summer of 1884 near the mouth of the Fraser Canyon, which was allegedly held in the New Westminster jail before being shipped to Victoria. Unlike Khatsahlano’s 9-foot-tall female Sasquatch, however, Jacko was said to be a male standing 4’7”. It must be mentioned that most researchers who have written on the Jacko story have dismissed it as a hoax perpetrated by mischievous British Columbian journalists, disregarding several eyewitness testimonies made by both natives and whites which attest to the truth of the story.
A Sasquatch in Stanley Park
If Chief Khatsahlano’s brief account is truly related to the Jacko story, then its New Westminster connection is merely incidental to the tale’s primary setting at the mouth of the Fraser Canyon. One classic Sasquatch sighting definitively set in Vancouver proper is said to have occurred in around 1925 in Stanley Park, a thousand-acre forested area which comprises the northwestern half of Vancouver’s Downtown Peninsula. The story was related by Dorothy Bailey, a woman from Sidney, BC, on Vancouver Island, and published in the May 7th, 1957 issue of Vancouver BC’s The Province. American cryptozoologist Chad Arment reproduced the account in his 2019 book The Historical Bigfoot.
“Back in 1925 or 1926,” Bailey told the press, “my mother had taken my sister and I to the wonderful playground in Stanley Park. We were playing near the edge of the playground by the bushes when she let out a scream and grabbed me to run to mother. In her description, she had seen a gorilla-like man standing up, towering over the bushes. It was standing still, watching us play. To this day, I have often wondered if anyone else may have seen the same thing. With so much talk about the Sasquatch lately, it makes me wonder if that could have been a Sasquatch, and if they inhabited Stanley Park years ago when it was a much denser forest than it is now.”
The Sasquatch of Richmond
Just south of Vancouver proper, cradled by the North and South Arms of the Fraser Delta, lies Lulu Island, home to the city of Richmond, British Columbia. Present-day Richmond is perhaps best known for boasting the highest concentration of ethnic Chinese per capita in all of Canada, its demographic makeup having earned it the epithet “North America’s most Asian city.” Back in 1966, however, the so-called ‘Garden City’ was a quaint municipality with a population of 50,000, whose populace had not yet been enlarged by the influx of Hong Kong immigrants who would pour into the Great Vancouver area in the 1980s and ‘90s. That summer, the rural outskirts of Richmond are said to have been visited by one of the slalacum whispered of in Tsawwassen campfire legend.
The series of sightings which comprise this story were collected by Canadian Sasquatch researchers John Willison Green and Rene Dahinden, and detailed in several British Columbian newspapers. Green’s coverage of the events is uncharacteristically inconsistent, conflicting with contemporary newspaper articles and deviating across his various writings. In his 1978 book Sasquatch: The Apes Among Us, he mistakenly dated the sightings to 1969.
According to Green in his 1973 book The Sasquatch File, brothers Don and Bob Gilmore, who owned a farm on the Number 8 Road which runs up the eastern end of Lulu Island, “noticed that something in a pine bog adjoining a distant field was scaring their cattle, so that they would stampede up towards the barn.” The brothers found this odd, as their cattle had spent their lives on the open range, and had never previously retreated to the farmyard on account of wild animals.
On July 15th, while shingling the farmhouse roof with his hired hand, Hank Porst, Don heard the familiar rumble of beating hooves and stood up to investigate. To his astonishment, he found that his cattle were being chased by a dark hairy animal. According to an article in the July 23rd, 1966 issue of the Vancouver Sun, the farmer claimed that the animal “went on all fours like a bear.”
The next day, Bob discovered that a section of barbed wire fence, which ran through the aforementioned pine bog about a half mile from the farmhouse, had been ripped two feet out of the ground and tossed aside. While mending the fence, either he or Don heard the telltale roll of stampeding cattle and stepped out into the open to see what was causing the commotion. The farmer saw a hairy black figure chasing the cows “on all twos,” as Green recorded it.
About a week later, on July 21st, 1966, a 35-year-old English-Canadian artist named John Osborne, while sitting on an embankment on either the Number 5 or Number 3 Road closer to town, sketching the landscape, spotted a brown, “slim, seven-foot, hair-covered manlike” creature standing in a patch of brush. “It wasn’t apelike,” he told a reporter for the Vancouver Sun. It was like a big hairy man, about six feet eight to seven feet tall.” The artist, who had never heard the legend of the Sasquatch, proceeded to sketch the creature, which he observed for about fifteen seconds from a distance of about 75 feet, before it walked back into the bush. His drawing was published in the July 22nd, 1966 issue of the Vancouver Sun.
Later that same night, a woman named Darlene Leaf, who was babysitting at her neighbour’s house at westerly Number 2 Road, which now cuts through the heart of Richmond, “heard the horses making a great fuss in the barn about 10 p.m.” Although the babysitter neglected to investigate the excitement, she encountered what she assumed was the source of it several hours later, after her charges’ parents had returned home. While walking back to her own residence, she spotted the head and shoulders of a manlike figure looming from behind a row of 6-foot-tall raspberry bushes.
The following morning, a Richmond store owner named John McKernan was driving along the banks of the Fraser River, perhaps on what is now River Road, when he saw a hairy giant stride on two legs across a perpendicular dirt road, apparently heading in the direction of a farm. “It came out from behind a tree and disappeared in some bushes,” Green wrote, “beside a large drainage ditch.” Green and Dahinden, who were in the Richmond area investigating the reports of Leaf, Osborne, and the Gimore brothers, interviewed McKernan that day, and examined the scene of his sighting. Although they failed to locate any tracks, they found evidence of something large having bedded down in some nearby bushes.
Green included his own analysis of the July 1966 Richmond sightings in Sasquatch: The Apes Among Us, writing, “The reports suggest that the thing had probably crossed to the north side of the river onto the island from a large bog on the south shore, where a fair variety of wildlife is still reported to live, although it certainly wouldn’t harbor a sasquatch population. It had apparently hung around in a similar bog near the farm for a few days, then gone exploring farther west… [finally heading] back to where it had come from.”
The Sasquatch of White Rock
Unbeknownst to Green and Dahinden at the time, July 1966 bore witness to another Sasquatch sighting in the nearby city of White Rock, located a short distance to the southeast, just south of Surrey. Dahinden learned of the event three years later and relayed it to Green, who published a brief description of it in The Sasquatch File.
According to Green, a man named Letoul, who lived in a small house built against a steep bank on the outskirts of White Rock, claimed that an enormous man covered with light-coloured hair walked up the long trail to his home one moonlit night. The creature loitered about the house for some time before climbing up a ladder onto the roof, and proceeding up the hill against which the house was built. Letoul reported the incident to the RCMP, who conducted a fruitless investigation of his property. Green claimed that by the time he got around to investigating the sighting, the RCMP report, which included a sketch of the creature that Letoul had witnessed, had been destroyed.
Classic Sasquatch Stories from Pitt Lake
If you drive half an hour north of Maple Ridge, British Columbia, a city at the northeastern edge of the Great Vancouver Area, you’ll leave the lush farmland of the Fraser Valley for a gloomy wooded corridor drawing you into the Coast Mountains. The road takes you to the southern terminus of Pitt Lake, a large U-shaped body of water sandwiched between the Coquitlam and Garibaldi Mountains. With the exception of its southern end, the lonely shores of this glacial lake are silent and desolate, accessible only by boat and float plane.
For over a century, Pitt Lake has earned itself a reputation as a place of mystery. It is the setting of one of Canada’s greatest lost treasure legends – a tale of murder, execution, and a secret golden bonanza known as Slumach’s Lost Mine. It is said to be home to a species of mysterious black alligator, referred to in cryptozoology books as the Pitt Lake Lizard. And it is the site of several disturbing unsolved disappearances.
The Timber Giants of Katzie Tradition
Another mystery enshrouding this remote sylvan haunt is the alarming number of wildman reports made by its visitors. The oldest of such stories are the traditional tales of the Katzie, a division of the Central Coast Salish Downriver Halkomelem endemic to Pitt Lake; its outflow, Pitt River; and nearby Pitt Meadows. In his 1955 book The Faith of a Coast Salish Indian, Canadian anthropologist Diamond Jenness explained that an entity called the ‘timber giant’ was one of at least four mythical creatures in which the Katzie believed, the other three being the two-headed snake, the lightning snake, and the warrior spirit.
“There are two timber giants,” Jenness wrote, “[suh-sk’uhts, and she-yeh’ya]. Anyone might meet the former, even a white man, but he would derive no benefit from the encounter, since [suh-sk’uhts] was an ordinary creature unable to confer any power. Only a man who purified himself, on the other hand, ever met [she-yeh’ya], who then became his guardian spirit and gave him great physical strength. [She-yeh’ya] always carried a small stick, one stroke of which would topple down a small tree, three strokes the biggest tree in the forest.”
The she-yeh’ya’s tree-felling proclivity strongly evokes the kwakwakwanutseels, or ‘Little Choppers,’ described by anthropologist Wayne Suttles’ Musqueam informants Andrew and Christine Charles, who were said to have a habit of knocking down dead trees. Interestingly, when Suttles asked the Charles couple their opinion of the Katzie she-yeh’ya, they stated that the creature was known as the s-yay-lheh in their own dialect, and that the Musqueam regarded it as “some kind of monkey or something.”
Later in his 1955 book, Diamond Jenness related a story told to him in 1936 by a Katzie shaman named Old Pierre, who lived near the village of Port Hammond, British Columbia – now a suburb of Maple Ridge which borders the Fraser River. This tale is about a man named Slah’mawkw, who obtained the guardian spirit of the she-yeh’ya. “He could strip apart the two prongs of an elk skull that ten strong youths, five pulling on each side, could not separate,” the anthropologist wrote. On one occasion, Slah’mawkw’s brother used a long pole to tear a strip of bark off a fir tree, and proposed that the two of them return the following day to collect the remainder of the bark before another native in need of firewood could avail himself of his work. “Without a word,” Jeness wrote, “[Slah’mawkw] slapped the trunk of the tree and shook it; all the bark to the very summit broke loose and tumbled down.”
American anthropologist Wayne P. Suttles commented upon Jenness’ work with the Katzie in an article entitled ‘On the Cultural Track of the Sasquatch,’ published in his 1987 anthology Coast Salish Essays. “It is not clear in what sense [suh-sk’uhts] is ‘an ordinary creature,’” Suttles wrote. “Other creatures that Old Pierre said might become guardian spirits include a number of mammals, birds, fishes, reptiles, and even insects, as well as inanimate things, all of which are ‘real’ to Europeans, and also a number of beings that are ‘mythical’ to Europeans; these last include beings that have human form, but live far away where they are encountered by the wandering ‘vitality’ of the power seeker… Perhaps what made the [suh-sk’uhts] ordinary to Old Pieere was its being human in attributes, and nearby…”
Suttles went on to describe how he worked with Old Pierre’s son, Simon Pierre, in 1952, and obtained different information about the wildman of Katzie tradition than Jenness had learned from Pierre senior. In addition to the suh-sk’uhts, and the she-yeh’ya, Simon described two more humanlike monsters called the steel-u’t and the thul-muh-kwus, which he claimed were very similar to the suh-sk’uhts. All four creatures had the ability to disappear into thin air.
“Once up on Pitt Lake,” Suttles wrote, “an old woman had a sturgeon hanging in front of her house; she saw a [suh-sk’uhts] wading toward it, and fired a rifle into the water ahead of him – and he was gone. Simon described the [she-yeh’ya] as his father had, as a creature that knocks down trees, and added that it was ‘the meanest of them all.” Simon also told Suttles that Slumach, the old Katzie Indian responsible for the tale of lost gold near Pitt Lake, had discovered his legendary bonanza after obtaining the guardianship of a she-yeh’ya.
“Simon also knew of the cannibal ogress, called [kulkahleet],” Suttles continued. “She caught children and took them home in a basket and ate them.” Pierre told the anthropologist that he had only heard of two such beings in existence. One of them was said to have been overpowered by native warriors at what is now Musqueam Village, at the southwestern end Vancouver’s Point Grey peninsula, and drowned in the Strait of Georgia. Simon described the creature as a ‘spirit,’ a word which few of Suttles’ Katzie informants applied to their legendary wildmen, and declared that it could vanish into thin air like the other manlike monsters of Katzie tradition.
Throughout the late 19th and 20th Centuries, untold prospectors wandered into the mountains beyond Pitt Lake in search of Slumach’s lost gold and never returned. While many of these gold-seekers likely succumbed to the implacable forces of nature which reign supreme in that rugged stretch of west coast wilderness, there is speculation that some of those who disappeared near Pitt Lake were captured or killed by the wildmen whom Katzie legend says haunt the slopes.
Rodgers and Cartwright’s Sighting
Speculation notwithstanding, the first white men to catch a glimpse of the Pitt Lake wildman and live to document their tale were a stockbroker named Cartwright – a bachelor known to his friends as ‘Cartie’, who ran an office on Vancouver’s Dunsmuir Street with his business partner, Mr. Crickmere – and an unnamed witness with a passion for geology.
In 1933, Cartwight, an experienced outdoorsman, organized an eight-man party to investigate rumours of an abandoned mine at the head of Pitt Lake. Among the group were the unnamed witness and his wife. One weekend, the party piled into Cartwright’s cabin cruiser motorboat and proceeded up the lonely lake.
The unnamed witness described the experience in a letter dated December 15th, 1968, sent to John Rodgers, a columnist for the Vancouver Sun. Rodgers, in turn, gave a copy of the letter to Canadian Sasquatch researcher John Willison Green who reproduced it in his 1970 book Year of the Sasquatch. “In the morning,” Rodgers’ informant wrote, “we left the rest of the party to amuse themselves for the day, and Cartie and I climbed some fifteen hundred feet and rested at the edge of a small plateau to eat our lunch. We had our good haversacks and small hammers but were otherwise unarmed.
“A movement behind a thicket some quarter mile away caught my eye, and I said, ‘Cartie, there is something down there.’ He looked, and then asked for the field glasses.
“We both thought it was a black bear feeding on berries, then he exclaimed, ‘Here, look at its face!’ Through the glasses, it was quite plain – a human face on a fur-clad body.
“‘What the hell,’ I said, ‘he must be a hermit of some kind, but look at the size of him.’
“Cartie replied, ‘wait until he leaves and let us go down and look at the tracks.’
“So we waited. I don’t think the creature saw us, though he or she may have sensed us, as presently it went away across the plateau and vanished among the rocks. We went down after a suitable interval and examined the tracks, which were quite distinct. Cartie looked pretty grim and said, ‘Let’s go back. What you have just seen is a Susquatch; don’t mention this to anyone, not even to your wife. No one will believe you, you will just be laughed at and you will have a miserable time of it! Just forget the whole thing and keep quiet.’
“So I did, and I have, until now.”
In his 1981 book Sasquatch: The Apes Among Us, Green revealed that Rodgers’ informant, in a later letter addressed to himself, explained that the tracks the creature left in the sparse alpine dirt seemed to be large human footprints bereft of claws, and that the berries it had been eating were a type of Oregon grape – tart blue fruits also known as barberries, which are common in the Pacific Northwest. When it walked, the creature “shuffled off on two feet, without haste.”
Ron and Loren Welch’s Encounter
The next major Pitt Lake sighting which Green included in his books took place in June 1965, and was unearthed by a 1967 inquiry made by the B.C. Provincial Museum. While prospecting at an elevation of about 4,000 feet in the mountains northwest of Pitt Lake, two brothers came across fresh footprints in the snow. Although John Green, who covered their discovery in various of his books, chose to keep them anonymous in order to preserve their professional reputations, Irish-American cryptozoologist Peter Byrne identified the siblings as Ron and Loren Welch, whose job was to seek out minerals on behalf of a large mining company.
“The prints were enormous,” Green wrote, “twice as long as their own boots, and as wide as a boot is long.” In another of his books, the cryptozoologist clarified that the tracks were about 24 inches long and 12 inches wide at the base of the toes. “They were perfectly flat,” he continued, “and showed four clear toe impressions, with the big toe on the inside of the foot like a man’s. The stride was double a man’s stride. Snow in the bottom of the prints was tinted pink.”
In the midst of the tracks were three parallel lines in the snow, which seemed to indicate that the maker of the tracks had been dragging or pushing something. Twin lines on either side of the tracks were deep and narrow, while a solitary line which ran between the footprints was shallow and wide. Keenly aware of the exceptionality of this discovery, one of the brothers produced a pen and paper and made a sketch of the weird prints.
The brothers then followed the tracks up a valley to a frozen alpine lake. The prints proceeded across the lake to a large hole in the ice, which appeared to have been made deliberately.
Unsure of what to make of the tracks, the brothers began to skirt the edge of the lake. Suddenly, at around noon, they became aware of a colossal figure standing at the edge of the forest, watching them from the other side of the lake. The mysterious observer appeared to be covered with auburn hair, which lightened to a yellow hue around the hands. According to Peter Byrne, the creature was actually “a uniform dark brown, almost black”. It had a humanlike head, massive square shoulders, and long dangling forearms with hands that reminded the prospectors of canoe paddles. Its hair seemed to be longer on its head and shorter on its arms. The creature swayed from side to side as it watched the prospectors, as if shifting its weight from one foot to the other, its arms dangling loosely at its sides. Judging from the nearby trees, the prospectors estimated that the creature measured between ten and fourteen feet in height. Despite its imposing size, the creature did not seem to pose an immediate threat, and so the unarmed prospectors decided to sit down to enjoy a chocolate bar and a cigarette, content to study their strange observer from a distance. One of the brothers took the opportunity to sketch the figure’s outline on the same sheet of paper on which he drew the footprints. When they finished their refreshments, the Welch brothers decided to continue on their journey, leaving the huge creature in its static position at the edge of the trees.
The following day, the prospectors discovered two pairs of humanlike tracks, one eighteen inches long, and the other ten inches long, in the hard compact snow of a neighbouring plateau. Like the pair of tracks they had come across the previous day, the larger of these two prints led to a small lake which had a large hole deliberately punched through its centre.
Several days later, the brothers returned to the scenes of their discoveries by helicopter, accompanied by a reporter for the Vancouver Sun. After photographing the large prints they had first discovered, which were badly melted, they came across another fresher pair of tracks which led to the edge of a cliff.
In his commentary on the strange discoveries, John Green wrote, “Plainly, the creature they saw had dragged some big object to the lake, and presumably, since no such object was in sight, it had dumped it through the hole, but there is no clue as to what the object may have been… There is an additional possibility that the things that made the tracks were entering the water through the holes they had made in the ice.” Green went on to explain that he and his fellow Sasquatch researcher, Swiss-Canadian cryptozoologist Rene Dahinden, flew over the mountains beyond Pitt Lake in a bush plane shortly after they learned the brothers’ tale, but were unable to discover any holes in the ice of alpine lakes. The researchers took this as an indication that whatever operation had been conducted by the makers of the tracks was not a common practice among the wildmen of Pitt Lake. Peter Byrne, conversely, likened the holes in the ice described by the Welch brothers to a similar anomaly discovered by his organization, the International Wildlife Conservation Society, in Elbow Lake, northern Washington, in 1971.
The Pitt Lake Giant
The story of the Welch brothers inspired cryptozoologists Loren Coleman and Patrick Huygue to designate the ‘Pitt Lake Giant,’ as they called it, a distinct subspecies of North American wildman in their 1999 book The Field Guide to Bigfoot, Yeti, and Other Mystery Primates Worldwide. They classified this creature as a member of the ‘True Giant’ family, a taxonomic category of their own devising, whose constituents are described as being generally 10 to 20 feet tall, with lean bodies, and covered with reddish brown or dark hair that is longer on the head and thinner on the arms. Like the Pitt Lake Giant, members of the ‘True Giant’ family were said to leave footprints with four visible toes. Other members of this class which appear in Coleman and Huygue’s book are Grendel, the monstrous antagonist of the Dark Age Saxon epic Beowulf, which made its home in a Scandinavian swamp; the legendary Am Fear Liath Mor, or Big Grey Man, said to haunt the misty slopes and passes of Scotland’s second highest mountain, Ben MacDhui [ben mcdoi]; the Tano Giant, supposed to dwell in the mountains of central Ghana; the Nyalmo, which abides in the Himalayas of northern Nepal; and the Jimbra and Tjangara, which are said to inhabit the remote outback of western and southern Australia.
Classic Sasquatch Stories from Squamish
If you drive north of Vancouver, across the Lion’s Gate Bridge, through the City of North Vancouver, beyond Horseshoe Bay, you’ll come to the scenic Sea-to-Sky Highway, which runs along the eastern shores of Howe Sound. At the head of this enchanting fjord, where the Squamish River drains into the sea, lies the quaint town of Squamish, British Columbia, a popular stopping place for skiers and snowboards on their way to the white slopes of Whistler. This mountain town is a popular recreational destination in its own right, being home to an imposing granite cliff known as the Stawamus Chief, renowned by rock climbers the world over, and boasting what are regarded as some of the best mountain bike trails in the world.
For millennia, the head of Howe Sound has served as the hub of the Squamish nation, a division of the Central Coast Salish, whose ancestral territory encompasses Howe Sound, the watershed of the Squamish River, and much of the Burrard Inlet. Like other Coast Salish nations, these people have traditional stories about mysterious wildmen that lurked in the surrounding rainforest – old campfire tales that appear to have been affirmed by a handful of chilling encounters made throughout the 20th Century. In this piece, we will uncover classic Sasquatch stories from Squamish.
Sa’skats
The oldest ethnographic work on the traditional tales of the Squamish appears in the 1895 German-language book Indian Myths and Legends from the North Pacific Coast of America, written by German-American anthropologist Franz Boas, whom some call the ‘Father of American Anthropology.’ Under a chapter entitled ‘Legends of the Squamish,’ Boas included a story set at the southern end of Lillooet Lake, in the traditional domain of an Interior Salish people called the Lillooet. In this story, a newly-bereaved widower set out into the wilderness on a mystical quest, hoping to retrieve the soul of his wife from the land of the dead. This ultimately fruitless errand required him to sneak past several spiritually powerful creatures, aided by a magic substance which he obtained from a pelican. These preternatural guardians included the double-headed serpent, which Boas’ informants called the Stl’alekam Atlke, a mysterious bird called a Tletsca Wul, and a giant called Sa’skats, who devoured any humans who tried to pass his lair. In a footnote in their 2006 translation of Boas’ book, Canadian ethnographers Randy Bouchard and Dorothy Kennedy identified this creature as the Sasquatch of Upriver Halkomelem tradition.
The Basket Ogress
Another of Boas’ stories is a Squamish variation of the basket ogress legend common to folk traditions throughout the Pacific Northwest. A nearly identical story appears in English-Canadian ethnologist Charles Hill-Tout’s 1900 treatise on the Squamish. Squamish elder Louis Miranda told another iteration of this tale to Dutch linguist Aert H. Kuipers, who included it in his 1967 book on the Squamish language. Miranda’s story was reproduced in the 2008 anthology Salish Myths and Legends.
One day, the story goes, a group of children of various ages were swimming and playing in some shallow water on a beach. The eldest of these children was a woodcarver named Tetke’tsen, who sat facing the water, with his back to the forest, whittling a piece of wood.
While the children were engrossed with their amusement, a huge old ogress named Qalqalil (also spelled “Ka’k’laitl”) emerged from the woods and crept towards them, carrying a large basket on her back (in one version of the story, this basket was made from woven snakes). Silent and stealthy, she snuck up behind Tetke’tsen, scooped him up in her huge arms, and tossed him into her basket.
In the version of the story recorded by Kuipers, Qalqalil found the children alone in a Squamish house, their parents having left to fish and forage.
After capturing Tetke’tsen, the ogress snatched the rest of the children one by one and threw them into the pack with the carver, luring some of the children with strips of cedar bark which she pretended were pieces of dried salmon. When the last of the children was stowed away, Qalqalil set off through the woods for her lair.
Unbeknownst to his kidnapper, Tetke’tsen still carried the knife with which he had been carving. While the ogress was trudging up the forest trail, he used his blade to slice a hole in the bottom of the basket, out of which he helped the littlest children to slip. Each time a child fell from the basket and hit the forest floor with a thud, the ogress stopped and asked what the noise was. Each time, the carver convinced her that the thudding was simply the sound of her own heels hitting the ground.
In time, Qalqalil reached her lair and dumped the remaining children from her basket. After building a huge fire, on which she placed a number of large stones, she set about preparing a quantity of tar, with which she planned to glue the children’s eyes shut. Correctly ascertaining her intention, Tetke’tsen urged the other children to screw their eyes shut as tightly as they could when the tar was applied so that as little as possible would stick to their eyelids and lashes. Some of those who followed his directions were afterwards able to open their eyes a crack, while the rest were rendered temporarily blind.
When she was convinced she had sealed the eyes of the children, the ogress painted herself and began to dance around her fire in preparation for her impending meal. Tetke’tsen complimented Qalqalil, whom he endearingly referred to as his ‘grandmother’, on her dancing ability, and urged her to caper a little closer to the children. The ogress acquiesced. When she was within arm’s length, the carver pushed the monster onto the fire, setting her hair ablaze. Shrieking, the ogress demanded that the carver help her out of the flames. Tetke’tsen grabbed a stick and extended them towards the ogress as if beseeching her to grab hold of it. Instead of pulling the monster from the fire, however, he used the stick to prevent her from escaping the flames, protesting all the while that she was too heavy to haul out.
While Tetke’tsen was struggling to keep the ogress on the pyre, the rest of the children found some grease nearby and used it to wash the tar from their eyes. When they were able to see clearly again, they helped the carver pile wood onto the fire, and soon the ogress was reduced to ashes, which transformed into snowbirds as they scattered in the wind. In some versions of the story, the snowbirds are lice that flew from the ogress’s burning hair. Free at last, Tetke’tsen took the children back home to their parents, who had given them up for dead.
The Ogress of Deeks Creek
Major J.S. Matthews, the first archivist of the City of Vancouver, included a note on the Squamish belief in the basket ogress in the 1935 issue of his publication Early Vancouver. Matthews received this information from Captain Charles Cates Jr., a tugboat captain and the son of a prominent pioneer of what would become North Vancouver, who would go on to serve on several anthropological and historical committees, be made an honorary Squamish chief, and serve as the mayor of North Vancouver.
According to Matthews, Deeks Creek, a waterway which empties into the eastern end of Howe Sound just north of Lions Bay, was said to have once been home to an ogress who ate children, who carried her prisoners off in a basket woven from snake skins. “Then one day, when she had a little boy in her basket,” Cates told Matthews, “the sun got hot and the snake skins stretched, and the little boy in it squeezed out and ran home and told the people.” Cates’ tale was reiterated by Squamish Chief August Jack Khahtsahlano, who told Matthews that the Squamish regarded Deeks Creek as an evil place that was to be avoided.
The Wild People
The basket ogress is not the only wild person that appears in traditional Squamish tales. In his 1900 book, Hill-Tout included an old campfire story which purports to explain the origin of forest dwellers called Smai’letl, or Wild People. A succinct introduction to these legendary beings appears in the Abstract of a 2007 paper written by Squamish archaeologist Dr. Rudy Reimer Yumks. “The native peoples who inhabit the Pacific Northwest Coast… possess oral traditions concerning cryptozoology, including the ‘wild people’ also known as Sasquatch or Bigfoot,” Reimer wrote. “For the Squamish Nation, these are Wild People, or ‘Smaylilh’. Squamish historical accounts indicate that these wild People and humans are, or once were, related. This common ancestry indicates long-standing co-habitation within Squamish territory.”
The Wild People origin story related by Hill-Tout seems to be a Squamish variation of a werewolf legend shared by the neighbouring Stahlo and the northerly and unrelated Dogrib – the canine version of which Hill-Tout interestingly included later in his book.
In this tale, the maiden daughter of a Squamish chief was regularly visited in the night by a mysterious male stranger, who took pains to conceal his identity in the darkness. After several of these nocturnal visitations, the girl found herself pregnant, to her father’s mortification. Desperate to learn the identity of this mysterious intruder, the girl put paint on her hands before she went to sleep, and smeared it on the mystery man’s back when he came to her that night.
The following morning, the girl discovered her paint on the back of her father’s slave, who routinely slept at the foot of her bed every night. When the chief learned that his slave had impregnated his daughter, he took the two of them into his canoe and paddled downriver until he reached a canyon with sheer walls. In his 2007 paper, Reimer Yumks indirectly identified this chasm as a section of Mill Creek, which drains into Howe Sound about seven kilometres southwest of Squamish, running by the bygone Woodfibre Pulp Mill. There, on a shelf of rock, the chief left the lovers to die.
Against all odds, the star-crossed couple managed to scale the cliff on which they had been abandoned and wandered into the forest above. After days of weary travelling through the mountains, they came to an inland lake, where they decided to settle.
Over the years, the princess and the slave raised a large family on the shores of the wooded lake. Their children intermarried, spawning a large tribe of tall men who lived without tools, and clad themselves in undressed furs, yet maintained use of the Squamish language. By dint of their primitive lifestyles, these people became great hunters, and developed senses as keen as wild animals. The Squamish who encountered these savages in the wilderness referred to them as the ‘Wild People.’
The Mountain Tribe Near Sechelt
Kuipers reproduced this story in his 1967 linguiography, and added two more tales of encounters with the Wild People related by his Squamish informant, elder Louie Miranda. One of the tales was the account of the Miranda’s great-great uncle, who hailed from the southwesterly seaside community of Sechelt, which lies on British Columbia’s Sunshine Coast. When his wife died, the man fell into a deep depression which could only be mitigated by daytrips into the wilderness. In the style of Squamish medicine men and vision questers, the uncle made a habit of washing himself frequently in cold spring water during his wilderness escapades, which the Squamish believed purified the spirit. Each of his successive adventures brought him ever deeper into the wilderness. “He used to come down when darkness fell,” Miranda said, “but finally it got so that he would camp out in the mountains and stay away for long periods.”
One day, the uncle’s wanderings carried him to an alpine lake. Night had already fallen by the time he reached this body of water, and so he camped on the lakeshore. The following morning, he awoke to see the telltale plume of campfire smoke rising from the opposite shore. Although he couldn’t make out any human figures on the other side of the lake, he spotted a herd of mountain goats fleeing for their lives, as if pursued by a predator. This was accompanied by the distant sound of what he first took to be the barking of dogs. Assuming that the person on the opposite shore was a native hunter, the uncle made his way around the lake, determined to greet his mysterious neighbour.
“When he came close,” Miranda said, “what he had kept for dogs came at him, and it turned out to be wolves. Presently, their master appeared – a giant, who quieted his pack…”
The uncle boldly approached the huge hunter who, as if to impress an idea of his strength upon the newcomer, drew his massive bow and shot an arrow clean through a nearby tree. Not to be outdone, the uncle selected a rotten stump, drew his own bow, and shot an arrow through the decayed wood. Apparently pleased with this display, the giant greeted the uncle and identified himself as one of the Wild People. The giant then invited the uncle to accompany him to his home in the mountains, which offer the hunter accepted.
The giant’s village proved to be a populous community, whose inhabitants treated their guest with all courtesy. When the uncle announced his intention to return to his own home, the giants gifted him an enormous bundle of mountain goat skins, which was far too heavy for him to carry. His giant friend then hauled the bundle to the lake on which the two of them had met and laid it by the shore, telling the uncle that he would go no further.
For weeks, the uncle made regular trips from the alpine lake to Sechelt, carrying manageable quantities of mountain goat skins back with him on every journey. His friends repeatedly inquired into the source of his treasure, but the uncle never told them where the skins came from. “On his deathbed, at last,” Miranda concluded, “he told about the tribe he had seen up in the mountains. After his death, people would go and look for the tribe he had told about, but no one discovered them, and afterwards they stopped looking for them.”
A Midnight Marauder
Later in his book, Kuipers included an English translation of another wildman story told to him by a Squamish informant. According to this tale, a man from the mouth of the Squamish River decided to go on a hunting trip. He paddled southwest to the mouth of Mill Creek and headed up into the mountains. When night fell, he made camp, kindled a fire, and lay down to sleep.
That night, long after the fire had died out, the man was awaked by the sound of someone climbing up the slope below him. His heart pounding in his throat, the hunter grabbed his rifle and peered into the darkness, his surroundings faintly illuminated by the light of the moon. Soon, a hulking manlike figure climbed over the crest and stared at the prone hunter, who kept still as stone. The figure backed up, as if reluctant to be seen, and melted into the darkness. Moments later, the same mysterious visitor emerged from the gloom and slunk stealthily towards the hunter in a predatory manner. Terrified, the hunter leveled his rifle at the intruder and shot it in the belly, sending it tumbling backward over the precipice with a shriek. For some time, the hunter could hear the wounded figure groaning from the spot at which its body came to rest. Then the groaning ceased, and all was quiet again.
The hunter wasted no time in packing his gear, descending the mountain, and canoeing back to his village. In the ensuing days, he made inquiries at all the neighbouring reserves, asking whether any natives had failed to return from their hunting trips recently, but could find no such reports.
“After a considerable time had passed,” the informant said in Squamish, “he went back to have a look at the spot where he had camped. Then he went down to what he judged to be the place from where the apparition had come. He reached the bottom and saw a skeleton there. It was, indeed, a human being, except that the bones were of very large dimensions: the shinbone reached up to his hip when he measured it. It must have been an enormous man.”
The Sasquatch of Anvil Island
No mere smoky tales bandied about Squamish longhouses, reports of wildman encounters in the Howe Sound area were made regularly throughout the 20th Century. In his 1978 book Sasquatch: The Apes Among Us, Canadian Bigfoot researcher John Willison Green briefly alluded to a story told to him and his fellow researcher Rene Dahinden by the aforementioned Captain Charles Cates Jr., who served at the time as the mayor of North Vancouver. “Charles Cates had grown up as a neighbour of the Indians on a North Vancouver reserve,” Green wrote. “He told us that a friend of his had been one of a group of people camped on Anvil Island in Howe Sound when a sasquatch put its head into their tent at night.” Anvil Island, incidentally, lies a mere 3.5 kilometres west of the mouth of Deeks Creek, which the Squamish said was once the domain of a basket ogress.
In 1957, three years prior to his death, Cates wrote Green a brief letter stating that the Squamish name for the wildman sounded somewhat like ‘Smy-a-likh’. “Their stories always seem to have the same description as to their physical appearance,” he wrote, “and also the Indians did not use the existence of these creatures to tell any fantastic tales about them. They merely refer to them by name, adding that they are quite shy and will do no harm, the reference always being quite casual. Also, I knew two or three old men who said that in their youth they had seen the creatures in various parts of the coast, as apparently they were quite plentiful years ago.”
Mountain Tracks Near Squamish
In his 1973 book The Sasquatch File, John Green alluded to the mysterious tracks of a two-legged animal discovered by a Vancouver man north of Squamish in the winter of 1964. According to Rene Dahinden, who interviewed the witness, the man claimed that the tracks were eighteen inches long.
Green made brief mention of a similar wildman sign discovered in March 1969 in his 1970 book Year of the Sasquatch, and his 1973 book On the Track of Sasquatch. “A man checking his summer cabin 6,000 feet up on a mountain near Squamish, B.C.,” he wrote, “found bipedal tracks taking six foot strides in deep snow. The feet were bare and had five toes.” In The Sasquatch File, Green placed these tracks at a tiny body of water called Lewis Lake, located in the Squamish-Cheakamus Divide mountain range between the Cheakamus and Squamish Rivers, just west of the Cheakamus Canyon Climbing Site.
The next month, on April 6th, 1969, trailblazers scouting a potential ski route in the Callaghan Valley west of Whistler discovered a third pair of five-toed humanlike tracks in the snow, which stretched across the slope of Powder Mountain for several miles. The footprints measured 14 inches in length, but indicated a relatively short stride length of between 30 and 34 inches. The prints were first discovered by Ted Osborn, one of the project leaders, and examined thoroughly by Osborn’s partner, Jack Wilson of North Vancouver. Wilson told Green and Dahinden that whatever made the tracks appeared to stop on occasion to strip spruce buds off the trees, presumably to eat them. As Green put it in Year of the Sasquatch, “every time the tracks passed one of the scattered spruce trees, all the new buds were stripped off the tree to a height of five or six feet on the side where the tracks passed, and husks from spruce buds were in the bottoms of all the tracks.”
Two years later, in May 1971, a man named G. Conway, who hailed from the city of Delta, BC, south of Richmond, wrote a letter to John Green in which he claimed to have found huge humanlike tracks in a sandbar in the Squamish Valley, more than 30 miles up a logging road. “They were 14 inches long,” Green wrote, “and looked like the photos of Sasquatch tracks, but were fairly old.”
Sasquatch Carrying a Fish
In his various books, Green included a transcript of an interview he conducted in January 1970, of a highway maintenance foreman who claimed to have spotted an unusual animal several days earlier, while driving on the B.C. Highway 99 about eighteen miles north of Squamish. The encounter took place on January 7th, 1970, at about 2:30 in the afternoon.
“I came around a slight curve in the road,” the foreman told Green, “and there was this animal on all fours facing away from me, a large hairy animal. I thought at first it was a bear. As I drew closer, it turned sideways, and it got up on its hind legs and ran across the road in an upright position. I knew then it was definitely not a bear, it was a humanlike animal, but a monkey-type appearance.”
The foreman told Green that the creature stood at least seven feet tall, had a sturdy build, appeared to weigh about 250 pounds, and possessed humanlike proportions, with the exception of an imperceptible neck and a “very prominent stomach.” Its body was covered with shaggy four-inch-long reddish-brown fur, while its head bore dark brown hair that was much shorter than the hair on its body. Its face was flat and apparently hairless, and lighter in colour than the hair on the head and body. The creature looked directly at the foreman as it strode quickly across the road, its face bearing an expression of either terror or rage, which startled the construction worker. Intriguingly, the witness noted that the creature clutched a 10-inch-long fish in a single hairy fist.
“Its hands swung along when it was running across the road,” the foreman elaborated, “and when it was climbing the bank, it did use its left hand a couple of times. It bent slightly forward like a man would do, and assisted itself or balanced itself up the incline with its left hand, still holding the fish in its right hand.”
Irish-American Sasquatch researcher Peter Byrne investigated this very same sighting, and published his findings in his 1973 book The Search for Bigfoot and his 2015 book The Hunt for Bigfoot. Several of the details he unearthed differ considerably from Green’s findings. While Green neglected to identify the highway maintenance foreman, refraining in his earlier books from even naming the location of his sighting in accordance with the man’s desire for anonymity, Byrne identified the witness as William Taylor, who hailed from the northeasterly town of Pemberton. Byrne wrote that Taylor’s sighting took place on a bitterly cold December afternoon in 1971, nearly two years after Green’s January 7th, 1970 date. And while Green claimed that the sighting took place about eighteen miles north of Squamish, which would place it between the Cheakamus Canyon Picnic Site and Lucille Lake, Byrne claimed that it occurred about six miles southwest of Alta Lake, just before the Cheakamus River Waterfalls, on a hairpin turn blasted through the mountains. Both of these vague locations conflict with Byrne’s more specific placement on a bend in the road adjacent to a CPR bridge over the Cheakamus River, which lies just south of the Cheakamus Canyon Picnic Site. Incidentally, this location lies less than five kilometres northeast of Lewis Lake, where a cabin owner found barefoot humanlike tracks in the snow the previous year.
Byrne interviewed Taylor in his Pemberton home, and found him to be “an intelligent, rational man of obvious credibility.” He secretly interviewed several of the man’s friends and co-workers, as well as the local police, who made similar pronouncements.
“His first impression was that it was a bear,” Byrne wrote of the subject of Taylor’s encounter, “for it was down on all fours close to the bank that edged the road on the left, or west side of it. Then it stood upright, and as he drew his truck to a sudden halt, it walked quickly across the road to the opposite bank. It climbed this bank, watching him as it did so. Then it went over the top of the bank, which is about twenty feet high at this place, and, walking upright, disappeared.”
As he had during his interview with Green, Taylor described the creature he saw as having a massive build and a large protruding stomach, and claimed that the entirety of its body, with the exception of its face, was covered with 4-inch-long dark reddish brown fur. This time, however, he estimated its weight to be between 300 and 400 pounds – an approximation considerably greater than the 250 pounds he proposed to Green, and a mass more accordant with its great height and robust build. As with Green, Taylor told Byrne that the creature held a 10-pound fish in its hand, with its fingers curled around the fish’s body. However, in Byrne’s retelling, the fish was held in the creature’s left hand instead of its right.
“He believed… that the creature must have fallen off the bank,” Byrne wrote, “or maybe jumped down and landed on all fours, because it seemed to rise awkwardly when it got to its feet. It walked upright all of the time that he watched it, and only once, when it was climbing the steep bank on the east side of the road, did he see it put a hand down. It seemed to do this to steady itself, as a man may do when climbing a steep slope. It did not run, but walked rapidly across the road and kept its head turned towards Taylor and its eyes locked on him until it reached the bank. Taylor described the look as menacing… and although he was perfectly safe, in the steel cab of a big solid truck, with both doors securely locked, he said that he felt the hair on the back of his neck begin to prickle and a cold feeling creep over him that was, simply, fear.”
Sources
CLASSIC SASQUATCH STORIES FROM VANCOUVER
“On the Cultural Track of the Sasquatch,” in Coast Salish Essays (1987), by Wayne P. Suttles
The Races of Mankind: Being a Popular Description of the Characteristics, Mannerisms, and Customs of the Principal Varieties of the Human Family (1873), by Robert Brown
“Stamp, Edward,” by W. Kaye Lamb, for Volume 10 of the Dictionary of Canadian Biography (1972)
“Deighton, John,” by Patricia E. Roy, for Volume 10 of the Dictionary of Canadian Biography (1972)
Conversations with Khahtsahlano, 1932-1954 (1955), by James Skitt Matthews
Early Vancouver: Volume 5 (1945), by Major J.S. Matthews
“It Would Be ‘Fabulous’: Swiss Alpinist Hunts Sasquatch,” by Larry Standwood in the April 12th, 1957 issue of the Victoria Daily Times
The Historical Bigfoot (2019), by Chad Arment
“Sasquatch May Live in City Park,” in the May 8th, 1957 issue of The Province (Vancouver, BC)
1966 Census of Canada
The Sasquatch File (1973), by John Green
“Richmond ‘Thing’: It Was Hairy, Sasquatchwise,” in the July 22nd, 1966 issue of the Vancouver Sun
“Sasquatch Hunt Seeks Footprints,” in the July 23rd, 1966 issue of the Vancouver Sun
Sasquatch: The Apes Among Us (1978), by John Green
CLASSIC SASQUATCH STORIES FROM PITT LAKE
The Faith of a Coast Salish Indian (1955), by Diamond Jenness
Katzie Ethnographic Notes (1973), by Wayne P. Suttles
“On the Cultural Track of Sasquatch,” in Coast Salish Essays (1987), by Wayne P. Suttles
The Best of Sasquatch Bigfoot (2004), by John Willison Green
The Sasquatch File (1973), by John Green
Year of the Sasquatch (1970), by John Green
Sasquatch: The Apes Among Us (1981), by John Green
The Hunt for Bigfoot (2015), by Peter Byrne
The Historical Bigfoot (2019), by Chad Arment
On the Track of Sasquatch (1973), by John Green
The Search for Bigfoot (1976), by Peter Byrne
Encounters with Bigfoot (1980), by John Green
The Field Guide to Bigfoot, Yeti, and Other Mystery Primates Worldwide (1999), by Loren Coleman and Patrick Huyghe
CLASSIC SASQUATCH STORIES FROM SQUAMISH
Sa’skats
Indianische Sagen Von Der Nord-Pacifischen Kuste Amerikas (1895), by Franz Boas
The Basket Ogress
Indianische Sagen Von Der Nord-Pacifischen Kuste Amerikas (1895), by Franz Boas
“Notes on the Sk’qomic of British Columbia, a Branch of the Great Salish Stock of North America,” by Charles Hill-Tout in the 1900 Report on the Ethnological Survey of Canada
The Squamish Language: Grammar, Texts, Dictionary (1967), by Aert H. Kuipers
“Qalqlil, the Basket Ogress: A Traditional Squamish Story, Told by Louis Miranda, Edited by Aert H. Kuiper,” from Salish Myths and Legends: One People’s Stories (2008), edited by M. Terry Thompson and Steven M. Egesdal
The Ogress of Deeks Creek
Volume Three of Early Vancouver (1935), by Major J.S. Matthews
“Time Traveller: North Vancouver Pioneer Charles H. Cates Sr, With His Horses,” in the March 24th, 2024 issue of the North Shore News
https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/93978521/charles_warren-cates
The Wild People
“Notes on the Sk’qomic of British Columbia, a Branch of the Great Salish Stock of North America,” by Charles Hill-Tout in the 1900 Report on the Ethnological Survey of Canada
“On the Cultural Track of the Sasquatch,” in Coast Salish Essays (1987), by Wayne P. Suttles
“Smaylilh or Wild People in Archaeology,” by Rudy Reimer Yumks in Volume 20 of Nexus (2007)
The Mountain Tribe Near Sechelt
The Squamish Language: Grammar, Texts, Dictionary (1967), by Aert H. Kuipers
A Midnight Marauder
The Squamish Language: Grammar, Texts, Dictionary (1967), by Aert H. Kuipers
The Sasquatch of Anvil Island
Sasquatch: The Apes Among Us (1978), by John Green
Mountain Tracks Near Squamish
The Sasquatch File (1973), by John Green
Year of the Sasquatch (1970), by John Green
On the Track of Sasquatch (1973), by John Green
Sasquatch Carrying a Fish
Sasquatch: The Apes Among Us (1978), by John Green
On the Track of Sasquatch (1973), by John Green
Year of the Sasquatch (1970), by John Green
The Search For Bigfoot (1973), by Peter Byrne
The Hunt for Bigfoot (2015), by Peter Byrne
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