In recent years, Western Canada has seen the resurgence of a small but impassioned political movement proposing that the western half of Canada ought to separate from its eastern counterpart. This philosophy stems from the notion that the western provinces take an unfair backseat to the provinces of Ontario and Quebec in federal politics, and is underpinned by the century-old sentiment that Western and Eastern Canada are essentially distinct and separate nations.
Politics and culture aside, anyone who has made the long drive between Western and Eastern Canada can attest to the fact that the historic metropolises of Southern Ontario and the Laurentian Valley, and the mixed forests and lush farmland which surround them, are at least geographically separated from the Manitoba prairies that mark the eastern edge of Western Canada by a sprawling, sparsely-populated tract of wilderness, bridged only by two narrow ribbons of railway and quiet two-lane asphalt. This rugged stretch of Canadian Shield is a natural borderland, having served, in centuries past, as the ill-defined no-man’s-land separating Rupert’s Land, the territory of the northerly British Hudson’s Bay Company, from the Pays d’en Haut, or Upper Country, of French Canada. In a manner reminiscent of medieval cartography, in which monsters populate the blank spaces of the map, legend has it that this remote frontier is haunted by a variety of strange and mysterious denizens.
The local Ojibwa, Cree, and Oji-Cree First Nations, whose ancestors have called the region home since time immemorial, have long maintained that their northern woods are the domain of a sinister entity called the Wendigo, Windigo, or Witiko, variously described as a gaunt preternatural giant with a craving for human flesh, or the spirit of that boreal demon, which imbues in the psyches of the vulnerable its own cannibalistic proclivities. Native legend contends that the lakes and rivers that crisscross the Canadian Shield, and particularly the rocky cliffs that fringe them, are home to little aquatic goblins sometimes described as hairy dwarfs, and at other times characterized as long-haired sirens. The skies above this wild country are supposed to be frequented by a giant eagle with the ability to create thunder and lighting, while Lake Superior to the south is said to be patrolled by a colossal underwater lynx with preternatural power.
Of all the legendary monsters said to haunt this vast and lonely wilderness, among the most obscure are the wild giants, supposed to be members of some large and ancient human tribe. In his 1995 book Sacred Legends, Canadian folklorist James R. Stevens included several traditional Oji-Cree giant stories told to him by elders of the Sandy Lake First Nation in northwestern Ontario. One of these tales is set on the shores of Deer Lake, a remote body of water about 60 kilometres (37 miles) southwest of the Sandy Lake Reserve.
“For many years,” the story begins, “the Indians on Deer Lake were plagued by a race of strange giant men. These monsters would come in the winter and would destroy their villages, killing and raping the Indians at will. Some of the braves would fight them when they came, but arrows had no effect on the giants. They could not be killed.”
After an especially devastating raid, the men of Deer Lake held a powwow in their medicine lodge, determined to resolve their untenable situation. One young warrior suggested that the band quit the country and flee to the west. His proposal was countered by a veteran brave, who spurned the idea of abandoning the homeland of his ancestors, and argued that the region to the west was occupied by hostile tribes who would give them as much trouble as the giants did.
After some time, the oldest man in the tribe, an elder named Musque respected for his wisdom, who had hitherto sat in silence, smoking his pipe, declared that he had learned the secret of the giants’ invulnerability in a dream the previous night. In his dream, he saw the village of the giants, which lay on a riverbank a seven day’s journey from their own camp. Within the village was a nest where the giants kept their own beating hearts, safe from the knives and arrows of their Indian enemies. “Destroy the hearts,” Musque said, “and we will be rid of the giants forever.”
Although most of the warriors dismissed Musque’s vision as a wishful nocturnal reverie, one fat boy stood up and declared that he would take it upon himself to find the village of which the elder had dreamed. Although his peers laughed him out of the medicine lodge, deriding him for his weak constitution and lack of skill as a hunter, the fat boy resolutely retrieved his bow and arrows and headed into the wilderness on snowshoe, following Musque’s directions.
One evening, after seven days of constant travelling, the fat boy espied a cluster of tall lodges standing atop a hill overlooking the river. At the edge of this camp was an elevated platform on which reposed a quantity of huge beating hearts, red, glistening, and steaming in the cold. The boy withdrew his bow and sent arrow after arrow into the living organs.
“When the arrows pierced the hearts,” Stevens wrote, “great moans and cries of agony came from around the camp. Everywhere giants were dropping dead in their footsteps. Then a giant came running across the ground to the nest. He had understood why his brothers and sisters were dying. When he got to the top of the scaffold, an arrow from the fat boy found his heart and he crumpled to the ground. The fat warrior shot arrows into all the hearts, killing the whole tribe of giants. Then he descended from the platform and extinguished the campfires of the giants forever.”
There are two more giant stories in Stevens’ book, each featuring a legendary hero and trickster figure called Ja-ka-Baysh, or Poke-in-the-Eye. These stories indicate that the giants were more numerous in the ancient past, and that they enjoyed eating the natives whom they killed in battle.
Giant legends also appear in American anthropologist Robert A. Brightman’s 1989 book on the oral traditions of the Rock Cree of Granville Lake, Manitoba. Stories featuring a legendary hero named Cahkapis, whom Brightman identifies as a Swampy Cree variant of the Ojibwa Ja-ka-Baysh, describe a race of huge wildmen called mistapewak. The mistapewak are portrayed as enormous men of immense strength who travel alone or in pairs, abducting native women and hunting native men.
In addition to the aforementioned Wendigo and cliff-dwelling mer-dwarfs, there are at least two more humanoid monsters whom native legend says once abode in the wilderness of the Canadian Shield. In their 1962 book Ojibwa Myths and Legends, Sister Bernard Colleman, Ellen Frogner, and Estelle Eich describe a legendary figure they call the “Wild Man of the Woods.”
“There is a man in buckskin who goes about the lakes and woods,” they wrote. “People see him and then he is gone… Sometimes people hear a whistle, or they hear their names called. But the minute they turn around, the man of the wild woods is gone… Or a rack of tools might fall over, but no one is there. A few people say that they have seen him and that sometimes he has smiled, but only for a second, and then he is gone.
“Some say he is a spirit who is trying to get himself back into human form.”
A fourth class of legendary humanlike monster said to have once prowled the forests north of the Great Lakes is a race of primitive human referred to collectively as the Hairy Hearts, or the Hairy Breasts. These wild and robust people are said to have once waged perpetual war against their Cree and Ojibwa neighbours, killing men and kidnapping women. They did not make use of the bow and arrow, but rather hunted their game and attacked their enemies by running them down, tackling them, and tearing them open with stone knives. Most versions of this ancient legend contend that native warriors wiped out these Stone Age predators long ago.
Just as legendary wildmen do not appear to be especially important elements of Cree and Ojibwa oral tradition, modern sightings of hairy wildmen in the forests of Northern Ontario are relatively scant. There is, however, one intriguing case which appears in classic Bigfoot literature indicating that the old Cree and Ojibwa legends of wild giants, preternatural wildmen, and primitive humans might be more than fireside fairytales. This case consists of four eerily consistent sightings set in the same unassuming corner of civilization, the oldest of the four separated from the latest by a span of 64 years.
In the heart of the desolate expanse of boreal forest and Precambrian rock which separates Eastern and Western Canada lies the tiny town of Cobalt, Ontario – the living relic of an early 20th Century silver rush for which it served as the hub. Back in 1903, following two silver strikes made by contractors engaged in the construction of the Temiskaming and Northern Ontario Railway, Canadian and American prospectors began to trickle into the area, establishing the boomtown of Cobalt at the site of one of the original discoveries. By the outbreak of the Great War, when the stampede began to abate, the surrounding silverfields had yielded over 32 million ounces of raw argentic treasure.
In September 1906, at the height of the Cobalt Silver Rush, a group of men tasked with building the headframe, or winding tower, of the Violet Mine just east of the Cobalt camp are said to have spotted a huge hairy man watching them from partial concealment in the trees. Word of this disturbing event spread quickly throughout the silverfields and embedded itself in local memory.
We owe our knowledge of this regrettably vague report to a handful of articles published years later in the North Bay Nugget, North Bay, Ontario, being the nearest city to Cobalt, located 145 kilometres (90 miles) to the south. The articles came into the possession of Canadian Sasquatch researcher Rene Dahinden, who sent them to his friend and counterpart, John Green, who, in turn, published them in his 1971 book On the Track of Sasquatch.
Seventeen years after the sighting at the Violet Mine, the wildman of Cobalt made a second appearance, this time near the Wettlaufer Mine, the latter lying about 25 kilometres (16 miles) southeast of Cobalt. According to an article in the July 27th, 1923 issue of the North Bay Nugget, in which the story of the 1906 sighting was published for the first time and in the greatest detail, miners J.A. MacAuley and Lorne Wilson were working their claims northeast of the Wettlaufer Mine, presumably near the southwestern shores of Lake Temiskaming, when they noticed what they first took to be a black bear sitting in a blueberry patch, picking fruit from the bush. Wilson threw a rock at the hairy creature, prompting it to stand up on two legs and growl at him. The figure then darted into the forest and out of sight, running on two legs like a human.
“It sure was like no bear that I have ever seen,” Wilson told reporters. “Its head was kind of yellow and the rest of it was black like a bear, all covered with hair.”
The newspaper described the creature as apelike and reported that locals had nicknamed it “Yellow Top” on account of its light-coloured mane.
It is worth noting that this article predates the famous and sensational reports of the Sasquatch of the Pacific Northwest, which began with J.W. Burns’ famous article for the April 1929 issue of Maclean’s magazine, precluding any influence of the latter.
The yellow-headed wildman of the Canadian Shield made its third appearance in the Cobalt area in 1946, twenty-three years after the 1923 sighting. This time, the witnesses were a mother and son who lived at Gillies Depot, a settlement which had sprang up around a railway station and section house of the Temiskaming & Northern Ontario Railway about 7 kilometres (4 miles) southwest of Cobalt. About a half mile east of Gillies Depot, the railroad runs along the shores of a small body of water called Gillies Lake, not to be confused with the pond of the same name which lies at the northeastern end of Timmins, Ontario, about 164 kilometres (100 miles) to the northwest. It was at the southern edge of Gillies Lake that the sighting took place.
“Old Yellow Top,” declared a piece in the April 16th, 1946 issue of the North Bay Nugget, “the half man, half beast that is supposed to be roaming the wilds around the Cobalt Mining Camp was reportedly seen again, this time by a woman and her son, who live near Gillies Depot, while they were walking the tracks into Cobalt.
“The woman, who did not want her name made public, said that she spotted a dark, hairy animal with a ‘light’ head ambling off the tracks into the bush near Gillies Lake. She said she did not get a clear look at the thing but said it walked almost like a man…”
The article concluded with a declaration that “a search party may be formed to try and find ‘Old Yellow Top.’” To the best of this author’s knowledge, the hopeful monster hunt never got under way.
With the possible exception of a vague roadside sighting alluded to in the North Bay Nugget, the fourth and most dramatic encounter with Old Yellow Top took place one evening in the summer of 1970, on the gravel road to the Cobalt Lode Mine about 5 kilometres (3 miles) southwest of town. That night, driver Aimee Latreille was conveying a busload of twenty-seven miners consigned to the graveyard shift, repeating a commute he had made nearly every evening for the past four months, when a dark figure loomed from the roadside forest before him and lumbered into the glare of his high beams.
“At first I thought it was a big bear,” Latreille told a reporter, whose story was published in the August August 5th, 1970 issue of the Nugget. “But then it turned to face the headlights and I could see some light hair, almost down to its shoulders. It couldn’t have been a bear.”
Latreille slammed on the brakes, sending the bus into a wild fishtail which nearly resulted in a fatal plunge off a cliff, and allowing the mysterious pedestrian an opportunity to complete its crossing and vanish into the trees on the other side of the road.
When later asked to identify the creature, Latreille simply stated, “I have heard of this thing before but never believed it. Now I am sure.” He added that he was less sure whether he would continue to drive the bus to the Cobalt Lode Mine.
Latreille’s account was echoed by the testimony of one of his passengers, a miner named Larry Cormack. “It looked like a bear to me at first,” Cormack told a reporter, “but it didn’t walk like one. It was kind of half stooped over. Maybe it was a wounded bear, I don’t know.”
When asked whether he thought the creature might have been Old Yellow Top, which the paper alternately referred to as the ‘PreCambrian Shield Man,’ Cormack said, “My father used to talk about it, but I’ve seen it close up.”
The reporter ended his story with a quip that the mysterious pedestrian might have been a rowdy patron from a local saloon, which John Green took as an indication that the newspaper, at least, regarded the story as a hoax. This sentiment was confirmed by Green’s associate, Bill Davis, who made inquiries at the Nugget office and learned that the journalists there regarded the tale as a miners’ prank.
In their 1999 book The Field Guide to Bigfoot, Yeti, and Other Mystery Primates Worldwide, in which they separate the various legendary wildmen of the world into taxonomic classes of their own devising, cryptozoologists Loren Coleman and Patrick Huyghe placed Old Yellow Top into a genus they called ‘Marked Hominid.’ In their outline of this taxonomic class, they explained that the term ‘Marked Hominid’ has a double meaning, deriving from the Christian name of Mark A. Hall, the cryptozoologist who first identified the unique traits of this supposed wildman subclass, which he initially christened ‘Taller Hominids’; as well as from the Mansi word Mecheny, or “Marked One,” a local nickname for a hairy wildman from Western Siberia, whose reddish-brown coat was marred by an anomalous patch of white fur covering the left forearm. Like the Mecheny, members of the Marked Hominid class are distinguished by their two-toned or multicolored hair patterns, which Old Yellow Top, with his dark coat and yellow mane, clearly displayed. It is worth noting that Old Yellow Top shares this singular attribute with the so-called ‘Traverspine Gorilla’, another supposed wildman, spotted at the eastern edge of the Canadian Shield in the wilds of Labrador, which witnesses describing as having a shock of white hair on the crown of its head. Other characteristics shared by this sub-class are their native subarctic range and roughly 7-foot-tall stature.
Incredibly, Old Yellow Top is not the only mysterious creature said to lurk on the outskirts of Cobalt, Ontario. Just east of town, straddling the border of Ontario and Quebec, is a long, deep body of water called Lake Temiskaming, which legend says is home to a monster known as the Mugwump… but that’s a story for another time.
Sacred Legends (1995), by James R. Stevens and Carl Ray
On the Track of Sasquatch (1971), by John Green
“Mines That Are Actually in Operation in Cobalt Silver Region: What Has Already Been Done in Getting Out the Ore Whose Fabulous Richness has been so Much Heard of Recently – Prospectors are out in all Parts from Metropolitan Centres,” from the April 28, 1906 issue of the Montreal Star
https://wmpub.ca/1189-gilles.html
Ojibwa Myths and Legends (1962), by Sister Bernard Colleman, Ellen Frogner, and Estelle Eich
Acaoohkiwini and Acimowina: Traditional Narratives of the Rock Cree Indians (1989), by Robert A. Brightman
“Neanderthals in First Nations Tradition,” by Hammerson Peters in the July 31st, 2023 issue of MysteriesOfCanada.com
The Field Guide to Bigfoot, Yeti, and Other Mystery Primates Worldwide (1999), by Loren Coleman and Patrick Huygue
“Mark A. Hall, Cryptozoologist and Fortean, Dies,” by Loren Coleman (2016), http://www.cryptozoonews.com/hall-obit/