THE SECRET SASQUATCH FILES

Part 1

Regular viewers of this channel may have observed that a video with the same title as the one you’re currently watching was published here this past Sunday before being deleted twelve hours later. This video featured untold Canadian Sasquatch stories drawn from the unpublished newsletters of the British Columbia Scientific Cryptozoology Club (BCSCC), and was intended to be the pilot episode of a long and interesting series. About half a day after I published the episode, I was contacted by a representative of the BCSCC, avowedly alerted by a viewer of this channel, who asked that I delete the video, remove old club newsletters from the digital Gary Mangiacopra Archive, and refrain from drawing from BCSCC material without written permission, with which requests I complied. So unfortunately, the secret Sasquatch files of the BCSCC will remain secret.

Serendipitously, that very night, my friend and fellow researcher Kevin Guhl, author of the excellent Fortean blog ThunderbirdPhoto.com (link in description), introduced me to a whole new realm of Canadian Bigfoot material equally deserving of the title ‘Secret Sasquatch Files, which frankly blew my mind. Until Kevin’s revelation, I had been under the impression that, with the massive exception of First Nations tradition, as well as a scattering of fur trade and settler tales, most of them from the subarctic, Canadian wildman stories were largely creatures of the 20^th Century and the Pacific Northwest, first brought to public awareness by Chehalis Indian Agent J.W. Burns’ famous article in the April 1929 issue of Maclean’s magazine on the legendary Sasquatch of Harrison Lake and the Lillooet Mountains. What was my amazement to discover that, thanks to the rapid growth of digital newspaper archives and improvements in OCR technology, wildman stories which have hitherto escaped the notice of researchers can now be found in North American newspapers dating as far back as the early 1800s. Most of these old tales which take place north of the 49^th parallel are set in Canada’s central provinces, far from traditional Sasquatch stomping grounds in the mountains and rainforests of the West Coast. Many of them are simply stories of hermits and crazy human beings who took to living in the wilderness, while a few have eerie similarities with the tales of huge hairy giants which characterize modern Bigfoot reports. The most interesting have elements of both of these archetypes, according with an ancient belief shared by First Nations across the continent – a theory largely neglected by Sasquatch researchers – that wildmen are really human beings transmogrified into hairy giants by some mysterious elemental force.

Although America’s early non-indigenous wildman lore is far richer than Canada’s, doubtless due to settler proliferation in the Midwestern and Southeastern United States, the Great White North makes a modest contribution to this forgotten anthology. In this series, we will uncover Canada’s secret Sasquatch files.

The Hermit of Cape Breton Island

The oldest wildman story to be published in a Canadian newspaper was printed in the August 7^th, 1847 issue of the Halifax Herald and reproduced in the same issue of the British Whig and General Advertiser for Canada West, a paper based out of Kingston, Ontario. The story is set on Cape Breton Island, a rugged mass of lakes and highlands off the northern tip of the Nova Scotian Peninsula, whose inhabitants are a quintessential mix of maritime Canadians, composed chiefly of Anglo-Celtic Britons, Acadian French, and indigenous Mi’kmaq. The article describes a strange and reclusive man who lived in the island’s forest, whose case makes an interesting comparison with some of the more sensational wildman stories we will explore later in this series.

Believed to be born of Scottish immigrants who took up residence in the town of Sydney, Nova Scotia, this hermit allegedly spent his childhood roaming the woods of Cape Breton, sometimes for days at a time. When his parents died, he is supposed to have taken to the forest, where his lifestyle degenerated into one of abject savagery. By the time well-meaning humanitarians captured him in the summer of 1847 and brought him to Halifax’s Poor Asylum in an attempt to rehabilitate him, he was living in a state of total nudity, and had apparently lost the ability to communicate.

“He is both deaf and dumb,” the article explained, “and his appearance is extremely haggard. He remains generally, whether awake or asleep, in a sitting position. His skin is considerably shriveled, from constant exposure to the weather, and his whole deportment resembles more that of an inferior animal than of a human being. When food is offered him, he seizes it, and pressing it to his mouth with both hands, devours it ravenously. He is remarkably fond of salt, which he eats in large quantities. The first steps toward civilization have been partially successful; he having learned the use of the spoon, and to a limited extent allowed his body to be covered with light wearing apparel.”

The Squirrel Man of Southwold Township

Twenty three years later, a tantalizing notice appeared in the September 27^th, 1870 issue of the Hamilton Spectator describing a wildman sighting made in Ontario’s Southwold Township, on the northern shores of Lake Erie just south of the city of London.

“A wild man who had no clothes on to speak of,” the piece declared, “who is partially covered with hair and climbs trees like a squirrel, pervades the bush in Southwold Township.”

Despite its brevity, this short announcement evokes images of an unusually hairy tree-climbing human being more akin to the so-called ‘woodwose,’ or wild man of the woods, of medieval European legend than the hulking mountain giant which dominates modern Sasquatch reports. This eerie notion suggests three possible candidates for the subject’s identity.

The Crazy Human Hypothesis

The first explanation – the most prosaic and perhaps the most likely of the three – is that the subject was a mentally-ill man who took to living like an animal in the woods after a suffering a mental break with reality. Canadian newspapers, letters, and journals are filled with stories of woodsmen who lost their minds after years of isolation in the bush. The hairiness ascribed to the man in this story may simply be the product of genetics, perhaps augmented to uncanny proportions by the witness to this alarming anthropoid aberration.

The Neanderthal Hypothesis

A less conventional explanation is that the wildman of Southwold Township was a surviving member of some ancient hominid species thought to be long extinct, a scattering of whom may have eked out a miserable existence in the Canadian wilderness in the late 19^th Century. This outlandish notion is supported by an old Cree and Ojibwa legend which we have explored in a previous piece, which holds that wildmen called the ‘Hairy Hearts’ or the ‘Hairy Breasts’, reminiscent of the Neanderthal of modern anthropology, dwelled in the wilderness of the Canadian Shield, just north of the Great Lakes, in the not-so-distant past. These archaic people are said to have preyed on both humans and wild game, killing their quarry by running them down, tackling them, and tearing them open with knives of stone or bone.

The Human Transformation Hypothesis

A third possible explanation, and perhaps the most difficult to swallow, is that the creature spotted in the bush north of Lake Erie was a woodsman undergoing some sort of mysterious metamorphosis resultant of his wild lifestyle, developing the mental and physical characteristics of a wild beast either as a natural adaptation to his harsh environment, or under the influence of some demonic or elemental spirit. This bizarre concept, laughable to the modern mind, is not only a universal motif in First Nations tradition, but also has a precedent in the natural world, and is hinted at in many of the newspaper articles we will explore in this series.

From the Atlantic to the Pacific to the Arctic, native peoples across the continent have traditional stories about evil spirits that possess human beings whom they find lost in the wilderness, or who make themselves vulnerable to their influence by committing some moral transgression. Victims under the spells of these demonic entities are lured to the wilderness, where they gradually transform into monstrous creatures which bear only vague resemblance to their former human forms. On Vancouver Island, British Columbia, the native Nuu-chah-nulth and Kwakwaka’wakw have traditional tales about a creature called the Bukwus, or “Wild Man of the Woods”, who haunts the banks of rivers and streams. This gaunt and frightening entity, with pale skin and long hair, offers food to lost travellers. Anyone who partakes of this enchanted repast will transform into Bukwus himself. North of Vancouver Island, on the northwestern coast of British Columbia and the Alaskan Panhandle, the Tlingit have stories about the Kushtaka, or “Land Otter Men,” who prey on drowning victims and those who become lost in the wilderness, allowing their victims to prolong their earthly existences by assuming their own hideous forms. Those fully transformed into Kushtaka are sometimes described as resembling human-sized otters, or human beings with otter-like features. The native legend most geographically relevant to the story of the Lake Erie wildman is that of the Wendigo, the evil cannibal spirit of Cree and Algonquin tradition. According to the Anishinaabe of Northern Ontario, people who consume human flesh in the wintertime, or in times of famine, expose themselves to the influence of this boreal demon. Those possessed by the Wendigo develop an insatiable craving for human flesh which compels them to eat their friends and family. If a Wendigo demoniac manages to commit these predations and escape the arm of justice, he will retreat to the wilderness and gradually transform into a gaunt grey-skinned giant with the appearance of a corpse freshly disinterred from the grave.

Incredibly, the disturbing notion that an external influence can cause a biological organism to undergo a radical physical and behavioral transformation is a well-documented reality in the animal kingdom. Certain species’ of grasshopper, when compelled to congregate by changing environmental conditions, abandon their solitary lifestyles and band together in massive travelling swarms, changing colour as they morph into smaller long-winged locusts. More relevant to this piece is the dramatic reversion of swine to a more primitive state when their living conditions are made to resemble those of their wild Eurasian ancestors. When domestic pigs are evicted from their pens and forced to fend for themselves in the wilderness, their minds and bodies adapt quickly to their harsh new environment. After a few months of life in the wild, newly-feral pigs grow coats of dark, thick bristles which serve the dual purpose of protecting them from the elements and camouflaging them from predators. They become lean and muscular, and grow the long, sharp tusks of wild boars. They also become more aggressive, and develop a diet and foraging habits more accordant with their habitat. Scientists believe that these dramatic transformations result from the expression of so-called “stealth genes” – dormant genetic traits stimulated by wild living. When considered in light of the wildman phenomenon, the adaptability of domestic pigs begets the uncomfortable notion that some human beings might be endowed with stealth genes which, if activated by environmental pressure, might cause them to revert to a feral state, developing the hairy coat, robust build, and antisocial behavior exhibited by legendary wildmen the world over.

The Wild Boy of Gore

The squirrel man of London was not the only wildman reported in east-central Canada in the 1870s. The Canadian summer of 1871 was darkened by the shadows of at least two sylvan spectres, the first of them spotted in Ontario’s historic Gore district not far from Hamilton, at the western end of Lake Ontario.

“Periodically we are startled by a Wild Man of the Wood,” declared an article in the June 27^th, 1871 issue of the Hamilton Spectator, “who appears in the press of the United States, to horrify the world with his fantastic tricks; and now we have nearer home, not a wild man, but a wild boy, treading the forest recesses of the Gore… to the uneasiness of men and the awe of maids. He was first seen about two weeks ago, on the edge of the forest extending about a mile and a half, and situated about four miles from the city. Five residents of the neighborhood, passing by the bush, saw him wandering aimlessly about, and made an effort to enter into conversation. But he no sooner saw them than he appeared to be very much frightened, and bounded off into the woods with the fleetness of a deer. He wore a peculiarly wild and haggard aspect, with nothing to cover him but a pair of dark pantaloons and a white shirt, both of which are torn and hanging in shreds to his person; one sleeve of the shirt was entirely gone. His hair, all matted and awry, lent him a lost and savage look. He has been seen on several occasions, but has always eluded his watchers, perhaps too timid to pursue him, and escaped from their sight into the depths of the wood. How he manages to subsist may be imagined from the fact that one day in the latter part of last week, an old resident whose name is in our possession, suddenly surprised him while reclining on a knoll, and Nebuchadnezzar-like, plucking the grass and herbs around him to eat. The old gentleman in question, hallooed to attract his attention, when the unfortunate demented being hastily arose, uttered a howl of dismay and ambled off as fast as he could to his shadowy retreat.”

The article went on to explain how several search parties went out in the woods with the intention of retrieving the boy and bringing him back to civilization, adding that locals believed he had taken up residence in a cave. “No one knows who he is,” the article concluded, “where he came from, or by what strange hallucination he has been prompted to run wild in the woods.”

It may not be out of place here to insert a word on the grass-plucking Nebuchadnezzar with whom the article compared the wild boy. King Nebuchadnezzar II ruled the Second Babylonian Empire of ancient Mesopotamia in the 6^th Century B.C. According to the Book of Daniel, part of the Ketuvim of Hebrew scripture and one of the prophetic books of the Christian Old Testament, God punished Nebuchadnezzar for his hubris by taking his sanity from him for a period of seven years, during which the king “was driven away from among men, and did eat grass like an ox, and his body was wet with the dew of heaven: till his hairs grew like the feathers of eagles, and his nails like birds’ claws.”

The Wild Man of Montreal

About a month and a half after the wild boy was reported in the Hamilton Spectator, another wildman was alluded to in the August 15^th, 1871 issue of the Montreal Star. This mysterious figure appears to have dwelled on the eastern slopes of Mount Royal, the solitary island eminence for which the surrounding city of Montreal, Quebec was named, and terrorized the residents of the Griffintown neighbourhood between the promontory’s foot and the St. Lawrence River.

“The fear of the ‘wild man of the mountain,’” the article declared, “now amounts to a practical prohibition as far as strangers, ladies and children are concerned in visiting this beautiful spot. This should no longer be tolerated. Let him be caught and punished, and placed where he would be looked after for about six months, or else send about a dozen Griffintown boys after him, and hunt him down, it would be nice fun for them!”

Discounting a brief piece in an 1873 newspaper alluding to a deranged gun-wielding hermit who dwelled in a swamp north of Kitchener, Ontario, the next wildman reference in the Canadian news is perhaps the most fascinating piece in this series. Out of all the articles we will examine, it is arguably the strongest piece of evidence supporting the notion that the legendary wildmen of the world are really human beings transformed into monsters by some natural or preternatural force.

Part 2

In the first installment of this series, we explored the ancient notion, common to native traditions across the continent, that the legendary wildmen of North America are really human beings mutated into their present forms through the workings of some mysterious power. A startling story which appears to support this peculiar hypothesis was printed in the December 4^th, 1875 issue of the Ottawa Daily Citizen.

The background to this forgotten tale is set in 1871, when the crown colony of British Columbia joined the newly-formed Dominion of Canada – at that time, a small easterly federation consisting of the provinces of Ontario, Quebec, Nova Scotia, and New Brunswick. British Columbia had agreed to join Canadian Confederation with the understanding that a great transcontinental railroad – the longest stretch of track in the world at that time – would be built from the Pacific Coast, through the Rocky Mountains, over the prairies, and across the Canadian Shield, bridging that western province with the easterly Dominion. In order to determine a safe and efficient route for that iron road, construction of which would commence a decade later, the Dominion government sponsored the Canadian Pacific Railway Exploratory Survey, and appointed railroad veteran Sandford Fleming as Engineer-in-Chief. Fleming organized three survey divisions and tasked them with assessing the terrain of what is now Northern Ontario, the Prairie Provinces, and British Columbia, respectively. Each division was subdivided into multiple survey parties which were assigned to particular stretches of country.

Our story is one of a handful of mysteries to come out of this grueling but forgotten undertaking, consigned to oblivion by the shadow of the epic construction project which it made possible. It is set in the summer of 1871, when parties R, S, T, U, and V of the Canadian Pacific Railway Exploratory Survey were tramping through the wilderness of British Columbia under the direction of engineers John Trutch, Walter Moberly, and Roderick McLennan. The tale concerns the nervous breakdown and subsequent disappearance of a German-born shopkeeper named Martin, who is supposed to have sold his business in the town of Victoria, on Vancouver Island, in order to join one of the surveying parties.

There is no mention of Martin’s disappearance in the official Progress Report of the 1871 survey, written by Fleming and the leaders of the various survey divisions. The only misfortunes alluded to in that publication are the confirmed death of a native guide and the disappearance of six survey employees – four natives and two whites – in a forest fire north of Lake Superior. That the labourer’s vanishing failed to merit mention in the report, however, is no indication that it didn’t happen. In his memoir Surveying the Canadian Pacific, commissariat Robert M. Rylatt of Division S described the disappearance and probable drowning of his coworker Jim Maloney, who was sucked under rapids on the Columbia River on October 7^th, 1871, on whose fate the official report is similarly silent. Rylatt’s superior, engineer Walter Moberly, also made no mention of Maloney’s drowning in his 1885 memoir. He did, however, recall his dismissal of several troublesome employees deep in the Columbia Mountains, leaving these firebrands to their own devices and washing his hands of their fates in the dying gold town of Wild Horse Creek. That some survey employees might express dissatisfaction with their lot, or, as in Martin’s case, suffer psychotic breaks, is understandable considering the hardships they faced in that wild and unforgiving country. As Canadian historian Pierre Berton put it in his 1970 book The National Dream:

“No life was harsher than that suffered by members of the Canadian Pacific Survey crews. None was less rewarding. Underpaid, overworked, exiled from their families, deprived of their mail, sleeping in slime and snowdrifts, suffering from sunstroke, frostbite, scurvy, fatigue, and the tensions that always rise to the surface when weary and dispirited men are thrown together for long periods of isolation, the surveyors kept on… The wonder was that anyone worked on the surveys at all.”

For Martin, apparently, the rigors of survey work proved too much. The following is an account of his bizarre fate, printed in the December 4^th, 1875 issue of the Ottawa Daily Citizen, under the headline: “Starling Story: A Former Victorian Running Naked and Wild on the Mainland.”

“The following is an extract from a private letter received from Clinton on Saturday. 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 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.

“‘From carrying his rusty rifle, his right shoulder is a little drooped. He carries it in his hand and walks slowly and erect. The reason he has not been seen more frequently is that he keeps to the high benches and does not appear to want to leave them. He headed towards Nicola Valley. When he first took to the woods he got into the mountains at the back of Cornwall’s and was frequently seen there, but would run away and hide. It seems impossible to live without freezing with the mercury at 50o below zero and the inference is that the blood of the insane has a cold resisting power much greater than that of sane people.’”

Martin’s strange odyssey, with episodes on the Thompson River, Stump Lake, and Nicola Valley, takes place in British Columbia’s Interior Plateau, a land of low hills, ponderosa pine, and desert terrain rendered uncanny by the many strange stories which surround it, which prompted this author, in a previous piece, to dub it the British Columbia Triangle. In addition to a startling number of unsolved disappearances, gold rush-era ghost stories, and the intriguing tale of a supposed time slip, this region is home to a number of eerie native legends told by the Interior Salish. Among the spookiest of these traditional tales are those involving ‘land and water mysteries’ – dangerous powers or entities which dwell in certain remote locations, such as particular peaks, alpine lakes, waterfalls, or mountain streams. Those who visit these places are liable to see extraordinary apparitions, hear phantom noises, or experience preternatural phenomena – all manifestations of the areas’ malevolent elemental denizens. Those who witness these things, without having first prepared themselves by painting their faces black or red, often become sick or paralyzed, and may die shortly thereafter. Believed, in some traditions, to be the spirits of ancient evil sorcerers, land and water mysteries were sometimes sought out by medicine men and their acolytes, who hoped to harness the power they exuded for their own purposes.

Even more disturbing, in the context of Martin’s story, are Interior Salish legends regarding the alpine wildmen with whom they share their territory. According to Canadian anthropologist Andrea Laforet in her 1998 book Spuzzum: Fraser Canyon Histories, 1808-1939, the Nlaka’pamux or Thompson Indians who lived along the Thompson River, on which Martin is said to have lost his mind, believed that the hairy giants seen in the Cascade and Lillooet Mountains from time to time were people who become wild after spending too much time in the mountains. In her book, she quotes Thompson elder Annie York as saying:

“The Indians claim that Sasquatches are human beings because they are the people who practiced to be medicine men when they were young. When boys or girls are young and want to be medicine men, their father or grandfather takes them up to the mountains and leaves them with very little to eat. They had to sleep and pray and stay alone, and some of them never returned. They got wild in the woods and never came home again. The Indians claim that that is where the Sasquatch came from.”

One native story which illustrates this notion appears in Canadian archaeologist and anthropologist Wilson’s Duff’s 1962 article The Upper Stalo Indians of the Fraser Valley, British Columbia. This story is set near Hope, British Columbia, on 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 quotes uses the term skalakum to denote Sasquatch, that word being an umbrella term for both unusual creatures and land and water mysteries.

“One day,” Mrs. Lorenzetto told Duff, “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.”

Is it possible that Martin suffered the same fate as the berry picker from American Bar, transformed into a hairy wildman by the mysterious power that the natives say haunt the mountains? Perhaps Martin himself was picking berries at the commencement of his extraordinary metamorphosis from a civilized citizen to a wilderness renegade, shirking his duties for a few moments to indulge in the wild blueberries or huckleberries which grow on the shores of the Thompson River. For reasons at which we can only speculate, berries and berry picking is a common theme in Canadian Sasquatch stories. In the next section of this series, we will take a look at another forgotten Canadian wildman encounter featuring these fruits of the forest.

Part 3

The Wildman of Southern Ontario

In late July, 1876, a strange event took place in March Township, Ontario, a historic district bordering the Ottawa River, located at the present western outskirts of Ottawa, Ontario. According to an article in the August 4^th, 1876 issue of Kingston Ontario’s Weekly British Whig, a group of children had decided to go berry picking the previous week off what was called the Arnprior Road – almost certainly a section of the now-forgotten Brockville & Ottawa Railway near the town of Arnprior. A passage in a later article indicates that most of these children may have been girls.

While they foraged, the children spotted what the paper described as “a man in a perfectly nude condition standing on the top of a hill, his body being covered with hair and his face covered with a long beard. The man stood looking at the children for some time, and appeared anxious to join in with them… [He] stood looking at them for fifteen minutes, and then slowly descended the side of the hill and disappeared in the woods.”

The article declared that the story was no childish invention, as a 15-year-old local named Bradley gave a clear and sober account of the experience to a reporter. “The story is fully believed by the people around the place,” the article concluded, “and several searches have been made to try and discover the wild man’s retreat.”

Despite the willingness of the local populace to take the children’s report at face value, a succeeding piece in the August 7^th, 1876 issue of the Ottawa Daily Citizen casts some doubt on the encounter, stating that “it has since leaked out that one of the male members of the party was playing a practical joke on the girls, and by wrapping a buffalo robe around his manly form, and hiding in the bushes succeeded in starting the above rumor.”

The Berry Connection

Prank or not, wildman sightings made while berry picking recur with surprising frequency in the annals of Canadian Sasquatch encounters. In an 1884 article for the Victoria British Colonist, an Anglican missionary named Reverend John Booth Good claimed that Thompson Indian berry pickers, while camping in British Columbia’s Fraser Canyon in the 1860s, ‘70s, and ‘80s, were sometimes “visited in the dead of night by something that seemed half man half beast.” In his famous 1929 article for Maclean’s Magazine, Indian Agent J.W. Burns included the story of an elderly Chehalis man named Charley Victor, who found a Sasquatch cave while picking salmonberries in the Lillooet Mountains near Yale, BC. In is 1961 book Abominable Snowmen: Legend Come to Life, cryptozoology godfather Ivan T. Sanderson included the testimony of Charles Flood of New Westminster, B.C., who claimed to have encountered an eight-foot-tall manlike creature in a huckleberry patch in the North Cascade Mountains in 1915. In a sworn statutory declaration, Flood declared that this mysterious animal, which stood on two legs and was covered with light brown fur, “[pulled] the berry bushes with its one hand or paw toward him and [put] berries in his mouth with the other hand or paw.” In his various books published in the 1960s and ‘70s, Canadian Sasquatch researcher John Willison Green included the testimony of John Bringsli, who described his frightening 1960 run-in with a huge silver-furred wildman while picking huckleberries in the Columbia Mountains not far from Nelson, BC. And in his 1973 book The Sasquatch File, Green included the account of a woman who, while picking berries near Rocky Mountain House, Alberta, the previous summer, realized with a thrill of horror that she was being watched by a hairy 9-foot-tall wildman half-concealed by the brush.

It may not be out of place here to mention that American researcher David Paulides, the notorious chronicler of mysterious missing persons cases in the United States and Canada, has identified “berries” as one of a handful of peculiar motifs common to vanishings which defy rational explanation. Although Paulides has been justly criticized for omitting or overlooking important details from many of his investigatory reports, he has decidedly demonstrated that a curious number of unsolved disappearances indeed involve the picking and consumption of berries.

In a previous piece, we touched on Paulides’ coverage of the respective disappearances of George Wanke and Jack Pike, both of whom vanished in 1935 while picking berries in southern Manitoba. There are similar cases which the former police officer included in his 2019 book Missing 411: Canada, for none of which, it must be mentioned, are there any indications that wildman abductions were to blame. To give one example, Paulides reported on the disappearance of 13-year-old Eva Hall, who vanished while picking huckleberries on August 15^th, 1932, in the woods near the rural settlement of Poverty Bay, Ontario, about 43 kilometres northeast of Parry Sound, in the centre of the 120 kilometre square of wilderness bounded by Georgian Bay, Lake Nipissing, Lake Muskoka, and Algonquin Provincial Park. Although Paulides stated that the girl was never found, a number of contemporary Canadian newspaper articles indicate that she wandered into a farm near the neighbouring settlement of Magnetawan after three days in the bush, hungry and exhausted but alive. She explained to reporters that she left the girls with whom she had been picking berries in order to get a drink from a nearby stream, but was unable to find her way back to the group.

“I have written extensively about the relationship between berries and missing people…” Paulides wrote in his summary of Hall’s case. “The most dangerous berries to pick are, without a doubt, huckleberries. I have no understanding why huckleberries represent the most dangerous berry, but people picking these berries who disappear are rarely found.”

The Hairy Giant of Pretty’s Island

The next wildman to make the Canadian news was a violent hairy giant said to live on a mysterious Ontario isle which 1883 papers called “Pretty’s Island, near Pembroke”. Pembroke, Ontario, is a city on the southern banks of the Ottawa River about 113 kilometres upriver from March Township, the site of the previous encounter. Back in 1883, it was a newly-incorporated town on the same rail line as Arnprior. The only medium-sized islands near Pembroke are adjacent Ile Morrison and Cotman Island, which lie in a lazy stretch of the Ottawa River known as Allumette Lake. Across the lake is massive L’Isle-aux-Allumettes, and 40 kilometres downriver is the similarly-sized L’ile-du-Grand-Calumet, both of which have retained their names since at least the early 18^th Century. The only “Pretty’s Island” in the area is “Pretties Island” south of what was then the village of Carleton Place, on a tributary of the Ottawa called the Mississippi, about 45 kilometres southeast of Arnprior. Whatever the identity of the island in question, it seems certain that it was located near the Ottawa River just upriver from the city of Ottawa, not far from the March Township incident of July 1876, suggesting that the wildman of Southern Ontario might be more than just a juvenile hoax.

According to a series of newspaper articles published in late July 1883, “Pretty’s Island, near Pembroke” was home to an 8-foot-tall hair-covered wildman who had been spotted flitting through the bush. An article in the Montreal Gazette averred that “two craftsmen who were bold enough to go in search of him had a narrow escape from being killed, one of them having his arm fractured by the giant.”

The hairy giant alluded to in this brief report is somewhat reminiscent of Old Yellow Top, a huge hairy creature allegedly spotted further to the north, in the Canadian Shield surrounding Cobalt, Ontario, on three different occasions throughout the 20^th Century, named for the shock of yellow hair that witnesses say crowned its head.

The Manitoba Monkey

Two years after the Pretty’s Island sighting, another wildman was spotted lurking on the outskirts of Sewell, a rural settlement about sixty kilometres southwest of Winnipeg, Manitoba. “Some of the farmers in this vicinity,” proclaimed an article in the September 24^th, 1885 issue of the Manitoba Weekly Free Press, “have become greatly excited over what they term a wild man who is running at large, and is represented as being covered with long hair and having a long tail.”

Rather than Old Yellow Top or the metamorphosed humans described in an earlier segment, this creature strongly evokes a large mysterious North American primate we have discussed in a previous piece – a monkey-like creatures known to the Ahtna Indians of southeastern Alaska as the ‘Tailed One’, and referred to by the woodsmen of Appalachia as the ‘Devil Monkey’.

Considering the location of the 1885 Sewell sighting, it is worth recalling an alleged Devil Monkey encounter supposed to have been made in the mid-2010s by two Cree sisters from Jackhead, Manitoba, while driving on the Manitoba Highway 6. This encounter was documented by a young cryptozoologist named Thomas Morgan of Kawartha Lakes, Ontario, on his website, SuperbugTom.com. While passing by a small body of water called Devils Lake between Lakes Winnipeg and Winnipegosis, about an hour’s drive south of Grand Rapids, Manitoba, the girls watched a large monkey-like creature cross the highway in front of them. The sisters described the creature as being four feet tall, and having brown hair, large shoulders, a sloped back, and a tail.

In the next section of this series, our research into the wildman of the Canadian press merges with the work of classic Canadian Sasquatch researchers like J.W. Burns and John Willison Green, transporting us to Canada’s West Coast, the birthplace of Canadian Sasquatch folklore.

Part 4

Canadian Wildmen of the 1880s

For the next twenty years following the monkey sighting near Sewell, Manitoba, every Canadian newspaper article on the subject of wildmen was a description of a reclusive human being who, by choice or as the result of mental illness, exchanged the comforts of society for the freedom of the forest.

In the summer of 1887, a naked man was seen bathing in Ontario’s Credit River, in what is now the Forks of the Credit Provincial Park. That fall, a wildman was seen lurking in a swamp near the village of Picton, Ontario, on the Prince Edward Peninsula which furrows the northern shore of Lake Ontario. Shortly thereafter, two teachers attending a convention in Brandon, Manitoba, while out on a midnight stroll, were chased by a long-haired man wearing nothing but a breechcloth, who barked at them and foamed at the mouth as he loped after them with impossible swiftness. Before he could close in on his pedagogical prey, the wildman was chased off by one of the teacher’s dogs.

In June 1888, brief mention was made of a half-clad man who haunted the outskirts of Stonewall, Manitoba, a mining town about 20 kilometres northwest of Winnipeg. That August, a powerfully-built, 6-foot tall wildman with long red hair and pink eyes that glowed like burning coals was seen chasing cattle near the village of Glencoe, between Lakes Erie and Huron. An article in the Brantford Daily Expositor reported that he had “long hairy arms with claws, and immense teeth and jaws, resembling a gorilla more than a human being,” and declared that he barked like a dog.

The Man from the Glacier

A remarkable article appeared in the April 26^th, 1890 issue of the Winnipeg Tribune, written by an author who signed his piece E.W.L. This short story, which has the polished prose of a fictional piece but was nonetheless presented as a real news story, describes the author’s encounter with a half-crazed Swiss on the lonely, wooded shores of Lake Wabigoon, Ontario, about 130 kilometres east of Kenora. After treating the famished vagabond to tea and raw rabbit, the author was rewarded with an incredible tale. The Swiss claimed that, forty years earlier, a wealthy German college friend had treated him to a luxurious tour of Europe which culminated in a trek through the Mer de Glace icefields in the French Alps, on the northern slopes of Mont Blanc. There, the German pushed the Swiss into a crevasse after telling him that he intended to make him the subject of a science experiment, having calculated that his frozen corpse would emerge from the ice near a certain chateau in forty years’ time. The Swiss claimed that he survived the fall and spent the next four decades subsisting on the creatures that tumbled into his icy prison, including an unfortunate mountain guide who perished in his descent. By the time the crevasse finally opened, incidentally at the time and place predicted by the German glaciologist, the luckless Swiss had lost his mind.

Canadian Wildmen of the 1890s

In May 1890, much was made of an antisocial hermit named William Walter Zimmerman, who lived in a ramshackle cottage six miles southeast of Grimsby, Ontario, between St. Catharines and Hamilton. For years, Zimmerman had gone about naked and hopped from place to place like a frog at night, earning himself the reputation of a local boogeyman. Other 1890s wildmen were reportedly spotted outside the parkland settlement of Rossburn, Manitoba, and in the settlement of Beulah, Manitoba, about fifty kilometres to the southwest.

Sightings of feral human beings continued to be reported throughout the 1890s. In January 1891, a chicken-stealing mentally handicapped French-Canadian was captured in the township of Sunnidale, Ontario, between Lakes Simcoe and Georgian Bay. An article declared “he was one of God’s creatures, but sunk to such a depth of degradation that there was only one thing to mark his superiority to the brute creation, speech, intelligible speech…” Brief mention was made of a hermit who haunted the banks of Ontario’s Cataraqui River in February 1893; of a wildman who prowled the shores of Netley Lake, Manitoba, off the southern tip of Lake Winnipeg, in March of that same year; of mentally disabled man known as “Black Jack,” who terrorized the residents of Oliphant, on Lake Huron’s Bruce Peninsula, that July; and of a vagrant named John Brazell who lived in a hollow log north of the village of Komoka, just west of London, Ontario, whom a November 1893 article described as “hopelessly insane.”

Other supposedly human wildmen were reported in various parts of Ontario, including the town of Aylmer, south of London; the village of Cornwall, on the St. Lawrence River; Stephen Township northwest of London; the forest which fringes the northern outskirts of London; the town of Wiarton not far from Oliphant; in a cave north of Kingston; in a wood west of Kitchener; in the brush near Holleford, near Frontenac Provincial Park; and near the village of Woodslee, south of Lake St. Clair. The only 1890s wildman to make his home outside the so-called ‘Heartland Province’ was a hermit whom the Indians said lived a vegetarian lifestyle on the banks of Quebec’s Du Lievre River. Most of these wildmen were supposed to be either convicts on the run or escapees from asylums. It is interesting to note, in light of this series’ previous segment, that many of these wildman sightings were made by berry pickers.

Early Wildman Reports from British Columbia

In 1901, wildman reports began to trickle out of the province of British Columbia, which borders the Pacific Ocean. In November of that year, an article in the Vancouver Daily Province described a hunting party’s run-in with a wildman on Vancouver Island’s Trent River, just south of present-day Courtney, BC.

“While making their way through the bush,” the article said of the hunters, “they came across a small clearing, with a cabin where, although they are men who knew the district well, they had no idea that there was anything in the shape of a habitation. A weird figure came out of the shack, a man garbed in ragged clothes and skins, and with long and tangled hair and beard, who yelled at them in a gibberish, which they could not understand. The threatening appearance and actions of the man, combined with the loneliness of the spot and the altogether unexpected nature of the encounter, were so uncanny and fearsome, that the hunters retreated hurriedly.”

The article explained that the wildman was supposed to be one Jacob Leedl, a former resident of Nanaimo, on the western side of the Island, whose apparent insanity was the result of years of isolation in the bush.

Two years later, a tall muscular man wearing a ragged shirt and trousers emerged from the woods near Surrey, on the Fraser Delta, and entered the home of one James Carruthers, who was away working at the time. Terrified, James’s wife and children hid in a bedroom while the wildman, who was described as having a red beard and fiery eyes, helped himself to coats, underwear, fresh-baked bread, and a beef roast, before stalking back into the forest. Another wild-looking figure, supposed to be the same man, was later seen by local farmers and schoolchildren, bounding across roads and flitting through the forest.

A Vancouver newspaper speculated that the wildman might be Edward Hyder, who had disappeared after his cabin near Agassiz, incidentally in the heart of what is now recognized as Sasquatch country, burned down in the autumn of 1902. Several weeks after the destruction of his home, Hyder is said to have paid a visit to a local bachelor named Mr. Leaf, and insisted that his impromptu host cook a rotten salmon he had picked up during his wanderings. After eating this rancid repast with apparent relish, the strange man bedded down for the night and departed early the next morning. In a strange parallel with the saga of Martin, the German CPR survey employee whose story we explored in a previous segment of this series, Hyder declared that he would make for the Nicola Valley to the east, in British Columbia’s Interior Plateau.

The next flurry of wildman reports to hit Canadian papers was relatively unremarkable, including the tale of a masked man who frightened children near Winnipeg, Manitoba’s Fort Rouge district; a cursory reference to a wildman supposed to haunt the forests near Mallorytown, Ontario, on the northern shores of the St. Lawrence; whispers of a gun-wielding madman near the prairie settlement of Brayselor, Saskatchewan; and the story of a naked hermit who prowled the fields of Rosser, Manitoba, northwest of Winnipeg.

It wasn’t until the summer of 1904 that reports of what we know today as the Sasquatch of the Pacific Northwest began to appear in Canadian papers, beginning with the tale of a startling encounter on Vancouver Island, British Columbia, which we will explore in the next segment of this series.

Part 5

Michael King’s Testimony

In the summer of 1904, a wildman story once again emerged from Vancouver Island, British Columbia. With the exception of an old Indian legend recounted by British and Spanish sailors who visited Nootka Sound in the 1790s, this report is the oldest British Columbian Sasquatch story to appear in classic Canadian Bigfoot literature, being referenced in Ivan T. Sanderson’s 1961 book Abominable Snowmen: Legend Come to Life, Chad Arment’s 2006 book The Historical Bigfoot, and John Willison Green’s seminal works The Sasquatch File, On the Track of Sasquatch, and Sasquatch: The Apes Among Us.
This tale appeared in newspapers throughout British Columbia, Ontario, and the American states of Washington, Oregon, and Nebraska. Several notable articles we will reference include a piece headlined “Wild Man of Vancouver: Strange Being Lately Seen by a Lumberman,” printed in the August 4th, 1904 issue of the Kingston Whig-Standard; and an article published four months later in the Nanaimo Daily News.

Several pieces placed the story in the “timber country inland from the head of Campbell River,” which would seem to be what is now Strathcona Provincial Park west of Buttle Lake, the oldest provincial park in British Columbia. This mysterious region, forming the mountainous heart of Vancouver Island, is steeped in dark native legend, and is most famous in some circles today for being the setting of an alarming number of unsolved disappearances. According to various contemporary newspaper articles, Vancouver Island natives shunned the place, regarding it as the territory of what they called the “massache ikta,” or “the bad thing,” “and no money or persuasive art,” as one article put it, “will induce them to go into it with hunter, trapper, timber cruiser, or prospector.”

Mike King, the lumber baron around whom the story revolves, was a colourful character whom earlier newspaper articles indicate had made a fortune in the Klondike Gold Rush. For many years in the twilight of that great northern stampede, King operated a sawmill at Caribou Crossing – now Carcross, Yukon – a major stop on the main trail to the Klondike goldfields. Several months before the incident we will relate shortly, he had co-purchased a silver mine in Mexico, and several months after, he would buy a huge tract of timberland in that same country. A number of papers which covered the story we will relate presently averred that he was a superior woodsman with decades of experience in the bush, was a strict teetotaller who never drank, and was regarded as honest and reliable by lumbermen throughout the Pacific Northwest. As an article in Oregon’s Corvallis Times put it, “Mike King is a man whose word on anything in his business or pertaining to the woods is a law throughout British Columbia. He knows the wilderness of this province better than any living man… and never drinks or ‘sees things’ in the forest. On the subject of the wild man he is ready at any time to make sworn attestation to the exact truth of his report, but he has been reluctant to discuss the matter, in view of the ever-ready joke.”

It should be mentioned that several articles published four months after the story broke alleged that the following encounter took place four our five years earlier, around the turn of the 20th Century.

“The Indians tell of a wild man on Vancouver Island,” began the article in the Kingston Whig-Standard, “and now a Caucasian, Michael King, relates that he has seen what looked like half-man, and half-ape.

“King told his story at a camp fire to the accompaniments of a chattering mountain brook and the whispering pines towering to a starlight sky. He was on one of his solitary cruises for timber on the island, and had not seen a human face for days. A strange cry of mingled surprise and fear, very human in its quality, brought him to a sudden halt, rifle in hand, and eyes straining everywhere for an explanation.

“This was quickly forthcoming in a manner to try even the nerve of so superb a woodsman as this veteran of the forests. Within 100 yards appeared 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.”

According to the article in the Nanaimo Daily News, 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…”

Startled, King levelled his rifle at the strange creature as it darted up a nearby hill. He kept it in his sights as it stopped halfway up the embankment and turned around to scrutinize him. Mastering his shattered nerves, the woodsman began to advance towards the figure, his finger brushing the trigger. In response, the hairy man bolted into the underbrush with the swiftness of a deer and was lost from sight.

Although King was denied a second meeting with this mysterious denizen of the forest, the article in the Nanaimo Daily News alleged that he was later disturbed by its chilling howls. “He did not see him again,” the article claimed, “although his extraordinary cries were heard at intervals during the night, and Mr. King, who sat the night out by a big fire, rifle in hand, was thoroughly convinced that the wild man slipped back silently to inspect him at a distant range during his vigil.”

The article in the Kingston Whig-Standard concluded that King’s “story, of course, has been received with sarcastic comment on the coast, but it is curious to note that Otto Schoch has just come in from the northern end of Vancouver Island bringing a tale of having seen footprints such as are made by no wild animal that ranges the forests of this continent. While apparently made by a human being they are those of neither Siwash nor white man.”
The piece in the Nanaimo Daily News described the footprints left by King’s wildman, claiming that they appeared to be human, but had very long spreading toes. An additional detail appeared in the article’s final sentence, alleging that, during his wilderness trek, Mike King came across a crude structure in the forest, which he suspected may have been built by the spectre he encountered.

The Legend

According to the article in the Kingston Whig-Standard, King had heard vague stories about the region’s wildman from his native friends, who refused to accompany him into that part of the country. “They had said,” the article declared, “that a fearsome thing lorded it over the country, and in their superstitious terror, they said it was a god of the Spaniards, the descendant of a great chief who had left his ship at Nootka and mated, by force, with a princess of the tribe.”

A piece published in the July 6th issue of Everett, Washington’s Daily Herald elaborated on this legend, interpreting it as a confused cultural recollection, obscured through long oral transmission, of what the paper indelicately called “a union between a baboon and a squaw.”

“There is no conclusive and satisfactory explanation of the phenomenon,” wrote the Washington paper’s Vancouver, BC correspondent. “Mr. King has brought the matter up time and again in his talks with Indians, whose confidence he enjoys. Bit by bit he has patched together their theory and tribal tradition, by which it appears that they credit the coming of the original wild man to the days of the Spanish occupation of certain of the west coast ports. At one of these, Nootka, it is alleged, an immense hairy creature, either baboon or ape, escaped from one of the ships, and after terrorizing the aboriginal inhabitants, proceeded to make itself at home in the forest. Thence it is alleged to have issued upon one occasion and seized an Indian girl, with whom it set up housekeeping. The wild man seen by Mr. King is believed by the Indians to have been the offspring.”

This interpretation of the legend was echoed in the article in the Nanaimo Daily News, which stated that a story “which Mr. King wormed out of an old native with much difficulty, is to the effect that at the coming of the Spaniards to the west coast, an immense monkey (presumably an ape or ourang-outang) escaped from one of the vessels and took refuge in the forest wilderness; several months later it appeared suddenly at a west coast village, and the Indians running in terror, it caught and carried away with it a girl of fifteen. The natives allege that two wild children resulted, but that one was found dead in a hut beyond the headwaters of Campbell River years ago, leaving the other lonely creature to dominate the woods.”

Robert Brown and the Vancouver Island Exploring Expedition

It should be mentioned that an obscure article in Omaha, Nebraska’s World-Herald, written by a correspondent from Victoria, BC, alleged that the lumber baron’s tale was not the first of its kind to appear in British Columbian papers. “Old prospectors also tell of reported glimpses of the wild man as far back as 1865,” the article contended, “when a mining man named Brown (now employed in this city) contributed to the Victoria Colonist a two-column account of his adventures through the desertion of his Muchalat Indians in terror during an ascent of Gold River, they having seen the wild man and one of their number having his eyes picked out by the nomadic savage. It is the tradition of all the west coast Indians that loss of sight is the penalty enforced against any Indian venturing into the territory of the “massache ikta”.

This author was unable to dig up the 1865 Victoria Colonist article alluded to, although it seems likely that the “mining man named Brown” is an allusion to British explorer Robert Brown, who led the Vancouver Island Exploring Expedition of 1864, launched chiefly for the purpose of discovering gold. Brown made no mention of an eye-gouging monster in his 1865 report on the expedition, although he did mention his native guides deserting him near the village of Comox when he expressed a desire to ascend the Puntledge River. This waterway – which Brown named after the Pentlatch Indians, a Central Coast Salish nation which he described as “the ancient tribe who lived on its banks” – has its source at Comox Lake, which lies at the eastern edge of Strathcona Provincial Park. Rather than the predations of wildmen, Brown’s guides attributed their reticence to venture up that waterway to their fear of the Tseshaht and Hupacasath Nootka of the Alberni Valley, whom Brown called the “Seshahts and the Opechesahts”.

It should be mentioned that, the following year, a Victoria paper published an article in which an old lumberman recounted a prospecting trip he made up the Gold River in the 1860s in which he and his companions encountered a very unique tribe of wild Indians. We will explore this strange story more thoroughly in a future piece.

Four months after the tale of Mike King’s harrowing encounter first appeared in print, a dramatic sequel was published in newspapers across the province. This remarkable story, also documented in classic Canadian Sasquatch literature, will be the subject of the next segment of this series.

Part 6

The Wildman of Horne Lake

In December 1904, a strange series of articles appeared in newspapers across Canada describing another wildman sighting on Vancouver Island, British Columbia. Only four months earlier, in August of that year, a woodsman named Mike King had reported his encounter with a creature he described as “half man and half ape” in the mountains of what is now Strathcona Provincial Park, west of the headwaters of Campbell River. The December sighting took place near Horne Lake, a body of water roughly seventy or eighty kilometres southeast of King’s encounter, and a mere 7 kilometres northeast of Port Alberni.

The most famous piece on the December 1904 sighting, which has been reprinted in a number of classic Sasquatch books, appeared in the December 13^th issue of Vancouver’s BC’s The Province under the headline: “A Mowgli in the Woods of the Island: Wild Man Discovered by a Hunting Party Near Horne Lake – Covered With Matted Hair – Was He Raised by Wild Animals?”

“Do the woods in the vicinity of Horne Lake, Vancouver Island,” the article began, “shelter a wild man whose history will rival even that of Rudyard Kipling’s famous story of Mowgli, or the youth who was raised by Mother Wolf? That is the startling question which a party of experienced hunters have started out to solve. The objective point of the party’s search is along the banks of Horne Lake, and they hope to capture a wild man whose frequent appearance there of late has revived a tale of the weirdest in the annals of backwoods life.

“For years past there have been vague rumors of the existence of a wild man, fleeting glimpses of whom may have been got in the vicinity of Horne Lake and Englishman’s River, by various men while out hunting. These rumors have always been discredited despite the fact that the wild creature’s appearance has been frequently reported during recent years. The truth in most cases depended upon one or two witnesses. The rumors were generally scouted.”

The article went on to state how these vague reports were verified on December 10^th, 1904, when four men from the proximate coastal settlement of Qualicum (now Qualicum Beach) went hunting near Horne Lake. Later articles identified these four hunters as A.B. Crump, James Kincaid, T. Hutchins, and W. Buss. According to the piece in The Province, while walking along the banks of Horne Lake, these men came upon “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.”

Various contemporary articles speculated that the wild man was either a certain man who had disappeared in 1892, at the age of twenty, while hunting near Horne Lake, or a young boy from Qualicum who had inexplicably vanished nine years before. “Although a vigorous search was instituted at the time,” declared the piece in The Province in reference to the subject of the former theory, “no trace of the youth was ever found. Many old timers and nearly every one who has heard the strange story of the quartette of hunters now believe that the wild man whose existence is now positively established, is the same youth who was lost in the woods over a decade ago.

“It is pointed out by medical men and others that if the youth met with an accident and hurt his head he might thereby lose his reason, and memory also vanishing he might become wild and live like the animals who in that case would be his only associates. Those who know the province well believe that it would be possible to maintain life on the roots and edible berries which grow in such profusion in the British Columbia forests. To this means of sustenance might be added the possibility that he caught some animals in simple traps.”

The article concluded with statements that both “scores of Indians” and settlers who built their cabins on the banks of the Englishman River – the headwaters of that waterway lying two valleys to the southeast of Horne Lake, about 12 kilometres (7 miles) away – also claimed to have encountered the wildman during their backcountry escapades, and that a search was presently underway to capture the skittish creature.

Wildman Shot at Union Bay

The tale of the wildman of Horne Lake appeared to end in tragedy five months later, when newspapers reported that the creature had been shot by a native near Union Bay, just south of Comox, and had stumbled into the woods to die. The first papers to break the sad development were the Nanaimo Daily News, the Vancouver Daily Province, and the Vancouver Daily World, which printed the wildman’s eulogy in their May 1^st, 1905 issues. More detailed descriptions of the incident appeared in the May 2^nd issues of the Toronto Star and the Montreal Star.

According to the story, brought to reporters by a bush pilot named Captain Owens, who heard it from merchant John Fraser of Fraser & Howe, a group of natives canoeing near Union Bay spotted what they first took to be a bear digging for clams on the beach. The creature was naked and covered with hair. One of the natives raised his shotgun and fired at the figure, which jumped up, issued a terrible howl and ran on two legs into the woods. Horrified by what they had done, the natives returned to the Union Bay settlement and related the tale to their friends and family, all of whom firmly believed in the existence of the wildman of Vancouver Island. A search party went back to the beach to find the creature, but its body was never recovered.

The pilot Owens, who brought the story to the press, put forth his own theory as to the creature’s identity, perhaps providing a backstory for the vague tale, so frequently alluded to in other articles, of young man from Qualicum who had disappeared in the woods twelve years earlier. Owens proposed that the hairy creature might be a young man who had accompanied him to that part of the coast ten or twelve years earlier, when he was the captain of a steamer called the Jean. This shipmate had disembarked at Qualicum in order to stay with a man named Buss during the holidays. At some point during his visit, he wandered into the woods and was never seen again. “Owens,” declared a piece in the Vancouver Daily World, “thinks that possibly he lost his way and ultimately his reason, and degenerated into a half-savage creature, and was the man who was recently shot.”

A last hopeful article, published in the May 5^th issue of the Vancouver Daily World, declared that some residents of Qualicum believed the wildman might yet be alive, and were in the process of organizing another search party for him. The fate of this embryonic expedition is a mystery.

The Wildman Lives

Fortunately, the story of the Vancouver Island wildman did not end with the creature’s shooting at Union Bay. On June 18^th, 1905, about a month and a half after his apparent demise, the elusive figure was spotted again by none other than James Kincaid, one of the four hunters who had first sighted the creature at Horne Lake half a year earlier. Kincaid’s second sighting took place near the mouth of the Little Qualicum River, about two miles up the coast from Qualicum Beach, while he was cycling near the local schoolhouse. He described the encounter in a letter addressed to government agent Marshal Bidwell Bray, writing:

“I write you to let you know that I saw the wild man on the 18^th of June, just by the Little Qualicum school house. I was out visiting, and was going home. I thought it was a man, and was going to get off my bike and walk with him, and whistled for him to get out of the way. When I was about ten yards from him he turned his head, and when he saw me coming he made a jump in the bush and ran away. I passed him. I was about three yards from him. He is a man about six feet high, and a very stoutly built fellow. It was the same looking thing I saw up at Horne Lake last fall when I was hunting up there. Would it be advisable to shoot him if seen again? Please let me know by return mail.

“Yours Truly,

“Sgt. James Kincaid.”

Marshal Bray wrote back to Kincaid, informing him that it was “unlawful to shoot Mowglies withing the province of British Columbia at any time.”

The China Indian Tribe

In the midst of these tantalizing developments, various theories were put forth as to the identity of what newspapers dubbed the “Mowgli” of Vancouver Island, Mowgli being the feral East Indian boy who features in English author Rudyard Kipling’s 1894 fictional anthology The Jungle Book. One novel hypothesis appeared in an article for the June 3^rd, 1905 issue of the Victoria Daily Times. The piece was written by a mysterious columnist who accredited himself “C. McK. S.,” who penned a number of articles for that publication from 1905-1907 on the subject of Canadian West Coast history. The writer claimed that, during his own lumber-hunting excursion up what was probably the Gold River, on the western side of the Island, in the summer of 1869, he and his companions encountered a band of mysterious natives who fled into the woods at their approach. When they returned to the mouth of the river, where a Muchalat Nootka village lay, the locals informed them that the strange inland dwellers they had encountered were the frightened remnants of a multiracial clan whom their ancestors had attempted to exterminate. These people were the descendants of Chinese settlers who had been brought to Vancouver Island in the 1780s by British trader John Meares, who had hoped to employ them in his fur trading fort at the Nootka village of Yuquot. In the chaos of what is known today as the Nootka Crisis, in which Spanish naval personnel arrested Meares’ employees for violating Spanish sovereignty in the North Pacific, the Chinese were left behind in the Nootka village. Resigned to build a new life for themselves on Vancouver Island, many of the Chinamen took Nootka women for wives.

The columnist’s informants explained that the descendants of the Chinese became so numerous that the Nootka feared they would overpower them. To prevent this, they made war on them, driving them from the coast into the inhospitable interior of the island. Later, they made another assault on their village on the Gold River, “and since that time,” the columnist wrote, “they have been wanderers in the mountains, fearing to return to their homes.

“Here,” he continued, “we may remark that it is quite possible that the wild man reported to have been seen in the mountains is in all probability none other than one of these poor outcasts of the China Indian tribe, who was seen by a prospector and shot recently by an Indian, and not a white man as some persons have supposed him to be.”

A Wild Man Named Pete

Another compelling theory as to the wildman’s nature surfaced in late June 1905, when a resident of Victoria named William Hallgran declared that the mysterious creature was really a former acquaintance of his, known only as ‘Pete,’ who had lost his mind and taken to the bush. This man, Hallgran claimed, was an American seal hunter who came to Victoria in the late 1880s. After a season on the high seas, the man relocated to Port Alberni just southwest of Horne Lake. “While there,” wrote a columnist who covered Hallgran’s tale, “his mind became deranged, and he began to live with the Indians. At first the natives accepted his companionship, not only willingly, but with pleasure, even going so far as to place him in charge of one of their sailing schooners.” When Pete wrecked this vessel on the rocky banks of the Alberni Inlet, however, the natives exiled him from their band.

“As far as Mr. Hallgran knows,” the columnist continued, “‘Pete’ wandered from one tribe to another for several years, and then disappeared, only to be heard of at rare intervals.

Hallgran first met Pete in 1890, when he worked on a sealing schooner called the Mascot. One day, the crew anchored off Willis Island, a small isle in Barkley Sound, off the southwestern end of Vancouver Island, about nine miles east of Ucluelet. “While the ship was anchored in the neighborhood,” the columnist continued, “the Indians reported that a white man was living on the island, and the captain decided to find out whether he could be of any assistance. ‘Pete’ was brought on board in an absolutely wild condition with only a few strips of clothing, uncouth in appearance, and withal apparently perfectly happy. During his years of life among all kinds of hardships his body had become hardened and, despite the lack of clothing, he didn’t mind the roughest weather, and what is more, could eat and appreciate almost anything that was laid before him. For a fortnight ‘Pete’ lived with the sealers, and then one day he made his escape. At the request of the captain the Indians organized a search party, and the ‘wild man’ was found sitting close to a little fire near the beach enjoying a supper of half-cooked shell-fish. ‘Pete’ absolutely refused to come back to Victoria when offered passage on the sealing schooner, and before leaving, the captain gave instructions to the Indians to take him back to civilization.

“Since then, Mr. Hallgran learned that the tribe became tired of his company, and rowing him down the Alberni canal, placed him in the bush to forage for himself. From that time, nothing has been heard except occasional reports of ‘wild man’ from different parts of Vancouver Island. In view of the fact that ‘Pete’ was gifted with an iron constitution, could subsist on the most meagre of food for days, besides deriving a living from nature where others would starve to death, and also being accustomed to the climatical and other conditions from his long residence with the Indians, Mr. Hallgran is confident that the ‘wild man’ frequently seen is none other than his former acquaintance ‘Pete’.”

Multiple Mowglies

The saga of the Horne Lake wildman took another interesting turn in August 1905, when a pair of fresh back-to-back sightings indicated that there might be more than one wildman haunting the rainforests of Vancouver Island.

The first sighting took place near Little Qualicum, where James Kincaid had his second encounter with the creature a month and a half earlier. The witness this time was an unnamed informant whom a journalist described as “one of Nanaimo’s most prominent and reliable citizens.”

Not far from the site of Kincaid’s sighting, the witness spotted a strange figure drinking from a brook, clad in a pair of ragged overalls and an undershirt. He described the creature as a rugged-looking man of about 75 years of age, “covered with long and shaggy hair…” When he realized that he was been watched, the wildman bounded into the bush.

The Nanaimo man chased the fleeing vagabond, overtook him, and began to interrogate him. In the midst of their conversation, the wildman uttered a howl and bounded off to his burrow beneath a tree, where the interview resumed. The only information the witness managed to wrest from the taciturn recluse was that he was a prospector who had first come to Victoria in 1858, and had spent much of the ensuing years panning for gold in Kootenay Country far to the east. He revealed that his home was on Kuper Island, one of the Gulf Islands about 40 miles southeast of Qualicum, known today as Penalakut Island.

Later newspaper articles reported that the wild man was arrested by officers Stephenson and Trawford of the British Columbia Provincial Police, determined to be a harmless if eccentric beachcomber, and promptly released. Perhaps resentful of his reception on Vancouver Island, the man relocated to the Fraser River on the mainland and became a fisherman.

While British Columbian newspapers smugly put the Qualicum story to bed, another more frighting wildman encounter took place on the upper Campbell River not far from Buttle Lake, about 65 miles northwest of Qualicum. The witness in this case was a Kyuquot Nootka hunter named Joe, who had been hired by a Nanaimo man named William McTavish and his friend from Seattle to guide them on a casual exploratory jaunt up Campbell River.

During the expedition, Joe spotted a small black bear in the distance and began to stalk it, hoping to bag it for dinner. The native followed the animal into a thick cluster of berry bushes which covered a section of hill that had been laid bare by a rockslide. As he did so, a 6-foot-tall humanlike creature covered in reddish-brown hair sprang from an overhanging ledge of rock and raced after the bear, brandishing an enormous club. Identifying the creature immediately as the “massache ikta,” or the “bad thing,” which the elders of his tribe claimed lived in the mountains, the native raised his rifle and shot the figure in the shoulder. The creature snarled with rage and terror and clamped an enormous hand over its wound. Unwilling that the monster should discover the source of the offence, Joe fled back to camp as fast as his legs would carry him.

According to an article in the August 4^th, 1905 issue of the Vancouver Daily World, “Joe… [shared] the tribal idea that the wild man [was] one of the descendants of a great ape that escaped from one of the Spanish ships during the first exploration of Vancouver Island. All the country at the head of Campbell river, and southward to Cowichan Lake, is shunned by the native tribes as the exclusive domain and hunting field of the uncanny human beast of the jungle.”

Part 7

The Wildman of Valdez Island

With the exceptions of a former British Army infantryman named Noah Perkins, who terrorized the residents of Carberry, Manitoba, and an elderly hermit named Daniel Barber, who lived in an underground burrow near Copetown, Ontario, who was found wearing a mysterious agate-encrusted gold ring with the name “R.C. Pat” stamped on the inside, the next wildman to appear in Canadian papers was a resident of what was referred to as “Valdez Island,” British Columbia. Although there is a Valdes Island near Nanaimo, BC – one of the many Gulf Islands which lie off the southeastern shores of Vancouver Island – contemporary pieces on this wildman story indicate that the island in question was located off the northern tip of Vancouver Island, in the vicinity of Alert Bay on Cormorant Island. It is possible that the ‘Valdez Island’ referred to was Quadra Island, which lies at the eastern end of the northerly Johnstone Strait, which contemporary writings indicate was referred to as “Valdez Island” at least as late as 1903. However, Quadra Island lies a full 70 miles east of Alert Bay, suggesting that the incident may have taken place on yet another “Valdez Island” further to the west.

The source for this tale was an unnamed traveler who related the following account to journalists at Ladysmith, BC, a town between Nanaimo and present-day Duncan, which, incidentally, lies a mere eight miles southwest of the aforementioned Valdes Island of present day.

One night in mid-October, 1905, so the story goes, a family by the name of Pitcock settled down for a late supper in their remote homestead on Valdez Island. At about 10 o’clock, their dinner was interrupted by the appearance of a ghastly face in the window. “The face was covered with black hair,” reported an article in the Nanaimo Daily News, “only a small portion of skin being visible.” Apparently cognizant that he was being observed, the figure “uttered a diabolical scream and vanished.”

The young men of the Pitcock family, rifles in hand, promptly searched the vicinity of the house for any sign of their uninvited visitor. The only clue they managed to uncover was a pair of large footprints impressed into the soft dirt of the flower bed beneath the kitchen window.

“Twice during the night,” the article contended, “the family heard a scream similar to that uttered by the possessor of the face that had been seen at the window. The next day, a careful watch was kept, but there were no signs of the creature, although naked foot-marks were found along the creek that passes the Pitcock house.”

Undeterred, the Pitcock men held another vigil the following night, positioning themselves behind a stack of hay. “About 10:30,” maintained the Nanaimo article, “horrible yells were heard in the direction of the creek, and after waiting for about an hour, two of the boys resolved to go and search along the creek. 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.

The Nanaimo article concluded by stating that “two half-breeds of Alert Bay claim to have seen the same man a few days after,” and that the Pitcock boys were adamant that the creature they saw could not have been a bear.

Mike King’s Refined Theory

Later that winter, two more articles were published on the island’s elusive wildman. The second, which appeared in the January 2^nd, 1906 issue of the Vancouver Daily World, was a brief paragraph which simply affirmed that the creature still loomed large in the consciousness of the local populace. The first, printed in the December 30^th, 1905 issue of the Vancouver Daily Province, was the product of an interview with Mike King, the lumber baron who came face to face with a wildman in present-day Strathcona Provincial Park around the turn of the 20^th Century, who had returned to his northern haunts after concluding a business venture in Mexico in order to celebrate New Year’s Eve with his friends. A year and a half earlier, King had told reporters that the natives with whom he travelled had their own ideas as to the nature of the Vancouver Island wildman, supposing him to be the descendant of an ape that had absconded from a Spanish ship over a century earlier and the Nootka maiden he had subsequently captured. This time, King proffered another slightly different version of the theory, also gleaned from conversations with island natives.

“As a result of diligent inquiry among the Indians residing in the vicinity of Englishman’s River,” the article declared, “one of the wildest and least frequented portions of Vancouver Island – where the Mowgli was seen a number of times, Mr. King has unearthed a new and somewhat startling theory to account for the origin of the strange being. This theory he made pubic to-day for the first time, although he has implicitly believed in it all along, and so do all the Indians in that district.

“Some twenty-eight years ago, a large ship was wrecked on Vancouver Island some distance north of Englishman’s River. Some of the crew perished, and some were saved. The survivors were afterwards massacred by the Indians, and to punish the latter a warship was sent up from Victoria –  but that is another story. In the cargo of this ship was a full-grown gorilla – one of the [few] ever captured – which was being taken to England for the Zoological Gardens. The animal’s cage was washed off the deck and broken in the surf, allowing the animal to escape. It was seen a number of times afterward on the shore by the survivors. For a number of years following, the gorilla created consternation and horror among some of the Indian camps and the natives tell [gruesome] tales of the animal having carried off a young squaw, who was not seen afterward. The Indians assert that the wild man is the descendant of the escaped gorilla.”

Gunboat Retaliations on Vancouver Island

The statement that ship wrecked “some twenty-eight years ago” indicates that the event in question occurred around 1877. Although this author was unable to find any information regarding a historical shipwreck, associated Indian massacre, and government retaliatory action which took place on the east coast of Vancouver Island in the 1870s, the narrative described vaguely resembles a series of events that took place in the spring of 1863, chronicled by author Chris Arnet in his 1999 book The Terror of the Coast.

That April, a German immigrant named Federick Marks decided to relocate with his family from Waldron Island to Mayne Island, the former being one of the Gulf Islands in Washington state, and the latter being a Gulf Island in British territory about eleven miles to the northwest. To accomplish this task, Marks secured the use of two boats, one of them a vessel called the Bella Coola, owned by a man named Henry, and the other a dugout canoe owned by his business partner, Christian Mayer. Marks’ wife and their five youngest children travelled in Henry’s boat. Marks himself, along with his 15-year-old married daughter, Caroline Harvey, travelled in the smaller canoe.

During the voyage, the vessels were beset by a sudden storm. Marks and Caroline decided to wait out the tempest on the southern shores of Saturna Island, while Henry opted to take Marks’ wife and young children to his own place on nearby Pender Island. After building a fire on the beach, Marks and his daughter were discovered and slaughtered by a band of Lamalchi Cowichan natives, who coveted the household goods they had brought on shore. The natives then destroyed the canoe with axes and threw their victims’ bodies into the sea. That accomplished, they returned to their home village and spread word of their exploit.

Around the same time, a party of natives, acting on the dream of one of its members, fired on a tent of sleeping white men on nearby Pender Island, mortally wounding one of their targets. One of the barrage’s recipients, who had been shot in the leg, crawled from the tent, wrested a rifle from the nearest assailant, and drove the remainder into the forest.

In order to obtain justice for these murders, British Columbia’s Governor James Douglas dispatched a Royal Navy gunboat called the HMS Forward to the Gulf Islands. After investigating the scenes of the crimes, the naval crew set out in search of the suspected murderers, and captured two near Salt Spring Island on their way home from a potlatch. The navy men then proceeded to a Lamalchi village on Kuper Island (now Penalakut Island), where other of the murderers were believed to have taken refuge. At the approach of the steamer, the native women and children fled into the woods, and the warriors took up strategic positions overlooking the beach. Through an interpreter, the gunboat’s captain, Lieutenant Commander Horace Lascelles, ordered the village chief to deliver the suspects into his custody within a certain timeframe. When the chief failed to meet his demand, Lascelles bombarded the village to destruction. The natives fired back with their rifles, and one of their bullets struck and killed sixteen-year-old sailor Charles Gliddon, the only British serviceman ever killed in action in British Columbia.

The 1860s saw other instances of British retaliatory action in response to native crimes in the Pacific Northwest, the most notable being the Royal Navy’s 1864 bombardment of Nootka villages on Flores Island northwest of present-day Tofino, perpetrated in response to the murders of four merchant sailors at Clayoquot Sound. The Gulf Island incident, however – sometimes referred to as the Lamalchi War – is the only action of which this author is aware which took place in the waters east of Vancouver Island, into which the Englishman River drains. To the best of this author’s knowledge, no gorillas were on board either the HMS Forward at the time of its Gulf Island campaign, nor on Henry’s dugout canoe at the time of Marks’ and Harvey’s murders.

Mike King Elaborates on the Creature He Encountered

After outlining his revised theory as to the nature of the Vancouver Island wildman, Mike King provided a thorough description of the creature that he encountered, including details which did not appear in earlier accounts of his run-in. “The theory,” he said of his gorilla-human hybrid hypothesis, “seems to me to be the only way to account for the origin of the strange being that I saw a little over [a] year ago… For even if a man lived in a wild state from birth he could not have assumed the apelike attributes possessed by this creature which I saw. I came up by accident, and was only about twenty-five feet away when it caught sight of me. The Mowgli, or whatever you like to call it, was squatted down like a [monkey] beside a little stream. It was washing a kind of wild onion that we prospectors sometimes eat when we run short of provisions. I thought it was a bear at first, but when it heard me and straightened up I brought my rifle up to my shoulder, for it was the strangest sight I ever expect to set eyes on.

“‘Imagine meeting in the depths of a lonely forest an animal in the shape of a man, standing over six feet high, and covered all over with long, coarse black hair, which on some portions of the body was a foot long. The forehead was low and retreating, and its small eyes glared at me in surprise for an instant. Just below the eyes the hair on the face of the creature was short, but everywhere else it was long and shiny, and on the hand the hair hung down below the finger ends. The being stood quite straight for a moment in surprise, and seemed to me to weigh about two hundred and forty pounds. If it had taken one step toward me I would have sent a bullet through it, for I had it covered with my rifle. But after glaring at me for a moment it uttered a cry – a half human sort of grunt – and grasping a branch near by, hoisted itself up the bank of the creek and ran away through the underbrush, slightly bending as it did so, with the speed of a startled deer.

“‘I examined the creature’s footprints afterward. Its feet were short and very broad. I noticed the heel came back almost to the point, like that of a gorilla. The armful of wild onions that it had been cleaning at the little stream were as nicely done up as if a human being had prepared them.’”

Part 8

History of the SS Valencia

With the exception of a lone article in the Ottawa Journal describing the capture of George Beaudutte, a homeless veteran of both the Imperial Russian and Imperial German Armies who roamed the woods outside Aylmer, Ontario, following in the footsteps of another vagabond who had haunted the area thirteen years earlier, the next spate of wildman stories to grace Canadian papers revolved around the wreck of an iron-hulled passenger steamer called the SS Valencia. This hapless vessel, which perished in what British Columbian historian T.W. Paterson described as a wreck unparalleled “in terms of human tragedy – of sheer unadulterated horror,” has an interesting history which may be worth retelling here.

Built in 1882 for the purpose of ferrying passengers between Caracas, Venezuela, and New York City, the SS Valencia survived several brushes with disaster throughout its colourful twenty-four-year career. On May 27^th, 1897, this 1,600-ton American steamship entered Cuba’s Guantanamo Bay to deliver passengers and cargo to the Port of Guantanamo. At the time, Cuba was embroiled in its third and final war for independence, a struggle between Spain and disgruntled Cuban colonists that had raged intermittently for twenty years. Although the United States had hitherto remained neutral in the conflict between the Catholic Monarchy and the mambises, as Cuban revolutionaries were sometimes called, the Spanish naval officers tasked with guarding Guantanamo Bay were wary of the American vessel as it steamed into the harbour, and for good reason. This latest insurgency had its roots in Florida, where veterans of the previous two Cuban liberation wars had taken refuge. And despite that the U.S. Coast Guard had an excellent record of seizing domestic supplies destined for the Cuban revolutionaries, the American public largely supported the insurgency, popular opinion on the conflict having been shaped by so-called “yellow journalists” who penned sensational articles exaggerating Spanish atrocities in Cuba, apparently in an attempt to sell papers.

As it pulled into Guantanamo Bay, the SS Valencia was approached by a cruiser called the Reina Mercedes, the flagship of the Spanish Navy in Cuba, which checked it over with a searchlight before granting it entry into the harbour. When the American steamer, having concluded its business, proceeded out of the bay the following day, it neglected to display its colours – a violation of maritime courtesy. Apparently taking umbrage at this oversight, the captain of the Reina Mercedes fired two shells at the foreign vessel, one of which slammed into the water about eighty yards astern of the Valencia, prompting the American Captain John F. Skillings to raise the stars and stripes. The incident was later reported in the American press, but no action was taken against this unwarranted act of Spanish aggression.

The following year, while the SS Valencia was in the process of transferring to the west coast of the Americas to ferry passengers and freight between San Francisco and Alaska, an incident occurred which thrust the United States into the war between Spain and the Cuban rebels. In January 1898, American President William McKinley dispatched a battleship called the USS Maine to Havana, Cuba, in response to riots that endangered the lives of American expatriates. On February 15^th, while anchored in Havana Harbor, the vessel mysteriously exploded, killing 260 American servicemen. The incident was popularly attributed to the connivances of the Spanish, prompting the United States to enter the war against Spain in what is known today as the Spanish-American War.

In June of that year, the SS Valencia was refitted as a troopship for the United States Army and commissioned with shuttling American soldiers between San Francisco and the Philippines, the latter being a Spanish colony in the throes of its own war of independence. In December 1898, at the conclusion of the Spanish-American War, Spain ceded the Philippines to the United States in accordance with the Treaty of Paris, prompting Filipino revolutionaries to shift their aggression to their new overlord, the American Military Government of the Philippine Islands. The SS Valencia continued to serve as a troopship throughout the ensuing Philippine-American War, finally resuming its former function as a West Coast ferry at the conclusion of that conflict in 1902.

The Wreck of the SS Valencia

Despite emerging from two back-to-back wars unscathed, the SS Valencia had a rough transition to peacetime duty. In 1902, while returning from a voyage to Valdez, Alaska, the Valencia collided with another steamer off Seattle, Washington, sustaining damage to its iron exterior. Three years later, she ran aground in the harbour of Saint Michael, Alaska, but was set float again with the assistance of a tugboat.

In January 1906, the Valencia was tasked with ferrying passengers from San Francisco to Seattle, necessitating a journey through the Strait of Juan de Fuca and down Puget Sound. En route, the steamer was beset by a storm off the coast of northern California which impeded navigation. In the confusion that ensued, the crew missed the entrance to the Strait of Juan de Fuca and proceeded north up the west coast of Vancouver Island, into a treacherous stretch of water known colloquially as the ‘Graveyard of the Pacific.’

On January 22^nd, just before midnight, the SS Valencia struck a reef off Cape Beale, the eastern edge of Barkley Sound which furrows the southwestern end of Vancouver Island. Hoping to ground the vessel before it foundered, the Valencia’s captain, Oscar Johnson, impaled the craft on sea rocks about ninety metres from an endless stretch of 100-foot-tall cliffs that comprised the shore, known today as the Valencia Bluffs. Contrary to the orders of the captain, four of the ship’s seven lifeboats were filled with passengers, many of them women and children, and lowered into the water. Three of the lifeboats careened on their way down the side of the iron hull, spilling their unfortunately occupants into the frigid blackness. Most of these passengers drowned immediately, while a few managed to swim to the base of the cliff, to be dashed to destruction by the waves upon the rock. The fourth lifeboat managed to clear the side of the ship and proceed toward the shore, illuminated for a few minutes by the red glow of a distress rocket as its occupants rowed desperately for safety. The boat would not be seen again for another twenty-seven years.

Two more lifeboats were launched when the wind and waves pushed the Valencia to the left, shielding her port side from the worst of the tempest. Only nine men between these two boats managed to make it safety to shore, to a section of cliff which seemed less daunting than the rest, both vessels capsizing in the process. These survivors, led by a school administrator named Frank F. Bunker, huddled among the rocks until first light, whereupon they scaled the cliff face, discovered a telegraph line through the forest, and followed it to a deserted lineman’s shack on the western banks of the Darling River. One of the men managed to establish communication with the keeper of the Carmanah Point Light Station, whom he informed of the disaster. The keeper relayed the information to the nearby community of Bamfield, which, in turn, sent word of the disaster to Victoria. Three rescue ships were then dispatched to the scene of the wreck.

Around the same time, Captain Johnson tasked a party of volunteer crewmembers, led by boatswain Tim McCarthy, with heading to shore in the last lifeboat so that they might find a suitable location on the top of the cliff at which to secure a lifeline shot from the Valencia. The party landed safely at a point about eight miles northwest of the wreck, where they found a trail directing them to the Cape Beale Lighthouse. Rather than head to the cliff as ordered, necessitating a grueling slog through impenetrable rainforest, they headed up the trail, and soon staggered up to the door of the promised lighthouse. The light’s keeper sent word of the Valencia’s plight to Bamfield by telegram, only to learn that the settlement had received the same news mere minutes earlier from the keeper of the Carmanah Point Light.

All day, the squall continued to rage without abate, and soon the frozen and weary survivors of the Valencia resigned themselves to another miserable night trapped in their nautical prison, bombarded by wind and spray. Heavy waves continued to beat against the stranded vessel, destroying her lower decks and sweeping errant survivors into the sea. By morning, everyone aboard the ship was forced to occupy the hurricane deck, and many opted to climb into the rigging.

That day, on January 24^th, the three rescue ships arrived on the scene and attempted to approach the Valencia. All were forced to abandon the enterprise on account of the waves and the shallow uncharted sea bottom.

Although she had exhausted her lifeboats, the Valencia was still equipped with two life rafts, a third having been washed overboard by the waves. Ten men piled onto one of these flimsy crafts and proceeded over the rough water, hoping to be picked up by a rescue boat. The remaining crew urged the surviving women and children to avail themselves of the second life raft, declaring that it might constitute their last opportunity for rescue. Believing that the storm would soon let up, however, they refused to board. Eighteen more men then committed themselves to the second life raft, paddling with oars and fragments of wreckage in the turbulent wake of their predecessor.

At 11:30 in the morning, about an hour and a half after the life rafts were launched, a huge wave demolished the portion of the Valencia which underpinned the rigging and the hurricane deck. Three would-be rescuers who had trekked overland from the Carmanah Point Light – a ragtag party consisting of an assistant lighthouse keeper, a trapper, and a lineman – watched in horror as the remaining passengers and crew plummeted into the ocean, to be hurled against the proximate cliff by incessant breakers, swept out to sea clinging to debris, or drown in the icy waters of the North Pacific, joining the silent grisly throng which bobbed about the wreckage.

Later that day, the eighteen men who had set out on the second life raft were discovered and picked up by a rescue ship. Of the ten men who had embarked on the first life raft, two drowned while four died of exposure. The four survivors managed to make their way to a place called Turtle Island, where they were rescued by natives. All told, of the 173 passengers and crew aboard the Valencia, only thirty-seven survived the wreck. All seventeen women and eleven children on board the vessel had perished.

Ghosts of the SS Valencia

Over the years, the wreck of the SS Valencia has spawned several chilling ghost stories. According to T.W. Paterson in his 1983 book British Columbia Shipwrecks, in the years succeeding the disaster, native fishermen in Barkley Sound sometimes encountered a lifeboat crewed by skeletons, rowing silently through the fog. In his 2017 book The Haunting of Vancouver Island, author Shanon Sinn included another tale which holds that sailors from Seattle often spotted the phantom of the wrecked Valencia while steaming along the southwestern coast of Vancouver Island, its ghostly passengers and crew clinging to the rigging and mast. In 1906, about seven months after the disaster, a native salvager claimed to have found the Valencia’s lost lifeboat in a seaside cave not far from the wreck, occupied by eight skeletons. Bizarrely, the cave’s entrance was fronted by a large boulder which could only be circumvented by a skilled swimmer, precluding access to even the smallest boat. And in 1933, twenty-seven years after the incident, what appeared to have been the very same lifeboat washed up on Turtle Island, where the four survivors of the ten-man raft had been rescued. Its discoverer, Captain George MacFarlane, removed its nameplate with an axe – a relic which is now on display in the British Columbia Maritime Museum in Victoria.

The Wildman of the Darling River

One eerie tale associated with the wreck of the SS Valencia, which remains absent from modern retellings of the disaster, appeared in Canadian newspapers in early May 1906, a little more than three months after the shipwreck. According to a lineman named David Logan – one of the three-man rescue party who had trekked overland from the Carmanah Point Lighthouse, who witnessed the gruesome climax of the Valencia disaster – local natives claimed that a wildman haunted the woods skirting the Darling River, eking out a Spartan existence not far from the site of the shipwreck. Logan – who routinely recovered the often-dismembered remains of the Valencia survivors and buried them in shallow graves on the beach – suspected that the mysterious figure might be a survivor of the wreck, his mind shattered by the trauma of the disaster that claimed the lives of so many of his fellow shipmates. As an article for the May 4^th, 1906 issue of the Vancouver Daily World put it:

“That a survivor of the wrecked steamer Valencia is living as an insane wild man in the woods near Darling creek, subsisting on clams, roots, berries, etc. found in the thick woods near the scene of the disaster to the Pacific Coast Steamship Company’s vessel last January, is the startling report brought to David Logan, lineman at Clo-oose, by Indians.

“Different Indians have brought in the same story after journeying over the trail near the scene of the wreck, and the lineman has started out, with a companion, to investigate the startling tale of the natives, says the Colonist.

“It is three months since the Valencia was wrecked, and of her complement of 154 persons, fifteen reached the Vancouver Island coast and a score of others were rescued from liferafts. If another unfortunate reached the shore with his mind wrecked as a result of the hardships incident to the disaster, it seems improbable that he would live so long under the conditions reported; but the tale so oft told by Indians is thought by those residents in the vicinity to be worthy of investigation.

“It will be remembered that Mr. Bunker, in telling of his landing on the beach after being overturned from a boat in the breakers, told of a man who had suffered grievous injuries to his face and head by contact with the rocks and was sitting on the beach gibbering insanely. The survivors left him there and started over the trail to seek succor at the telegraph huts at Darling creek. Nothing more was heard of this man. It is hardly probable that this unfortunate, who was severely injured, would survive so long.

“The Indians tell of hearing shouting, shrieking, and loud crying by what they have classed as a wild man. It may be, of course, that the natives have heard the noise of a panther, or other animals; but they deny this, and state it was the crying of a human being that they heard.

“Indians of the district have been badly frightened by the reported presence of the insane man, who, they say, frequents the vicinity of Darling creek, near the mouth of which is a good clam beach, and in whose valley there are many berries and roots. In the winter months, though, one would think the woods would have furnished little sustenance.

“Collating the various reports brought by the Indians, Mr. Logan has decided to investigate, and has gone to Darling creek with a companion for this purpose. If the reports made by the various Indians are found to be correct, Mr. Logan will report the existence of the unfortunate and a party will the be organized to capture the deranged man, so that he can be properly cared for.”

The findings of this expedition, to the best of this author’s knowledge, were never made public.

Part 9

Another Horne Lake Sighting

Nearly three months after the tale of the wildman of the Darling River circulated throughout Canadian papers, Vancouver Island’s most elusive resident made headlines again, having been spotted in his traditional haunt in the woods near Horne Lake.

“The Mowgli of Vancouver Island has been seen again,” declared an article in the July 30^th, 1906 issue of the Vancouver Daily World, whose author omitted the terminal ‘e’ from the ‘Horne’ in Horne Lake. “A gentleman who came over from the island today,” he wrote, “and who is stopping at Leland, says that four days ago two prospectors dropped right on the wild man on the shores of Horn Lake [sic], Alberni District. Horn Lake is what by most people would be called a marshy or rushy pond.”

In fact, Horne Lake is about eight kilometres (five miles) long, with a depth of 50 metres (164 feet).

“The wild man was clothed in sunshine and a smile,” the article continued, “except that his body was covered with a longish growth of hair of a brownish color, much like the salmon berry-eating bears that infest that region. The wild man ran as soon as the prospectors came within the range of vision.”

The journalist went on to explain how the hunters tracked the wildman to what he called a “wickieup,” or primitive hut, where they found evidence of root gathering.

Edmonton Wildman

The next two wildmen to make Canadian papers appeared to be of the human variety. That August, a party of children claimed to have been chased by a naked man in the bush near the Cameron House Hotel in Edmonton, Alberta. Officers of the North-West Mounted Police investigated the scene of the incident and found a quantity of berries abandoned near the banks of the North Saskatchewan River. “It has been surmised,” the article explained, “that the object of the excitement was a bather who had become light-headed through the effects of the intense heat, causing him to act strangely. There are those, however, who say that this is not so, and that the man has escaped the police and has annoyed parties in town.”

The Wildman of Pasely Island

That same month, several West Coast newspapers reported on an old prospector who lived a savage, lonely existence on Paisley [Pasely] Island at the mouth of Howe Sound, between Bowen Island and Gibsons. Residing in a derelict fisherman’s hut, the man would take to the bush whenever he was approached by well-meaning crew members of the ferry SS New Era. “He has a beard like Rip Van Winkle,” declared an article in the Vancouver Daily World, “almost down to his waist.” In September, the prospector spoke with the members of a four-man search party who hoped to recover the body of a sailor believed to have drowned in the area, telling them that he believed the surrounding waters were full of man-eating sharks that attacked the occupants of small vessels.

Mysterious Figure on Hornby Island

In early September 1906, a party of adventurers had an unusual experience on Hornby Island, one of the Gulf Island off the eastern coast of Vancouver Island, about sixteen kilometres north of Horne Lake and eleven kilometres northwest of Qualicum Bay. The testimony of one of their number, described as a “reputable correspondent,” appeared in the September 14^th, 1906 issue of the Nanaimo Free Press.

“We were a party of eight having a trip around last week in a sloop,” the informant explained. “The day being warm and dead calm, we put into Deep Bay, opposite the south end of Denman and decided to stay there until next day. Some of us decided to [come] ashore, and the party scattered for a while. There were three of us looking over some old deserted cabins and a wharf formerly used by Japanese for putting up dog salmon. We heard a noise coming from the ferns and scrub behind us, and a little later a strange cry. One of the party, who had a camera, said, ‘That sounds like a deer calling for her fawn. I wish I could get a snapshot.

“Presently we saw what one believed was an Indian, another said an old Chinaman. We shouted and he turned, staring or glaring at us. My friend snapped his camera and tried again, but his films were exhausted. We rushed forward simultaneously to try to get a closer view of the creature, but lost sight of him directly, though the country was comparatively open, except of course for the ferns. One of the party suggested it to be the famous ‘wild man’. We tried our utmost all the remainder of the evening to get in touch with him or it, but without further results.”

The friends later developed the single photo they managed to capture of the creature, which, according to the article, “shows clearly the head and shoulders of a bare-headed man protruding above the apparently thick mass of fern growth. The photograph, however, is not sufficiently distinct to come to any definite conclusion as to the ‘genus’ of the individual. The features are those of an old man.” The photo was not reproduced in the paper.

Feral Girls on Northern Vancouver Island

The next Vancouver Island wildman story to be reported by the press is the heartrending tale of two half-feral girls who lived with their widowed father at the northern end of the island. “Away up at the north end of the island,” proclaimed an article in the Toronto Star, “in a deserted shack, in a more deserted portion of the woods, lives a man who has two children, one ten and one six years old, and neither of these two girls has been washed or had her hair combed for years. They have never worn shoes or stockings, and are in such a state of neglect that they are almost like wild beasts… When the father goes into the woods or out in his log boat, the two children follow him like dogs, and the small girl often crawls on her hands and knees like a beast… The father of the two children is in a similar condition and has developed into a mere brute. He never washes himself or combs his hair and never even removes his filthy clothes.”

The Wildman of North West River, Labrador

The next Canadian wildman story to grace Canadian newspapers is a fascinating forgotten tale set in the wilderness of eastern Labrador, in an extremely remote stretch of Canadian Shield west of Lake Melville. More specifically, the story takes place at the mouth of the North West River, which drains into the lake’s western end. Today, the peninsula north of the river’s mouth is home to a town called North West River, while the southerly shore boasts the Sheshatshiu Indian Reserve, home to about a thousand Innu or Montagnais natives. In the autumn of 1906, however, the north shore of the river’s mouth was dotted by a scattering of log structures, including a Hudson’s Bay Company trading post and a handful of trappers’ cabins, while the southern bank was the site of a French fur company store – the lonely successor of a Gallic trading post built back in 1757. Of the twenty permanent residents to call the place home, seventeen were either Metis or full-blood native. An Anglo-Canadian fur trader named Stuart Cotter ran the HBC post, while French factor Monsieur Duclos and his French-Canadian assistant, Captain Fournier, constituted the only white residents of the southern shore.

In the autumn of 1906, British astronomer Edward Walter Maunder of the Royal Observatory, Greenwich, accompanied a party of Canadian government scientists to the mouth of the North West River to observe a solar eclipse. In a letter to the London Daily Graphic, Maunder wrote, “We found the little community in a state of great excitement over some mysterious footmarks that had been seen in the neighborhood, resembling the track left by a bare-footed man, with the exception that there was the mark of a great claw on each foot. Three individuals seemed to have been passing, for the tracks were of three different sizes, those of the largest being very deeply sunk in the ground, as if made by an enormously heavy creature; indeed, Capt. Fourier told me that he estimated the weight of the creature making them as fully seven hundred pounds. The alarm was much intensified when a half breed trapper, Michael by name, who had a hut some twenty miles from the settlement up one of the rivers, brought his family into the settlement with the story that his daughter (who was, I believe, a grown-up young woman, not a child) had seen an enormous black-looking man who beckoned her to come away with him. She took refuge in the hut and shut herself in, and when her father returned home told him what had happened, and he at once gathered all his family together and hurried off to the fur station. Capt. Fournier at once gathered together as large a force as he could, and they set out to track the mysterious beings. They came upon their spoor, and upon very abundant traces of their feeding. At the time when we were in the Northwest River, Labrador was over-run by a plague of field voles, and it was clear that the creatures in question made these their chief diet, which they ate by biting the middle out of the living animal and throwing away the head and skin, as if it where a prawn or shrimp. They would have no difficulty in catching the voles by the hundred, for, as we found in our camp, the little beasts seemed absolutely without fear of human kind.

“Capt. Fournier tracked the mysterious creatures to a place that they had evidently made their lair, and hid himself in a tree close by for the whole of a night. He never succeeded in seeing them in the open but he heard their gibbering, and also the noise they made when feeding on voles. Possibly they may have detected the presence of a hunter in the neighborhood, and therefore took to flight. At least they disappeared, and nothing further was seen of them up to the time that we left Northwest River.

“There can, I think, be no reasonable doubt as to the real nature of these mysterious beings,” Maunder continued. “The wandering Indians in the vast solitudes of Labrador and Northern Canada are peculiarly liable to attacks of madness, or, as they themselves put it, to possession by an evil spirit. When so ‘possessed’ they seem to have strong cannibalistic tendencies.”

Maunder then stated how, while in Nova Scotia the previous year, the visited Dr. Henry Youle Hind, the Canadian geologist who had led the scientific portion of the Red River Expedition of 1857, as well as the western portion of the Assiniboine and Saskatchewan Expedition of 1858, collecting information on the topography and terrestrial constitution of Western Canada. Hind told Maunder about the native legend of the Wendigo, describing the monsters as “gigantic cannibals and vampires.” Later, during his trans-Atlantic voyage back to Britain on the steamer S.S. Tunisian, he made the acquaintance of Anglican Bishop George Holmes, who had spent the previous two decades serving the Church of England in missions across subarctic Canada, from remote Fort Chipewyan in what is now northeastern Alberta to the Ontario settlement of Moosonee just south of James Bay. Holmes told Maunder that he had personally witnessed a Wendigo possession in Manitoba’s Red River Valley. When the victim of this dreaded affliction began to exhibit symptoms of his disorder, the bishop’s native congregation, who were normally averse to violence, insisted that he be killed immediately, fearing that he would soon eat them.”

Maunder’s incredible story was printed in the November 1^st, 1906 issue of the Outcrop, a newspaper based out of the tiny settlement of Wilmer, British Columbia, located in the Rocky Mountain Trench just north of Windermere Lake. At the end of the article, the nameless journalist included a telegram from Montreal related to Maunder’s experience, which reads, “A man named Fournier… reports the existence, far north, of a race of semi-human giants. Fournier met one of the monsters and gave chase, for the creature fled at a rapid rate. Fournier fired at it, but missed. Three similar creatures attempted to kidnap a little girl. The monsters have enormous heads and arms, and their lower bodies resemble bears. The Eskimos have often mentioned the existence of these creatures, but their tales were never credited.”

Parallels with the Traverspine Gorilla

Maunder’s forgotten tale, which has hitherto escaped the notice of Sasquatch researchers, is doubly intriguing in that it appears to be either the prelude to, or a more accurate contemporary account of, the tale of the Traverspine Gorilla, a classic if obscure Sasquatch story set in the Labrador wilderness near what is now the Happy Valley – Goose Bay Airforce Base, located a mere twenty seven kilometres southwest of the North West River. More specifically, the story is set on the banks of the Traverspine River, a tributary of the Churchill River which runs just south of the present Airforce base. The story first appeared in American writer Elliot Merrick’s 1933 book True North: A Journey Into Unexplored Wilderness.

In the autumn of 1913, Merrick explained, six years after the incident at North West River, a little girl by the name of Michelin was playing near her parents’ cabin when she saw a strange manlike creature emerge from the woods. The thing was seven feet fall, covered in hair, and had long dangling arms, while its head was topped with a shock of white hair. The creature grinned at the girl and beckoned for her to come closer, just like the wildman had done to the Metis girl near the North West River. Miss Michelin screamed and raced for the safety of the house.

Following the girl’s terrifying encounter, local men began to search for the creature, setting bear traps and keeping nightly vigils with their rifles at the ready. Although they never managed to lay eyes on the creature, they found its strange footprints in the dirt and snow. They described the prints as being “about twelve inches long, narrow at the heel and forking at the front into two broad, round-ended toes.” Some of the hunters described the tracks as “apelike,” and said that they were impressed so deeply that they estimated the creature that made it to weigh five hundred pounds. They proceeded over stumps and obstructions which most men would try to avoid, leading to what the hunters interpreted as nests under trees, and passed by uprooted logs and trees shorn of their bark which lent the impression that creature ate insects.

The Traverspine Gorilla, as the creature came to be known, haunted the vicinity of the Traverspine River for two years, often harassing locals’ dogs in the night. One afternoon, it made a second appearance at the Michelin home, peering through the cabin window at one of the children inside. Alerted by her child’s screams, Mrs. Michelin seized a shotgun and fired at the creature as it darted into the bush.

Part 10

The Wildman of Banks Island

Around the same time as the excitement in Labrador, a series of strange events swirled around the inlet of Port San Juan on southwestern Vancouver Island – the site of present-day Port Renfrew, BC. In early October 1906, a lumberman named Ed Russ returned from a timber cruise in the area with the vague report that he had seen the wild man of the woods.

About a month and a half later, two fishermen named Tom Ash and O. Bratland, who were employed by the San Juan Fish & Packing Company and worked aboard a steamer called the San Juan, had a strange experience while returning to Port San Juan from a northerly voyage. During the homeward journey, the two men decided to make the best of the bad weather in which they found themselves, which rendered fishing impossible, and headed ashore for a hunting trip.

The location of their sojourn was 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 rambling on the beach of this misty, rain-soaked hideaway, 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 sailors spent some time searching for the strange creature, but were unable to locate him.

The Kamloops Squaw Man

Although the subject of the next wildman story disseminated by the Canadian press is unmistakably of the human variety, the tale is fascinating nonetheless, and worth retelling here.

In early January, 1907, a group of cowboys employed at a ranch south of Kamloops, BC, headed out into the hills southwest of town in search of lost horses. They rode into a heavy fog in which one of their number, a ranch hand of Shuswap Indian extraction, became separated from the rest.

While calling out for his companions, the lost cowboy was answered by the voice of what proved to be a young native woman. Upon seeing him, the woman burst into tears, exclaiming that he was the first Indian she had laid eyes on in seven years.

No sooner had the bewildered cowboy offered to take the girl into town than the pair were approached by a savage-looking sun-bronzed white man sporting long tangled hair and a beard. The startling figure brandished a rifle and growled a deadly threat, promising to shoot the Indian unless he left immediately. Left with little choice, the cowhand departed, and related his strange tale to his band’s leader, Chief Louis, later that night.

Chief Louis suspected that the mysterious girl was the only survivor of an unsolved massacre that still haunted the memories of the westerly Lillooet Indians. Seventeen years earlier, an entire Lillooet family from the little community of Bridge River, just north of Lillooet, BC, was wiped out in a mysterious nighttime murder spree. The only family member unaccounted for among the dead was a thirteen-year-old girl, who was presumed to have been kidnapped.

At the insistence of Chief Louis and his Lillooet counterpart, Constable William Fernie of the British Columba Provincial Police – who, incidentally, had attained national celebrity the previous year for his capture of “gentleman” train robber Bill Miner – tasked a party of Indian special constables with scouring the hills for the native girl and her supposed captor. The natives were forced to call off the search prematurely, unable to travel through the deep snow. The true story of the girl and her abductor, to the best of this author’s knowledge, was never solved.

The Creature of Monkey Beach

With the exception of the story of George Laviss, a mentally ill Greek vagrant who was captured in Windsor, Ontario’s Sandwich district after locals spotted his nightly fire flickering in a marsh, Canada’s next wildman story is a chilling forgotten tale from British Columbia evoking the popular urban legend surrounding Portlock, Alaska.

In early March, 1907, a steamship called the Capilano 1 made its slow, steady way up the Inside Passage, the tortuous network of sounds and inlets which British Columbia’s coastal islands shelter from the Salish Sea. At a point on the Ursula Channel about 60 kilometres south of present-day Kitimat, the steamer pulled into Bishop Cove, the site of the remote Bishop Bay Hot Springs and a small Haisla Indian settlement. There, on the shores of what would come to be known as Monkey Beach, the entire population of the settlement was congregated in a tightly-knit throng, evidently in a state of great excitement. At the site of the expected vessel, entire Haisla families promptly piled into dugout canoes laden with household effects and paddled desperately for the steamer, some members occasionally twisting around to hazard fearful glances at the gloomy forest beyond the beach.

As they helped the terrified natives clamber aboard their vessel, the crew of the Capilano learned that a strange creature had been making nocturnal visits to the beach beside the settlement, apparently to dig for clams. While going about its nightly errands, the creature let out the occasional howl, which unearthly sounds first alerted the villagers to its presence. Those who saw the creature described it as a “monkey-like wild man” covered with long hair, with a height of about five feet.

“The Indians say they had tried to shoot it, but failed,” declared an article in a Vancouver newspaper, “which further increased their superstitious fears. The officers of the vessel heard some animals howling along the shore that night but are not prepared to swear that it was the voice of the midnight visitor who so frightened the Indians.”

Mowgli Theory Debunked

In the midst of a couple brief allusions to a naked spearfisherman spotted at a creek in Sooke Country, at the southwestern end of Vancouver Island, papers across Canada ran with a story debunking one of the theories as to the nature of Vancouver Island wildman, namely that the creature was really an eccentric German recluse named John Feurst.

A December 1907 article in a Vancouver newspaper explained how a lumberman named F. Muller, while scouting for quality timber, stumbled upon a human skeleton partly embedded in the earth. Muller’s grisly discovery was made in the deep woods above Sproat Lake, whose eastern end extends to a point about fourteen kilometres southwest of Horne Lake.

Muller reported his find to Chief Constable Charles Augustus “Gus” Cox of the British Columbia Provincial Police, who promptly investigated the scene. Cox recovered several personal effects near the body, which he instantly recognized as the property of his former acquaintance, John Feurst, a one-time resident of Port Alberni.

Feurst had worked on the Island as a surveyor, and had often confided in his colleagues that he longed for a lifestyle secure from the wiles of the fairer sex. He feared that a certain woman he had known in Germany, whose charms he was helpless to resist, would track him to Canada and drag him to the altar expressly for the purpose of shearing him of his wealth.

The German eventually established a homestead on the banks of Sproat Lake, where he hoped no woman would follow him. His new abode and profusion of whiskers earned him the nickname the “Sproat Lake bear.”

In around 1899, Feurst’s abandoned canoe was found on shore at a remote section of Sproat Lake. The provincial police subsequently conducted a search for the peculiar woodsman but could find no trace of him. Some Islanders began to speculate that the strange German had lost his mind completely and had taken to the bush, and that his occasional appearances to hunters and lumberjacks had spawned the legend of the Vancouver Island wildman. As a Vancouver article put it, “The known mental peculiarities of the man Feurst, and the fact that he had an abnormal growth of beard and hair, made it easy to fit him to the descriptions that came in from time to time regarding the ‘Mowgli’ wild man, but… this theory was wrong, and… all the time Feurst was supposed to be running wild over the Island, his bones were resting in the deep wilderness where his malady had driven him to seek refuge from his kind.”

“The mystery of the identity of the real wild man,” concluded a piece in the Montreal Star, “is consequently more baffling than ever.”

The Wild Couple of Pemberton Meadows

In December 1908, a year after the body of John Feurst was discovered, a Vancouver Island trapper caught a fleeting glimpse of a wildman lurking near one of his snares. The creature fled with astonishing agility when it became aware of his presence. Incidentally, this sighting preceded the trapper’s equally-intriguing discovery of a wolverine in his trap, those animals being so rare on Vancouver Island that veteran trappers were confident that they had long been extirpated.

Aside from this brief report, two and a half years elapsed without any journalistic reference to a wildman sighting in Canada, human or otherwise. The silence was finally broken in the summer of 1909, when a flurry of articles published across Western Canada chronicled a strange tale eerily evocative of the so-called “squaw man” of Kamloops, spotted by the Shuswap cowboy two years earlier.

In July of that year, a bearded wildman dressed in buckskins began to terrorize the Lillooet Indian residents of Pemberton Meadows, a place north of present-day Pemberton, BC, not far from the resort town of Whistler. Armed with a makeshift fauchard fashioned from a pole and a sling blade, this mysterious figure stalked natives from partial concealment in the brush, sometimes throwing stones at girls who strayed too close to his hiding place. At night, he descended from his mountain hideaway and stole into native camps, apparently with the intention of capturing a Lillooet girl. During one of his nightly escapades, he lit a native’s tent on fire, destroying everything inside.

According to a letter written by the Lillooet chief to the provincial police at Ashcroft, which was delivered by Catholic missionaries named Rohe and Lessieur, the wildman was accompanied by a woman, who appeared to assist his operations. In order to protect themselves from the designs of these crazed marauders, both men and women began wearing revolvers regularly, and forbade their children from venturing too far from the village. Some proposed that the man was a telegraph lineman driven mad by solitude. Others suggested that he was the same murderer who had wiped out a native family at northerly Anderson Lake two years earlier, carrying off a girl in an event chillingly reminiscent of the aforementioned 1890 massacre at Bridge River. No theories, however, were proposed as to the identity of his female companion.

A band of Lillooet hunters searched for the wild couple without success. Although newspapers alleged that the provincial police were looking into the matter, no information regarding their investigation was printed by the press.

The Wild Man of Amherst

Inexplicably, Canadian newspaper stories on semi-human wildman abruptly ceased in 1907, and did not reappear for another thirteen years. Although the second decade of the 20^th Century was filled with stories of men who adopted wild lifestyles, including outlaws, hermits, vagrants, exhibitionists, madmen, and a superstitious East Indian bather who fled naked into the woods at the approach of strangers, it failed to produce a single article on the mysterious hairy wildmen which had once been a mainstay of Canadian papers.

In early 1920, the journalistic drought was broken by an article originally published in the Chicago Blade and reprinted by a flurry of Canadian newspapers. This piece describes the capture of a wildman on an island in Lake Ontario just southwest of Kingston. It has the tenor of a prank, and indeed a Kingston paper which carried it dismissed it as “dope”. Nevertheless, it includes the names of several residents of Belleville, Ontario, which lend it a faint whiff of legitimacy. The article, which appeared in the February 28^th, 1920 issue of Kingston’s Weekly British Whig, reads:

“A startling discovery which brings back the story of Robinson Crusoe to real life 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.

“‘We were trampling through the wild underbrush on the island,’ says Henry Flerville, one of the members of the hunting party, ‘when we decided to smoke out a cave, thinking possibly that we might shoot some wolves. The wind was blowing in the right direction, so we built a fire in the narrow entrance to the cave. The smoke from the wet wood poured into the cave. Suddenly, we heard a violent commotion from within.

“‘A huge hairy being, which resembled an immense gorilla more than a man, rushed out. Several of us fired, but, luckily, in our fright, we did not hit him. The wild man picked up a huge boulder as easily as if it were a clod and threw it at us. It just narrowly missed. If it had hit any of us it certainly would have killed the victim.

“‘Then followed an exciting chase through the underbrush. One of the members of the party had a rope which he made into a lasso. After a few unsuccessful casts, he threw the loop around the head of the wild man. I slipped up behind him with another rope and tied his arms fast to his body. Then, with the aid of several farmers living near here, we loaded him into a boat and took him to Belleville.’

“After the wild man was brought to Belleville, he was put into a cage for safe keeping which had formerly been occupied by a Zoo gorilla. During the first night of his captivity, he uttered blood-curdling howls which could be heard for miles around.

“The next morning, the residents of Belleville attempted to [feed] the monster. They offered him breakfast food, pie and other dainties, at which he sniffed contemptuously. Then a large piece of raw meat was thrown into his cage. The wild man tore it into shreds with his long fingers and claw-like toes and devoured it voraciously.

“After the monster had been in captivity a couple of days, Mrs. Florence Masters, proprietress of the village millinery store, who has been advertising to find her lost husband for more than twenty years, came down to the cage out of curiosity.

“‘Ethelburt!’ she cried, the moment she set eyes on the wild man. ‘It’s my dear husband!’

“By several scars and moles, Mrs. Masters positively identified the wild man as her husband. Her mate had gone on a fishing trip twenty-two years before and had never been seen since then. The waters were dragged for his body, but Mrs. Masters always clung to the belief that he was still alive. It is now thought that he had become stranded on the island, which was seldom visited in those days, and had led a Robinson Crusoe existence almost within sight of his former home. It is believed that he [survived] on roots and herbs and what game he could capture with his hands, and finally reverted to a savage state as a result of the life he was leading.

“‘I am going to try to teach him to talk and wear clothes again,’ said Mrs. Masters. ‘For a time I will have to keep him in a cage, but I am confident that it will not be long until Ethelburt is himself again, and can tell me of those terrible years he spent on that island.’”

Part 11

The Bear Man of Prince George

In 1921, the English-reading world was introduced to the Abominable Snowman, or Yeti – the hairy ‘Wild Man of the Snows’ said to haunt the slopes of the Himalayas, the legend of which members of the British Mount Everest Reconnaissance Expedition had learned from their Tibetan sherpas. The resultant surge of interest in this exotic Asian wildman had little restorative effect on Canadian curiosity regarding the wild man of British Columbia, which was finally dragged from its 15-year-long dormancy by a series of sightings in the spring of 1922, made in the wooded centre of the province. Specifically, these encounters took place in the Nechako Plateau near Prince George, a city near the geographic middle of British Columbia, referred to today as the province’s ‘Northern Capital’.

An article in the Edmonton Journal which covered the story began, “‘How near does a human being resemble a bear, or how near does a bear resemble a human being?’ is a busy question just at present in the Prince George district of British Columbia, owing to rumours of a ‘wild-man’ running at large in the upper country. His description, given by those who have seen him, is such that he is easily mistaken for a bear at first sight; narrowly escaping the attention of the rifle every homesteader in these lonely regions packs along at this time when she bears are out with their cubs in search for food; hungry, and desperate bad actors if a man happens between her and the cubs.

“This ‘wild-man’ has been seen in different places lately. Those who got close enough to see it was a human and not a marauding animal describe him as a type of primitive cave or tree-top dweller – huge in stature; his few tatters of rags streaming from him as he runs like a deer when seen. He is evidently a white man, according to them.”

The article went on to explain how the wild man was supposed by some to be a navvy who had laboured on the Grand Trunk Pacific Railway, which was built through central British Columbia from 1908-1914. When the railroad was completed, he, like other out-of-work labourers, established an illegal homestead in the woods of the Nechako Plateau, careful to maintain a safe distance from the Hudson’s Bay Company’s Fort George so as to avoid eviction and prosecution. The extreme isolation had a devastating effect on his mental state. Gradually, his lifestyle devolved into one of abject savagery, apparently resulting in a physical transformation so profound that locals who spotted him flitting through the trees often mistook him for a bear.

“Last fall,” the article continued, “there was a ‘wild-man’ scare in the neighborhood of Isle Pierre, thirty-five miles west of Fort George, on the Nechako River. The R.C.M.P. got after him and scoured the wild country as only these men know how to scour, but failed to find anything on two or four feet that answered to the description given them by the thoroughly-scared homesteaders. Up near Chief Lake they found a rude cabin on a small clearing, occupied by a man who was supposed to be peculiar, but he was not to be found when the police visited there. The theory was advanced that this was probably the ‘wild-man,’ owing to neighboring homesteaders declaring his strange behavior when he visited their cabins in search of food.”

Seeahtiks

In 1924, newspapers across the United States published the story of a sensational encounter between four prospectors and a party of so-called ‘ape men’ in a gorge at the foot of Mount St. Helens, Washington, known thereafter as Ape Canyon. According to this tale, regarded today as a classic American Bigfoot story, the prospectors stumbled across a 7-foot-tall ape espying them from atop a cliff. The gold-seekers shot the creature to death with their rifles, and watched it tumble over the cliff into an inaccessible canyon. That night, after having returned to their cabin, the prospectors were besieged by a troop of furious ape-men, which bombarded their shack with large stones and left 14-inch-long footprints in its vicinity. The prospectors later learned that the local Clallam Indians were aware that they shared their hunting grounds with these mysterious creatures, and that they referred to them as Seeahtiks.

Circulation of the Ape Canyon story prompted Vancouver Island natives to weigh in on the Washington creatures, drawing a parallel between them and the wildman that haunted their own backyard. A Clallam native named Jorg Totsgi was quoted in several papers as saying, “The Seeahtiks are seven to eight feet tall, with hairy bodies like bears. They are great hypnotists and also have the gift of ventriloquism, throwing their voices to great distances… The Seeahtiks were last heard by the Clallam Indians about fifteen years ago, and it was believed by the present Indians that they had become extinct. The Seeahtiks made their home in the heart of the wilderness on Vancouver Island and in the Olympic range.”

Another Clallam native named Henry Napoleon claimed to have encountered a Seeahtik on Vancouver Island years before, saying, “I had been visiting relatives near Duncan, B.C., and while there I had been told many stories of the Seeahtiks by the Cowichan tribe of British Columbia and warned by them not to go too far into the wilderness. However, in following a buck I had wounded I went in farter than I expected. It was at twilight 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.”

Mike King’s Story Revisited

An article from Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario, resurrected the old story of Mike King, including the transcript of an interview of the timber cruiser conducted years before by C.H. Gibbons, editor of the Vancouver Daily Province. According to the article, Gibbons had kept the transcript secret for years, having promised Mike King that he would not publicize it while he was alive. However, King’s recent death, which he met while falling from a tree into a rocky river, coupled with the Ape Canyon excitement, prompted the editor to finally come forth with the story.

“I was dropping down a hillside to a likely spot for water,” King had told Gibbons, “when I heard a shout. I don’t know that you’d call it a shout, either, or a scream or a yell exactly – sort of a mixture of all three. Wasn’t any sort of animal I ever heard of. I know ‘em all pretty well. If course I stopped dead in my tracks and stood maybe two minutes listening, but there was not another sound.

“Then I caught a glimpse of him. He was running uphill across the draw, 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. Well, we stands there sizing each other up. Looked like we were trying to see which could stand it longest. B’th lovely dove. I never felt so queerlike before or since. Finally I starts on down hill. I hadn’t taken two steps an’ he was on his way, howling t’ beat th’ band. Fear, it was plain this time, and I felt a heap easier. He was into the bush like a flash, travelling fast and regardless. You could tell by the noise he was making. I kept on to the waterhole, where I knew it would likely be. And what d’yeh think I found?

“Down there by the little spring, to one side, was a pile of lachamas – the wild onion the Siwashes are so struck on – just as it had been pulled out by the boots, with the dirt and all sticking. And a bit away was another pile, clean white roots. He’d been pulling and washing them at the spring when I came along. Ain’t that human-like, b’th’ lovely dove?

“That was the last I saw of him, though he must a’ circled round and round me fifty times that night. In the soft spots he’d left his prints, a foot big enough for a No. 12, toes spread wide apart and the drag of a long claw on each.”

Part 12

The Wildman of Kemptville, Ontario

Another old wildman tale appeared in a disturbing article published in the March 26^th, 1927 issue of the Ottawa Citizen. The tale is set in the village of Kemptville, Ontario, just south of Ottawa, near a crook in the Rideau River, and far predates the sighting of Mike King.

The year was 1837, a turbulent annum in Canadian history. At that time, Canada west of the Maritimes consisted of two British colonies called Lower and Upper Canada, the former comprising the lowland of the St. Lawrence River Valley in present-day Quebec, and the latter skirting the northern shores of the Great Lakes in the so-called ‘Upper Country’ of present-day Ontario. Back in 1763, following the British Conquest of Canada, this vast region had been united into the single Province of Quebec, a British colony whose French-Canadian inhabitants were allowed to retain French civil law and the old seigneurial system which had existed under the French regime. In the aftermath of the American Revolutionary War, British Loyalists from the Thirteen Colonies fled north into British Territory and were granted land north of the Great Lakes. In order to allow the original French-Canadian inhabitants of the Laurentian Valley to retain the system of governance they had grown accustomed to, and to give the British-American newcomers a government and judiciary modeled on the British system for which they had fought, the Crown divided the Province of Quebec into Upper and Lower Canada: Upper Canada for the Loyalist refugees, and Lower Canada for the French-Canadians.

Following the War of 1812, in which the British repulsed an American attempt to annex Canada, political power in both Lower and Upper Canada was concentrated into oligarchies. In Lower Canada, the Governor General, the representative of the King, appointed certain wealthy British merchants and French-Canadian seigneurs to the Legislative Council of Lower Canada, apparently selecting candidates whom he believed would uphold the interests of the Crown in the event of another threat to Canadian territory. This tightly knit group of councilors, known as the ‘Chateau Clique,’ or the ‘Lower Canada Tories,’ espoused conservative British values defined by loyalty to the King and the Church of England, as well as an interest in assimilating the French-Canadian habitants of Lower Canada into British culture. These members of the Legislative Council voted on bills passed by the Legislative Assembly, the lower house of Parliament whose members were elected by the people of Lower Canada. In this way, Crown-appointed councilors, whose primary loyalty lay with Great Britain, could veto any bills proposed by representatives of the people, most of whom were French-Canadian. This oligarchic system sparked a political backlash called the Patriote movement, whose members, led by Louis-Joseph Papineau, espoused French-Canadian nationalism, as well as republicanism and the classical liberal philosophies which formed the backbone of the revolutions of the previous century. For years, members of this movement struggled for political reform, hoping to replace the appointed members of the Legislative Council with representatives elected by the people of Lower Canada.

Meanwhile, in Upper Canada, United Empire Loyalists who managed to accrue wealth through banking began to purchase land and assume the same political role as that of the aristocracy in Old England. Members of this elite community, known as the Family Compact, were appointed to both the Executive and Legislative Councils of Upper Canada, and had the power to veto bills proposed by elected members of the Legislative Assembly. As in Lower Canada, this oligarchy spurred a political reaction in the form of the Upper Canadian Reform Movement – a push for responsible government led by Scottish-Canadian immigrant and radical republican William Lyon Mackenzie.

In the autumn of 1837, due in large part to the economic repercussions of a banking crisis in the United States, the political strife in Lower Canada degenerated into violence. On November 23^rd, 1837, Patriote rebels who had congregated in a small village on the Richelieu River repulsed a company of British regulars who had been sent to quash their movement. This skirmish, called the Battle of Saint-Denis, touched off a two-year struggle called the Lower Canada Rebellion.

Buoyed by the Patriotes’ success at Saint-Denis, reformers in Upper Canada decided to launch their own Upper Canada Rebellion. In December 1837, two hundred rebels congregated in a stopping place on Yonge Street north of York, Upper Canada – present-day Toronto, Ontario. After two days of indecision, they were approached by a thousand-man government force composed of British regulars and Upper Canada militiamen. After a brief exchange of gunfire, the government troops shot a cannonball into the tavern, sending the rebels into a panicked retreat.

Government troops then marched from York to the tiny community of Scotland, Upper Canada, which lay between that colonial capital and the westerly village of London, to engage rebel forces in another bloodless skirmish. Most of the defeated reformists subsequently fled to the United States, from which they occasionally raided British possessions throughout the year in what is known as the Patriot War.

Despite being thoroughly suppressed, the Lower and Upper Canada Rebellions prompted the British Crown to make a formal inquiry into the political landscape of its North American colonies, the findings of which were published in a document called the Durham Report. Acting on the report’s recommendations, the Crown unified Lower and Upper Canada into a single Province of Canada – a British colony which attained responsible governance in 1849. The political momentum initiated by the rebellions would eventually lead to creation of the Dominion of Canada in 1867.

The strange story published in the Ottawa Citizen appears to be set in the midst of the Lower Canada Rebellion, when government troops were scrambling to suppress the Patriote insurgency in the Laurentian Valley.

“It is alleged,” the article began, “that a real ‘wild man’ existed in the vicinity of Kemptville about the year 1837.

“While loyalists of Kemptville were going through the bush in that year, they came upon a man who was entirely nude and who had a considerable growth of hair all over his body. He could not speak intelligibly, in fact he could hardly articulate. He was more like a beast than a man.

“The captors brought the poor creature before Magistrate Bottomley and a court was held in Beckett’s Hotel. It was soon evident to the court that the man was an absolute imbecile.

“While the judge was considering what to do with the prisoner, the people in the hotel brought him food. He ate ravenously.

“At that period, there were no such institutions for the care of the insane as there are at present. The court and the citizens did not know what disposition to make of him.

“The court decided that the only course was to allow him his liberty, arguing that if he had managed to exist in a wild state for so long, he would probably continue to do so.

“So he was given his liberty. When let go at the hotel door, the man ran like a deer and soon disappeared into the bush. The poor man was never seen or heard of again. The villagers were curious to know what happened to him, but they were never enlightened.”

The Wendigo of Front Lake

The next wildman story to appear in Canadian papers is the tale of a Cree man who appeared to be afflicted with the most dreaded disease of the North Country – possession by an evil man-eating spirit called the Wendigo. This man hailed from a bygone Hudson’s Bay Company post called Front Lake, which this author has tentatively identified as Big Trout Lake in Northern Ontario.

“Before the influence of the missionary had been felt by the Indians,” the article began, “there was a belief prevalent among the tribes that at different times an evil spirit or ‘wedigo’ took possession of a human being. When this person was completely under the spell of the evil spirit, he became invulnerable and would kill every member of the camp and no one could resist him. Therefore, when an Indian became ill and delirious with fever, or from old age showed signs of mild insanity, he was killed on the ground of self defence. ‘If we do not kill him soon enough, he will kill us later on,’ reasoned the rest of the camp.

“In the winter of 1925-26, word which had been carried by mouth to mouth from far distant Front Lake, via Island Lake to Norway House, and thence by letter to Winnipeg, was received by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police that there was a wedigo up north. Inspector Meade was despatched to Front Lake and brought the man in. Crazed by fear of Indian black magic and witchcraft, he was out of his mind, unable to walk and generally [desperate]. Under police protection,  however, he soon began to improve, and by the time he was brought to Norway House, he was able to walk and run.

“The two pictures which were sent in by the Rev. F.G. Stevens of the Fisher River Indian Mission, show the supposed wedigo soon after he had been brought down by Inspector Meade and the result of about eighteen months’ care by the proper authorities.

Bruce McKelvie’s Article

On June 3^rd, 1928, Vancouver BC’s Sunday Province ran with a full-page article written by Canadian historian Bruce Alistair McKelvie, an unsung pioneer of Canadian Sasquatch research whose work on the subject predates that of the celebrated J.W. Burns. It seems likely that this forgotten article prompted Burns to piece together his own famous collection of wildman stories, which would introduce the English-speaking world to the legend of the Sasquatch.

“Do the mountains of the interior of Vancouver Island,” McKelvie began, “offer shelter to a race of hairy giants? Some Indians declare that they do, and that the survivors of a once-powerful tribe, gifted with powers of mesmerism, hide from the pale-face and his civilization in the forests and caves of the central range of the Island and about Mt. St. Helens in Oregon.”

McKelvie revealed that an 80-year-old adventurer and folklorist named Jason Ovid Allard, the son of a French-Canadian fur trader and a Cowichan woman, had recently attempted to collect as many native stories on the subject as possible. Allard unearthed the story of Ape Canyon, Washington, where giant hairy ape-men are said to have besieged a prospectors’ cabin at the foot of Mt. Saint Helens in 1924. He also recovered the testimonies of Cowichan natives Jorg Totsgi and Henry Napoleon, including a passage from the latter’s narrative which seems to have been omitted from earlier publications. “They treated me with every courtesy while in their home,” Napoleon said of the Seeah-tiks, after having been taken to their underground cave. “‘During the winter,’ the Seeah-tik said, ‘we sleep like the bear, then when the spring comes we make our regular trip along the [mountain ranges] and come out by Tacobut [Mount Tacoma]. Then we go to the Squay-ch [Mt. St. Helens], and sometimes we go down the mountains and return around by the Olympics and back home again.’”

Another native whom Allard interviewed was Peter J. James, a member of the Lummi tribe from Puget Sound. James recalled his mother’s tales about the so-called ‘Indians of the night’ who used to come down from the mountains to raid the coastal tribes, stealing women and children. When warriors of the Duwamish tribe killed one of the giants in retaliation, his huge kinsmen attacked the native camp at night, tearing young braves asunder with their bare hands.

McKelvie briefly related the story of Mike King, whose encounter he anomalously set on a wilderness trail between Port Hardy, near the northern tip of Vancouver Island, and the island’s western coast. Recall that most other versions of Mike King’s story place the timber cruiser’s encounter in what is now Strathcona Provincial Park.

McKelvie’s article went on to describe how Jason Allard travelled throughout southern Vancouver Island, asking native elders and seasoned white woodsmen if they had ever heard stories about the area’s wild giants. Most of his interviewees, including an elderly Cowichan chief called Charlie Quitquarten, had never heard of the creature before. William Ernest Ditchburn, the Indian agency inspector for British Columbia’s southwest coast, proposed that the legends might derive from ancient raids which Cowichan Lake Indians made on the tribes of Vancouver Island’s West Coast. And Finnish-Canadian seal hunter Captain Victor Jacobson claimed to have heard tales of a strange tribe of Indians from Neah Bay, Washington, on the other side of the Strait of Juan de Fuca, who possessed hypnotic powers.

Legend of the Forbidden Plateau

“There is a story current about Comox,” McKelvie wrote, referring to a town on the eastern coast of Vancouver Island, “that the Puntledge tribe, once a powerful band, but now numbering so few that they have been merged with the Comox by the Indian department, were practically wiped out, only one or two families escaping, about seventy-five years ago, by the invasion in the night of a war party of strange, unknown natives who swarmed down from the mountain heights of what is now known as the Forbidden Plateau, a few miles from Courtenay. Today, Coast Indians can not be induced to venture into this scenic wonderland where, beneath towering peaks, luxuriant grasses and beautiful wild flowers grow beside cool lakes that swarm with trout.”

McKelvie appears to have drawn this story from a now-infamous article written by journalist Ben Hughes and published in the April 17^th, 1927 issue of the Vancouver BC’s Sunday Province. The article extolls the natural virtues of a certain tableland in the mountains of Vancouver Island, which Hughes dubbed the ‘Forbidden Plateau’ on account of a supposed native legend which he proceeded to relate.

“There has long been a tradition,” Hughes wrote, “that a race of Indians, ferocious and wild – of another nature altogether to the mild-mannered clam-eaters of the coast – inhabited the centre of the island, from whose fastnesses they made forays to the coast, although their existence is not authenticated by any historical evidence… Indians [cannot] be found who would guide strangers back into the interior of the Island, but whether their fear [arises] from a taboo placed on the region by the sorcerer of the tribe, or whether it was fear of the legendary foe, it is difficult to say.”

In the 1930s, newspapers revealed to the reading public that eerie red snow could sometimes be seen on the back of Mount Albert Edward, the mountain which towers over the plateau. This strange phenomenon, known as ‘watermelon snow,’ is an optical illusion produced by crimson algae over which the snow sometimes falls. According to an article in the June 28^th, 1930 issue of the Victoria Daily Times, the red snow contributed to the natives’ taboo of the Forbidden Plateau, which they believed was “haunted by spirits of the dead.”

Over time, the legend which Hughes introduced evolved to incorporate both the watermelon snow of Mount Albert Edward and the hairy monsters of Vancouver Island. Folklorist Shanon Sinn summarized a version of this multifaceted tale in his 2017 book The Haunting of Vancouver Island. “The K’omoks were about to be attacked by the Cowichan,” he wrote. “They sent all their women and children to hide on the plateau until the battle was over. When the fighting was finished, the warriors went to the Forbidden Plateau to retrieve their elders, wives, sons, and daughters. There was no sign of them anywhere.” In one version of the story, the warriors discovered that the place where the non-combatants had taken shelter was now covered with blood-red lichen – a sure sign, they believed, that their loved ones had been taken by the demons that haunted the mountains.

In a scrapbook she put together, which is housed in the Courtenay & District Museum, local historian Ruth Masters included a 1967 confession by mountain guide Clinton S. Wood, who claimed to have invented the legend of the Forbidden Plateau. Wood first discovered the plateau in 1925, while working as a waterworks engineer for the City of Courtenay.

“So entranced was I with the great beauty of the sub-Alpine country,” he wrote, “that I made up my mind that the general public should be made aware of its great potential as a drawing card for the district and as a great recreational district for all, especially if it could be made a bit more accessible. I was Secretary of the Board of Trade, and had the idea that a bit of mystery added to the obvious attractions would help publicize it. I wrote a small article to the Comox Argus and the idea was seized upon by Ben Hughes, the Editor, who wrote an article to the Vancouver Daily Province, using the word ‘Plateau’. To this was added the word ‘Forbidden’ by Cecil Scott, and thus originated the name – ‘Forbidden Plateau.’”

Wood would later capitalize on the legend he created, building the Forbidden Plateau Lodge from which he led skiing and mountaineering tours with his wife.

Introducing B.C.’s Hairy Giants

On April 1^st, 1929, Maclean’s Magazine published an article by Indian agent J.W. Burns entitled “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.” This piece, which introduced the word ‘Sasquatch’ to the public, marks the beginning of the age of Sasquatch research, and the end of our Secret Sasquatch Files.

 

Sources

Part 1

Article from the August 7^th, 1847 issue of the British Whig and General Advertiser for Canada West

Article in the September 27^th, 1870 issue of the Hamilton Spectator

Article in the June 27^th, 1871 issue of the Hamilton Spectator,

The Book of Daniel, Chapter 3, Verse 30, from the Douay-Rheims Bible

“Notes by the Way,” from the August 15^th, 1871 issue of the Montreal Star

Article in the November 3^rd, 1873 issue of the Hamilton Spectator

Part 2

“Startling Story: A Former Victorian Running Naked and Wild on the Mainland,” in the December 4^th, 1875 issue of the Ottawa Daily Citizen

Progress Report on the Canadian Pacific Railway Exploratory Survey (1872), by Sandford Fleming

Surveying the Canadian Pacific: Memoir of a Railroad Pioneer (1991), by R. M. Rylatt (Foreword by William Kittredge)

The Rocks and Rivers of British Columbia (1885), by Walter Moberly

The National Dream (1970), by Pierre Berton

Spuzzum: Fraser Canyon Histories, 1808-1939 (1998), by Andrea Laforet

“The Upper Stalo Indians of the Fraser Valley, British Columbia,” by Wilson Duff in Memoir No. 1 of Anthropology in British Columbia (1952)

Surveying the Canadian Pacific: Memoir of a Railroad Pioneer (1991), by R. M. Rylatt (Foreword by William Kittredge)

Part 3

“Wild Man,” in the August 4^th, 1876 issue of the British Whig

“That Wild Man,” in the August 7^th, 1876 issue of the Ottawa Daily Citizen

Article in the August 10^th, 1876 issue of the Clinton New Era

Missing 411: Canada (2019), by David Paulides

“Near Exhaustion Girl Staggers Out From Bush: Had Been Lost in Woods Near Poverty Bay Since Monday: Lived on Berries: Wore Thin Cotton Dress – United States Searcher Also Turns Up,” in the August 18^th, 1932 issue of the Toronto Daily Star.

“Girl Lost in Bush, Returns,” in the August 19^th, 1932 issue of the Vancouver Sun

“Mere Mention: Minor Local Matters In and Near Ottawa,” in the July 28^th, 1883 issue of the Ottawa Daily Citizen

“Dominion News: From Ottawa: Personal – P.P. Savings Bank – N.W. Police – A Wild Man – Labour Agitation,” in the July 30^th, 1883 issue of the Montreal Gazette

“Sewell,” in the September 24^th, 1885 issue of the Manitoba Weekly Free Press

Part 4

Article in the August 8^th, 1887 issue of the Brantford Daily Expositor

“Jottings About Town: Grist From the Mill of Perambulating Reporters,” in the October 3^rd, 1887 issue of the Kingston Daily News

“Chased by a Wild Man: The Weird Adventure of Two Manitoba College Students,” in the October 8^th, 1887 issue of the Manitoba Free Press

“Canadian,” in the November 30^th, 1887 issue of the Montreal Star

“Winnipeg Wirings: More Rumor About Railways – Hon. Mr. Royal Sworn – A Wild Man Captured,” in the July 6^th, 1888 issue of the Montreal Gazette

“What Is It?” in the August 24^th, 1888 issue of the Brantford Daily Expositor

“Wild Man of Wabigon: A Thrilling Experience: Which Lasted Forty Years – For the Benefit of Science: One of the Most Remarkable Tales of Modern Times,” in the April 26^th, 1890 issue of the Winnipeg Tribune

“Investigating the Freak: A Visit to the Wild Man of Clinton Township: He Is Stark Naked But Not Stark Mad, Not by Several of a Majority – He Hops About Like a Frog and Lives in Disgraceful Squalor,” in the May 19^th, 1890 issue of the Hamilton Spectator

“Visit to a Wild Man: He Hops About Like a Frog and Lives in Disgusting Squalor,” in the May 28^th, 1890 issue of the Winnipeg Tribune

“Rossburn,” in the June 5^th, 1890 issue of the Manitoba Weekly Free Press

“A Libel on God’s Image: For Thirty-Six Years Naked and Not Ashamed,” in the June 18^th, 1890 issue of the Ottawa Daily Citizen

“The Strange Story of Walter Simmerman ‘The Wild Man of Clinton – He Lopes Like a Kangaroo and Will Not Stand Up Straight – It Would be Incredible If it Were Not True,” in the June 18^th, 1890 issue of the Ottawa Daily Citizen

“Beaulah Bits,” in the August 28^th, 1890 issue of the Manitoba Free Press

“Wild Man of the Woods,” in the January 22^nd, 1891 issue of the Witness and South Simcoe General Advertiser

“A Wild Man,” in the February 7^th, 1893 issue of the Windsor Star

Article in the March 27^th, 1893 issue of the Manitoba Semi-Weekly Free Press

“About the County,” in the July 13^th, 1893 issue of the Owen Sound Times

“The Wild Man of the Woods Captured,” in the November 7^th, 1893 issue of the Hamilton Spectator

“A Wild Man at Aylmer: He Stands Stark Naked in a Field as the Trains Go By: No One Knows Who He Is and He Has Declined to Give an Account of Himself – The People Will Capture Him,” in the October 11^th, 1894 issue of the Ottawa Journal

“Wild Man or Convict? A Stranger Hiding in the Woods Near Cornwall,” in the September 10^th, 1895 issue of the Montreal Gazette

Article in the September 27^th, 1895 issue of the Clinton New Era

Article in the October 12^th, 1895 issue of the Montreal Star

“Wild Man Near Wiarton: An Albemarle Farmer Beaten Into Unconsciousness and An Attempt Made to Burn Him,” in the October 18^th, 1895 issue of the Waterloo Region Record

“A Wild Man at Large,” in the November 18^th, 1895 issue of the Kingston Whig-Standard

“Captured a Wild Man: He Is An Escaped Criminal Convict from Utica, N.B.” in the June 11^th, 1896 issue of the Weekly British Whig

“Wild Man at Large: Said to be Roaming Through McKay’s Bush: A Lady Badly Frightened. Her Story at the Police Station Yesterday, Constables Detailed to Capture the Uncanny Creature,” in the July 8^th, 1896 issue of the Ottawa Daily Citizen

“Met a Wild Man,” in the August 2^nd, 1898 issue of the Kingston Whig-Standard

“He is A Vegetarian: Why the ‘Hermit of Lievre’ Did Not Eat Meat,” in the December 16^th, 1898 issue of the Ottawa Journal

Article in the September 2^nd, 1899 issue of the Windsor Evening Record

“The Hermit of Cumberland: Wild Man of the Woods Who Lives in Lonely Spot on the Trent,” in the November 22^nd, 1901 issue of the Vancouver Daily Province

“Apparition: A ‘Wild Man’ Story from the Wilds of Surrey,” in the January 19^th, 1903 issue of the Vancouver Daily World

“Appearance of an Alleged Wild Man Inspires Fear in the Hearts of Children: Eccentric Individual Wearing a Mask Has Been Seen Several Times,” in the July 8^th, 1903 issue of the Winnipeg Tribune

“Apparition: A ‘Wild Man’ Story from the Wilds of Surrey,” in the January 19^th, 1903 issue of the Vancouver Daily World

“Mallorytown Murmurs,” in the July 9^th, 1903 issue of the Weekly British Whig

Article in the August 21^st, 1903 issue of the Star-Phoenix

“Ran About Naked,” in the June 18^th, 1904 issue of the Calgary Herald

Part 5

“Wild Man of Vancouver: Strange Being Lately Seen by a Lumberman,” in the August 4^th, 1904 issue of the Kingston Whig-Standard

Abominable Snowmen: Legend Come to Life (1961), by Ivan T. Sanderson]

The Historical Bigfoot (2006), by Chad Arment

The Sasquatch File (1973), by John Green

On the Track of Sasquatch (1973), by John Green

Sasquatch: The Apes Among Us (1978), by John Green

“Weird Being in Woods of B.C,.: Afrighted Hairy Thing Runs on Prospector’s Approach: It Believed to Be the Result of a Union Between a Baboon and a Squaw,” in the July 6^th, 1904 issue of the Daily Herald (Everett, Washington, USA)

“The Wild Man: How Mike King Met Savage Denizen of the Bush Years Ago: Referring to the Recent Encounter With a Wild Man at Horne Lake, the Colonist Says,” in the December 15^th, 1904 issue of the Nanaimo Daily News

“Mike King on Deck Again in Mexican Timber Deal,” in the September 14^th, 1904 issue of the Bellingham Herald

“Weird Being in Woods: Wild, Hairy and Affrighted, He Fled on Approach of Prospector: Peculiar Experience of Mike King in the Big Forests of British Columbia,” in the July 8^th, 1904 issue of the Evening Statesman (Walla Walla, Washington)

“Wild Man of the Forest: Hairy Creature Seen by Lone Traveler in British Columbia,” in the July 7^th, 1904 issue of the Morning Astorian (Astoria, Washington)

“Mike King is It,” in the May 31^st, 1904 issue of the Daily Evening Star (Whitehorse, Yukon)

“The Wild Man: He Has Been Seen by Many in the Northern Woods: Flees at the Approach of Man – Indians of Vicinity Fear Him – Will Not Enter Districts That He Habitates – Other News,” in the December 21^st, 1904 issue of Carvallis Times (Corvallis, Oregon)

“Wild Man a Wanderer on Vancouver Isle: Timber Cruiser Surprises a Man Beast While Preparing an Evening Meal: Creature Covered with Reddish Brown Hair and Emits Weird Cries,” in the December 26^th, 1904 issue of the World-Herald (Omaha, Nebraska)

Vancouver Island Exploration, 1864 (1865), by Robert Brown

Part 6

“A Mowgli in the Woods of the Island: Wild Man Discovered by a Hunting Party Near Horne Lake – Covered With Matted Hair – Was He Raised by Wild Animals?” in the December 13^th, 1904 issue of The Province (Vancouver, BC)

“Wild Man of the Woods,” in the December 13^th, 1904 issue of the Nanaimo Daily News

“Is Horne Lake Home of Another Mowgli? Four Qualicum Settlers Declare They Saw a Wild Man in That Vicinity While Hunting,” in the December 14^th, 1904 issue of the Victoria Daily Times

“Says Wild Man is No Dream: King Saw the Mowgli: Well Known Backwoodsman and Timber-Cruiser Confirms the Existence of a Strange Being in Vicinity of Campbell River – Return of Search Party Expected,” in the December 21^st, 1904 issue of The Province (Vancouver, BC)

Article in the December 22^nd, 1904 issue of the Vernon News

“Wild Man of the Woods: Believed to be a Lad Who Disappeared Nine Years Ago and Has Been Cared for by Wild Beasts,” in the December 24^th, 1904 issue of the Calgary Herald

“The Wild Man of Vancouver: Mysterious Denizen of the Woods: Prototype of Kipling’s Mowgli Seen by Reputable Witnesses. Various Theories to Account for His Presence in the Forests,” in the December 30^th, 1904 issue of the Ottawa Journal

“Wild Man Again: This Time He Has Been Seen Near Union,” in the May 1^st, 1905 issue of the Nanaimo Daily News

“Wild Man is Shot: Story of Tragic End of Vancouver Island Mawgli,” in the May 1^st, 1905 issue of the Vancouver Daily Province

“Wild Man is Shot on the Island: Indians Mistake Him for a Bear on Beach at Union,” in the May 1^st, 1905 issue of the Vancouver Daily World

“Shot and Wounded Wild Man in B.C.” in the May 2^nd, 1905 issue of the Toronto Star

“Wild Man of the West: Indians Wound a Strange Creature Covered With Hair,” in the May 2^nd, 1905 issue of the Montreal Star

“After Wild Man,” in the May 5^th, 1905 issue of the Vancouver Daily World

“The Chinese Indian Tribe of Muchalat: Written for The Times by C. McK. S.),” in the June 3^rd, 1905 issue of the Victoria Daily Times

Biographical Dictionary of Well-Known British Columbians (1890), by J.B. Kerr

“Saw Wild Man Again: Cyclist Surprises Strange Inhabitant of Forest,” in the June 21^st, 1905 issue of the Vancouver Daily World

“A Startling Story from Vancouver Island: Settler Wants to Shoot on Sight: He is Advised That it is not Lawful to Shoot ‘a Mowglie,” in the June 26^th, 1905 issue of the Ottawa Journal

“Sees Wild Man,” in the June 28^th, 1905 issue of the Chilliwack Progress

“Pioneer Explains Wild Man Mystery: How An American Became an Outcast: W. Hallgran Claims to Have Met Strange Character Years Ago – His Story,” in the June 30^th, 1905 issue of the Victoria Daily Times

“Crop of Wild Men Increases: Two of them Now at Large on Vancouver Island: Nanaimo Man Says He Interviewed Mr. Mowgli at Little Qualicum, While an Indian Brings in Story That He Shot Him at Campbell River,” in the August 4^th, 1905 issue of the Vancouver Daily World

“‘Wild’ Man Discovered: Turned Out to Be a Harmless Old Beachcomber,” in the August 4^th, 1905 issue of the Vancouver Daily Province

“Midsummer Night Dream: Poor Old Wanderer Magnified Into Mythical ‘Wild Man’,” in the August 4^th, 1905 issue of the Nanaimo Daily News

“The Wild Man: Story That He Had Again Been Sighted Proved a False One,” in the August 4^th, 1905 issue of the Victoria Daily Times

“The Mowgli Story,” in the August 5^th, 1905 issue of the Daily News Advertiser

“Wild Man Seen and Talked With: Simply an Old Prospector Who Is Sane as Anybody Else,” in the August 5^th, 1905 issue of the Nanaimo Daily News

“The Mowgli Explained,” in the August 5^th, 1905 issue of the Vancouver Daily World

Part 7

“‘Wild Man’ Will Be Examined: Erratic Individual Arrested at MacGregor Committed by Portage Magistrate,” in the August 3^rd, 1905 issue of the Manitoba Morning Free Press

“‘Wild Man’ Will Be Examined’,” in the August 9^th, 1905 issue of the Free Press Prairie Farmer (Winnipeg, Manitoba)

Article in the August 9^th, 1905 issue of the Leader-Post (Regina, Saskatchewan)

“Wild Man Story,” in the September 1^st, 1905 issue of the Brantford Daily Expositor

“Wild Man in Woods Caught in Copetown: Mystery Which Alarmed Residents Has Been Cleared Up – Most Peculiar Ring is Unearthed,” in the September 6^th, 1905 issue of the Brantford Daily Expositor

“Vancouver Island Wild Man on Valdez Island,” in the November 29^th, 1905 issue of the Nanaimo Daily News

The Year Book of British Columbia: Manual of Provincial Information (1903), by R.E. Gosnell

“Indian Report,” by W.H. Lomas, in the February 28^th, 1885 issue of the Nanaimo Free Press

“Island Wild Man Heard From Again: Scares Two Valdez Youths Out of a Twelvemonth’s Growth,” in the December 1^st, 1905 issue of the Vancouver Daily World

“Plans Expedition to Catch Mowgli: Mike King’s Idea: Well Known Prospector Who Declares He Saw Strange Being in Vancouver Island Forest Has New Theory of Its Existence – An Exciting Adventure,” in the December 30^th, 1905 issue of the Vancouver Daily Province

The Terror of the Coast: Land Alienation and Colonial War on Vancouver Island and the Gulf Islands, 1849-1863 (1999), by Chris Arnet

Article in the January 2^nd, 1906 issue of the Vancouver Daily World

Part 8

“The Wild Man of Aylmer: Ontario Town Harbours a Notable Visitor,” in the February 1^st, 1906 issue of the Ottawa Journal

“Valencia Arrives in Port: Captain’s Statement of His Being Fired On by the Spanish Cruiser Reina Mercedes: It Was Off Cuba’s Coast: When the Flag Was Hoisted the Warship Ceased Firing and Sheered Off – Colors Had Been Previously Shown to the Fort,” in the June 13^th, 1897 issue of the New York Times

British Columbia Shipwrecks (1983), by T. W. Paterson

The Haunting of Vancouver Island: Supernatural Encounters with the Other Side (2017), by Shanon Sinn

“Valencia, SS, the Wreck of (1906),” by Daryl C. McClary, in Essay 7382 of HistoryLink.org (July 29^th, 2005)

“Did Insane Man Survive Valencia? Siwashes Tell Tale of Wild Man at Scene of Wreck,” in the May 4^th, 1906 issue of the Vancouver Daily World

“News of the Province: live and Dead Victims of the Valencia Disaster – Victoria Customs Returns – Lawlessness at the Boundary – Suicide at Fernie: Vitoria [sic],” in the May 4^th, 1906 issue of the Daily News Advertiser

“Indian Story of Insane Survivor of Valencia,” in the May 4^th, 1906 issue of the Province

“Another Wild Man in Victoria: This Time Supposed to be a Survivor of San Francisco Wreck,” in the May 7^th, 1906 issue of the Calgary Albertan

“Another Wild Man in Victoria: This Time Supposed to be Survivor of San Francisco Wreck,” in the May 10^th, 1906 issue of the Weekly Albertan

Part 9

“Island Mowgli is Again Seen: He was Clothed Like a Salmon Berry Eating Bear: Hunters Trace Wild Man to His Lair: Wanderer of the Woods is no Figment of Imagination,” in the July 30^th, 1906 issue of the Vancouver Daily World

“Island Mowgli is Seen Again,” in the August 1^st, 1906 issue of the Nanaimo Free Press

“An East End Sensation,” in the August 9^th, 1906 issue of the Edmonton Journal

“The Old Prospector: Another Wild Man,” in the August 11^th, 1906 issue of the Vancouver Daily World

“He Lives Alone: Wild Man on Paisley Island Has No Companions,” in the August 21^st, 1906 issue of the Hamilton Spectator

“Paisley Island Wild Man Found,” in the September 5^th, 1906 issue of the Province

“Wild Man on Hornby Island,” in the September 14^th, 1906 issue of the Nanaimo Free Press

“Children Live Like Animals: Two Daughters of Wild Man on Vancouver Island Never Washed: Hair Has Never Been Combed: Flee at the Sight of Strangers – Sleep and Eat on Filthy Floor,” in the September 24^th, 1906 issue of the Toronto Star

Nameless article in the October 12^th, 1906 issue of the Nanaimo Free Press

“Mysterious Race Semi-Human Beings: Wild Men of the North Who Have Gone Mad,” in the October 5^th, 1906 issue of the Evening Journal (Edmonton, Alberta)

“An Arctic Mystery: Wild Men of the North Believed to be Indians Who Have Gone Made and Turned Cannibals,” in the October 9^th, 1906 issue of the Windsor Star, and the November 1^st, 1906 issue of the Outcrop (Wilmer, British Columbia) and the November 27^th, 1906 issue of the Red Deer News

Mysteries of Canada: Volume I (2018), by Hammerson Peters

Part 10

Nameless article in the October 12^th, 1904 issue of the Nanaimo Free Press

Nameless article in the November 22^nd, 1906 issue of the Victoria Daily Times

“One More Wild Man is Added to List: Fishermen Say They Saw Him, Gaunt, Hungry, and Hairy,” in the November 24^th, 1906 issue of the Vancouver Daily World

“May Mean Solution of Old Mystery: Strange Story from Kamloops of Wild Man Who Threatened Indians, and Woman Thought to Be Murdered,” in the January 14^th, 1907 issue of the Province

“Strange Tale from Cariboo: Indian Girl Lost for Seventeen Years Found in Company with Wild Man in Vicinity of Fish Lake, Back of Kamloops – Accidental Encounter by Cowboy,” in the January 31^st, 1907 issue of the Daily News-Advertiser (Vancouver, BC)

“Wild White Man and Terrified Squaw: Their Appearance Together at Kamloops Recalls a Murder of Seven Years Ago,” in the February 5^th, 1907 issue of the Leader-Post

“Arrested a Wild Man: Unkempt Vagrant Roaming at Large and Creating Alarm,” in the February 25^th, 1907 issue of the Windsor Star

“Played ‘Wild Man’: Greek Scares Farmers: Ontario People Find a Man Who Has Lived in the Bush All Through Winter,” in the February 26^th, 1907 issue of the Daily Herald (Calgary, Alberta)

“‘Wild Man’ in Court: Vagrant Who Was ‘Captured’ a Week Ago Was Remanded,” in the March 4^th, 1907 issue of the Windsor Star

“Wild Man Story from Upcoast: Superstitious Natives Declare that Hairy Person They Have Seen Digs Clams,” in the March 8^th, 1907 issue of the Province (Vancouver, British Columbia)

“A ‘Wild Man’: Coast Indians Tell of Howls of an Untamed Claim [sic] Digger,” in the March 11^th, 1907 issue of the Calgary Herald

“Strange Being Lately Seen by a British Columbian Lumberman,” in the May 31^st, 1907 issue of the Representative (Leduc, Alberta)

Nameless article in the November 26^th, 1907 issue of the Victoria Daily Times

“Naked Wild Man,” in the December 4^th, 1907 issue of the Free Press Prairie Farmer (Winnipeg, Manitoba)

“Timber Cruiser Find Body of ‘Wild Man’ of Island Near Alberni: Timber Cruiser at Sproat Lake Comes Across Dead Body of ‘Mowgli’ of Island – Thought Women Were Pursuing Him for Imaginary Fortune and Disappeared Seven Years Ago: Mystery of Wild Man is Cleared,” in the December 4^th, 1907 issue of the World (Vancouver, British Columbia)

“Wild Story Exploded,” in the December 6^th, 1907 issue of the Star-Phoenix (Saskatoon, Saskatchewan)

“Deep Mystery Which Concerns Findings of John Feurst’s Body: Identity of the ‘Wild Man of Vancouver Island’ is Now More Baffling Than Ever Before,” in the December 11^th, 1907 issue of the Montreal Star

“Wolverine Caught on Vancouver Island: Rare Animal is Trapped at Horne Lake – Story of Wild Man Revived,” in the December 26^th, 1908 issue of the Province (Vancouver, BC)

“Wild Man Seen at Pemberton Meadows,” in the July 7^th, 1909 issue of the Vancouver Daily World

“Wild Man of the Woods: A British Columbian District Terrorized by Demented Creature,” in the July 14^th, 1909 issue of the Montreal Star

“Wild Man Terrifies Indians,” in the July 14^th, 1909 issue of the Manitoba Morning Free Press

“Wild Man Scares Indians: Pemberton Meadows District Terrorized by ‘Mowgli’,” in the July 14^th, 1909 issue of the Leader-Post (Regina, Saskatchewan)

“Wild Man Seen in Ashcroft District,” in the July 15^th, 1909 issue of the Nanaimo Daily News

“News of the Province: Wild Man Terrorizes Settlers in Pemberton Meadows: Ashcroft: Wild Man Seen Again,” in the July 15^th, 1909 issue of the Daily News-Advertiser (Vancouver, BC)

“Wild Couple at Large on Mainland: Man and Woman Haunt Indian Camp at Pemberton Meadows and Attempt to Kidnap Children: Police on Trail of the Oulaws,” in the July 16^th, 1909 issue of the Evening Post (Victoria, BC)

“Wild Man Story Received with Suspicion: Pemberton Meadows Chief Ordered to Vancouver for Examination – ‘Massache Iktas’ May be Tracked,” in the July 29^th, 1909 issue of the Evening Post (Vancouver, BC)

“Find Hairy Wild Man: Led Robinson Crusoe Existence for 22 Years: Eats Only Raw Meat, Has Forgotten His Speech – Wife Will Keep Him in Cage and Teach Him How to Talk and Wear Clothes,” in the February 28^th, 1920 issue of the Weekly British Whig (Kingston, Ontario)

Part 11

“Cave Man or Tree Top Dweller? British Columbia Wild Man Huge in Stature and Runs Like A Deer When Sighted: Residents of Upper Country Declare Wild Man is White and Clad in Few Tatters of Rags – Homesteaders Are Carrying Their Guns Loaded for ‘Bar’,” in the May 27^th, 1922 issue of the Edmonton Journal

“Another ‘Wild Man’ Is At Large in Northern B.C.,” in the May 28^th, 1922 issue of the Vancouver Sun

“Story of Cave Man in British Columbia,” in the June 21^st, 1922 issue of the Waterloo Region Record

“Wild Men of the West Coast,” in the August 2^nd, 1924 issue of the Moncton Transcript

“‘Mountain Devils’ Lost Indian Tribe: Indian Leader States Opinion About Gorilla-Like Men in Washington State: Seeahtiks Formerly Made Home on Vancouver Island; Missing For Years,” in the July 16^th, 1924 issue of the Victoria Daily Times

“Ape Men Stoned Trappers is Claim: Cabin at Spirit Lake Bombarded During Night; Apes 8 Feet Tall!” in the July 25^th, 1924 issue of the Sault Star (Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario)

“Big Hairy Indians Back of Ape Tale: Mountain Devils’ Mystery Grows Deeper: Giants Said to Roam Hills: Shaggy Creatures Kill Game by Hypnotism, It Is Said: Ventriloquism Is Used: Redmen’s Editor at Hoquiam Gives Theory of Reported Attack at Spirit Lake,” in the July 16^th, 1924 issue of the Oregonian (Portland, Oregon)

“Band of Ape-Like Men: Expedition Leaves to Investigate Tales of Queer Indians,” in the July 25^th, 1924 issue of the Daily Standard (Kingston, Ontario)

“Mysterious Ape-Men Seen at Spirit Lake: Not Satisfied With White Indians, American Scientists Discover Human Gorillas,” in the July 25^th, 1924 issue of the Toronto Star

“Story of Apemen Being Investigated: May be Members of Tribe of Indians Seldom Seen Openly,” in the July 25^th, 1924 issue of the Expositor (Brandford, Ontario)

“Ape Men in West Attack Two Trappers: Indian Race 7 to 8 Feet Tall,” in the July 25^th, 1924 issue of the North Bay Nugget

“Reports of Ape Men in West,” in the July 26^th, 1924 issue of the Standard (St. Catharines, Ontario)

“Vancouver Island Home of Ape-Men: Tribe of Indians Huge in Stature and Hairy Like Beasts,” in the July 28^th, 1924 issue of the Daily Gleaner (Frederickton, New Brunswick)

“Ape-Men Seen Among Rockies: Parties Go to Investigate Tales Trappers Bring From Indians,” in the July 28^th, 1924 issue of the Edmonton Bulletin

“Band of Ape-Like Giants Found on Vancouver Island: Expedition Away to Verify the Story Told by Trappers,” in the July 28^th, 1924 issue of the Telegraph-Journal (Saint John, New Brunswick)

“Seeking Ape-Men Reported Recently in Washington: Huge Beasts, 8 Feet Tall, Bombard Cabins on Mountain,” in the July 28^th, 1924 issue of the Moncton Transcript

“Wild Men of the West Coast,” in the July 31^st, 1924 issue of the Sault Star (Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario)

Part 12

“Wild Man Caught at Kemptville; Was Nine Day Wonder in Year ’37: Captured in Woods, Taken Before Magistrate, Found to be an Imbecile and Allowed to Return to His Wild State, Naked and Body Covered with Hair. Disappeared and Never Heard of Again,” in the March 26^th, 1927 issue of the Ottawa Citizen

“Indian Wild Man is Transformed: Mounted Police Gather in ‘Wedigo’ Much to Relief of Northern Indians: Crazy Man Responds to Treatment and Soon Becomes Normal,” in the October 12^th, 1927 issue of the Free Press Prairie Farmer (Winnipeg, Manitoba)

“And the Party Returned Without Finding Race of Hairy Giants on Vancouver Island,” in the June 3^rd, 1928 issue of the Sunday Province (Vancouver, British Columbia)

https://amcguinness.opened.ca/jason-ovid-allard/

“The Forbidden Plateau – Beauty Spot on Vancouver Island,” by Ben Hughes, in the April 17^th, 1927 issue of the Sunday Province (Vancouver, BC)

“Courtney has Many Attractions,” in the June 28^th, 1930 issue of the Victoria Daily Times

The Haunting of Vancouver Island: Supernatural Encounters with the Other Side (2017), by Shanon Sinn

“Story of the Forbidden Plateau,” by Alan Pattinson in the November 14^th, 2010 issue of StrathconaPark.org