Mrs. Wakeman vs. the Antichrist

by Robert Damon Schneck

  The men returned with water and told the others what happened, and everyone agreed that it was time to go. Smith’s Ford was too far away for them to reach it before sundown, and not liking the idea of being in the woods after dark, they decided to wait till morning. After dinner they smoked their pipes, fastened the door shut, and went to bed: two in a bunk built into the wall and the rest on pine boughs on the floor.

  Between cooking, smoking, and unwashed clothes, the atmosphere in the cabin must have been close, yet its inmates doubtless slept better having thick walls between themselves and the moonlit forest.

  Night of the Mountain Devils

  The assault began around midnight and, according to I Fought the Apemen, it started with a bang. Something struck the cabin with enough force to dislodge the chinking from between two of the logs onto Marion Smith and jolt the men awake. Smith was yelling, kicking, and waving his rifle, and, as Fred cleaned the debris off him, they heard what sounded like “a great number of feet trampling and rattling over a pile of our unused shakes.” Everyone grabbed a pistol or rifle, and Beck and Smith looked through the space where the chinking had been and saw ape-men outside. The cabin was being pelted with rocks, and the miners improvised a plan to defend themselves.

  The only time we shot our guns that night was when the creatures were attacking our cabin. When they would quiet down for a few minutes, we would quit shooting. I told the rest of the party, that maybe if they saw we were only shooting when they attacked, they might realize we were only defending ourselves. We could have had clear shots at them through the opening left by the chinking had we chosen to shoot. We did shoot, however, when they climbed up on our roof. We shot round after round through the roof. We had to brace the hewed-logged door with a long pole taken from the bunk bed. The creatures were pushing against it and the whole door vibrated from the impact. We responded by firing many more rounds through the door. They pushed against the walls of the cabin as if trying to push the cabin over, but this was pretty much an impossibility, as previously stated the cabin was a sturdy made building. Hank and I did most of the shooting—the rest of the party crowded to the far end of the cabin, guns in their hands. One had a pistol, which still is in my family’s possession, the others clutched their rifles. They seemed stunned and incredulous.

  A humorous thing I well remember was Hank singing: “If you leave us alone, we’ll leave you alone, and we’ll all go home in the morning.” He did not mean it to be humorous, for Hank was dead serious, and sang under the impression that the “Mountain Devils” as he called them, might understand and go away.

  At one point a hairy hand reached through the opening in the wall and grabbed an ax by the handle; Fred “swiftly turned the head of the axe upright, so that it caught on the logs; and at the same time Hank shot, barely missing my hand . . . [the] creature let go, and I pulled the handle back in, and put the axe in a safe place.17

  They never saw more than three creatures at once, and there were quiet intervals, but the attacks continued until just before dawn, at which point the apes withdrew. When it was light enough to see clearly, the men ventured out and saw one of the creatures standing at the edge of the canyon eighty yards away. Whether it was a straggler from the night before or an innocent giant hairy bystander, the men were not taking chances and Beck fired three times, toppling it over the cliff and down a gorge four hundred feet deep.18

  Taking nothing but their packs and firearms, the men abandoned the cabin along with “about two hundred dollars in supplies, powder, and drilling equipment.”

  As they drove down the mountain, Fred suggested that they keep the attack a secret. Everyone agreed, including Marion Smith, who immediately told the rangers at Spirit Lake and then his friends in the Blue Ox Tavern at Kelso. According to Fred’s son, Clifford, “my grandfather went down to the corner tavern and got a snootful. He blabbed the whole story.”19

  Sportsmen, reporters, and police converged on Mt. St. Helens in what became known as the Great Ape Hunt of 1924. The woods were full of people “armed with rifles and shotguns and pistols, and they’re shooting at anything that moves.”20 Beck returned with two reporters and a detective to find the miners’ possessions strewn about the cabin, the blasting powder missing, and at least one giant footprint. It was photographed, and pictures were taken of Fred and LeRoy Smith reenacting the siege.

  Many dismissed the story as a hoax. Deputy game warden Justus Murk declared it was “[a]ll bunk.”21 When forest rangers J. H. Huffman and W. M. Welch found a four-toed footprint, “Huffman . . . with the knuckles and palm of his right hand duplicated the imprint perfectly with the statement: ‘They were made that way.’”22 Over the years, the attack would be dismissed as either a hoax or a figment of the miners’ imagination. It could have been group hysteria brought on by a rockslide, teenagers from the nearby YMCA summer camp rolling stones into the canyon, or prankster Rant Mullens, who claimed that he and his friends threw rocks at the cabin and made the tracks with giant carved wooden feet.

  Wildly exaggerated versions of the story also appeared in print. On July 14, 1924, the Berkeley (CA) Daily Gazette reported that the miners were surrounded by “a cordon of thirty gorillas” and “200 rocks crashed through the roof to the floor of the shack.” Newspapers also printed allegedly authentic Indian legends about mountain giants and renegade tribes, “much like giant apes in appearance who lived like wild animals in the secluded caves of the High Cascades.”23

  While reporters turned in their copy, Fred got his tooth pulled. He was leaving the dentist when a group of Yakima Indians told Beck about the “Selahtiks,” beings that were “not like a man and not like a spirit, but in between.”24

  They traveled the mountain ranges, floated down rivers at night “like logs,” and ran off with Indian women. Fred learned that if he ever saw one “to make sure I expressed to them that I was friendly [by taking] some cedar boughs and [waving] it at them, and in that way they would know I had come in peace.” The Yakima also told Beck something he already knew—ape-men hold grudges: “’If you ever harm one they will get even . . . They never forget.’”25

  Nor was the miners’ adventure likely to be forgotten around Mt. St. Helens, where it is preserved in local folklore and geography. The narrow gorge where the attack occurred has been “Ape Canyon” since 1924, and when an immense lava tube was discovered nearby in 1951, it was christened “Ape Cave.”26 Meanwhile, Fred Beck returned to a more or less ordinary routine of work, family, and psychic experiments.

  After the Apes

  Traumatic Sasquatch encounters have been known to sour people on the outdoors. When a Nootka trapper named Muchalat Harry was kidnapped by hairy giants in 1928, he escaped but never left his village again. There is nothing to suggest that Fred Beck suffered similar long-term effects, and though little has been written about his life after Ape Canyon, members of the Beck family tend to put their thoughts on paper.

  Our Uncle Fred impressed us. There was [a] uniqueness about him that filled the three of us with awe. It was our feeling that he could read our innermost thoughts.

  As a child, I always tried to keep a chair between Uncle Fred and me. I felt he had “x-ray eyes,” remembers June. “I didn’t want him looking through me!”

  The fifth son of the William Becks did seem to have currents of energy that were lacking in the other Becks. He seemed engrossed in various phases of “psychic phenomena.”27

  There is no evidence that Beck continued to hold séances or prospect for gold, but he did pursue an interest in psychic healing. Ronald Beck told a friend that “his Father [sic] Fred was very similar to Edgar Casy [Cayce]. He claimed Fred had psychic powers. That he could go into a trance and predict things.”28 (Edgar Cayce [1877–1945], “the Sleeping Prophet,” gave countless trance readings. Most concerned people’s health, with occasional departures into more arcane subjects, like Atlantis.) Some of Fred’s family found the “faith-healing p
eriod” embarrassing.

  Strangers drove out the Coweeman valley road looking for the residence of Dr. Beck. They came from places out of state and stopped to ask for direction to the “Doctor.”

  Well, our Uncle Fred was a self-appointed doctor. We didn’t think of him as a real doctor so we tended to look the other way and ignore the requests. However, our parents politely gave out directions to the Alfred Beck home.29

  At some point, Beck also overcame his reluctance to discuss what happened at Mt. St. Helens and “delighted in telling the story to family members whenever he got the chance.”30 One history includes this unexpected detail:

  Clifford said his dad received a telegram from the Federal Bureau of Investigation Washington, D.C. He remembers reading it. “Do not shoot the creatures [ape-men]. The Federal Government knows all about them. They are on official record.” Or words to that effect, Cliff added.31

  For those around him, living “in the same neighborhood as Uncle Fred added excitement to a quiet community,” but Beck was not just a mystic. In 1956 he still worked at a Weyerhauser mill (producers of wood and paper) and continued there until around 1960, when his wife died and he was seventy-two years old.32

  The Birth of Bigfoot Hunting

  The attack at Ape Canyon remains a unique event, but the “Hairy Ape Hunt” that followed was not. Three years before Mt. St. Helens, Pennsylvanians were pursuing the “Gettysburg Gorilla,” and in 1931 there was a search for a short hairy creature on Long Island, New York. Ralston, Mississippi, had a “gorilla hunt” in 1952; a posse chased a peach-eating “Booger” at Clanton, Alabama, in 1960; and carloads of armed hunters set out after Texas’s “Lake Worth Monster” in 1969. Similar ad hoc expeditions have taken place around the country, but it was the development of a more systematic approach to finding ape-men that led colorful old Uncle Fred to turn his colorful old story into a book.

  In British Columbia during the mid-1950s, the Swiss emigrant Rene Dahinden and journalist John Green began a long-term, open-ended search for Sasquatch. Working independently and together, they interviewed witnesses and studied footprints and physical evidence, slowly piecing together a profile of the creatures as a species of bipedal primate. Hairy giants went from a regional to a national story in 1958, when enormous tracks appeared at a road construction site outside Bluff Creek, California.

  A bulldozer operator named Jerry Crew poured plaster into the prints, and the Humboldt Times ran a photograph of him holding the cast of what looks like the bottom of a flat, human-looking foot, sixteen inches long with potato-sized toes. The Associated Press picked up the story, and the whole country was soon aware of “Big Foot.”

  Scottish-born naturalist Ivan Sanderson followed with a magazine piece, “The Strange Story of America’s Abominable Snowman” (True Magazine, December 1959), which contains a detailed account of Crew’s story and suggests that something like the Himalayan yeti lives in the Pacific Northwest. Sanderson wrote other articles about incidents from British Columbia, including William Roe’s sighting of a female Sasquatch at Mica Mountain in 1955, and the Chapman family’s encounter with a Bigfoot at Ruby Creek in 1941. As the public read about these events, most for the first time, investigators reexamined old cases like Ape Canyon and visited Fred Beck, the one witness willing to discuss it.

  The Irish big-game hunter Peter Byrne claims to have spoken with him as early as 1960, but Byrne’s account contains unlikely errors such as Beck claiming not to know what happened to the other men who were present in 1924. (Byrne also reports that the remains of the miners’ cabin were still standing in 1972.)

  Six years later Beck was interviewed by Roger Patterson, a rodeo cowboy from Yakima, Washington. Patterson’s search for Bigfoot began after reading Sanderson’s articles, and he quizzed the old man several times about Ape Canyon, the creatures, and their footprints. He wrote it up, added some embellishments (“Tremendous boulders began pelting their cabin roof followed by loud wailing that echoed hideously off the canyon walls”), and told the story in his 1966 book Do Abominable Snowmen of America Really Exist? Rene Dahinden met Beck around 1968, and John Green sometime in the late 1960s.

  Green’s interview did not go well. Though he believes that “something exciting” happened to the miners, “Fred Beck had told his story so often that he had established a set pattern of things and there wasn’t much use in asking further questions.”33 This agrees with Beck’s nieces’ account. They describe how at one “point Uncle Fred always closed his eyes as if to get a better look,” and at another, “Uncle Fred always sighed here and brushed his right hand over his head.”34

  Decades later, John Green remembers the meeting with Beck as something out of the ordinary:

  I can recall talking to Fred Beck only once and it was a long time ago, my recollections are fragmentary, but I think I would remember if he had said anything about spiritualism, the occult etc. and I do not. What I do recall is that his son took a major role in the latter part of our conversation and insisted on showing me a photograph that he said included the image of someone who was not actually there . . .35

  When Beck was a very old man he appeared in a documentary describing the creatures as having “big, big shoulders and small hips, and hairy . . . they looked like they was eight, nine, feet tall.”36 The ape-men might have grown over time, but physical details were less important to Fred Beck than what Ape Canyon revealed about the creatures’ true nature. None of the Bigfoot hunters seemed interested in that aspect of the story, however, so Beck felt “it right that I express my views at last” and tell “the real facts after 43 years of silence” in a book.37

  He dictated the story to his son Ronald, who later wrote, “I was close to my father, and believe me, his account is straight and true,” but also told a friend that “the book was his [Ronald’s] interpretation on his Father’s story.”38 Do the contents of I Fought the Apemen reflect the elder Beck’s beliefs?

  Michael Perry, Fred’s nephew, has “no doubts about Fred and his son Ronald discussing the [metaphysical] theory, but those words were written by Ron—Fred never talked like that.”39 John Green had the same response: “When I later read the I Fought . . . book my reaction was that it was more the son’s book than Fred’s. I presume that son was Ronald . . .”40 By all accounts, Ronald held his father in high regard, and it is reasonable to assume that the results are a fair presentation of the elder Beck’s ideas, if not his idiom. Since it is impossible to know who believed what, Fred will be referred to as the sole author. (Ronald died in September 2009, a month before work on this chapter began. Since it is impossible to know who believed what, Fred will be referred to as the sole author.)

  The Metaphysics of Ape-Men

  I Fought the Apemen is a patchwork: part memoir, part history, and part metaphysical disquisition. Its twenty-two pages are divided into five sections: “The Attack” is Beck’s account of the siege, followed by a newspaper article, “Legendary Mt. St. Helens Apemen Called Legitimate”41; ”Background Events” describes Fred’s early mystical experiences; “Questions and Answers” offers amusing anecdotes about the miners’ time in the mountains, such as shooting rats off a sack of dynamite, and useful advice like “If you boil beans in the mountains, put on a good lid and be patient.” Beck describes the ape-men as physical and spiritual beings and believes that UFOs expand consciousness by “confounding the wisdom of the proud and material minded” (he was probably familiar with the Maury Island incident, which involved doughnut-shaped UFOs that appeared sixty miles northeast of Kelso in June 1947). “Miscellaneous Selections” elaborates on events at Ape Canyon, and the booklet closes with “Theories on the Origin of Abominable Snowmen,” which describes Earth in prehistoric times, Native American folklore, other Bigfoot encounters, and reflections on esoteric beliefs and higher consciousness.

  For this discussion, the crucial point about Fred’s metaphysical beliefs is that ape-men are a paranormal pheno
menon, a concept that would not raise an eyebrow among the Yakima but was something new for white men. What he believed requires some explanation, and even then Fred found it “hard to classify a spiritual subject and apply a system to it.”

  Like many mystics, Beck sees the cosmos as consisting of many spheres, dimensions, or planes of existence. The different planes are often depicted as layers, with the physical, or material, plane—the universe inhabited by humankind—sandwiched between higher and lower immaterial planes. All of them are inhabited by beings whose level of spiritual development, or consciousness, is consistent with the plane upon which they exist; beings with a primitive consciousness exist on lower levels, and those with higher consciousness in higher ones. Though the planes are separate, they overlap, and under certain circumstances nonphysical beings from other planes can manifest in the physical world.

  One reason they might do this is an impulse common to all life, on every plane: the urge to evolve. This is not evolution in the sense of adapting to the environment but movement toward a higher form of consciousness, and ultimately, to the highest form of consciousness, which is human.

  “Humanity,” however, is more than the Homo sapiens who exist in the material plane, for the inhabitants of higher, nonphysical planes like Vander White and the Great Spirit, are also human. Moreover, the level of a spirit’s consciousness determines how it will manifest in the physical world. Highly evolved spirits take noble and beautiful human forms, while beings with primitive consciousnesses from lower planes appear in crude or monstrous shapes.