If you cross the Fraser River just east of Chilliwack, British Columbia, and continue north, you’ll enter an enchanting corridor through the Coast Mountains known as the Agassiz-Harrison Valley. This stretch of farmland, flanked by dark green mountains covered from base to peak with thick coniferous jungle, leads to a little village hugging the southern shores of vast Harrison Lake.
If you meander through the streets of this tiny community and keep a vigilant eye, you may begin to realize that there’s something distinctly different about the place. For instance, you might notice the hairy sentinel who keeps perpetual watch at the village entrance, lounging contentedly on a wooden bench beneath the town’s welcome sign.
Perhaps you’ll catch a glimpse of another more startling village guardian standing further up the road, poised to hurl a wooden boulder at passing cars.
If you’re especially observant, you may detect a certain pattern in the titles of various establishments; the names of inns, liquor stores, and ski resorts seem to suggest a recurring theme. Even the street signs are topped with a stylized silhouette of British Columbia’s most elusive resident. Welcome to Harrison Hot Springs, the Sasquatch capital of Canada.
A Chehalis Horror Story
Although the wildman stories to come out of Harrison Hot Springs and the Agassiz-Harrison Valley are not the oldest in Canada, being preceded by native legends, fur trade reports, and a handful of newspaper articles, they introduced the reading public to the word ‘Sasquatch,’ and popularized the unnerving notion that a race of hairy giants might roam the mountains of the Pacific Northwest.
In most Canadian regions in which wildman stories abound, there is a clear distinction between native legends and historic reports. The tales from the Agassiz-Harrison Valley are unique in that the oldest recorded native legends, with a few notable exceptions, are the historic reports, collected in the early 20th Century from the mouths of native witnesses themselves. The first and most prolific chronicler of these incredible tales was an Irish-born schoolteacher named J.W. Burns, who served as Indian agent for the local Chehalis Reserve throughout the 1930s, and collected the stories of his native charges.
The only wildman stories from the Agassiz-Harrison Valley which seems to predate Burns’ second-hand accounts include a pair of old legends told to Canadian anthropologist Wilson Duff by August Jim, an octogenarian of both Hope Tait and Vancouver Musqueam descent, who hailed from the village of Katz just west of the town of Hope, B.C. Duff included this story in his 1952 treatise on the Upper Stahlo Indians, the Stahlo being a division of the Upriver Halkomelem Coast Salish.
“Within the lifetimes of present informants,” Duff began in his introduction to the wildman subject, “the giants have been seen many times, especially in the Chehalis-Harrison Mills area. These encounters, which no longer cause sickness, usually occur on moonlit nights. The person sees the giant and runs; the sasquatch follows, just walking, but keeping up. Finally it drops behind. Sometimes the giants raid gardens or storehouses, but usually they just seem curious.”
Duff went on to reproduce a horror story from August Jim which deviates from this typical pattern. This startling piece of oral lore describes an ancient Sasquatch attack on the villagers of Agassiz, a historic Chehalis settlement located between Harrison Hot Springs and the Fraser River.
“A long time ago,” Jim told Duff, “six women and their children went from the village at Agassiz to gather roots. They camped at the foot of that mountain on the left as you go to the Hot Springs. Just at dark they heard somebody holler. Everybody was quiet and they heard that same hollering again. Most of them didn’t want to answer, but some thought it might be the men looking for them, and called out. Then a big man, 8 or 9 feet tall, hair all over his body, came into the firelight. He grabbed one of the women, pulled open her breast, and took the heart out.
“A little girl got scared and ran away, following the trail back 3 or 4 miles to the village. The people armed themselves and went right back to the camp. They found all the women dead, the children crying, unhurt. The men followed the tracks of that big man up over that high mountain and down the river, but they lost him.”
Sasquatch Shot on the Harrison River
Jim’s next tale is no less remarkable, being one of the few Canadian stories to reference the discovery of Sasquatch bones. It is set on the Harrison River, a short, spacious waterway which drains Harrison Lake into the Fraser River.
“A Chehalis man,” Jim said, “hunting bears on the gravel-bar on Harrison River one fall, heard a loud crackling noise up the side of the mountain. He thought it might be a bear, but a big man came out. His canoe wasn’t very far away so he ran for it, and the big man followed, just walking, but getting closer. He reached his canoe and launched it. The big man stopped and stood right at the edge of the water. The man took his rifle and shot the big man, saw him drop.
“The next fall he and his friend were hunting at the same place and saw some big bones. He told his friend, ‘That’s the one I shot.’”
War of the Sasquatch
Another old Chehalis tale which appears to precede the memory of the storyteller was referenced by writer Francis Dickie in a piece we will explore shortly. “In this region,” Dickie wrote, referring to the mountains which overlook the northwestern end of the valley, “according to the Indians, two large bands of Sasquatch fought a long time ago until both were brought almost to extermination.”
J.W. Burns elaborated on this tradition in a later piece, writing, “Legends tell of two tribes of Sasquatch who were deadly enemies and fought until they almost exterminated one another, fighting hand-to-hand with stone clubs on the wild, steep slopes.”
The Oldest Modern Sighting
The second-oldest regional Sasquatch story of which this author is aware, and the only datable report to predate the work of J.W. Burns, was related to Sasquatch researcher John Willison Green by an elderly gentleman from Prince George, British Columbia. Green briefly outlined the sighting in his 1973 book The Sasquatch File, writing that it took place around the turn of the 20th Century.
“C.H. Olds Sr. of Prince George, BC,” Green explained, “wrote to me that when he and his brothers were boys living in Morris Valley, they found some very large tracks like barefoot human tracks on a sandbar on a creek above a falls, behind their home.” The Morris Valley to which Green alluded is the valley of Morris Creek, a tributary of the Harrison River, on which many of the encounters we will shortly relate took place.
Introducing BC’s Hairy Giants
In 1925, J.W. Burns began work as a teacher at the school in the Chehalis Reserve. He quickly earned the respect of the local natives and became fast friends with Frank Dan, a prominent Chehalis medicine man. When the Irishman demonstrated an open-mindedness towards their traditional tales, many of his native charges opened up to him, and made him privy to a carefully-guarded tribal secret that had hitherto evaded the ears of white men. The Chehalis told Burns that the surrounding mountains were inhabited by a race of hairy giants they called Sasq’ets, who had dwelled in the forest since time immemorial. In 1929, Burns compiled some of these stories and wove them in a groundbreaking article published in the April 1st, 1929 issue of the Canadian magazine Maclean’s, under the headline “Introducing B.C.’s Hairy Giants: A collection of strange tales about British Columbia’s wild men as told by those who say they have seen them.” In this piece, Burns coined the word ‘Sasquatch’ – an Anglicisation of the Halkomelem word Sasq’ets, used by his Chehalis friends, the spelling of which he apparently drew from a letter written to him by a young Chehalis man.
“Are the vast mountain solitudes of British Columbia, of which but very few have been so far explored,” Burns began, “populated by a hairy race of giants – men – not ape-like men?
“Reports from time to time, covering a period of many years, have come from the [hinterlands] of the province, that hairy giants had been occasionally seen by Indian and white trappers in the mountain fastnesses, far from the pathway of civilization. These reports, however, were always vague and indefinite; for the reason that no person could be found, or, at least, nobody came forward with the information that they had obtained a close-up view of these strange creatures.
“Persistent rumors led the writer to make diligent enquiries among old Indians. The question relating to the subject was always, or nearly always, evaded with the trite excuse: ‘The white man don’t believe, he make joke of the Indian.’ But after three years of plodding, I have come into possession of information more definite and authentic than has come to light at any previous time. Discounting rumor and hearsay, I have prevailed upon men who claim they had actual contact with these hairy giants, to tell what they know about them. Their story is set down here in good faith.”
Peter Williams’ Encounter
Burns went on to relate the experience of a Chehalis man named Peter Williams, which later articles indicate took place in May 1909. While walking in the woods along the foot of Mount Morris about a mile from the Reserve, Williams heard a grunt in the bush. When he looked to see where the sound had come from, he found himself staring at what he first took to be a bear crouched atop a boulder about thirty feet away. As he raised his rifle to shoot the animal, it stood up and emitted a piercing scream. “It was a man,” said Williams. “A giant, no less than six and one-half feet in height, and covered in hair.” Enraged, the giant leapt from the boulder and tore after the Indian.
“I never ran so fast before or since,” said Williams, “through brush and undergrown toward the… Chehalis River [a tributary of the Harrison], where my dugout was moored.” Every so often, Williams glanced over his shoulder to check on his pursuer, who was quickly overtaking him. The native narrowly escaped the monster by leaping into his boat and paddling downriver as fast as he could. “The swift river…” he said, “did not in the least daunt the giant, for he began to wade it immediately.”
When he finally reached the safety of his cabin, Williams made sure that his wife and children were safe inside before bolting the door. “Then with my rifle ready,” Williams said, “I stood near the door and awaited his coming.”
After about twenty minutes, Williams heard a noise in the distance somewhat akin to the trampling of a horse. The noise became louder and louder. Williams eventually looked through a crack between the logs of the cabin wall and saw that the giant was approaching. “Darkness had not yet set in,” he said, “and I had a good look at him. Except that he was covered with hair and twice the bulk of the average man, there was nothing to distinguish him from the rest of us.”
When the monster reached the cabin, he began pushing the walls so that the structure rocked back and forth. The cabin creaked and groaned, yet by some miracle it managed to maintain its integrity. Clutching his rifle with trembling hands, Williams whispered for his wife to take the children and hide under the bed.
“After prowling and grunting like an animal around the house,” Williams continued, “he went away.” The family spent a restless night in the cabin, and in the morning, Williams found the beast’s tracks in the mud outside, which were 22 inches long, “but narrow in proportion to their length.”
Peter Williams’ Second Encounter
The giant so damaged their cabin that the Williams’ family was forced to abandon it the following winter. Sometime later that season, Peter Williams went duck hunting on the north side of the Harrison River about two miles from the Reserve. Once again, he found himself face to face with the same hairy giant he had encountered the previous summer. As before, Williams ran for dear life, and the wildman chased after him. After about four hundred yards, however, the giant broke off and wandered back into the woods.
Interestingly, Peter’s brother, Paul, encountered the same creature later that afternoon. While he was fishing for salmon in a creek near the Reserve, the giant emerged from the forest and began to approach him. Terrified, Paul raced back towards his cabin with the monster hot on his heels. The giant gave up the chase shortly before Paul reached the cabin and walked back into the bush. Exhausted from fear and exertion, Paul collapsed in the snow and had to be carried inside by his mother and other relatives.
The Wild Couple of Harrison River
“The first and second time,” Williams told Burns, “I was all alone when I met this strange mountain creature. Then, early in the spring of the following year, another man and myself were bear hunting near the place where I found him. On this occasion, we ran into two of these giants.”
Initially, Williams and his companions thought the creatures were tree stumps. Suddenly, when they were about fifty feet away, the wildmen, who had been sitting on the ground, rose to their feet. Williams and his companion stopped dead in their tracks.
“We were close enough to know they were man and woman,” Williams said. “The woman was the smaller of the two, but neither of them as big or fierce-looking as the gent that chased me.” Williams and his friend ran home, and were not pursued.
Peter Williams’ Fourth and Final Sighting
One morning several weeks later, Williams and his wife were fishing in a canoe on the Harrison River not far from the Reserve. Upon paddling around a bend, they saw the same hairy giant that had destroyed their cabin the previous year. Fortunately, the monster took no notice of the Indians, and they made their escape without incident.
The Sasquatch Cave at Yale B.C.
Another wildman encounter Burns included in the article was the story of an elderly Indian named Charley Victor. Unlike Williams, Charley Victor was not a member of the Chehalis First Nation, but rather hailed from the Skwah Nation, a Coast Salish tribe from the Chilliwack area.
“The first time I came to know about these people,” Victor said, “I did not see anybody.” On this particular occasion, Victor was foraging with three other men on a rocky mountain slope about six miles from Yale- a town which lies on the CPR’s main line just north of Hope, BC. He and his companions were picking salmonberries- wild fruits similar to raspberries.
“In our search for berries,” Victor said, “we suddenly stumbled upon a large opening in the side of the mountain. This discovery greatly surprised all of us, for we knew every foot of the mountain, and we never knew nor heard there was a cave in the vicinity.”
Near the cave’s mouth was a massive boulder, which looked as though it once might have been employed as primitive door. The natives cautiously approached the cave and peered inside, but were unable to see anything on account of the darkness. In order to combat this, they gathered pitchwood (a type of pine heartwood naturally saturated with flammable resin), lit it on fire, and began to explore.
Not far from the mouth of the cave, the natives came upon a primitive stone house. “We couldn’t make a thorough examination,” Victor explained, “for our pitchwood kept going out. We left, intending to return in a couple of days and go on exploring.”
When Victor and his companions told the tale of their discovery to their fellow tribesmen back at the Reserve, the elders warned them not to venture near it again, as it was surely occupied by a wildman. “That was the first time I heard about the hairy men that inhabit the mountains,” Victor claimed.
Disregarding the elders’ advice, Victor and his companions went back to explore the cave. When they reached it, they discovered, to their astonishment, that the massive boulder that stood near the entrance had been rolled back over the mouth, fitting so perfectly “that you might suppose it had been made for that purpose.”
Charley Victor’s First Encounter
About twenty years later, Charley Victor and a couple of his friends were bathing in a small lake near Yale. After he finished bathing and started to put on his clothes, a big hairy man stepped out from behind a rock only several feet away. “He looked at me for a moment,” Victor said. “His eyes were so kind-looking that I was about to speak with him, when he turned about and walked into the forest.”
In a 1948 article, Burns inexplicably attributed these last two stories to “an old Indian named Henry Napoleon.” Curiously, Henry Napoleon is the name of a Clallam Indian whose sensational account of a run-in with a wildman on Vancouver Island appeared in Canadian newspapers in 1924. Napoleon claimed to have spoken to the wildman he encountered in his own native dialect. This unprecedented claim that Sasquatch can speak human language would appear again in Charley Victor’s third and final story, related by J.W. Burns in his 1929 article, and in subsequent works.
The Wild Women of Hatzic, B.C.
In around 1914, Charley Victor came face to face with another wild giant while hunting in the mountains near the village of Hatzic, just east of Mission, B.C.
On this excursion, Victor was accompanied by his dog. Upon hiking up to a plateau, his dog rushed over to a large cedar tree and began to growl and bark at it. Victor noticed that there was a large hole in the tree about seven feet from the ground, and that his dog apparently wanted to enter it. Victor lifted his dog up and watched it scurry into the hole.
Suddenly, a muffled cry issued from within the tree. Victor raised his rifle, thinking that his dog had encountered a bear. Sure enough, something large crawled out of the hole and fell to the ground. Instinctively, Victor took a shot at it – an action which he immediately regretted, for there at his feet sprawled a bleeding, naked, black-haired Caucasian boy of about twelve or fourteen years of age.
Horrified, Victor dropped his rifle and approached the boy to examine the extent of his injury. He saw that he had shot the boy in the leg, but before he had a chance to dress the wound, the child cried out as if appealing for help from the forest.
“From across the mountain a long way off,” Victor said, “rolled a booming voice.” Shortly thereafter, Victor heard the voice again, this time a little closer. The boy screamed again, as if in reply.
Although he was terrified, Victor’s conscience would not allow him to abandon the child he had wounded. He waited on the plateau, his dog whimpering fearfully at his feet, while the boy guided his mysterious sylvan savior to his location. “Less than a half-hour,” said Victor, “out of the depth of the forest came the strangest and wildest creature one could possibly see…”
“The hairy creature,” he continued, “for that is was what it was, walked toward me without the slightest fear. The wild person was a woman. Her face was almost Negro black and her long straight hair fell to her waist. In height she would be about six feet, but her chest and shoulders were well above the average in breadth.”
Victor told Burns that, although he had already met several wildmen by this time, he had never seen anyone quite so savage in appearance as this woman. “I’m sure that if that wild woman laid hands on me,” Victor said, “she’d break every bone in my body.”
The creature glanced at the boy before rounding on Victor, her face contorted with rage. Then, something truly remarkable happened. Using the tongue of the Douglas First Nation, a branch of the Lillooet tribe whose members lived at the northern end of Harrison Lake, the wild woman snarled, “You have shot my friend!”
Victor, who knew the Douglas language, replied that he had mistaken the boy for a bear, and that he was sorry. Ignoring him, the wild woman proceeded to dance around the stricken child, chanting the word “yahoo” in a loud voice. Every time she vociferated, a similar reply came from the mountain.
Soon, the wild woman was joined by another creature like her, who carried a six-foot-long cord which Victor suspected was either a snake or the intestine of some animal. “But whatever it was,” he said, “she constantly struck the ground with it.”
At the end of this strange ceremony, the second wild woman effortlessly picked the boy up with one hairy hand. She then turned towards Charley Victor, brandished the cord at him, and said, “Siwash, you’ll never kill another bear.” With that, the wild women and the boy disappeared into the woods.
With tears in his eyes, Charley Victor admitted to Burns that he had indeed not had the fortune to shoot a bear, nor any other animal, since that fateful day.
The Wild Man of Agassiz, B.C.
Another wildman story which Burns included in his article derives from a letter which he received from a young native man from Vancouver named William (or perhaps Herbert) Point.
According to the letter, Point and a native girl named Adaline August decided to pick wild hops one day in late September 1927, in the wilderness near Agassiz. When they were finished, they returned to August’s father’s orchard by way of the railroad track. Along the way, August noticed something walking along the tracks in their direction.
“I looked up,” wrote Point, “but paid no attention to it, as I thought it was some person on his way to Agassiz. But as he came closer, we noticed that his appearance was very odd, and on coming still closer we stood still and were astonished, seeing that the creature was naked and covered with hair like an animal.” Alarmed, Point picked up two stones with which he intended to hit the creature if it decided to attack him or his companion.
“He was twice as big as the average man,” Point wrote of the creature, “with hands so long that they almost touched the ground. It seemed to me that his eyes were very large and the lower part of his nose was wide and spread over the greater part of his face…”
Terrified at the creature’s appearance, the teenagers ran all the way to Agassiz. There, they told the story of their encounter to a group of natives who were relaxing after a day of berry-picking. The elders there informed them that the creature belonged to a race of hairy giants who had always lived in the mountains, making their homes in tunnels and caves.
Frank Dan’s Sighting
Predictably, Burns’ article spurred journalistic interest in the legendary wildmen of the Agassiz-Harrison Valley, bringing additional encounters to light in the press. In March 1934, newspapers across Canada publicized the eerie account of Burns’ friend, Chehalis medicine man Frank Dan. Dan was a resident of the tiny hamlet of Harrison Mills, located across the Harrison River from the Chehalis Reserve and southwest of Harrison Hot Springs, just upriver of the Harrison’s confluence with the Fraser. According to at least one newspaper article, in addition to his shamanic duties, Dan was an employee of the local Rat Portage shingle mill for which the hamlet was named.
One night in March 1932, the story goes, Dan’s dog began barking wildly at something in the darkness. Roused from his slumber, the medicine man stepped outside to investigate the commotion and came face to face with a tall, muscular giant standing in the moonlight. The creature was completely naked, and covered from head to foot with black hair, save for a small bald patch around the eyes. The big man growled at the medicine man, prompting him to stumble back into his cabin and bolt the door. Peering through the window, Dan watched the giant unhurriedly saunter into the bush and disappear.
Footprints discovered the following morning revealed that the wildman had prowled about the cabin for some time prior to Dan’s frightening encounter.
The Duck Hunter
Several articles which carried the story of Frank Dan also included the testimony of an unnamed resident of Harrison Mills, who encountered a Sasquatch while returning home from a duck hunt.
“I was carrying a bag of ducks when I met this monkey-man,” the witness told a reporter. “It was so close to me I did not have a chance to use my gun or make a run for it. The monster snatched the ducks away from me and darted into the woods, and though I searched for it for some time afterwards I am unable to find any trace of it. It was like a hairy man, was completely nude and much taller than any man I have ever seen. I was so frightened I suppose I wasn’t very observant and didn’t notice many details about it. It didn’t speak or many any sound, just grabbed the ducks and dashed into the woods.”
In one journalistic retelling of this story, the giant stuffed a solitary duck into the hunter’s shirt before making his exit.
Mrs. Caufield’s Encounter
Two months later, Canadian papers published the account of one Mrs. James Caufield, who lived with her husband on a farm near Harrison Mills. One day, while washing her clothes in the Harrison River, Mrs. Caufield heard a buzzing noise which she initially mistook for a hummingbird. “I turned my head,” she told a reporter, “but instead of a bird, there stood the most terrible thing I ever saw in my life. I thought I’d die, for the thing that made the funny noise was a big man covered with hair from head to foot. He was looking at me and I couldn’t help looking at him. I guessed he was a Sasquatch, so I covered my eyes with my hand, for the Indians say that if a Sasquatch catches your eye, you are in his power. They hypnotize you. I felt faint, and as I backed away to get to the house, I tripped and fell. As he came nearer, I screamed and fainted.”
Some articles indicate that Mrs. Caufield fell into the bucket of soapy water which she had brought with her, and lay there stunned, too frightened to move. Fortunately, her scream attracted the attention of her husband, who ran to her assistance just in time to catch a glimpse of a huge hairy figure darting into the woods.
Tom Cedar’s Close Call
Later that July, Canadian writer Francis Dickie, a prolific contributor to popular magazines who would come to specialize in Canadiana, included several more Sasquatch encounters from the Agassiz-Harrison Valley in an illustrated, full-page article entitled ‘Are They the Last Cave Men,’ published in newspapers throughout the United States. Dickie wrote that, just prior to the penning of his piece, a middle-aged native named Tom Cedar took his canoe onto Morris Creek, a tributary of the Harrison River which empties into the latter just east of the Chehalis Reserve. While fishing for trout at the foot of a rugged cliff, a large rock suddenly plunged into the water mere feet from his canoe, splashing him violently. “Looking up,” Dickie wrote, “he saw with amazement a huge hairy man above him just as he threw another rock. This also barely missed the canoe. Cedar paddled rapidly upstream to the settlement.”
Canadian historian John A. Cherrington alluded to a similar event in his 1992 history of the Fraser Valley, writing, “On March 23rd, 1934, a few Indians were quietly fishing at Morris Creek near Harrison River when rocks began to fall around them from the cliff above. They looked up to see a gigantic hairy man – or beast – preparing to roll a huge boulder over the edge. The natives scattered.”
J.W. Burns himself touched on a nearly identical story in a 1948 article, identifying the victim as a native elder named Chehalis Phillip, who claimed to have seen Sasquatch on several occasions in his youth. “On this recent occasion,” Burns wrote, “he was fishing for trout in Morris Creek, a tributary of the Chehalis River. His canoe was gliding quietly along the sluggish mountain stream close to the rocky, terraced bank when without warning a rock was thrown from the shelving slope above, falling with a splash within a yard of the canoe, almost swamping it and drenching the Indian. Startled, Phillip hurriedly looked upwards and saw a hairy monster leaning over the cliff and holding a bulky object which proved to be another heavy rock. This the wild giant deliberately hurled with terrific force at the helpless and by now thoroughly scared Phillip. The rock splashed into the water bare inches from the canoe. Believing that the Sasquatch was about to dive into the water and attack him, Phillip cast free his lines and paddled frantically away.”
Morris Creek is not the only waterway in the Agassiz-Harrison Valley on which canoeists are said to have been harassed by stone-throwing Sasquatch. According to an article in the May 13th, 1934 issue of the Detroit Times, a native fisherman was accosted on the Harrison River by a mysterious assailant. “The Indian was gliding along in his canoe,” the article claimed, “when, without warning, he said, a rock was thrown into the water within a foot of the canoe. The boat was almost swamped.
“The startled Indian glanced upwards and asserts that he saw a huge, hairy man bounding down the side of the cliff, like some wild animal, carrying under his arm another huge rock. As the Indian struggled to swing his canoe out into mid-stream, the wild man paused and hurled the second rock at him, missing the canoe by inches. On missing the boat a second time, the monster ‘swung his arms wildly and ran down to the edge of the river, snarling and half-shouting, half-screaming,’ the frightened Indian reported. The Indian paddled away as quickly as he could and returned to the reservation to tell his terrifying tale.”
Emma Paul and Millie Saul’s Encounter
Later in his 1934 piece, Dickie related the brief account of Emma Paul and Millie Saul, two Chehalis women who spotted a Sasquatch at the edge of the woods near the Reserve. “Several nights later,” Dickie wrote, “he was heard prowling around the home of Millie Saul, and once rubbed his hand over the window pane.”
J.W. Burns elaborated on the women’s encounter in a later article, describing Emma Paul, from whom he obtained the story firsthand, as “an intelligent young Chehalis woman.” He included her testimony in an article published in the November 1948 issue of Sir! A Magazine for Males.
“I saw the Sasquatch, a few yards from the house,” Emma said. “I was standing by the door at the time. He was watching me closely, and I had a good look at his face. He was big and powerful in appearance. Other members of the family were present who also saw him.
“We bolted the door, and he prowled around outside the house for some time. We have often heard one of them at night since then, and one used to rub his fingers over the window panes. It was only last night that a Sasquatch was outside, tramping loudly about the house. We all heard it, and so did the white carpenter who lives next door.”
Sasquatch Caves Near Morris Creek
In his 1934 article, Francis Dickie referenced an intriguing discovery supposedly made by one “Captain Warde,” whom he stated had resided in the Agassiz-Harrison Valley for forty years at the time of writing. Near Morris Creek, Warde discovered the mouths of several caverns, which he decided to explore. On the cavern walls, the captain is said to have discovered crude drawings.
J.W. Burns described a similar discovery in a statement to journalist Alex MacGillivray of the Vancouver Sun, whose article was published in the May 25th, 1957 issue of that publication. “Burns… tells of receiving a letter from an Ontario lawyer, S.A. Wallace,” MacGillivray wrote, “notary public of Windsor, Ontario, who told Burns that 10 years ago a cave containing skeletons of 40 Sasquatch were discovered… But if Mr. Wallace said where, Mr. Burns isn’t telling.
“‘The skeletons were in a good state of preservation,’ said Mr. Burns. ‘The mummified remains were those of a giant race of men and women.
“‘A geologist who examined them,’ Mr. Burns said,’ told Mr. Wallace that they must be thousands of [years] old.’”
Frank Dan’s Second Encounter
Sasquatch stories from the Harrison area continued to trickle to the press throughout 1935. An article published in the October 12th issue of Eau Claire, Wisconsin’s Leader-Telegram described “weird wolf-like howls” emanating from the mountains beyond Harrison Mills, sightings of huge club-wielding wild men bounding across rocky mountainsides, whose “weird language floated on the breeze across the lake to the pioneer [settlements],” and stories of Sasquatch paddling with their hands across glacial streams astride floating logs.
J.W. Burns, meanwhile, continued to receive reports from his native friends about their encounters with Sasquatch in the woods and fields surrounding the Chehalis Reserve – a circumstance which accelerated in 1933, when he was appointed local Indian Agent. In July 1936, his friend, Chehalis medicine man Frank Dan, had a second run-in with a Sasquatch while paddling his canoe on Morris Creek, in an incident mirroring Tom Cedar’s harrowing encounter of two years prior. Cryptozoology godfather Ivan T. Sanderson reproduced Burns’ florid description of this event in his seminal 1961 book Abominable Snowmen: Legend Come to Life.
As Burns described it, the day had been exceptionally pleasant, and the fishing remarkably good, when, without warning, a huge rock plunged into the water mere feet from Dan’s canoe. “Startled out of his skin” Burns wrote, “Frank glanced upward, and to his amazement, beheld a weird looking creature, covered with hair, leaping from rock to rock down the wild declivity with the agility of a mountain goat. Frank recognized the hairy creature instantly. It was a Sasquatch. He knew it was one of the giants – he had met them on several occasions in past years, once on his own doorstep. But those were a timid sort and not unruly like the gent he was now facing.
“Frank called upon his medicine powers, sula, and similar spirits to protect him. There was an immediate response to his appeal. The air throbbed and some huge boulders slid down the rocky mountain side, making a noise like the crack of doom. This was to frighten away the Sasquatch. But the giant was not to be frightened by falling rocks. Instead, he hurried down the declivity carrying a great stone, probably weighing a ton or more, under his great hairy arm, which Frank guessed – just a rough guess – was at least 2 yards in length. Reaching a point of vantage – a jutting ledge that hung far out over the water – he hurled it with all his might, this time missing the canoe by a narrow margin, filling it with water and drenching the poor frightened occupant with a cloud of spray…
“The giant now posed upon the other ledge in an attitude of wild majesty as if he were the monarch of these foreboding haunts, shaking a colossal fist at the ‘great medicine man’ who sat awe-struck and shuddering in the canoe, which he was trying to bail out with his shoe. The Indian saw the Sasquatch was in a towering rage, a passion that caused the great man to exude a repugnant odor, which was carried down to the canoe by a wisp of wind. The smell made Frank dizzy and his eyes began to smart. It was more repelling than the stench of moccasin oil gone rotten. Indeed, it was so nasty that the fish quitted the pools and nooks and headed in schools for the Harrison River. The Indian, believing the giant was about to dive into the water and attack him, cast off his fishing lines and paddled away as fast as he was able.”
According to Burns, this event so demoralized Frank Dan that it caused him to relinquish the mantle of medicine man, illustrating to him, in no uncertain terms, that his medicine had been defeated by the power of the Sasquatch.
Battle Between a Sasquatch and a Bear
One of J.W. Burns’ most remarkable Sasquatch stories is hidden away in an article in the March 2nd, 1938 issue of the Chilliwack Progress. According to this story, one evening in late February, 1938, three local natives went out for a stroll along the banks of the Chehalis River, a narrow mountain waterway which empties into the Harrison River near the Chehalis Reserve. The lower seven kilometers of the Chehalis River run along a timbered flat, while its upper stretch, which cuts through the rugged Douglas Mountains, forms what is referred to as the Chehalis Canyon.
While walking along the banks of the Chehalis River not far from the terminus of the Chehalis Canyon, the three natives were startled by a terrific noise in the forest. “We were on our way home after an all-day unsuccessful hunt in the Chehalis Mountains,” said Jimmy Craneback, one of the witnesses. “We had just crossed the government road at the Chehalis River – a mile or so north of the Indian village, when all at once we heard a roar in the forest ahead of us that shook the firs and cedars around and startled the crows and bluejays from their roost. We stopped to listen. Down the old trail ahead of us, we could hear groans, growls, thuds and the snap and crack of rotten branches as if Old Nick himself [that is, the Devil] had gone off his noodle and was running amuck through the dark forest.”
Fearing that a Chehalis elder might have had a run-in with a hungry bear fresh from hibernation while out collecting roots for basket-making, the hunters unshouldered their rifles and headed in the direction of the unnerving racket.
“Fifty yards or so down the wooded trail,” Craneback continued, “we came upon a sight that made our eyes pop. In awe we stopped dead in our tracks. In the fading twilight and shadowy forest we first thought we were looking on two bears fighting each other to the death. As we stood beside a log twenty yards away, we could see the great struggle of strength. There was a crunching of bones as the monsters in their rage came to grips with each other and tumbled and tossed about in their fury on the forest floor within a few feet of the Chehalis. But there was something about one of the monsters that puzzled us.”
The wild animals rolled towards the Chehalis River as they grappled with each other on the forest floor. Eager to avail themselves of such large came before they fell into the water and became irretrievable, the hunters raised their rifles and prepared to shoot, when one of the animals bellowed an articulation which sounded almost human. When Burns asked Jimmy Craneback to attempt to replicate the sound he had heard, the native said that it sounded something like the syllables “poo-woo-uoo.”
The astonished hunters held their fire, realizing that one of the combatants was a Sasquatch, one of the legendary wildmen of the mountains. One of the friends, named Ike Joe, suggested that they take the side of the Sasquatch, since “it’s well to be on their side.” Burns appears to have implied that the hunters alleged to have assisted the Sasquatch in his battle with the bear, but whether they did so with their rifles or physically threw themselves into the fray, the Indian agent did not specify.
After a ferocious brawl lasting what the hunters estimated to be ten minutes, the Sasquatch wrapped his hairy arms around the bruin’s throat and squeezed the life out of it. “It must have been a hum-dinger of a hold,” said Jimmy Craneback, “for the bear began to gasp for breath, and gasping, pawed the air as his tongue was hanging out. The wild man had won the fight. With a grunt, he flung the carcass of the bear into the river.”
“It was a skookum fight,” Craneback concluded, “skookum” being a Chinook Jargon word meaning powerful or impressive, “and as no one of our little party had ever seen a hairy giant of the Sasquatch in a fight before, I’m telling you we got the biggest kick of our life.”
The Chilling Tale of Seraphine Long
Throughout his writings, J.W. Burns made frequent allusions to what he called Mount Morris – now Mount Keenan – a forested mountain which overlooks Harrison Lake. The slopes of this nondescript landmark, which stands just north of the Chehalis Reserve and northwest of Harrison Hot Springs, are now crisscrossed by ski runs which form the aptly-named Sasquatch Mountain Resort.
In the early 20th Century, the Chehalis believed that summit of Mount Morris was a gathering place where, once every four years, scattered Sasquatch from across the Douglas Mountains came to congregate. Wildmen spotted in the valley were believed to scouts whose presence in the area immediately preceded this quadrennial pilgrimage. Chehalis elders told of signal fires they had observed flickering atop Mount Morris in the dead of night, which were taken as evidence of some mysterious Sasquatch powwow. Burns described these eerie lights in an article for the March 23rd, 1934 issue of the Vancouver Daily Province, writing that they typically appeared for three or four consecutive nights in mid-July, and were described as being unusually tall, and of reddish tint. “The Sasquatch…” Burns wrote, “by this method of communication, keep in touch with one another across the mountain ranges, according to the Indians.”
Mount Morris is the setting of one of J.W. Burns’ classic Sasquatch stories, published in the January 1940 issue of The Wide World: A Magazine For Men. Burns learned this story from an 87-year-old Chehalis woman named Seraphine Long, who had lived in the Agassiz-Harrison Valley all her life. Her harrowing tale remains one of the most disturbing Sasquatch stories ever recorded.
In 1872, 17-year-old Seraphine Long stumbled from the woods into the Chehalis village near the foot of Mount Morris. The villagers were astonished, as Seraphine had been missing for nearly a year and had long been given up for dead. The girl was in a state of supreme exhaustion and was too weak to talk, and so her inquisitive countrymen withheld their many questions and put her to bed. Later that night, Seraphine gave birth to a monstrous-looking child which only survived for a few hours.
When she was able, Seraphine Long related her incredible experience to her family and friends. Nearly seventy years later, she told the same story to J.W. Burns at the Chehalis Reserve.
On the day of her disappearance back in 1871, Seraphine Long had been foraging for cedar roots at the base of Mount Morris, daydreaming about the brave she was engaged to marry. On her way back to camp, a hairy hand shot out of the bush and clamped over her mouth. Seraphine was hoisted into the air and thrown over the shoulder of a hairy giant.
“I was terrified,” the lady told Burns, “fought, and struggled with all my might. In those days, I was strong. But it was no good, the wildman was as powerful as a young bear. Holding me easily under one arm, with his other hand he smeared tree gum over my eyes, sticking them shut so that I could not see where he was taking me. He then lifted me to his shoulder and started to run.”
The Sasquatch took Seraphine all the way up what could only be Mount Morris. “Although I was frightened,” Seraphine told Burns, “I could not but admire his easy breathing, his great strength and speed on foot.”
The Sasquatch brought Seraphine into a large cave near the top of the mountain and removed the tree gum from her eyes. “I sat up,” Seraphine said, “and saw that I was in a great big cave. The floor was covered with animal skins, soft to touch and better preserved than we preserve them. A small fire in the middle of the floor gave all the light there was. As my eyes became accustomed to the gloom, I saw that beside the young giant who had brought me to the cave, there were two other wild people- a man and a woman. To me, a young girl, they seemed very, very old, but they were active and friendly and later I learned that they were the parents of the young Sasquatch who had stolen me.”
For nearly a year, the Sasquatches kept Seraphine Long as their prisoner, never allowing her an opportunity to escape. The Sasquatches spoke to each other in a language similar to the tongue of the Douglas Indians, and in time Seraphine learned enough of their speech to communicate with them.
“They fed me well on roots, fish, and meat…” she told Burns. “I asked the young giant how he caught and killed the deer, mountain goats and sheep that he often brought into the cave. He smiled, opening and closing his big hairy hands. I guessed that he just laid in wait and when an animal got close enough, he leaped, caught it and choked it to death. He was certainly big enough, quick enough and strong enough to do so.”
About a year into her imprisonment, Seraphine Long became very ill. She begged her young captor to return her to her own people so that she could recover. “At first he got very angry,” she said, “as did his father and mother, but I kept on pleading with them, telling them that I wished to see my own people before I died. I really was ill, and I suppose they could see that for themselves, because one day after I cried for a long time, the young Sasquatch went outside and returned with a leaf full of tree gum. With this he stuck down my eyelids as he had done before. Then he again lifted me to his big shoulder.”
The return journey was a hazy nightmare for Seraphine Long, who was too weak to even cling to the Sasquatch as he carried her down the mountain. At last, he laid her down in the forest not too far from her home and gently removed the sap from her eyelids. “When he saw that I could see again,” Seraphine said, “he shook his head sadly, pointed to my house and then turned back into the forest.”
The villagers were wildly excited at Seraphine’s return. Too weak to reciprocate their enthusiasm, she crawled into bed. That night, she gave birth to a child, which only survived for a few hours.
“I hope that I never again shall see a Sasquatch,” she concluded.
The Ruby Creek Incident
In October 1941, two of the most sensational Sasquatch encounters to ever hit Canadian newspapers occurred back-to-back, within the space of two weeks. The first of these sightings took place just outside Ruby Creek, tiny rural community situated on the banks of the Fraser River about 14 kilometres northeast of Harrison Hot Springs, as the crow flies, at the edge of what is now Sasquatch Provincial Park.
In mid-October 1941, a Chehalis man named George Chapman lived in a cabin near Ruby Creek with his wife Jeannie and their three children. One day, while George was away from home, working as a tie gang labourer on the nearby railroad, the eldest of the Chapman children ran into the cabin and declared that a cow had emerged from the woods. Alarmed by the inexplicable panic in her 9-year-old son’s tone, Jeannie stepped outside to investigate and spied what she first took to be a grizzly bear ambling along a distant hillside. Her two remaining children, aged 7 and 5, were playing in a nearby field at the time, and did not appear to be in any imminent danger. Nevertheless, Jeannie decided to call her children to the cabin as a precaution.
The bear’s strange physical appearance unnerved Jeannie, and so she decided to keep an eye on it from the cabin door as it made its way down the hill towards the railroad. Upon reaching the tracks, the animal, to Jeannie’s astonishment, reared up on its hind legs and began to stride towards the cabin like a human. Mrs. Chapman quickly realized that the creature was not a bear at all, but rather an enormous eight-foot-tall man covered with long brown hair. “I had much too much time to look at it,” she would later say of the incident. Jeannie described the giant has having an enormous chest and shoulders, inhumanly long arms, and a small head with a dark face.
Fearing that the monster was after her children, Mrs. Chapman unfurled a blanket and used it as a screen to shield her little ones from the wildman’s gaze. Ordering her children to stay behind her, she walked backwards from the cabin in the direction of the Fraser River. When they had put considerable distance between themselves and the giant, which had begun to examine the house, Jeannie and her children raced for the safety of Ruby Creek.
Two hours later, George Chapman, none the wiser, returned home from work to find that his home had been ransacked. Specifically, he found that his storage shed had been broken into, and that a heavy barrel filled with dried fish had been hauled outside and torn open, apparently without the use of tools. George knew from the pair of 17-inch-long, humanlike footprints which encircled his cabin that the intruder had been a Sasquatch, one of the legendary wild men of the woods of which his people had long spoken. The tracks indicated that the giant had loitered about the home for some time before finally heading back into the mountains, tripping over a barbed wire fence as it departed the Chapmans’ property.
To his relief, George quickly spied four smaller sets of footprints leading along the Fraser River in the direction of Ruby Creek. He followed the footprints to his father’s house, where he discovered his family had taken refuge.
Accompanied by George’s father, who armed himself with a hunting rifle, the Chapmans returned to their cabin the following day. In the nights succeeding the incident, they heard strange howls emanating from the nearby woods. Sometimes they would awake in the morning to find huge footprints in the vicinity of the cabin. When the terrifying nocturnal visitations persisted for a week straight, the Chapmans decided to abandon their cabin and relocate.
In his 1952 treatise on the Upper Stahlo, anthropologist Wilson Duff included a commentary on the Ruby Creek story made by Edmond Lorenzetto, the neighbour of his informant August Jim, who lived a few miles further up the Fraser River from the village of Katz.
“George Chapman’s kids saw it,” said Lorenzetto of the Ruby Creek Sasquatch, “and pointed it out to his wife, Jeanny. She got scared and ran to Ruby Creek, and would never go back. It almost made her sick. She traded houses with her sister-in-law and stayed at Ruby. That thing had squeezed itself through a door to steal dried fish. It left red fur on the door frame.”
In 1957, the Ruby Creek incident attracted the attention of John Willison Green, a Canadian journalist who would become one of Canada’s most prominent Sasquatch researchers. Green was so impressed by the Chapmans’ testimonies that he decided to settle in Harrison Hot Springs, where he lived and carried out his research until his death in 2016.
The Monster of Port Douglas
About a week after the excitement at Ruby Creek, an enormous hair-covered wildman was seen again, this time at the remote Lillooet Indian town of Port Douglas, which lies at the northernmost end of Harrison Lake.
One chilly evening, residents of Harrison Hot Springs were hailed by the occupants of three canoes approaching from the north, all of whom were clearly suffering from some terrible shock. The newcomers proved to comprise the family of Jimmy Douglas, a Lillooet clan from the lonely village at the opposite end of the lake. Locals treated the newcomers to typical Chehalis hospitality, and received in turn a hair-raising tale.
Earlier that day, without any warning, an enormous hairy wildman emerged from the forest and strode directly into Port Douglas. No such creature had been seen in the area for years, and the suddenness of its appearance and the boldness of its actions would have been sufficient to send the entire town into an immediate panic. What struck pure terror into the hearts of the locals, however, was the creature’s unbelievable size: this particular specimen stood an appalling fourteen feet tall – nearly twice the size of any Sasquatch Jimmy Douglas had ever heard of.
As the giant sauntered leisurely through the village, the natives of Port Douglas promptly abandoned their outdoor activities and fled into their houses with their families, locking the doors behind them. Jimmy Douglas made to do the same, but his trembling fingers fumbled with the rusted bolt which secured his front door. To his growing horror, the Sasquatch slowly approached his home, easily pulled the door open, stooped low, and began to work his way through the entrance. Like the Chapmans before them, the Douglas clan relinquished their home to their unwanted guest. Fleeing out the back door, the family members piled into three canoes and paddled desperately down the lake.
Sightings in the 1940s
Sasquatch sightings continued to be made in the Agassiz-Harrison Valley throughout the 1940s. In early 1944, an article appeared in the Vancouver Daily Province describing the experience of a Chehalis man, who was knocked down by some mysterious assailant while entering a derelict cabin. “The hunter scrambled to his feet and raised his gun to shoot,” wrote the journalist who covered the story, “only to lower the weapon with wonder and fear, when he saw not an animal rushing away, but a gigantic hairy wild man. The creature walked quickly in a sort of half-trot towards cover, glancing over his shoulder at the trembling figure in the doorway.
“On another occasion,” the journalist continued, “two natives, passing along a trail, were startled by big stones thrown on the path in front of them from a cliff above. On looking up, they saw two Susquatch leering at them over the edge of the cliff. One of the natives, a more than usually intelligent man, thought that the Susquatch were trying in a half fearful, tentative way to make advances toward getting acquainted.
“Retreating hastily, the Indians looked back to note the non-plussed attitude of the wildman, whose gestures seemed to be an invitation to return.”
In his book The Sasquatch File, John Green wrote that an old farmer from Agassiz found huge barefoot tracks in the snow of one of his fields sometime that decade. He followed the tracks to the slope of a mountain before concluding that further investigation might be hazardous to health.
One of Green’s informants, a Chehalis man named Henry Charlie, told the investigator that in 1948, while riding his bike down Morris Valley Road near Harrison Mills, a Sasquatch emerged from the forest and began to chase him, easily keeping pace with him as he pedaled for his life.
By the late 1940s, Sasquatch were spotted occasionally by white loggers. Anthropologist Wilson Duff alluded to such sightings in his 1952 book, noting a particular encounter that took place around that time on an unnamed logging road near Harrison Lake.
An Unexpected Encounter
Wildman sightings continued to be made in the area throughout the 1960s. A man from Langley, BC, told John Green and his fellow Sasquatch researcher, Swiss-Canadian cryptozoologist Rene Dahinden, that in the fall of 1965, when stepping into the bush off the highway near Harrison Mills, he spotted a “small dark creature with long hair, that appeared to be wearing fur around its waist.”
This author himself, while collecting footage in Saskatchewan’s Great Sand Hills in the autumn of 2021, happened upon a Belgian-Canadian immigrant who saw a Sasquatch in 1970, when he was sixteen years old, while driving with a timber crew on a logging road between Harrison Hot Springs and Hope, BC. Although he preferred to remain anonymous, this man, who possessed an intelligent and sober demeanour, as well a remarkable aptitude for impromptu storytelling, gave me permission to publish his story, which follows:
“I came to Canada in 1968, and I was fourteen years old. Two years later, we moved to Chilliwack, and I got a job working Cattermole Timber, on the now-new part of the highway, going from Harrison Hot Springs to Hope. In those days, it was just a gravel road for logging trucks, and nobody really lived there. We were burning slash so that the natives could grow corn.
“We’d been to work about a week or so into the summer, and one morning, I had to drive the company truck. We had two people – my neighbour, who owned the company, his son was sitting next to me – and a whole bunch of natives in the back earning beer money. Anyway, all of a sudden, they were banging on the cab of the truck, so I stopped, and I looked in the rearview mirror, and they’re all jumping out and running.
“I said to Harold, sitting next to me, ‘What are they saying?’
“He says, ‘Sasquatch! Sasquatch!’
“I said, ‘What’s that?’
“So they pointed ahead, and about five hundred metres ahead, there was a big thing standing on the railroad tracks. Now, the two railroad tracks are still there. The ditch is still there, too. And in one step, it stepped across the railroad track. I didn’t jump. It was upright, and it stepped across the ditch, and then it stopped in the middle of the road. And the road, at that point, is just as wide as a four-lane highway – it was gravel. When it stopped, it went like this, and looked at us…” At this point, the witness turned his body as if to look at something to the side, twisting at the waist so that his upper torso rotated as a single unit, rather than turning his head at the neck.
“… and then started running,” the man continued. “And Harold says, ‘Hit the gas! Hit the gas! Let’s go see it.’ So we did, and then we got to the spot where it ran in the bush, and we split up, the three of us, a few metres apart, looking for signs, and about five minutes into trying to find this thing, Harold says, ‘What the hell are we doing?’ So we went back.
“Now, how big was this thing? I would say – it was quite a distance away – it was about, at least seven feet tall, maybe eight.
“It wasn’t afraid. And I don’t ever want to see that thing again.
“And that was my introduction to the Sasquatch, because I didn’t know what they were or whatever. It wasn’t a bear, because a bear would have gone on all fours to jump across the ditch, it wouldn’t walk on its hind legs across the highway, and it was way too big to be a bear even standing up.
“So, that’s it. I’ve never seen anything like it since, and I don’t want to.”
The Sighting at Dunbar Camp
The same year as the Belgian’s sighting, on April 2nd, 1970, a man from Vancouver was driving near Harrison Hot Springs when an 8-foot-tall manlike creature ambled out of the woods in front of his car. The motorist had to slam on his brakes to avoid hitting the creature, which he said bore characteristics of both a man and a gorilla. The only part of the giant which was not covered with dark hair was its face, which he described as being dark and wrinkly. The motorist idled in the middle of the road, dumbfounded, as the mysterious figure proceeded across the road and disappeared into the brush on the other side.
In August 1975, a Sasquatch sighting was made by a staff member of Dunbar Camp, an isolated reform camp for troubled youth, located on a lonely peninsula at the northeastern end of Harrison Lake; accessible only by boat or bush plane. While sitting by a campfire one night, at about nine o’clock, camp leader Wayne Jones was startled by movement in the heavy brush on the other side of the fire. Before he could prepare to receive this uninvited guest, an enormous hair-covered man emerged from the forest. Jones described the creature as being manlike in posture and countenance, appearing unnervingly human, and not at all apelike. The creature walked slowly toward the fire, and then looked at Jones, who decided to remain as still as possible. The creature stood watching Jones and the fire for a period of three to four minutes, maintaining a distance of about 35 feet. At no point did it display threatening or aggressive behavior. Suddenly, some of the camp’s young attendees came running through the trees, prompting the big man to turn and stride briskly into the trees. Some of the children caught a glimpse of the creature as it vanished into the underbrush.
Despite Jones’ reluctance to speak with reporters, a brief allusion to his encounter was published in the August 22nd, 1975 issue of Canada’s National Observer. Spurred by this tip, Sasquatch researcher Stuart Mutch flew a hundred miles from the Pacific Coast to Dunbar Camp to investigate the sighting. The late Irish-American cryptozoologist Peter C. Byrne later published Mutch’s findings in his 1975 book The Search for Bigfoot, and in his 2015 book The Hunt for Bigfoot.
Sasquatch Days
Today, the Agassiz-Harrison Valley’s rich history of Sasquatch sightings are honoured by an annual festival called Sasquatch Days, established by J.W. Burns in 1938, in which locals of all ethnicities congregate for canoe races, traditional salmon barbecue, and a celebration of traditional Chehalis culture. This festival is typically scheduled in late June, a mere half month before the quadrennial Sasquatch powwow which was once supposed to have been held atop Mount Morris. If you ever have the fortune to attend this event, keep your eyes peeled. You might catch a glimpse of a wary Sasquatch scout watching from the edge of the woods.
Sources
“Introducing B.C.’s Hairy Giants: A collection of strange tales about British Columbia’s wild men as told by those who say they have seen them,” by J.W. Burns in the April 1st, 1929 issue of Maclean’s Magazine
“Woman Sees Wildman: Says it Sounded Like Humming Bird As It Approached,” in the May 22nd, 1934 issue of the Montreal Gazette
“Are They the Last Cave Men? British Columbia Startled by the Appearance of ‘Sasquatch,’ a Strange Race of Hairy Giants,” by Francis Dickie in the July 29th, 1934 issue of the Lincoln Star (Lincoln, Nebraska)
The Fraser Valley: A History (1992), by John A. Cherrington
“Dreaded Wild Men: Strike Fear Into Indian Children: Chehalis Tribes Claim to Have Seen Hairy Men Who Live in Caves and Subterranean Caverns,” in the March 3rd, 1934 issue of the Lethbridge Herald
“A Hairy Giant Sasquatch and Huge Black Bear Engage in Mortal Combat,” in the March 2nd, 1938 issue of the Chilliwack Progress, courtesy of Mr. Gary S. Mangiacopra
“The Hairy Giants of British Columbia,” by J.W. Burns in the January 1940 issue of The Wide World: A Magazine For Men
“Wild Giants of British Columbia,” by J.W. Burns in the November 1948 issue of Sir! A Magazine for Males
“Shouldn’t Be Captured: Nothing Monstrous About Sasquatch, Says Their Pal,” by Alex MacGillivray in the May 25th, 1957 issue of the Vancouver Sun
“Harrison Indians Flee: 1941 Edition of Sasquatch Twice as Big as Predecessors,” in the October 29th, 1941 issue of the Chilliwack Progress
“Hairy Monster Stalks: Here’s That Sasquatch Again,” in the October 25th, 1941 issue of The Province (Vancouver, BC)
“Sasquatch Return Frightens Indians in British Columbia,” in the November 28th, 1941 issue of the Long Beach Independent (Long Beach, California)
The Search for Bigfoot (1975), by Peter Byrne
The Hunt for Bigfoot (2015), by Peter Byrne
Abominable Snowmen: Legend Come to Life (1961), by Ivan T. Sanderson
The Historical Bigfoot: Second Edition (2019), by Chad Arment
The Sasquatch File (1973), by John Willison Green
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