Yeti, Sasquatch & Hairy Giants

by David Hatcher Childress

  When the event occurred Bauman was still a young man, and was trapping with a partner among the mountains dividing the forks of the Salmon from the head of Wisdom River. Not having had much luck, he and his partner determined to go up into a particularly wild and lonely pass through which ran a small stream said to contain many beaver. The pass has an evil reputation because the year before a solitary hunter who had wandered into it was there slain, seemingly by a wild beast, the half-eaten remains being afterwards found by some mining prospectors who had passed his camp only the night before.

  The memory of this event, however, weighed very lightly with the two trappers, who were as adventurous and hardy as others of their kind. They took their two lean mountain ponies to the foot of the pass, where they left them in an open beaver meadow, the rocky timber-clad ground being from thence onwards impracticable for horses. They then struck out on foot through the vast, gloomy forest, and in about four hours reached a little open glade where they concluded to camp, as signs of game were plenty.

  There was still an hour or two of daylight left, and after building a brush lean-to and throwing down and opening their packs, they started up stream. The country was very dense and hard to travel through, as there was much down timber, although here and there the somber woodland was broken by small glades of mountain grass.

  At dusk they again reached camp. The glade in which it was pitched was not many yards wide, the tall, close-set pines and firs rising round it like a wall. On one side was a little stream, beyond which rose the steep mountain-slopes, covered with the unbroken growth of the evergreen forest.

  They were surprised to find that during their short absence something, apparently a bear, had visited their camp, and had rummaged about among their things, scattering the contents of their packs, and in sheer wantonness destroying their lean-to. The footprints of the beast were quite plain, but at first they paid no particular heed to them, busying themselves with rebuilding the lean-to, laying out their beds and stores, and lighting the fire.

  While Bauman was making ready supper, it being already dark, his companion began to examine the tracks more closely, and soon took a brand from the fire to follow them up, where the intruder had walked along a game trail after leaving the camp. When the brand flickered out, he returned and took another, repeating his inspection of the footprints very closely. Coming back to the fire, he stood by it a minute or two, peering out into the darkness and suddenly remarked, “Bauman, that bear has been walking on two legs.” Bauman laughed at this, but his partner insisted that he was right, and upon again examining the tracks with a torch, they certainly did seem to be made by but two paws, or feet. However, it was too dark to make sure. After discussing whether the footprints could possibly be those of a human being, and coming to the conclusion that they could not be, the two men rolled up in their blankets and went to sleep under the lean-to.

  At midnight Bauman was awakened by some noise and sat up in his blankets. As he did so his nostrils were struck by a strong, wild-beast odor, and he caught the loom of a great body in the darkness at the mouth of the lean-to. Grasping his rifle, he fired at the vague, threatening shadow, but must have missed, for immediately afterwards he heard the smashing of the underwood as the thing, whatever it was, rushed off into the impenetrable blackness of the forest and the night.

  After this the two men slept but little, sitting up by the rekindled fire, but they heard nothing more.

  In the morning they started out to look at the few traps they had set the previous evening and to put out new ones. By an unspoken agreement they kept together all day, and returned to camp towards evening.

  On nearing it they saw, hardly to their astonishment, that the lean-to had been again torn down.

  The visitor of the preceding day had returned, and in wanton malice had tossed about their camp kit and bedding, and destroyed the shanty. The ground was marked up by its tracks, and on leaving the camp it had gone along the soft earth by the brook, where the footprints were as plain as if on snow, and, after a careful scrutiny of the trail, it certainly did seem as if, whatever the thing was, it had walked off on but two legs.

  The men, thoroughly uneasy, gathered a great heap of dead logs, and kept up a roaring fire throughout the night, one or the other sitting on guard for most of the time. About midnight the thing came down through the forest opposite, across the brook, and stayed there on the hillside for nearly an hour. They could hear the branches crackle as it moved about, and several times it uttered a harsh, grating, long-drawn moan, a peculiarly sinister sound. Yet it did not venture near the fire.

  In the morning the two trappers, after discussing the strange events of the last thirty-six hours, decided that they would shoulder their packs and leave the valley that afternoon. They were the more ready to do this because in spite of seeing a good deal of game sign they had caught very little fur. However, it was necessary first to go along the line of their traps and gather them, and this they started out to do.

  All the morning they kept together, picking up trap after trap, each one empty. On first leaving camp they had the disagreeable sensation of being followed. In the dense spruce thickets they occasionally heard a branch snap after they had passed; and now and then there were slight rustling noises among the small pines to one side of them.

  At noon they were back within a couple of miles of camp. In the high, bright sunlight their fears seemed absurd to the two armed men, accustomed as they were, through the long years of lonely wandering in the wilderness to face every kind of danger from man, brute, or element. There were still three beaver traps to collect from a little pond in a wide ravine nearby. Bauman volunteered to gather these and bring them in, while his companion went ahead to camp and made ready the packs.

  On reaching the pond, Bauman found three beaver in the traps, one of which had been pulled loose and carried into the beaver house. He took several hours securing and preparing the beaver, and when he started homewards he marked with some uneasiness how low the sun was getting. As he hurried towards camp, under the tall trees, the silence and desolation of the forest weighed on him. His feet made no sound on the pine needles, and the slanting sunrays, striking through among the straight trunks, made a gray twilight in which objects at a distance glimmered indistinctly. There was nothing to break the ghostly stillness which, when there is no breeze, always broods over these somber primeval forests.

  At last he came to the edge of the little glade where the camp lay, and shouted as he approached it, but got no answer. The campfire had gone out, though the thin blue smoke was still curling upwards. Near it lay the packs, wrapped and arranged.

  At first Bauman could see nobody; nor did he receive an answer to his call. Stepping forward he again shouted, and as he did so his eye fell on the body of his friend, stretched beside the trunk of a great fallen spruce. Rushing towards it the horrified trapper found that the body was still warm, but that the neck was broken, while there were four great fang marks in the throat.

  The footprints of the unknown beast-creature, printed deep in the soft soil, told the whole story.

  The unfortunate man, having finished his packing, sat down on the spruce log with his face to the fire, and his back to the dense woods, to wait for his companion. While thus waiting, his monstrous assailant, which must have been lurking nearby in the woods, waiting for a chance to catch one of the adventurers unprepared, came silently up from behind, walking with long, noiseless steps, and seemingly still on two legs. Evidently unheard, it reached the man, and broke his neck by wrenching his head back with its forepaws, while it buried its teeth in his throat. It had not eaten the body, but apparently had romped and gambolled round it in uncouth, ferocious glee, occasionally rolling over and over it; and had then fled back into the soundless depths of the woods.

  Bauman, utterly unnerved, and believing that the creature with which he had to deal was something either half human or half devil, some great goblin-beast, abandoned everything but his rifle and struck
off at speed down the pass, not halting until he reached the beaver meadows where the hobbled ponies were still grazing. Mounting, he rode onwards through the night, until far beyond the reach of pursuit.

  Teddy Roosevelt, one of America’s most popular presidents, was known for his adventurous outdoor spirit and honesty. Roosevelt has no doubt that Bauman’s story is true and it is one of the few stories I know of that has a sasquatch killing a human being. It would seem that the reality of bigfoot and the early stories pertaining to the wild apeman would be given a great deal of credibility if President Teddy Roosevelt was a believer in the elusive and dangerous creature.

  Teddy Roosevelt in 1885.

  Sasquatch Around Mt. St. Helens

  The year 1924 became a big year for sasquatch encounters. In that year, a Canadian named Albert Ostman claimed he was kidnapped by a sasquatch family, and an American named Fred Beck claimed that he and some friends fought off a small army of sasquatch in a place called Ape Canyon near Mt. St. Helens in Washington state.

  Ostman had kept his experience to himself until 1957 when bigfoot reports were making the news in the Pacific Northwest and he decided to tell his story. He claimed that he had been doing construction work in 1924 and needed to take a break, so he decided to look for gold around the head of Toba Inlet in British Columbia. Something kept disturbing his camp late at night and so one night he decided to stay completely dressed inside his sleeping bag, and keep his rifle handy. He fell asleep, however, and late in the night he felt something picking him up. He still had his rifle with him, which he clutched while he was carried for an hour up a steep hill.

  After more ups and downs, he was deposited on the ground, while it was still dark. He claimed that as it got light he could see four bigfoot creatures, two large and two much smaller. This bigfoot family apparently had a young son and daughter, and Ostman speculated that they might have brought him as a suitor to the young female sasquatch.

  The young male was about seven feet tall, Ostman said, and probably weighed about 300 pounds. They slept beneath an overhanging rock on dry moss, using moss-filled “blankets” and went out in the daytime to gather grass, shoots, nuts and roots to eat. He never saw them eat any meat.

  He eventually made his escape after offering some snuff to the large father sasquatch on occasion. One time, after a few small pinches, the big sasquatch grabbed the whole box of snuff and gulped it down. Soon the sasquatch started to become sick and rushed off to get some water. Ostman then grabbed his belongings and ran out of the valley, firing some shots from his rifle as he left to frighten the rest of the family. He was not followed and eventually made his way back to civilization.

  Ape Canyon near Mount St. Helens in Oregon.

  Fred Beck, who fought the sasquatch at Ape Canyon, seen here in 1965.

  Down near Kelso, Washington in July of 1924, Fred Beck and four other gold miners were in a remote log cabin in an area to the east side of Mt. St. Helens, later to become known as Ape Canyon. They said that they encountered a group of four gorilla-men on the mountainside during the daytime, and fired on them with a revolver to halt an attack at that time.

  Roger Patterson’s map of the Mount St. Helens area and Ape Canyon.

  One of the huge creatures was believed slain, and the body rolled over a cliff into a deep ravine. The attack resumed after dark. A man named Smith reported to the Cowlitz County Sheriff that the hairy giant apemen pelted their cabin all night with rocks, and danced and screamed until daylight.

  The men described the mountain “devils” as being at least seven feet tall and covered with long, black hair. Their arms were long and trailed, the men told the Portland Oregonian, which published an article about the encounter.

  Bigfoot hunter Roger Patterson interviewed Fred Beck in 1966 and included the story in his book Do Abominable Snowmen of North America Really Exist?16 Beck told Patterson about shooting one of the sasquatch:

  So we seen him running down this ridge then, and then he took a couple more shots at him. Marion, when he first shot I rushed over there, it was hard going, he said: “Don’t run, don’t run, Fred, don’t run,” he said, “he won’t go far,” he said, “I put three shots through that fool’s head, he won’t go far.”

  So we got up the ridge and looked down there he was goin’ Just jumpin’, looked like it’d be twelve, fourteen feet a jump, runnin’. The old man took a couple more shots at him and the old man said, “My God, I don’t understand it, I don’t understand it, how that fella can get away with them slugs in his head,” he says, “I hit him with the other two shots, too.”

  Roger Patterson’s drawing of the attack at Ape Canyon.

  Regarding that night in the sturdy cabin of pine logs, Beck told Patterson:

  When we seen ‘em, you know, why we heard that noise—pounding and whistling, at night they come in there and we had a pile of shakes piled up there, big shakes. Our cabin was built out of logs. We didn’t have rafters on it, we had good-sized pine logs, you know, for rafters, two-inch shakes, pine shakes. We had them rafters close apart, they was about a foot apart, ‘cause he said he wanted to make a roof what’d hold the snow. We made one to hold the snow. Them buggers attacked us, knocked the chinking out on my dad’s, on my father-in-law’s chest, and had an ax there, he grabbed the ax.

  And the old man grabbed the ax and the logs and then he shot on it, right along the ax handle, and he let go of it. And then the fun started! Well, I wanta tell you, pretty near all night long they were on that house, trying to get in, you know. We kept a shootin’. Get up on the house we’d shoot up through the ceiling at them. My God, they made a noise. Sounded like a bunch of horses were running around there. Next day, we’d find tracks, anywhere there was any sand on the rocks, we found tracks of them.16, 67

  The Oregon Journal reported in 1962, in a story entitled “Monster Sightings rekindle interest in Mt. St. Helens Hairy Giant Saga,” that three persons driving along a remote mountain road east of the Cascade wilderness area had said that they saw a 10-foot, white, hairy figure moving rapidly along the roadside. The white-haired sasquatch was caught in the headlights as their car passed, but they were too frightened to turn around to investigate. They apparently reported their sighting to the police.

  The Oregon Journal also said that a Portland woman and her husband fishing on the Lewis River south of Mt. St. Helens saw a huge beige figure, “bigger than any human,” along the bank of the river. As they watched the tall creature, it “moved into a thicket with a lumbering gait.”

  The article also mentioned that the Clallam Indian tribe of Washington State had traditions of hairy giants on Mt. St. Helens. These hairy giants are called the Selahtik, a tribe of “renegade marauder-like people, who lived like animals in the caves and lava tunnels in the high Cascades.”76

  During the 1950s, as more roads were made into the remote forests of the Pacific Northwest, things started to heat up as far as claims of sasquatch encounters. On August 26, 1957 William Roe provided a sworn statement about his encounter with a female sasquatch. Roe, who had worked as a hunter, trapper, and a road worker, was doing a jop in British Columbia during October of 1955. One day he hiked five miles up Mica Mountain to explore a deserted mine.

  This illustration appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle in 1965.

  This photograph was sent to the San Francisco Chronicle and published in 1965.

  As he was stepping out of a clearing, he saw what he thought was a grizzly bear. When the animal stood up, he realized this was no grizzly bear! The animal, a female sasquatch, was six feet tall, three feet wide, and weighed approximately 300 pounds. Her arms reached almost to her knees, and when she walked she put the heel of her foot down first.

  Roe was hiding in some brush and was able to observe the creature from a distance of some 20 feet. He said that he watched, fascinated, as she used her white, even teeth to eat leaves from a nearby bush. Her head was “higher at the back than at the front"; her nose was flat. Only the area around her
mouth was bare—the rest of her body was covered in hair, none of which was longer than an inch. The ears looked very much like a human’s. The eyes were small and dark, similar to a bear’s.

  At this point, the animal caught Roe’s scent and walked back the way she had come, looking over her shoulder as she went. As she disappeared into the bush, Roe heard her make a sound he described as “a kind of a whinny.”

  Roe said he wanted to find out whether the animal was a vegetarian or whether she consumed meat as well. He searched for and found feces in several places. Upon examination, no hair or insect shells were found. Roe concluded this animal lived solely on vegetation. Most researchers agree however, that these animals probably eat a variety of foods, including fish, fowl, frogs and even deer, plus all kinds of berries, pine cones, wild onions and everything else edible, much like bears.76

  Roger Patterson and the Bluff Creek Movie Film

  As I said in the last chapter, as a youngster I had met Roger Patterson in 1967. It was a year or so later that Patterson was to film the most controversial of all sasquatch photos and movie footage.

  Patterson was a former rodeo rider who took an interest in bigfoot after reading Ivan T. Sanderson’s book Abominable Snowmen: Legend Come to Life. Patterson was born in Wall, South Dakota (famous for Wall Drug and its billboards across the state) on February 14, 1926 and died on January 15, 1972. Starting around 1958, Patterson and his friend, Bob Gimlin, began going into Washington state to do follow-up reports on sasquatch sightings and explore remote areas of wilderness where the apemen were reported to live.