Bigfoot. Sasquatch. Yeti. Yowie. Whatever their regional appellation, legendary wildmen the world over have engendered controversy since they were reintroduced to Western consciousness in the late 19th Century. Most people today dismiss such beings as relics of our superstitious past – fairytales perpetuated by wishful thinking, clever hoaxes, and overactive imaginations. Those who believe in wildmen generally regard them as some rare and elusive variety of great ape – a sort of primitive hominid which survived in the wild regions of the world until the relatively recent past, remnants of which might still exist today. And a smaller proportion of believers suppose that they are spiritual, preternatural, or otherdimensional entities whose nature surpasses modern comprehension.
For eight years, I have been digging up old native and frontier accounts of wildman encounters in Canada, combing through First Nations ethnologies, forgotten newspaper articles, and the writings of pioneering Sasquatch researchers in order to gain a better understanding of what Canada’s legendary wildmen were originally supposed to be. Like the modern man, some old-time Canadians, both native and white, refused to believe in the existence of such creatures. Others regarded them as animals straddling the border between man and beast. And a higher portion of the population than exists today attributed them with preternatural powers.
Of all the traditional theories as to the nature of Canada’s legendary wildmen, however, the most popular by far is a notion which has been completely excluded from the modern conversation. Throughout my research, I’ve consistently come across the forgotten belief that the elusive, hair-covered giant said to haunt the mountains of the Pacific Northwest, and the shadowy, red-eyed predator said to prowl the frozen forests of northern Canada, is a human being, transformed into its present state by the workings of some mysterious power.
Natives, regardless of nation or geographical location, almost universally attributed this metamorphosis to the influence of an evil spirit which preys on those who become lost in the wilderness, or who commit some moral transgression. On Vancouver Island and British Columbian coast north of Desolation Sound, the Wakashan nations have stories about a creature called the ‘Bukwus,’ or ‘Wild Man of the Woods,’ described as a gaunt, long-haired spectre that haunts coastal rivers and streams, which transforms lost travellers into creatures like itself by coercing them into eating ‘ghost food.’ Further to the north, on the Alaskan Panhandle and the northwestern coast of British Columbia, the Tlingit and Tahltan have stories about the Kushtaka or ‘Land Otter Man’, which captures drowning victims through trickery, allowing them to prolong their earthly existences by assuming their own chimeric forms. In the boreal forests of the prairie provinces, and in Ontario’s Canadian Shield, the Cree and Anishinaabe nations tell campfire stories about the Wendigo – a skeletal, grey-skinned giant with an insatiable craving for human flesh, whose evil spirit possesses the bodies of cannibals and transforms them into corporeal demons like himself. And in the frigid wilds of the Northwest Territories, the Gwich’in, Sahtu, Slavey, and Kaska Dene once lived in considerable fear of predatory man-eating giants called Nakani – believed, in some traditions, to the descendants of evil men cursed for their unnatural practices.
White frontiersmen, on the other hand, when confronted with the existence of the hairy manlike creatures that their kinsmen spotted from time to time in the Canadian wilderness, seemed to regard them as crazy human beings who had taken to the woods and physically transformed as a natural consequence of their wild lifestyles. Like the domestic pig, which develops tusks, a muscular frame, and a coat of thick bristles when forced to fend for itself in the wilderness, they believed that these men, exiled from polite society through choice or circumstance, had reverted to a rugged, more bestial form better suited to the harsh conditions of the backcountry through the natural process of adaptation.
In this piece, we will examine some of the evidence illustrating the once-widespread belief that Canada’s Sasquatch is a human being.
Stories from Harrison Hot Springs
In his famous article in the April 1st, 1929 issue of Maclean’s Magazine, Chehalis Indian agent J.W. Burns of Harrison Hot Springs, British Columbia, introduced the reading public to what he dubbed the ‘Sasquatch’ – a huge hairy manlike creature which his native charges claimed roamed the surrounding mountains, which name he took from the letter of a native witness named William or Herbert Point. One of Burns’ informants – a Chehalis man named Peter Williams – recalled his first run-in with a Sasquatch in the spring of 1901, while walking along the foot of a mountain about a mile from the Chehalis reserve. “I thought I heard a noise, something like a grunt nearby,” he told Burns. “Looking in the direction in which it came, I was startled to see what I took at first sight to be a huge bear crouched on a boulder twenty or thirty feet away. I raised my rifle to shoot it, but as I did, the creature stood up and let out a piercing yell. It was a man – a giant, no less than six and one-half feet in height, and covered with hair… 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.”
Another of Burns’ informants – a Skwah Coast Salish named Charley Victor, who hailed from Chilliwack, BC – described coming face to face with a Sasquatch while bathing in a small lake near Yale, British Columbia, at the end of the Fraser Canyon. “He was a big, big man,” Victor told Burns. “He looked at me for a moment, his eyes were so kind-looking that I was about to speak to him, when he turned about and walked into the forest.”
Talking Sasquatch
Victor went on to describe a second more terrifying encounter with a female Sasquatch, precipitated by his accidental shooting of a Caucasian boy whom he mistook for a bear, whom he supposed the wild woman had stolen. “The wild person was a woman,” Victor said of the terrifying creature who came to the boy’s assistance. “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.” Enraged, the wild woman proceeded to curse Victor in the Lillooet tongue of the Douglas Indians of northern Harrison Lake, transfixing him with her hypnotic gaze. “It is my own opinion,” Victor concluded, “since I met that wild woman fifteen years ago that because she spoke the Douglas tongue these creatures must be related to the Indian.”
Victor’s story is not the only tale in which a Sasquatch was said to have used human language. In another of his articles, published in the January 1940 issue of The Wide World: A Magazine For Men, Burns included the account of “an Indian named Henry Napoleon.” While hunting deer in the mountains near a suspected Sasquatch cave, Napoleon spotted what he first took to be a bear standing on its hind legs in the twilight. “When I stopped and raised my rifle,” he told Burns, “the creature spoke to me in a tongue very much like my own. He invited me to come closer and when I did so I saw that he was a man over seven feet tall; his body was very hairy.
“At first, I was terribly scared, but his eyes looked kind and he asked me to sit down and talk. He told me that during the winter the sasquatch sleep like bears and that their home is on top of Morris Mountain where no Indian or white man could ever find them. They live on roots, fish, and meat just like us Indians. Then suddenly it grew dark and he slipped away.”
This story appears to be a less sensational variation of a tale which appeared in North American newspapers in 1924, set on Vancouver Island instead of in the Lillooet Mountains. The storyteller, Henry Napoleon, who was identified as a Clallam native from Washington’s Olympic
Peninsula, claimed to have stumbled across a Seeahtik, or wildman, near Duncan, British Columbia, while trying to track a deer that he had shot. “It was at twilight,” Napoleon said, “when I came across an animal that I believed to be a big bear but as I aimed at him with my gun, he looked and spoke to me in my own tongue. He was about seven feet tall and his body was very hairy. As he invited me to sit down, he told me that I had come upon him unawares and that his mind had been projected to distant relatives of his, otherwise [he] would never have been seen.
“After we talked for some time he invited me to the Seeahtik’s home. Though it was now dark, yet the giant Indian followed the trail very easily; then we began an underground trail and after hours of travel we came to a large cave, which he said was the home of his people, and that they lived during the winter in the different caves on Vancouver Island. He also told me that the reason they were not seen very much was because they had a strange medicine that they rubbed over their bodies so that it made them invisible, and that, combined with their wha-ktee-nee-sing or hypnotic powers, made them very strong tamanaweis men. They also told me that they could talk almost any Indian language of the northwest. The next day they led me out and just at twilight I came out of the underground trail and they accompanied me to within a mile of the Indian village I was staying at.”
Human Women Impregnated by Sasquatch
The ability to speak is not the only human characteristic which Burns’ informants attributed to the Sasquatch. At the end of his 1940 article, the Indian agent included the disturbing account of a Chehalis elder named Seraphine Long, who claimed to have been abducted and impregnated by a Sasquatch in her youth.
One day while she was out gathering roots, Long claimed that a large hairy hand shot out of the bush and clamped over her mouth. “Then I was suddenly lifted up into the arms of a young Sasquatch…” she told Burns. “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.”
Long went on to explain how the Sasquatch took her to a large cave in the mountains and removed the sap from her eyes. “The floor was covered with animal skins,” she said, “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… Later I learned that they were the parents of the young sasquatch who had stolen me… They fed me well on roots, fish, and meat… [I learned] a few words of their tongue, which is not unlike the Douglas dialect…”
The wild people kept Long as their prisoner, treating her kindly but refusing her liberty. Long became pregnant by her abductor, and eventually fell very ill. Her wild husband returned her to her village in the same manner in which he had abducted her, just in time for her to give birth. Her child only survived for a few hours.
Seraphine Long is not the only native woman said to have been impregnated by a Sasquatch. In an article published in the 1962 Report of the Okanagan Historical Society, historian Hester E. White recorded a number of traditional tales told to her by an Okanagan Indian elder named Susap. Paraphrasing the elder’s words, White wrote, “Stenwyken, the hairy giant who smelled of burning hair, left large tracks near the Indian caches from which he helped himself to the dried meat, fish, roots and berries stored for the winter.
“He was often seen at the mouths of creeks catching fish. He was a peaceful man and never harmed the Indians.”
Susap went on to relate how, many years ago, a native girl disappeared from her camp in the northern Okanagan, in south-central British Columbia, and was presumed dead. Three years later, the girl stumbled back into her village, emaciated and ill, with a hair-raising tale. “Stenwyken had seized her,” White wrote, “put pitch on her eyelids and carried her to a large cave. [Sometime] afterwards she gave birth to a baby, but it died. In due time pitch was again put over her eyes and she was carried back to a spot near her people’s camp. There the pitch was removed and she was released. Stenwyken remained hidden and watched her safe arrival.”
Another Okanagan story involving a union between a giant and a native woman appears in anthropologist James Teit’s 1921 treatise on the mythology of the Thompson Indians. In this tale, a giant glad in grizzly bear skins kidnapped an Okanagan woman and brought her to his cave at the base of a cliff, the entrance of which was concealed by the stump of a large and ancient tree. Inside was a narrow passageway which miraculously dilated at the giant’s approach. The tunnel led deep into the mountain, to a lofty and spacious cave which the giant made his home.
“After some time,” Teit wrote, “the captive woman gave birth to a boy, who grew up to be a man of very large stature and of great strength, and who had the power of changing himself into the appearance of a grisly bear at will. He afterwards travelled over the country, performed many wonderful feats, and had many strange adventures. He was particularly fond of assuming the form of a grisly bear and frightening people.”
Sasquatch of the Fraser Canyon
Just up the Fraser River from Harrison Hot Springs, in the vicinity of the Fraser and Thompson Canyons, lies the traditional homeland of the Thompson Indians, an Interior Salish people. Historian Andrea Laforet included an exposition on the traditional Thompson conception of the Sasquatch in her 1998 book Spuzzum: Fraser Canyon Histories, 1808-1939, told to her by Thompson elder Annie York in 1970.
“The Indians claim that Sasquatches are human beings,” York said, “because they are the people who practiced to be medicine men when they were young. When boys or girls are young and want to be medicine men, their father or grandfather takes them up to the mountains and leaves them with very little to eat. They had to sleep and pray and stay alone, and some of them never returned. They got wild in the woods and never came home again. The Indians claim that that is where the Sasquatch came from.”
Another native story corroborating this eerie notion appears in Canadian anthropologist Wilson’s Duff’s 1962 article The Upper Stalo Indians of the Fraser Valley, British Columbia. “Sasquatches are usually seen singly,” Duff wrote in his introduction to the Tait conception of the wildman. “They are described as men, covered with dark fur, more than 8 feet tall, who leave footprints about 20 inches long.”
The anthropologist then reproduced a story set near Hope, British Columbia, in the Fraser Canyon, near the traditional border separating Thompson Indian territory from that of the Tait Indians, the latter being a division of the Upper Stahlo Coast Salish. Mrs. Lorenzetto, the native storyteller whom Duff quoted, used the term skalakum to denote Sasquatch, that word being an umbrella term for any wild creature with preternatural power.
“One day,” Mrs. Lorenzetto said, “the women of American Bar (a few miles above Hope) were out picking berries in the hills. One of them disappeared. The hunters found big tracks and followed them up the mountain until they disappeared. They then had to give up, saying ‘The slalakums got her.’
“A couple of years later the same thing happened. My friend’s grandmother was taken away by a sasquatch. As soon as it touched her she lost consciousness, and when she came to again she found the woman who had disappeared earlier, her own relative. The woman told her that she, herself, would never go home again because one of the sasquatches was her man and she now had a small son. However, she would help her to escape. They had flour and other foods around, which the woman said the sasquatches had stolen for her and her son.
“The next day the sasquatches went off to hunt and steal food. They also wanted to get a wife for the third one. The women prepared a lot of bread, and the other woman led my friend’s grandmother part way home. When she got to the creek at American Bar, my friend’s grandmother caught sight of some of her people who were still out looking for her. She went unconscious because she had been with the sasquatches and wasn’t like a person any more. The people found her and took her home. She couldn’t speak their language any more, and hair had started to grow all over her body. They got some Indian doctors to work on her, and after a long time she became normal again.
“Many years later the American Bar people heard a loud yelling at that same creek. They went there and saw three sasquatches yelling. The woman tried to talk with them, but she couldn’t remember their language. So they never found out why they had come. They thought maybe the woman had died or that one of the sasquatches was her son. My friend always tells [my husband] and the other hunters never to shoot the giants because they might be her relations.”
Martin’s Transformation
Incredibly, the notion that some human beings who retreat to the wilderness can sprout thick coats of body hair recurs in late 19th and early 20th Century newspaper articles, often in a manner insinuating that the phenomenon is common knowledge. An article published in the December 4th, 1875 issue of the Ottawa Daily Citizen, for example, described the disappearance and subsequent transformation of a member of the Canadian Pacific Railway Exploratory Survey.
“The following is an extract from a private letter received from Clinton on Saturday,” the article began. “The person alluded to was an axeman in the employ of a Canadian Pacific Railway survey party in 1871, and suddenly went mad while on Thompson River and plunged into the woods. From the extract there would seem to be no ‘doubt that he is still living in a state of wildness.
“‘You may perhaps remember Martin, a German who had a store on Kanaka Road, Victoria. He left a Canadian Pacific Railway survey party, and was occasionally seen for that season on the mountains. Last winter, in the coldest time, he was also seen by Indians after he had to cross the Thompson River on the ice. It is wonderful how he managed to exist during the intense cold. A few days ago he came to the sheep-run of Peter Frazer, on Stump Lake, between Kamloops and Nicola. He carries his rifle which was very rusty; he had as clothing what appeared to be a piece of old trousers around his neck and not another rag or hat; his hair is gray and matted and hangs down on his shoulders, and his body has become thickly covered with hair like an animal of the gorilla species. He asked the shepherd for something to eat and he gave him the remnants of his dinner. The shepherd asked many questions, but received no answer, the wild man appearing to be deaf. After he had finished eating he said, ‘That is the first bread I have eaten in five years.’ Whilst eating he stood leaning on his rifle. The shepherd offered him clothes, but he seemed unconscious of anything said and walked away.”
The Horne Lake Mowgli
A figure answering to a similar description was allegedly spotted by four hunters near Horne Lake, British Columbia, on Vancouver Island, in late 1904. According to an article in Vancouver’s The Province, the creature was “a being in the form of a man, who, although evidently young, had long matted hair and a beard, and was covered with hair all over the body. The creature was surprised while near the shore of the lake and on catching sight of the four men ran away with the swiftness of a deer, and was soon lost to sight in the thick underbrush. The wild man was distinctly seen by the four members of the party, and as they are all reliable individuals, their testimony is accepted without any doubt.”
In the wake of the Horne Lake sighting, newspapermen across British Columbia speculated as to the nature of the Vancouver Island ‘Mowglie,’ as the creature was dubbed, most proposing that it was a white man or a Chinese prospector who had lost his mind and taken to the bush.
Mike King’s Encounter
The excitement at Horne Lake was preceded by the startling report of a woodsman who claimed to have caught a Sasquatch in the sights, but chose not to shoot due to the creature’s manlike appearance.
Around the turn of the 20th Century, a lumberman named Mike King claimed to have stumbled upon a wildman on Vancouver Island, British Columbia, in what is now Strathcona Provincial Park. The story of his encounter first appeared in print in the summer of 1904, and continued to circulate throughout the first two decades of that century. While scouting for quality timber beyond the headwaters of Campbell River, King came across what one article described as “a thing, large, completely covered with hair, with long arms hanging below the knee, penetrating eyes under a mass of unkempt hair – certainly a man, said King, but yet such a human as no nation, tribe, or country knows.”
King had caught the creature in the act of washing and sorting “certain edible grass roots” in a small pond. “He says that the body was covered with reddish-brown hair,” the article explained, “and that its arms were peculiarly long…”
“He was running uphill across the draw,” King is quoted as having said in an interview posthumously published in 1924, “legs and arms all working, four or five feet tall, I’d judge, and plenty hairy – sort of reddish brown, like a bright bay horse. I dropped my 30.30 on him as he climbed, when all of a sudden he stopped short, pretty near the top, and turned round and stared at me. ‘Course he saw me. Wasn’t more than eighty yards.
“I couldn’t a’ missed him, but then I couldn’t shoot somehow. Looked too much like a man.”
After the creature bounded into the bush, King examined the place at which first spotted him and found two piles of wild onions – one of them washed, and the other still covered in dirt. “He’d been pulling and washing them at the spring when I came along,” King said. “Ain’t that human-like, b’th’ lovely dove?”
William Roe’s Encounter
Another woodsman who forwent an opportunity to shoot a Sasquatch on account of its humanness was William Roe, a construction worker who hiked Mica Mountain near Tete Jaune Cache, British Columbia, in 1953, during the construction of the Yellowhead Highway. “I had just come out of a patch of low brush into a clearing,” he wrote in an affidavit, “when I saw what I thought was a grizzly bear, in the bush on the other side. I had shot a grizzly near that spot the year before. This one was about 75 yards away, but I didn’t want to shoot it, for I had no way of getting it out. So I sat down on a small rock and watched, my rifle in my hands.”
Roe quickly recognized that the creature he had stumbled upon was no grizzly, but rather an impossibly stocky woman covered from head to toe with short dark brown silver-tipped hair. “The shape of this creature’s head somewhat resembled a Negro’s…” the hunter wrote. “Its ears were shaped like a human’s ears. But its eyes were small and black like a bear’s. And its neck also was unhuman. Thicker and shorter than any man’s I had ever seen.”
Suddenly, the wildwoman glanced in Roe’s direction, apparently having caught his scent. “A look of amazement crossed its face,” the hunter wrote. “It looked so comical at the moment I had to grin. Still in a crouched position, it backed up three or four short steps, then straightened up to its full height and started to walk rapidly back the way it had come. For a moment it watched me over its shoulder as it went, not exactly afraid, but as though it wanted no contact with anything strange.”
Roe considered shooting the creature as it stalked back into the bush. “I levelled my rifle,” he wrote. “The creature was still walking rapidly away, again turning its head to look in my direction. I lowered the rifle. Although I have called the creature ‘it’, I felt now that it was a human being and I knew I would never forgive myself if I killed it.”
Sasquatch Clothes
In addition to their physical appearance, fluency in human language, and ability to procreate with native women, there are other characteristics ascribed to Canadian wildmen which seem to qualify them as members of the human race. One of these is the ability to create fire – a motif which regularly appears in the traditional tales of the Okanagan, and in the stories of the Chehalis, who claimed that campfires that could sometimes be seen flickering atop Mount Morris during an annual Sasquatch powwow.
Another attribute which seems to elevate the Sasquatch above the brute creation is their purported ability to wear clothing. Although the subjects of most Canadian wildman sightings are described as completely naked, the Shuswap, Thompson, and Okanagan Indians contended that the giants that abode in British Columbia’s Interior Plateau often clad themselves in bearskins, deerskins, dog skins, or goat skins. And the Nakani of the boreal forest was often described as wearing clothing that was strange or incomplete, such as rawhide boots or a lone headscarf.
In October 1905, a family by the name of Pitcock is said to have been harassed by a nocturnal hair-covered wildman on a remote isle off the coast of Vancouver Island. Two young men of the household resolved to confront the creature one night, and followed its blood-curdling screams to the banks of a nearby creek. According to an article in the Nanaimo Daily News, “They had gone up the stream about half a mile when the light of a lantern carried by one revealed a tall man, entirely naked, except for a few rags hanging from a belt at his waist. His body was covered with long hair and the face that [which] was seen peering through the window the previous evening.”
Nearly paralyzed with fear, one of the men managed to level his rifle at the creature. In response, the wildman threw himself into the creek, swam to the opposite shore, and cried, “Don’t shoot!” before darting into the bush and out of sight.
Roughly one year later, in the autumn of 1906, two fishermen named Tom Ash and O. Bratland had a strange experience on Banks Island, a remote coastal isle sandwiched between the Hecate Strait and the Principe Channel east of the Queen Charlotte Islands, or Haida Gwaii. While hunting for game on the beach, the fishermen came face to face with a frightening creature which they said resembled a gorilla more than a human being. The figure stood six feet tall, and was covered from head to toe with hair measuring about six inches in length. The hair on the wildman’s head was longer than the rest, falling halfway down his back. The fishermen described the creature as gaunt and hungry-looking, and said that it was completely naked save for a small breech cloth. Apparently startled by the appearance of these visitors, the creature turned and ran like a deer through the woods, uttering strange guttural sounds as it disappeared into the bush.
The Wildman of Amherst Island
Perhaps the most blatant illustration of the bygone belief that hairy wildmen are really human beings transformed by the rigors of the wild is a sensational article published in the February 28th, 1920 issue of Kingston, Ontario’s Weekly British Whig. The article describes the capture of a wildman on an island in Lake Ontario just southwest of Kingston.
“A startling discovery which brings back the story of Robinson Crusoe to real life,” the article declared, “was made here when a party of hunters in search of game on Amherst Island, in the Bay of Quinte, found a huge, hairy man clad only in the skins of wild animals and leaves who was unable to utter a syllable of any language. He was discovered in a cave and resisted ferociously until the hunters captured him with a lasso. After being brought back to Belleville he was identified by Mrs. Florence Masters, who keeps a millinery store, as her husband, who disappeared after going on a fishing trip twenty-two years ago.”
The article went on to relate the capture in vivid detail, describing the wildman as “a huge hairy being, which resembled an immense gorilla more than a man,” and later identifying him as a fisherman named Ethelbert Masters who had disappeared twenty-two years earlier. “It is believed that he [survived] on roots and herbs and what game he could capture with his hands,” the article concluded, “and finally reverted to a savage state as a result of the life he was leading.”
There are many more passages in old Canadian literature hinting at the belief that the Sasquatch is a human being, transformed by some mysterious wilderness power or some natural process which has eluded scientific comprehension. Is this notion nothing more than a primitive attempt to make sense a phenomenon which has yet to be explained? Or is it possible that the Sasquatch is one of us?
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