At the foot of one of the rolling hills which blanket the Dordogne department in southwestern France is an ancient cavern called the Rouffignac Cave. The limestone walls of this prehistoric hollow are adorned with over 250 petroglyphs and cave paintings inscribed by long-forgotten Neolithic artists. These beautiful umber renderings depict ancient animals which lived alongside our Stone Age ancestors, like the cave bear and the wooly rhinoceros. Incredibly, roughly 70% of the megafauna represented on the stone tapestry which envelopes that age-old sanctuary are members of a species once believed to have predated Man: the woolly mammoth.
Since at least the days of Victorian paleontology, the Western mind has accepted the fact that mammoth was contemporaneous with our caveman ancestors, those prehistoric pachyderms likely having supplied the material needs of ancient Man in the twilight of the Pleistocene Epoch, the last Ice Age. Perhaps on account of some heritage from our biological past, Modern man has demonstrated a fascination with those enormous long-tusked elephants, incorporating them into children’s shows and business logos. And, despite a Michael Crichton book and six Hollywood blockbusters illustrating the dangers of such an endeavour, biotechnologists have expressed a desire to scientifically resurrect those huge herbivores for decades.
Most scientists today agree that the mammoth died out millennia ago, perhaps having succumbed to the climate change which characterized the late Pleistocene Epoch or been hunted to extinction by humans. This notion is challenged by a surprising number of indigenous traditions native to Canada, along with a handful of relatively modern reports by white frontiersmen, which indicate that some enormous, hairy, elephant-like creature roamed the boreal wilderness of North America well into the 19th Century, and perhaps beyond. In this piece, we will explore these eerie legends and strange reports of living mammoths in Canada.
https://www.youtube.com/@HammersonPeters/videos
In the summer of 1896, a Nova Scotian prospector named Robert Henderson found a sizeable quantity of gold dust while panning a creek on what would come to be known as King Solomon’s Dome – a small mountain near the western edge of Canada’s Yukon Territory, bounded by the Indian, Yukon, and Klondike Rivers. Returning with a handful of fellow gold-seekers, he sank a mine shaft on the site of his discovery and extracted $750-worth of gold from the soil.
At the same time, four Tagish Indians and a white man named George Carmack were encamped on that very same slope one creek to the west of Henderson and company, intent on scouting for quality timber which they might float downstream to the town of Fortymile. Their stock of fish having run out, one of their number, a huge Tagish packer named Skookum Jim, shot a moose for supper and prepared to cook it. While washing his frying pan in what would come to be known as Bonanza Creek, he spotted a gleam in the water, and plucked from the creek bed a thumb-sized nugget of solid gold.
News of these discoveries trickled their way to civilization, and by 1897, thousands of hopeful prospectors from all over the world were on their way to the goldfields surrounding King Solomon’s Dome, travelling by steamer, horse, and canoe in what is known today as the Klondike Gold Rush.
Among the thousands of Stampeders to try their luck in that last great gold rush of the 19th Century was a young American writer named Jack London, whose experiences in Klondike Country were the fodder from which derived his classic novels White Fang and The Call of the Wild. Among the lesser-known literary progeny of London’s Klondike escapade is his short story “A Relic of the Pliocene,” which was published in his 1904 anthology The Faith of Men.
This tale is told from the perspective of a prospector who encounters a lonely frontiersman named Thomas Stevens deep in the subarctic wilderness. While sharing his campfire, Stevens shows the narrator his mukluks, or Inuit-style boots, and tells him that they are made from the hide of a woolly mammoth he killed in what a brief geographical description indicates is the Mackenzie Mountains of Canada’s Northwest Territories. He then launches into the story of his adventure, claiming that, shortly after his beloved dog, Klooch, gave birth to seven wolfdog puppies, a mammoth came and stepped on them while mindlessly traipsing through the forest, destroying his gun in the process.
“The beast was thirty long and twenty high…” Stevens told the narrator, “and its tusks scaled over six times three feet. I couldn’t believe, myself, at the time, for all that it had just happened. But if my senses had played me, there was the broken gun and the hole in the brush. And there was – or, rather, there was not – Klooch and the pups. O man, it makes me hot all over now when I think of it.”
Enraged, Stevens seized a hatchet and took off after the mammoth, chasing him into a valley. For two months, he drove the timid creature in an endless circle through the wilderness, compelling it to flee from him by screaming at it and pelting it with rocks, “eating jerked meat and salmon berries on the run, and snatching winks of sleep between.” Whenever the mammoth turned to attack him, he fled into soft muskeg where heavier animal dared not tread, or squeezed himself into a rock fissure too narrow for that antideluvian giant to penetrate.
“At last I wore him out,” Stevens concluded, “and he lay down, broken-winded, broken-hearted, hungry, and thirsty. When I found he wouldn’t budge, I hamstrung him, and spent the better part of the day wading into him with the hand-axe, he a sniffing and sobbing till I worked in far enough to shut him off… Barring the fact that I had run most of the juices out of him, he was fair eating, and his four feet, alone, roasted whole, would have lasted a man a twelvemonth.”
When he finished his tale, Stevens gave the narrator his mammoth-skin mukluks as a token of his appreciation for the tobacco he had shared with him. The narrator then claims that he donated the mukluks to a certain professor at the Smithsonian Institute, who verified that they were indeed crafted from mammoth hide.
A paragraph in London’s piece indicates that the American author likely drew the inspiration for his short story from the mortal remains of woolly mammoths which Stampeders frequently found ensconced in the banks of the Klondike and its tributaries. As Canadian historian Pierre Berton put it in his 1989 book The Mysterious North, “Embedded in this frozen muck are the bones and skulls and even the flesh of animals that have long since vanished from the earth – the hairy mammoth, the great tusked mastodon, and varieties of bison, deer, and horse long extinct.” This phenomenon was not restricted to Klondike Country, being a common feature of river systems throughout the subarctic, from Alaska to Siberia. Canadian historian Philip Godsell, for example, in several of his pieces, alluded to “Indian reports brought down from the Lower Mackenzie of frozen mammoths being exposed in the falling away of ice cliffs, leaving their flesh – though millions of years old – still fit, when thawed, for dog feed.” According to Father Julius Jette, a French-Canadian Jesuit missionary who lived among the Koyukon Indians of Alaska’s Yukon River in the late 19th and early 20th Centuries, the Dene natives of northern Canada called these fossilized remains the “Bones of the Underground Game,” believing that they belonged to other-dimensional game animals hunted by the spirits of the dead.
Discoveries of these primordial relics were once so common that northern frontiersmen casually decorated their cabins with mammoth tusks. In the officers’ residence in Hudson’s Bay Company’s Fort Simpson, located at the confluence of the Mackenzie and Liard Rivers, there was a room called the Ivory Room, which housed a collection of mammoth bones, tusks, and teeth that had been picked up by voyageurs during their boreal travels. In his memoir Son of the North, geologist Charles Camsell, whose father was the factor of Fort Simpson, described how steamboat engineers who often entertained themselves in a recreation room beside the Ivory Room, for want of proper equipment, were relegated to playing billiards one winter with balls they fashioned from mammoth ivory.
In addition to physical remains, the elephantine monsters which once roamed the subarctic left behind enormous footprints on the ancient riverbanks of Alaska and Canada’s northern Territories, some of which have survived the test of time. On certain stretches of the Yukon River, and along the shores of Williston Lake in Peace River Country, one can find ancient mammoth footprints baked into stone. Prospectors Hank Russell and Jack Lee, according to a controversial article published in the November 11th, 1922 issue of Valdez, Alaska’s Valdez Miner, claimed to have made a similar discovery in a particularly lush valley near what might have been the Toad River Hot Springs, located in northern British Columbia at the northern feet of the Cassiar Mountains. “In looking over the valley,” the article asserted, “the prospectors found tracks of several animals of species unknown to them. These tracks were too large for bears, being some eighteen inches in diameter and perfectly round with three depressions in the front of the track resembling toes. Had they been living in a prehistoric age, the prospectors would have sworn the tracks to be those of a mastodon or mammoth.” Three years later, the prospectors’ discovery was corroborated by the account of Vancouver-based mining engineer Frank Perry, who reported finding similar tracks in what was likely the same verdant stretch of wilderness. According to a summary of his account published in the June 26th, 1925 issue of Seattle, Washington’s Alaska Weekly, “The country was never visited by the Indians because of imprints of huge three-toed prehistoric animals found in the sandstones and shales. Indians thought these monsters still roamed the country and, although they knew it to be a hunter’s paradise, they gave the valley a wide berth.”
Another possible source of inspiration for London’s story are the dozens of allusions to living mammoths in North America which appeared in the journals, letters, and memoirs of frontiersmen throughout the 19th Century, most of them being references to native legends. As might be expected, tales of living mammoths pepper the folklore of the Dene Indians, whose traditional hunting grounds in the Canadian and Alaskan subarctic abound with the mortal remains of those ancient elephants, preserved in perpetuity by the permafrost. Most written references to this native belief are cursory. For example, in a letter to a friend, dated February 8th, 1913, Canadian prospector and former RCMP officer Poole Field included the mammoth in the menagerie of monsters that populate the traditions of the Mountain Indians, a mysterious Dene tribe native to the Mackenzie Mountains with whom he lived and travelled, writing, “They have tales of enormous animals such as the mammoth, and spiders as large as a full-sized grizzly bear, and long worms that are supposed to be alive today and nobody can save them from these animals but their doctors. Some of the Indians will tell you they have seen these animals.”
In the old and scattered archives of the Society for the Investigation of the Unexplained, an organization established by British-American biologist Ivan T. Sanderson, the so-called ‘Godfather of Cryptozoology’, is a letter dated July 12th, 1971. The letter writer, whose signature this author is unable to decipher, described meeting an old native man named Guh-goh-nah-neh-neish, or “Gugo”, whole visiting the town of Moosenee in northern Ontario. Through a Cree interpreter, the letter writer learned that Gugo was a Dene who claimed to have frequented the valley of the South Nahanni River, a haunted region steeped in gruesome history and ghastly legend, popularly known as the “Headless Valley”. The old Indian told the traveler that the Nahanni was home to a variety of dangerous and unusual predators, including hairy wildmen, brutal bear-sized dogs, and enormous cave lions. “The lions,” he wrote, “kill everything when in the mood, including the bears, moose, and what would appear to be mammoths. The latter being described as creatures bigger than all the others, with long noses. I assume that this is what was meant by the description, as Gugo didn’t have a name for it and the interpreter seemed rather amazed.”
The Kaska Dene, whose traditional homeland includes northern British Columbia and Southeastern Yukon, have traditional folktales which strongly imply that their ancestors encountered living mammoths in the boreal wilderness and were sometimes attacked by them. In his 1964 ethnography on the Kaska, American anthropologist John J. Honigmann related an old Kaska story about a huge, nocturnal, man-eating predator called a Nu’uti, which was described as “a big monster, like an elephant,” which emitted tremendous howls. In this story, the Nu’uti stalked a band of Kaska, whom it intended to eat. When the band’s medicine man accosted it, the creature swallowed him whole, apparently satiating its appetite. Miraculously, the shaman eventually emerged from the Nu’uti’s other end unscathed, but reeking so strongly that his fellow band members had to smoke him in a fire of rotten wood in order to purify him.
In his own 1917 ethnography on the Kaska, Scots-Canadian anthropologist James Teit included a traditional story about an animal called an atix, which he described in a footnote as:
“A very large kind of animal which roamed the country a long time ago. It corresponded somewhat to white men’s pictures of elephants. It was of huge size, in build like an elephant, had tusks, and was hairy. These animals were seen not so very long ago, it is said, generally singly; but none have been seen now for several generations. Indians come across their bones occasionally.”
In this story, a young Kaska family consisting of a husband, a wife, and a newborn baby, went hunting for beaver one winter on the shores of some large nameless lake. One day, while hauling some of her husband’s kills back to camp, the wife was approached by an antix. Terrified for herself and the baby she carried on her back, she abandoned her toboggan and the beaver meat and fled back to camp. When she told her husband about her horrifying experience, the hunter did not believe her, joking that she had probably just given his beaver meat to her imaginary paramour, whom he pretended had followed them into the wilderness.
That night, the woman lay down with her baby on the opposite side of the fire from her husband. Although the hunter quickly fell asleep, the woman remained wide awake, terrified that the antix would find their camp. Sure enough, the crackling of the fire and the snores of her husband were soon superseded by the sound of heavy, plodding footsteps and the snapping of branches crushed underfoot. The woman poked her husband with a stick, but could not rouse him. “She then ran away,” Teit wrote, “and the animal came into camp and ate her husband. Afterwards the animal followed the woman’s tracks, making sounds like a person crying.”
Her baby on her back and the antix hot on her trail, the woman ran out onto the frozen lake toward a group of Kaska who were encamped on the ice. She warned her kinsmen of the approaching monster, prompting them to cut a series of holes through the ice at the edge of their camp so as to weaken it.
The antix soon reached the edge of the lake, and, seeing the flickering of the Kaska fires, ventured out onto the ice in their direction. When it reached the line of holes the Kaska had drilled, the ice gave way under its weight, and the monster plunged into the frigid water. Instead of drowning, however, the huge animal gained a footing on the lake bottom and doggedly plodded on, using its tusks to break a path through the ice.
Although most of the Kaska froze at the monster’s approach, too terrified to move, one strange boy who had hitherto been despised and ill-used by his fellow band members seized his bow and quiver and shot arrow after arrow into the monster’s head. Eventually, the boy succeeded in killing the creature, and was ever after regarded as a great medicine man.
According to 19th Century British scientist and explorer Robert Brown, the Dene’s cultural fear of living mammoths and mastodons extended south into central British Columbia, into the historic homelands of the Dunne-za, or Beaver Indians, and their southerly neighbours, the Carrier. “Near Stewart [Stuart] Lake and Peace River, in British Columbia…” he wrote, “Indian canoe-men [relate stories] about a huge animal which, ages ago, ravaged that country, destroying Indian villages, until they had to erect (as some African and other tribes do at the present day) scaffolds to sleep on, or even houses on platforms in shallow lakes, like the old lake-dwellers in Switzerland and other parts of Europe… It is curious enough that in [this region] bones of the mastodon are found in abundance; and though possibly the tradition may have originated in a desire to account for the presence of these remains, yet I think it is more than probable that … these traditions are only the fragmentary remembrance, handed down from generation to generation, of a time when this animal was contemporary with man…”
North of Dene territory, in the Arctic Circle, lies the domain of the Inuit nations, some of whom also have traditional stories about living mammoths. In his 1990 collection of northern aboriginal legends, American folklorist Howard Norman included two such stories. One of these was an Inuit adaptation of the Genesis flood narrative, which he attributed to the Caribou Inuit who inhabit the Barren Lands northwest of Hudson Bay. This story purports to explain why the mammoth live underground – a belief which the Caribou Inuit shared with the Kaska and other Dene tribes. American ethnologist Edward William Nelson elaborated on this belief in his 1899 book The Eskimo About Bering Strait, writing:
“The bones of the mammoth which are found on the coast country of Bering sea and in the adjacent interior are said to belong to an animal known as the ki-lug-u-wuk (ko-gukh-puk of the Yukon). The creature is claimed to live under ground, where it burrows from place to place, and when by accident one of them comes to the surface, so that even the tip of its nose appears above ground and breathes the air, it dies at once. This explains the fact that the bones of these animals are nearly always found partly buried in the earth. The Eskimo say that these animals belong to the under world and for that reason the air of the outer world is fatal to them.”
The other mammoth story in Norman’s book derives from the Kobuk River Inuit of northeastern Alaska. According to this tale, an Inuit hunter who always hunted barefoot went looking for marmots in the mountains near the Salmon River, a remote tributary of the Kobuk. “While he was up on the mountain,” Norman’s informant said, “the weather got foggy. He stayed on the mountain trail, and when he looked down the creek he saw some great big animal walking along, as though it was floating, barely touching the ground. He could see its breath.” This animal was a kilyigvuk, or mammoth, which the storyteller asserted “come around… now and then… This was a great, huge animal with long curved ivory tusks growing out of its head.”
The mammoth was pursued by three strange hunters armed with spears, who also floated down the game trail without their feet touching the ground. The storyteller explained that these hunters were ancient medicine men who lived in the sky, who only came down to earth to hunt during heavy fog.
The sky people killed the mammoth and invited the barefoot hunter to join in the subsequent feast, kindling their fire from wet wood they retrieved from a lake. Out of gratitude for his company, the sky people granted the marmot hunter the ability to cut and drill jade with his little finger.
By the late 1800s, tales of real live mammoths and mastodons eking out their existence in the far-flung corners of the North Country were making their way into American newspapers. Among the first of these was the account of an American fur trader named Cola F. Fowler which appeared in the May 5th, 1889 issue of the Philadelphia Press. Fowler was an employee of the Alaska Fur and Commercial Company who spent the 1880s working various trading posts throughout Alaska.
In 1887, Fowler left his post at Kodiak Island and travelled to the headwaters of the Snake River, a waterway which empties into the Bering Sea at Nome, Alaska. There, he met with the chief of a local Inuit band and proceeded to inspect some of the ivory tusks that the natives had collected in the wilderness.
“I subjected the ivory to a rigid inspection,” he wrote, “and upon two of the largest tusks, I found fresh blood and traces of decomposed flesh.” When the trader pointed out this curious detail to the chief, the Inuit informed him that, three months earlier, a handful of young Inuit hunters had encountered a small mammoth herd about fifty miles to the north, and managed to kill an old bull and a cow with their large-calibre muskets.
The chief introduced the incredulous trader to the leader of the hunt, and asked him to relate his adventure. “He told me a straightforward story,” Fowler wrote, “and I have no reason to doubt its truth.
“He and his band were searching along a dry watercourse for ivory and had found a considerable quantity. One of the Indians who was in advance rushed in upon the main body one morning with the startling intelligence that, at the spring of water about a mile from where they then were, he had discovered ‘signs’ of several of the ‘big teeth’…
“The chief immediately called about him his hunters and started for the spring. They had nearly reached it when they heard loud, shrill, trumpet-like calls, and an enormous creature came crashing toward them through the brush, the ground trembling under his footfalls. With wild cries of terror, the Indians fled, except for the chief and the scout who first discovered the trail of the monsters. They were armed with large-caliber muskets and stood their ground, opening fire on the mammoth. A bullet must have penetrated the creature’s brain for he staggered forward and fell dead, and subsequently, on their way back to their camp, they overhauled a cow ‘big teeth’ which was evidently the mate of the first one killed.
At Fowler’s insistence, the Inuit drew his impression of the creature on the soft clay of the riverbank using a stick. The animal resembled a woolly mammoth, albeit with smaller ears, bigger eyes, and a longer, more slender trunk. Interestingly, the creature had four 4-foot-long tusks in addition to two curved 15-footers.
In his commentary on the story in his excellent 1996 book Strange Stories of Alaska and the Yukon, American author Ed Farrell observed that the monster that the Inuit drew is consistent in appearance with a Eubelodon, or ‘four tusker’ – an ancient relative of the woolly mammoth which was unknown to science at that time.
A report similar to Fowler’s appeared four years later, in the March 4th, 1893 issue of a newspaper based out of Sitka, Alaska, called the Alaskan. This story is set in the valley of the Stikine River, a waterway in northwestern British Columbia which drains into the Pacific Ocean just north of Wrangell, Alaska. This valley is the historic homeland of both the Tlingit people of the Pacific Northwest, and a Dene people called the Tahltan. The article reads:
“The Stikine Indians positively assert that within the last five years they have frequently seen animals which, from the description given, must be mastodons.
“Last spring, while out hunting, one of their hunters came across a series of large tracks, each the size of the bottom of a salt barrel, sunk deep in the moss. He followed the curious trail for some miles, finally coming out in full view of his game. As a class these Indians are the bravest of hunters, but the proportions of this new species of game filled the hunter with terror, and he took to swift and immediate flight.
“He describes the creature as being as large as a post trader’s store, with great, shining, yellowish-white tusks and a mouth large enough to swallow a man at a single nip. He further states that the animal was undoubtedly of the same kind as those whose bones and tusks lie all over the country.
“The fact that other hunters have told of seeing these monsters browsing on the herbs up along the river gives a certain probability to the story. Over on Fortymile Creek, bones of mastodons are quite plentiful. One ivory tusk nine feet long projects from one of the sand dunes on the creek, and single teeth have been found that are so large that they would have been a good load for a man to carry.”
Among the oldest written references to a supposed population of woolly mammoths extant in the Canadian wilds are the journals and memoirs of David Thompson, a Welsh Hudson’s Bay Company-turned-North-West Company explorer whose crew traversed the Athabasca Pass in what is now the Albertan Rockies in 1811, becoming the first white men to make the journey. Thompson’s employer, the North-West Company (NWC), had learned that the newly-established Pacific Fur Company was planning to bring the fur trade into the hitherto untapped watershed of the Columbia River. Hoping to check the success of their competitors, the NWC tasked Thompson with reaching the mouth of the Columbia River before the Astorians (as Pacific Fur Company agents were known), necessitating a journey west across the Rocky Mountains.
In his various writings, which several historians have since compiled and reworked into flowing narratives which masquerade as the explorer’s single definitive journal, Thompson described a strange discovery he and his men found on January 7th, 1811, just prior to their ascension of the Athabasca Pass.
At about 3:00 in the afternoon, Thompson, his four native guides, and seven French-Canadian voyageurs under his charge came across the tracks of a large and mysterious animal, which were clearly impressed in the 4-8 inches of snow that covered the ground. Whatever made the tracks appeared to have walked south for some time before heading back into the forest. According to the natives, whose livelihood depended on their tracking abilities, the tracks appeared to be about six hours old.
Each print consisted of a large circular impression, which Thompson called the ‘ball of the foot,’ crowned with four large toes tipped with short, thick claws. Using his folding ivory ruler, the explorer determined that the tracks measured fourteen inches in length and eight inches in width. The toes were between 3-4 inches long, and the hind part of the foot did not make a substantial imprint in the snow.
Thompson’s native guides appear to have believed that the tracks had been made by a young woolly mammoth, claiming that those ancient elephants were known to frequent the headwaters of the Athabasca River. Those huge herbivores, they claimed, stood three fathoms high (three fathoms being equivalent to 18 feet, or about 5.5 metres), and slept standing upright, leaning against large trees which supported their weight. They suspected that their legs did not have joints, but had not had the opportunity to verify their suspicion, as none of them had managed to kill one. They indicated to the explorer that it would be futile and dangerous to pursue that particular specimen into the forest, as their musket balls would only succeed in wounding and angering it.
Thompson could not bring himself to believe in antediluvian monsters extant in the Canadian wilds, and suggested that the tracks were actually made by a large old grizzly bear whose claws had worn down – a theory which he himself did not fully believe. The natives simply shook their heads and tacitly expressed their desire to continue on – a wish to which the explorer reluctantly acceded.
“The sight of the track of that large beast staggered me,” Thompson admitted in a later reminiscence, adding that in the thirty years that separated the incident from the time at which he penned his memoir, he had often cast his mind back to that strange winter day in 1811, puzzling over the mystery of the tracks.
The native belief that a population of woolly mammoths abode in the Athabasca River Country in the early 19th Century was attested to in the writings of Thompson’s contemporary, a Scotsman named Alexander Ross, who began his career working for the NWC’s aforementioned competitor, the Pacific Fur Company. Following the dissolution of the PFC in 1813, Ross, like many of his fellow Astorians, was hired by the NWC and dispatched to various posts throughout the so-called Columbia District in what are now the American states of Washington, Oregon, and Idaho. In later life, he would settle in Manitoba’s Red River Valley. In his 1832 memoir Adventures on the Columbia River, Ross wrote:
“Some of the Upper Crees, a tribe who inhabit the country in the vicinity of the Athabasca river, have a curious tradition with respect to animals which they state formerly frequented the mountains. They allege that these animals were of frightful magnitude, being from two to three hundred feet in length, and high in proportion; that they formerly lived in the plains, a great distance to the eastward; from which they were gradually driven by the Indians to the Rocky Mountains; that they destroyed all smaller animals; and if their agility was equal to their size, would have also destroyed all the natives, &c. One man has asserted that his grandfather told him he saw one of those animals in a mountain pass, where he was hunting, and that on hearing its roar, which he compared to loud thunder, the sight almost left his eyes, and his heart became as small as an infant’s.
“Whether such an animal ever existed I shall leave to the curious in natural history to determine; but if the Indian tradition have any foundation in truth, it may have been the mammoth, some of whose remains have been found at various times in the United States.”
It is perhaps worth mentioning that Ross’ testimony was later plagiarized by the aforementioned British explorer Robert Brown, who included a near-verbatim reproduction of it, without attribution, in his 1876 book The Races of Mankind.
Over the years, several writers have interpreted certain monster stories of Algonkian tradition as evidence of a cultural recollection of living mammoths, suggesting that the First Nations belief in living Pleistocene monsters might also have been prevalent in eastern Canada. As American paleontologist Nathaniel Southgate Shaler put it in his 1871 article for the American Naturalist:
“There seems to have been an obscure tradition among some portions of the Indians of eastern North America, that on the unexplored and distant recesses north of Lake Ontario and the St. Lawrence, there dwelt some great mammals which had a size like that of the elephant. With the early voyagers this was accepted as proof that the mammoth still lived in the western part of Labrador; and on some of the first maps this territory was laid down as the habitation of these surviving members of the giant race whose bones strewed the surface of so large a portion of the continent.”
Shaler’s statement echoes the work of English anthropologist Sir Edward Burnette Tylor, who made the following case one year earlier in his 1870 book Researches Into the Early History of Mankind and the Development of Civilization:
“There is… a certain amount of evidence which tends to prove that the memory of the huge animals of the quaternary period has been preserved up to modern times in popular tradition. It is but quite lately that the fact of man having lived on the earth at the same time with the mammoth has become a generally received opinion, though its probability has been seen by a few far-sighted thinkers for many years past, and it had been suggested long before the late discoveries in the Drift-beds, that several traditions, found in different parts of the world, were derived from actual memory of the remote time when various great animals, generally thought to have died out before the appearance of man upon the earth, were still alive.”
To support his theory, Tylor reproduced an excerpt from Volume V of Charlevoix’s 1744 history of New France, Pierre Francois Xavier de Charlevoix being a French Jesuit priest who travelled throughout the Pays d’en Haut, or ‘Upper Country’ surrounding the Great Lakes, and French Louisiana in the early 1720s.
“There is also a rather pleasant tradition among these Barbarians,” Charlevoix wrote in French, probably referring to the Abenaki of what is now southern Quebec, “of a large Moose, with whom the others seem like ants. He has, they say, legs so high that eight feet of snow do not embarrass him: his skin is proof against all kinds of weapons, and he has a kind of arm, which comes out of his shoulder, and which he uses, as we do with ours. He never fails to have a large number of Moose in his wake, who form his Court, and who render him all the services he requires of them.”
In his commentary on the excerpt, Tylor wrote, “It is hard to imagine that anything but the sight of a live elephant can have given rise to this tradition. The suggestion that it might have been founded on the sight of a mammoth frozen with his flesh and skin, as they are found in Siberia, is not tenable, for the trunks and tails of these animals perish first, and are not preserved like the more solid parts, so that the Asiatic myths which have born out of the finding of these frozen beasts, know nothing of such appendages. Moreover, no savage who had never heard of the use of an elephant’s trunk would imagine from a sight of the dead animal, even if its trunk were perfect, that its use was to be compared with that of a man’s arm.”
Another Algonkian legend hinting at an Eastern Canadian folk memory of living Pleistocene monsters appears in American anthropologist Wilson Duncan Strong’s 1934 article North American Indian Traditions Suggesting a Knowledge of the Mammoth. In his piece, Strong included an old Naskapi story he recorded himself during a visit to the Labrador Peninsula, which, to his mind, “[seemed] to embody a former knowledge of the living animals in question, perhaps grown hazy through long oral transmission.”
“Long ago,” the story begins, “there was an old man, his wife and daughter. The old man told his wife to come with him and cut birch for ladles. A huge monster, Katcheetohuskw, heard them chopping wood and came and killed them both. He trampled and ate the bodies but he tossed aside an unborn child carried by the woman. It was unclean.”
Hearing a terrible commotion, the daughter huddled alone in the family tent, crying softly. When silence finally returned to the forest, the girl mustered up her courage and followed her parents’ tracks into the woods, where she found what remained of their bodies. She also spotted her newborn brother lying nearby, prematurely rent from their mother’s womb and stubbornly clinging to life. After cleaning him with moss, she placed him in a wooden bowl and carried him back to the tent, where she took care of him.
The baby, whom his sister named Djakabish, survived his infancy and grew into a strong boy skilled with a bow and arrow. When he learned of his parents’ fate, he resolved to bring Katcheetohuskw to justice, and set out into the wilderness with a spruce bow he had crafted himself.
Djakabish found the monster with little difficulty and challenged him to a duel. The creature fought ferociously with his long nose, which it used to smash his smaller opponent. Every time he landed a blow, however, the boy got stronger.
Ultimately, Djakabish slayed the monster with his arrows and brought his head back to his sister’s camp as a trophy. At the monster’s own suggestion, he removed its large ears, and had his sister make his bed from them.
“When asked to describe Katcheetohuskw,” Strong wrote, “the informants said he was very large, had a big lead, large ears and teeth, and a long nose with which he hit people. His tracks in the snow were described in their stories as large and round. One Indian who had seen pictures of the modern elephant said he thought that Katcheetohuskw was the elephant.”
Considered as a whole, the various First Nations legends concerning an elephantine monster in Canada seem to be nothing less than dramatizations of native encounters with mammoths. As Tylor pointed out, the detail of the creature’s prehensile trunk, which appears in folkloric traditions across the continent, negates the possibility that such stories derive wholly from discoveries of mammoth bones, or even frozen mammoth carcasses. And the near-ubiquitous interpretation of the creature as a beast covered with long shaggy hair contradicts the notion, put forth by a number of writers, that native mammoth stories were inspired by photos and illustrations of elephants shown to the Indians my missionaries and fur traders. The stories clearly imply a cultural recollection of living mammoths. Less clear is the age of such cultural memories. Is it possible that the mammoth legend is a relic of the Paleo-Indians’ last megafaunal hunts at the end of the Pleistocene Epoch, preserved throughout the millennia in tales conveyed from campfire to campfire? Or, as the remarkable clarity of the legend seems to imply, are the tales born from run-ins with mammoths in the relatively recent past, in the 18th, 19th, or even 20th Centuries? As late as the 1950s, fabulous tales of a tropical oasis hidden away in some remote northern valley, where the last of the Ice Age giants could still be found, were being printed in North American newspapers and magazines. As Philip Godsell put it in his 1944 book Romance of the Alaska Highway, somewhere in the Mackenzie Mountains, perhaps in the fabled Nahanni Valley, was “a palm-girt oasis that had escaped the impact of the last Ice Age, where living dinosaurs and mammoths of a forgotten age disported themselves in steaming pools rich with luxuriant vegetation. For over fifty years stories of this legendary valley had been carried south to civilization by travellers from the Great Lone Land, yet never could the trapper or hunter be found who could say he’d actually seen these wonders.”
“On the Superstitions of the Ten’a Indians (Middle Part of the Yukon Valley, Alaska)”, by Reverend Father Julius Jette in Anthropos (1911)
Adventures on the Columbia River Including The Narrative of a Residence of Six Years on the Western Side of the Rocky Mountains Among Various Tribes of Indians Hitherto Unknown Together With a Journey Across the American Continent (1832), by Ross Cox
Legends of the Nahanni Valley (2018), by Hammerson Peters
The Kaska Indians: An Ethnographic Reconstruction (1964), by John J. Honigmann
“Kaska Tales,” by James A. Teit in Volume 30 of The Journal of American Folk-Lore (1917)
The Races of Mankind: Being a Popular Description of the Characteristics, Mannerisms, and Customs of the Principal Varieties of the Human Family (1873-1876), by Robert Brown
Northern Tales: Traditional Stories of Eskimo and Indian Peoples (1990), by Howard Norman
“North American Indian Traditions Suggesting a Knowledge of the Mammoth,” by W.D. Strong in Volume 36 of the American Anthropologist (1934)
The Eskimo About Bering Strait (1899), Edward William Nelson
Histoire et description generale de la Noucelle France, avec le Journal historique d’un voyage fait par ordre du roi dans l’Amerique septentrionale, Volume V (1744), by Pierre Francois Xavier de Charlevoix
Researches Into the Early History of Mankind and the Development of Civilization (1870), by Sir Edward Burnett Tylor
“The Time of the Mammoths,” by N.S. Shaler in Volume 4 of the American Naturalist (1871)
Strange Stories of Alaska and the Yukon (1996), by Ed Ferrell
Klondike: The Last Great Gold Rush, 1896-1899 (1958), by Pierre Berton
The Faith of Men and Other Stories (1904), by Jack London
Son of the North (1954), by Charles Camsell
Romance of the Alaska Highway (1944), by Philip H. Godsell