Sasquatch Chronicles - SC EP:357 1924 Ape Canyon

Episode Date: September 3, 2017

Marc Myrsell is a land surveyor and public aquarist in SW Washington and has apparently found his specialty in historical monster attack research. In SW Oregon over the course of 30 years, miners and hunters had numerous sightings and at times violent encounters with large, hair covered creatures in the hills, above Port Orford, resulting in the methodical killing of four men, whose murders are still unsolved. Marc will be analyzing the 1924 Ape Canyon, the Thompson Flat Monster Projects and the Butchertown Murders (1875-1905) to discuss historical document and field research techniques that are used for in-depth, detailed investigation of long standing episodes of the unexplained. Having spent his life researching and writing on unexplained historical events, he began in earnest with a fresh investigation of the 1924 Ape Canyon attack, culminating in the discovery of the actual cabin site in 2013, where the events took place. An incredible historical story with the latest details will be shared during this presentation, you will be glad you sat in on this one!

Black thing go from left to right, and I thought, I'm going to die out here and no one's ever going to know. I couldn't believe what my eyeballs was showing me. I'll never forget how evil the eyes were. It was horrible. I mean, I've never seen nothing that evil. It ran towards me at a rate that I can't even explain, turned and stared at me. And this look of, I just want to kill you. I want to say it was human, but it wasn't.

He was yelling out, he'd he grab a gun, grab a gun. I was like, for what? He said, just grab a gun. And there's footprints all the way to the door of my house. It had went inside my garage all the way to the door. 911, what are you reporting? Sure. Get somebody out here. What's going on now, sir?

That son of a bitch is about six foot, nine, I don't know. Do you see him now, sir? Yes, I'm looking right at him. Uh-oh. to Sasquatch Chronicles. Check us out online at Sasquatch Chronicles.com. If you've had an encounter, email me. My email address is Wes at Sasquatch Chronicles.com. Welcome to the show, everyone. Thanks for being here tonight. Got a great show planned for you tonight. Woody and I are live at the International Bigfoot Conference here in Kennewick, Washington.

What do you think of the conference? This is awesome, man. What a gathering of a bunch of of great people. You know, it's a lot of fun. Everybody has something in common here. And, man, what a crowd. Look at this crowd. I know. It's amazing.

I felt like we're two sports announcers for a boxing room. Kind of fools that way, doesn't it? Yeah, no, the crowd's crazy, and a lot of cool guys. A lot of cool people. Yeah. Bob Gimlin's here, hanging out with the ladies. Yeah. I'll be taking his money later on tonight, too, as well, along with Woody's.

Yeah. Right. And I think we're actually going to play poker tonight at eight, aren't we? Yeah. Yeah, I've been telling everyone just after 8 o'clock we're going to start setting up. I don't think we have enough poker chips. We don't. Yeah. I don't think we have enough cards. Oh, yeah. We've got to get cards. I mean, I think it's going to be a pretty big showing, to be honest with you. Yeah. Well, I didn't really get a chance to, it's kind of hard to do this show like this.

Yeah, there's Mark Moseau. Yep, there he is. A lot of great guests that we have coming up. Stay tuned. I know Lyle Blackburn's going to be on the show a little bit later. He's in the booth over next to us. He is the author of Boggy Creek. He's done a few movies.

They showed his movie last night at dinner. And I know he'll be coming on here. So stay tuned for that, everyone. And we will be right back after these words. July, 1924, two miles east of Mount St. Helens in Washington State. Five miners' lives were changed forever. Fred Beck and his associates find tracks and begin arguing.

How do you know you didn't actually see it? Well, it's been in the track. It's about 18 inches long. The five miners were stalked and harassed by an unknown creature when traveling from their mine to their cabin. Until one day, they came face to face with the creature. One of the miners raised. raised his rifle, took aim, and fired.

It was a decision he would later come to regret. Few stories become legendary. This is one of them. In an act of revenge, the creatures returned that night as the miners slept. The creatures threw rocks and tried to get into the cabin. They came at the men from every angle, including the roof. The creatures were everywhere. The miners fought back, firing anywhere and everywhere.

The attack lasted through the night. Just before dawn, the creatures broke off their attack and left. All five miners, along with their cabin, survived the attack. Moving debris and exiting the cabin, the men try to comprehend what had happened that. night. The men made a pack, never to speak of this, to anyone. The story eventually got out. Where the attack happened is today called Ape Canyon. I want to welcome Mark, Marcel. Marcell? Mercelle. I haven't even been drinking yet.

Okay, me either. Welcome to the show, Mark. Thanks for coming on. Thank you, Wes. Golly, thank you for having me, man. I've been wanting two for a while. No, I'm glad to have you on. And I'm so glad that you came on, Mark. I've been a fan of your work for a long time. I think everyone is a fan of the ape canyon attack, the famous attack on the cabin. It's kind of Sasquatch lore. Yeah, you bet.

I think that particularly, I don't know, did you grow up in the Pacific Northwest? Yes, I grew up in Washington. Okay, well, there you go. Anybody in the Pacific Northwest, particularly of our age, knew about it, whether you're involved with Sasquatch community or not. everybody knows or some version because you know when early on when i got involved with the ape

canyon research hey you know mark what are you doing and so i started talking to people and about you know researching ape canyon and do you know that story oh no i don't know that story but once i got about halfway into it they're like wait a minute i know this story i remember hearing about that's a tv or you know saskatch legend of big foot or they heard some version of the story so every yeah everybody knows that in one version or another. Yeah, it's so true. You know, when we think of like Mount St. Helens, you think of the ape caves, the mountain blew up, and the ape canyon story. Yeah, and Harry Truman.

Yeah, and Harry Truman, absolutely. But what, and I want to get into your encounter and talk about the ape canyon. I missed a presentation that was over here, so forgive me. Well, you're working. Yeah, well, I really wanted to hear it. I really, really wanted to hear it. And, but as far as what got you interested in the ape canyon in particular, why did you spend so much time focusing on that? Because what you did, I don't think you get enough credit for.

Oh, thank you. You're nice. Yeah, because, you know, it burnt down. A lot of people said, you know, it's lost a legend. And a lot of times when something has lost a legend, it's never found again. Yeah, you've got. And you found it. Yeah.

But what started your obsession with the ape canyon? If you have enough time. Yeah. Long story. You know, okay, let me tell you. I was born in 1966, right? And when any of us were coming of that age, six, seven, eight years old, where we're starting to, like, think about what's going on around us and becoming aware.

Well, at that time, that was when American pop culture started having a resurgence in the unexplained and, you know, unknown stuff. So, you know, I was growing up, and, you know, that hit, like, B movies, TV. So I grew up with In Search of. I grew up with Colchack, The Nightstocker, and, you know, books like Cherries of the Gods. And, I mean, you know, so it was hitting me at the right time, you know, in the 20th century at the right age for me. And I've always been fascinated with just unexplained mysteries of life, right? So any time I'm going to the library, which includes the event when I went down to the Vancouver Public Library, I'm always hanging around the lower regions of the Dewey Decimal System, you know, the zero-zero-one's and stuff, you know, looking for anything new on the shelf.

It's land as their pyramids or pyramids or anything that piques my interest. So it was my first book that I ever read by, that it picked up, looked cool, by Nick Redfern. And he wrote Three Men Seeking Monsters, which I cannot recommend enough. And if Nick ever listens to this, or I'm talking to Nick, I hope he's considering selling the movie rights for that book. Because the book is a... What's it called again? Three Men Seeking Monsters. Oh, okay.

And it was while Nick was still in England, and it's he and two buddies hear this story about a man monkey, a hundred-year-old story down in Cornwall called the Man Monkey, 1880s or so. And they get into a van, and it's kind of a buddy road trip going through southwest England, you know, pub crawls, interviewing all these weird people to go down and, you know, research the Man Monkey. Well, later on in the book, NIT promulgates an idea, and I don't know if it originated with Nick, but it was an idea that kind of grabbed me.

And the idea was that if you have a rash of lights in the sky or pulpit ice or Saskatch or whatever, if you look around the general geographic area and around the general timeline, more often than not, you're going to to find other seemingly unrelated disconnected phenomenon as fort used to say of high strangeness right and so that idea is like it was it towards the end of the book and i was like well that's that's an interesting idea i never really thought about so i purposely picked two stories off of my shelf to purposefully test that out i'm going to grab these two stories and go back to those and take a look take a look around one was extremely well known the 1924 Canyon incident and one is not known at all. It's never been published and it took place

sort of western Yamhill County in Oregon. And it was a strange chain of events over about three or four years of dark shadowy figures with red glowing eyes in the woods and there were multiple witnesses over the period of years. So the problem of trying to track down those witnesses for the Yamhill County incident coupled with the fact of me starting the preliminary re-research of Eighth Canyon. The Amhill County project got way put on the back burner because as I started to get into Eighth Canyon,

like I tell everybody, it's like, you know, opening up the closet, you know, after you've stuffed it full, after cleaning the house and everything tumbles down on top, you know, the kitchen sink and mules and everything. Eight Canyon turned into this massive treasure trove of information that was published

at the time in 1919. 24 that may have been picked out a little bit, but there was a lot that hadn't been brought out. One of the troubles with Ape Canyon is that Fred Beck, it's one of the blessings and curses, is that Fred Beck and his son Ronald Arnie Beck published their famous book in 1967. I fought the Eight Man of Mount St. Helens, right? That story, Fred Beck's writing has been continually just repeated over and, over and over again, and it's been relied on as the primary source. And that's understandable. Fred was the first-hand, one of the miners involved in 1924. But he wrote that book in 1966 and

1967, that's when it's published. The funny thing about Abe Canyon is that there was the big attack on the night of July 10th, 1924, and the miners split. They headed down the trail. We're not going to tell anybody. Don't tell anybody a thing. They're going to think we're nuts. And they had had an encounter before the 4th of July that same year, and they said the same thing. So they returned to their families for the 4th of July to celebrate down and kill so. And they had kind of made baby steps to tell their families what had happened. And what they were telling was that initial encounter of the creature peeking up behind a cedar tree with Marion Smith. and Fred Beck and those three shots were taken and the skin the bark of the tree was skinned off.

You know, that's happened before July 4th. So they went back into town and talked to their family and kind of got an idea of what kind of potential ridicule they might receive. And so when they're walking back to the car, running back to the car, the six miles to Spirit Lake on the morning of July the 11th, don't tell anybody, right? well I always think thinking about that idea of not telling anybody it's like you know I'm going to come here and I'm going to put on the headphones and I'm going to hang out with my good friend Wes and just wrap about 8 Canyon what if I had just gotten hit by a truck teaboned in the intersection coming here how can I come and hang out with Wes and not say you're not going to believe Wes

what just happened to me you know I'm going to talk to you about it well when it took a solid day to go from Spirit Lake through Castle Rock back to Kelso And so they got back there about Friday night. After that, the first thing I'm going to do, which is what Marion Smith did, is I'm going to go have a beer. So you ended up at the Blue Ox Tavern on the foot of First Street in Kelso. And he could not talk about it. He talked to his friend who was a bartender there. I got the Blue Hawk. I got the Blue Hawk.

Is that how it got out? That's how it got out. I got the lead from our friend John Pickering, because John is a local Southwest Washington guy, and he's really into history. And so he approached me and we became friends and he told me about the whole Blue Ox Tavern thing, right? Yeah. So Marion Smith ends up telling the Blue Ox Bar-Tender,

it's a small town. At the time, the Longview Daily News was being published on a daily basis. It was an evening paper. So next thing you know, a reporter from the Longview Daily News hears about it and that story gets, it hits the street that next Saturday night.

So from Thursday night, Friday night, Saturday night, between the initial attack on Thursday night, it was almost less than 48 hours before it had the paper, right? At the time, we had the AP wire, and so it got out on the wire and spread like wildfire thanks to the AP wire and started getting published. Isn't that funny, though? Isn't that how normally something like this would happen? Guy gets out drinking too much. He's probably drinking because he's stressed out.

Yeah. You know, and he goes over there, starts drinking, and spills his guts, and all of a sudden it ends up. I never knew that. I never knew that's how it got out. I thought he told a family member and then they went and went to the newspaper, but what you said makes more sense. He'd be drinking at a bar, still in his guts. And thank goodness when I'm drinking, it doesn't hit the paper the next day.

No kidding. No kidding. And so that's how it ended up getting out and what it ended up being the aftermath, since it spread through so many newspapers about, what was called at the time mountain devils, these big hairy eight men up on Mount St. Helens. What ensued was what they called the Great Ape Hunt of 1924. Historianically, they would say that half the population of the young men in southwest Washington and half the armory was drained while everyone's going up on the mountain,

if we're going to bag the big one, you know, we're going to, and it was a shooting match. I've got to tell you, because it ended up where, rangers of their own individual districts around Mount St. Helensonson's Comenia County, Lewis County, Spirit Lake. They finally ordered that all weapons had to be checked before you entered the forest. No, it was that bad.

It was that bad, yeah. After the attack, Fred Beck and his brother-in-law, Leroy Smith, two of the youngest miners up there, they returned to the cabin one time after the attack a week later. And I'm not sure why they took two Portland policemen.

They took two Portland policemen, a reporter from the Portland News. So it's the name of the newspaper, Portland News. And I'll get to this later, but also a newsreel company as well. No kidding. Yeah, there might be newsreel footage still existing out there. It's like my holy grail. But they ended up taking two Portland policemen up there.

The Portland Police Museum helped me out a lot to actually get me the professional head shots of these policemen you know like they're still photos and who they were and what their backgrounds were but they took he took two policemen up there and I guess it was it had been raining the night before and it was a little windy

and the brush shook and the first thing one of the cops does he whips out of shooting iron and start shooting into the bush yeah so you know so even a policeman they must have believed these guys I think because what cops today if he said hey it was attacked by the ape man and cops aren't going to go out there and help you.

But at that time, you know, I guess it was a different time and that they were very believable for the cops to even go up with these guys back to the cabin. With these two Portland policemen, I really don't know. The policemen were not interviewed, and so I don't have any kind of like feedback of what the policeman thought. The general public,

I can't say they were split into believing what these. guys said and the other half not believing but one thing getting into it I was shot at the amount of explained-of-away theories and ridicule that came out right after the attack much like one would see today you know I think that we we like to think of our four of our predecessors as these bumpkins who would believe anything coming down the tracks right but that wasn't the case at all as soon as that story hit the papers and everyone was reading about it immediately there were let's see one two three major maybe four things that people would harken on what would talk about about they really did not get attacked by mountain devils it was a b or c they were

spiritualists is one of them you know i've never been attacked by bigfoot anytime i've used a wiji board but they're spiritualists right uh they're spiritualists right uh they're spiritualists right uh They were drunk. You know, they were moonshiner. They had a still up there. The YMCA boys from Spirit Lake did it. The Indians did it. You know, there are all these immediate, trying to explain it away,

some of which I've found not only don't hold water and trying to analyze it, but also on a couple of the ideas, I have found solid evidence that the YMCA, as an example, the YMCA boy camp at Spirit Lake, they did not do it. They were there the day before camping out, but I actually have an article published that noted that all the campers were back in camp six miles away when the attack actually happened. So it wasn't the Boy Scouts, YMCA boys at all. No, and you wouldn't think that these guys would, I don't see guys, especially back that time, even more so today, opening fire through the walls and just unloading everywhere you can go. That's true terror. When you take out a weapon.

Right on. And you, yeah, you just start blasting right through the walls and whatever's coming. You're truly terrified for your life at that point. That's not YMCA boys. That's not. Yeah, the one thing that I talk about, argumentatively, mind you, as talking about the YMCA boys, is that the idea was that there were two or three YMCA boys, that it snuck out after bed check and camp went up to the cabin and mind you what it is.

It's a six-mile hike from the camp up to Pumasbute. You have to ascend Pumasbute about two or three hundred feet. Go down the other side of Pumasbute about seven or eight hundred feet to get to the cabin site, right? And so they would have had to have done all that thrown rocks on the cabin and gotten back into bed before anyone went missing. But the story that would have hit the paper is not five men getting attacked by mountain doubles. I felt that the story would have been five men getting arrested for shooting, opening fire on two or three young unarmed YMCA boys. That would have been the real story. Yeah.

Right. And that didn't happen. And a lot of this came out afterwards, you know, about a week or two afterwards, that, oh, my son confessed and he said that he did it. Yeah. And that's rugged country, too. I mean, I've been, I haven't been to the cabin side. I don't know we were going to do it last year. And the weather just got, it would have been a huge.

mistake. It would have been bad. Major, major mistake, but... Yeah, we may not be sitting here today. Yeah, it's true. There was flooding. There was snowstorm. Yeah, a lot of snow, yeah. But, you know, that whole area is very rugged country. Yeah. And I can't imagine trying to traverse that at night.

Exactly. I mean, during the day, it's hard enough. Most people, you know, you're talking the side of Mount St. Helens, really. Right. And it is rough, rough country. Yeah, that area in particular. Ape Canyon is an example. Further south, there's lava canyon near near the south end at Smith Creek, that immediate area produces extremely dramatic box canyons

that are very deep and narrow and very sheer walls. And, yeah, it's not easy to get around, man. So, yeah, I completely discount the YMCA boys. Yeah, no, and I think most of the stuff that you can discount, because, you know, it just doesn't make sense. Yeah, it doesn't make sense. There's a lot of cases where people on the show and it's, they never saw it. But when you line up the details, it's not a baron, it's not a person. Okay, yeah.

And I would imagine in a situation like this, you could take some of these people like the YMCA boys, plug it in and go, that makes no sense. That makes absolutely no sense of all. Exactly. Yeah, exactly. Well, it kind of did hold water that the Indians did it. The Indians did it. Well, cultural stories of Spirit Lake. Spirit Lake was a no-go area for the tribes around that area.

the Callets and the Yakima. You weren't supposed to go up there. Maybe you know, maybe some people don't. I think it's a holy place. They view it as a holy place, don't they? No, it is not. No. Because, you know, in English, we say Spirit Lake, and we think of, you know, our stereotypes of Indian folks. It's like, oh, they're talking about the great spirit.

No, it's not. They're talking about the band of the mountain spirits. They're talking about the big hairy tribe that lives up there that will mess with you if you go up there. And so that's why Spirit Lake was a no-go area. There's an old story where many, many, in the old times, as my Indian friends used to say, that human Indian folks did live around Spirit Lake.

But if you had a daughter that was unfortunately born with reddish hair, when she got around puberty, there were too many times when they would be kidnapped by this tribe that lived. lived further up the mountain. Really? Wow. And the tribe, in the Calhlet's dialect, I don't know the name specifically, but in the dialect around Clallum, around the Olympic Peninsula, they were called Seatix. That's right.

That's right. That's right. I got this from a Clallum reporter wrote in the 1920s, and he described, because he were the Ciotics. and the Cetects knew how to weave a specific kind of cedar basket. That's right. And so the story of the old times is that they said, look, and there was a meeting, and they said, look, if you teach us and show us how to make these baskets that you're stuffing our daughters into for kidnapping,

if you show us how to weave those baskets, then we will leave Spirit Lake and we'll never come back. and that's how the local tribes have these wonderful cedar baskets today from the story that they got on this truce agreement from the Ciotic tribe up there. So that's the old story of Spirit Lake, right? But at the time, no, nobody lived up at Spirit Lake. Yeah, I always thought it was a holy place and that's why they never went through. That makes more sense. It's the exact opposite of a holy place. Because the Indians do avoid, the Native Americans do avoid.

Thank you, everyone. Thank you. We're here all night. Thanks, folks. The natives, you know, they will, they avoid Mount St. Helens like it's the plague. Yep. And I've always assumed Spirit Lake was more or less a lake play. I did a show on the Sea of Tech.

And so that's why. Oh, did you really? Oh, nice, cool. And I wasn't sure if they were talking about an ape, like Sasquatch, or not that Sasquatch. We don't know what Sasquatch is. Right. what I'm saying is like it almost sounds like they were talking about a tribe

of a giant people. You're... More than like an animal. Yeah, you're talking about both. I'm going to hearken back to York Totsky who is a sideline research project that came off of a weekend. He was one of the coolest cats

I've ever read about. He was a man of letters. He edited a newspaper called The Real American out of Hoquim, close to where I live. And the paper was dedicated It ran for about three or four years, and it was dedicated exclusively to Native American affairs. And this was in 1920 through 1924 or so.

And, you know, it was, it's, you know, Indian papers somewhat of avant-garde today, certainly, you know, in 1920s. And so right after the ape canyon attack, one of the very last articles that York wrote for his paper was about a week after the ape canyon attack. and York said, look, I got the whole scoop on this. You know, these guys were not attacked by mountain devils. They were attacked by Indians who live upon Mount St. Helens. That was the headline. That was the first paragraph. It was an extensive article.

But what most people did not go ahead and do was read the rest of the article. Because if they did, they would realize that this tribe that attacked the miners, according to York Totsky, were seven and eight feet tall and covered entirely with reddish brown hair, right? So Toski's thing was, I think he had an agenda to kind of try to educate the world about this elusive tribe of Indians up there. And he must be rolling in his grave because what actually stuck was that, oh, the Indians did it. Yeah.

Without, you know, going into the details. Sounds like today, when the clickbait, you know, when it's something, yeah, that's right. Yeah, that's right. That's hilarious. I never knew that story either. And so when you found the cabin, what did you find? Initially, well, it was about a... Or unless I'm jumping ahead, Mark.

No, no, no, no. It was about seven, well, the whole thing started about seven years ago or so when I started to research it. After about four or five years, I started to realize that there is no map. There was never any map of the claim or of the cabin or the mine. It was just sort of this basket of clues about where it's. could be. However, I did realize part way through that where this could possibly be within this like half mile by quarter mile area, that could have very well have survived the eruption, the big eruption

of Mount St. Howland's through sort of like some sort of like weird coincidence of topography. You know, it's a very, it's a very strange reason why it could have been. So at that point, while I'm still collecting documents, I'm going up there. Oh, I just found out the other day going through my photos. My first trip up there was in 2011, when my first trip is to poke around and that kind of stuff. And after about five or six trips, a friend said, hey, you know, you've been telling me about this project. Can you take me up there? I want to go. It's like, oh, well, okay. So there were four, no, there were five of us in 2013. And getting to the cabin side is extremely dangerous. And so everybody,

gets to a comfortable point and they look way down the mountain. And all except for one is like, nope, I'm not going to. I'll just go out hiking for the day. You guys have fun. So it was me and a friend Gabe. And Gabe was cool. Gabe was, his name's Gabe Tammy, and he's not really like a big footer kind of guy. But I really appreciated taking him because he was a good sounding board.

The guy is in monster shape. He was a forest, he was a smoke jumper for the forest service. But he was really good because I could tell Gabe, This is what I'm looking for. These are the clues I'm looking for in relationship to the canyon. There was a rock outcropping noted in the mining claim that I should be looking for. And so we be sitting and I'm looking for this and I think it's around here. And Gabe could tell me, yeah, that makes sense.

Or no, I don't see that at all. So there was a point where Gabe was down below me about 30 feet. And I said, okay, okay, look, there's some trees downhill from us, about 200 feet or so. and Gabe's below me, and I said, do you think that you could get there? One of the crucial items that I'm looking for at that time are the remnants of some stumps. The area had never been commercially logged because it's so treacherous. And there were stumps in a 1924 photo of the cabin

where the miners had cut down those stumps, and you could see the stumps in the photo right next to the cabin. So I knew that if I could find old rotten stumps, Stumps can last a very long time in the woods, right? I knew if I could find those stumps, I knew I'd be close. So Gabe goes on, and I follow him, and it's just, you know, monstrous vine maple having to get through there. And I can't even see Gabe, and I'm almost through the vine maple,

and he's like 15 feet away from me, and I can't see him. And Gabe found a stump. Then we found another stump. And then we found another stump and another stump. We had a metal detector with us, and so we break out the metal detector. And on that trip, I think the very first thing I found, just about six inches underground or so, was a wire with about 18, 19 inches long, with a curly cue around it as if it had been used for baling, like a baling wire. You know, we ended up finding nails in the ground.

But the funny thing is, is that we ended up finding nails in the ground all along a line, like in a straight line, like 20, 20 foot long straight line, right? And we get into it a little bit more. and just under the crust, just under the ash and the pumice, about six inches down, we found an old rotten log, weighing horizontally with the nails still driven into it. And the nails, someone pointed out, I described what I found in these nails, and these nails when they were driven in. As an example, there were two nails,

and they were driven partway in to make an X. The nails were still sticking up out of the wood. as if it were an X. And someone pointed out that was a classic log cabin building technique where you drive two nails in, you make an X so that when you put the next log on top, there's a little bit of grip there for those nails so the log just doesn't not fall off again while you're trying to secure it. And so we found, and so we were messing around some more,

and we're very, very confident that this is the foundation of the underground, the foundation of the eight canyon cabin. That's amazing. It's amazing. There you go. Okay. Thank you. You guys are very nice.

Yeah, that's amazing that you found your laughing mark. Give you a break. Yeah, no, it's amazing that you guys found that. And, you know, it burned down, didn't it? Didn't the cabin burn down at some point in time? Or is that? I'm going to say I'm not confident of that at all. What do you think it happened?

The only, the idea of it burning down, we have a great audience here tonight you guys are so nice thing you know Wes gets us it on every show

and the only the reason why we think it burnt down is only and it's the only time ever ever seen a reference is in Fred Beck's book

Fred Beck's book I fought the Men of Mount St. Helens published in 1967 and he said that the cabin burnt down

or he understood that the cabin had burnt down right so here's an old man let's see he was, when the book was published, he was into his 70s. I don't have the exact age.

My brain's not working. But he said it had burnt down. He hadn't been up there forever, like 40 years. How do you know it burned down? Yeah, exactly. He did not note in the book how he knew that, or if someone told him that or anything. The reason why I think it did not burn down is because even more than stumps, charcoal lasts a long time in the ground.

And there are two things. if it was a wildfire, forest fire, there are sizable trees right around the cabin, very, very sizable trees that may not be there if it was a big forest fire that burned down the cabin. It would have burnt down everything. The cabin was a formidable cabin. It was like about 10 feet by 20 feet with big dang logs that they cut down to build it. If it was intentionally set on fire to the point of being burnt down to the ground, it would have had to have been a very intense fire to burn down a log cabin.

So, but more importantly than that, there wasn't any, there's no charcoal in the ground at all. And I have gotten down to natural ground underneath the ash, right? So the reason why, when one goes there today, you're walking out in the woods and there's some rocks and there's some trees and there's some fern and there's some vine maple. There's no above ground evidence of the cabin at all. You have to realize that this is near, well, it is. It's pretty much at the timber line of Mount St. Helens that gets whatever, six, eight, 10 feet of snow every single year. Now, I, this is, I think it's my first contact with the Bigfoot community, is in 2013, I believe, is when we found the cabin.

I had heard that Bob Gimlin was going to be at the Sasquark Summit. Yeah. And so, a friend, Jamie Trimble, well, we had corresponded and I knew Jamie was going to be there. I knew Bob was going to be there. So I was like, Jamie, you know, I was like, Bob Gimlin's this. big spooky celebrity, you know, he's not at all. He's a warmest guy I've ever met. But I went to the summit, Jamie, you know, can you introduce me to Bob?

I wanted to talk to Bob because I understood that Bob and Roger Patterson had visited the cabin site at some time in the early 60s. Oh, well, I didn't know that. Yeah. And so I talked to Bob and he's like, well, Bob, you know, like I said, Bob gambling's so very warm. I'm just standing there as a nobody in the back. And he must have gotten worse. because he crosses my path in front of me, and he stops, and he takes two steps back.

He says, hey, you're the Abe Canyon guy. Hey, I want to talk to you. And so we end up sitting down for like an hour. And Bob lays it all out. He said, yeah, and he was around 1961 or 1962. When Roger and Bob visited ape canyon, they did get to the cabin. And the way that Bob had explained it, it's at that time, through disuse and through the weight of the yearly snows, and it kind of like started crumbling in on itself. roof was collapsed and because of that the logs were kind of so it was just kind of like a remnant

of a cabin anymore it was semi-standing in 1961 or 62 but then fast forward from 61 to 2013 and no there's no cabin there's no nothing you know I had always had hopes of fantasies of I knew they had a fire inside of some sort of standing chimney standing stones over but no all it was was just a fire in the middle of the cabin with a vent for the smoke to come out. So you go out there and no, there's nothing there. You know, there's nothing obvious as you're going through the woods. Stumps. Yeah, there's stumps.

Do you still go out to it? Heck yeah. Yeah, you bet. This year, I am not sure. My sweetheart son, Santiago, is 13 this year. And he has been really getting into outdoorsmanship, how to start a fire with nothing kind of thing. You know, I just had to be out in the woods. And so, you know, I've been going up to Abe Canyon a lot and through the past three or four years.

And, you know, my daughter Veronica, she's 17 and she's like very embarrassed about her father being here talking to West German and stuff, you know. But Santiago is like, I want to go this year. And so, yeah, at least Santiago and I are probably going to go up. Maybe, see what else, maybe wants to poke along. But there is one more piece of field work that needs to go. and I'm a land surveyor so everything needs a map right everything needs a map so the last part

since I am working on writing all of this research into a book form because you know I might get hit by a bus and you know someone off to go talk to my wife Catherine to get it all the files back and stuff I want to publish a book and so that needs a map of significant features about the story the cabin

they built a ladder in order to get down to the cabin I've identified the latter site. The spring where the initial sighting and shooting took place. I've identified the spring. I think I found the trail between the cabin and the spring. The mine is, I'm pretty confident that the mine is gone. The cabin was built about 30 feet above the mine entrance. I gleaned that because people visited the cabin in 1924 and kind of described

the topography and the lamp. Where the mine's up. Yeah, right. And so right below the mine. entrance is like a 200-foot drop into the bottom of the canyon. I think what happened was, was that with earthquakes from the eruption, being basalt and being relatively soft porous rock, the sides of the canyon and the earthquake kind of spalled off and changed the cross-section, if you will, of the canyon. So with that, I think that the mine has either collapsed or the entrance is gone. However, right below the cabin site, I stupidly risked my life and went down over the edge a little bit, and I found a small, tiny hole in the side of the rock. And like caves or mines,

they breathe through the day with airflow from the change in barometric pressure as the temperature goes up and temperature goes down. Sometimes holes in the ground, like caves, will suck air in, or blow air out, depending on the time of day. So an old caver test, I've been caving for years, is you can take a little bit of dust in front of a hole and kind of throw it into the hole and see if it blows back, or if the dust is sucked back in to see if there's a large...

I don't know that. Yeah, it's a caver trick. So it's one of those things to indicate a larger void beyond this tiny little hole than you're looking at. And sure enough, I got a little hole and did the dust trick, and yeah, it was breathing. So maybe the mine, which I understand, stand with about 75 to 100 feet deep.

There's a hard rock mine. Maybe there's parts of the mine still there underground. That's amazing. It'd be cool to go in there. I wonder if they left anything behind. According to Rod Beck, Fred Beck's grandson, you know, the second or third generation stories, of course you have to take him with a grain of salt because they're family stories. With Rod Beck, I put a fair amount of credence into,

because he grew up with one of Fred's sons. I don't know exactly, but I got the impression like there may have been some sort of family trouble, but around his early teens, his dad said, look, you're going to go live with your grandfather, Fred. So between early teens and into late teens or early adulthood, Rod lived with his grandfather, Fred Beck. Oh, wow. Then he got a job and moved out. He calls him Fred. He doesn't call him Grandpa. But I asked Rod, you know, what do you think about Fred Beck's story?

you know, just what's your gut feeling? And Rod said, you know, whatever Fred said was 100% true. He believed it. So I guess that Fred did give him directions to the cabin site. Rod, in the early 70s or so, was a work to logging around Chalachie Prairie in that kind of area. And so in one day off, he went up to the cabin site, 71, 72, and he said the mine was still there.

and there were I'm going to wait for the applause because this is a good one he said that there were still tools left inside the mine really? Wow. Yep That would be a cool fine Yeah yeah there still are some artifacts

that I'm tracking down one of them is Leroy Smith he was about 18 or 19 years old at the time of the attack and his son and daughter is still alive I talked with his granddaughter,

his daughter, excuse me. And she said that her brother, according to the family story, still has all of old dads old guns. Oh, really? When dad died, yeah, her brother got all of dazzled. So, you know, there's these stories floating around about the ape canyon guns still out there somewhere.

Yeah. I wanted to ask you the one part about the story, where they shoot it and it falls off a cliff. Did they, through all your research, is that pretty much how it went down? Relatively so, yeah. Now, again, going back to Fred's book, his version,

kind of play-by-play version of what happened at that moment, it was a little bit different than other contemporary accounts at the time. You see, by 1967, there were only two minors still alive, and that was Fred Beck, and his brother-in-law, Leroy Smith, Leroy Smith said in 1924, I don't know what that was. He was interviewed. All the minors were interviewed in 24, but Leroy Smith in 24 said, I don't know what that was, but I do know I never want to have anything to do with it ever again. And it's true, because when I talked to his daughter, his daughter said, dad never said anything. I never knew about this. She

knew about Eat Canyon, but she didn't know that her dad was one of the miners, right? So he shut his mouth about that. So in 1967, LeRoy Smith was still alive, but he wasn't talking. John Green when they interviewed Fred Beck, but he understood that Leroy Smith didn't want to talk, so John Green never bothered Smith about it. Anyway, my point being, in 67, Fred's word was the only thing he left about the story. However, in 1924, all the miners were in. interviewed, right? And they were interviewed separately, sometimes public. Their interviews were published separately in different newspapers. And so the idea, what Fred said was the creature was shot, one of the very last times before the attack on the Akabin. One of the very last times was the

creature being shot on the edge of the cliff and falling down into it. Fred's account is that it happened the morning after the attack, but in 1924, all of the miners said, no, it happened on Thursday, day, day before the attack. And what had happened, this was about the third shooting or so. Leroy was coming back from the spring, and they knew this creature was out there, and they had taken some pop shots at it. Leroy was coming back from the spring. There's something in the bush.

He turns out, he's almost up the cabin. He turns around. There's this big creature. Leroy has a revolver, and he shoots at it. Well, this is later in the day, so all the miners are in the cabin, and they start piling out of there. like bees and everyone shooting at this dang thing. Marion Smith, the dad, estimated there were about 16 to 18 rounds that went into this creature

and one of the very last shots. According to the 24 account was that the creature was on the cliff, someone shoots it either Smith or back and the creature either falls into the canyon or it crouches down and scrambles down, climbs down into the canyon, right? So that was on Thursday day and then Thursday night all hell broke loose. Why do you think that they were shooting at it? Do you think that they were shooting at it because they were terrified of this thing? Or do you think it was an annoyance?

Or do you think it was just something unknown? And these guys are just tailbillies up there doing pop shots? I mean, what is your honest opinion? Because when you read the accounts, my impression is they were terrified. They were. They were terrified. And there is something significant going on about these men's, one in particular, maybe two. Something significant going on about these men's.

backgrounds and it's sort of the patriarch. Fred Beck gets most of the credit because he was alive in the 60s and nobody else was. But really the patriarch of this group was Marion Smith and it was Fred's father-in-law, right? Marion Smith was the son of Lorenzo Perry Smith who was an old donation land claim owner, one of the sort of settlers of the Lexington neighborhood of Kelsa. And Marion grew up in the age of Big Timber, right? In 1890s, 1900s, as a young man. And he had spent a lot of time in the woods, and it was a passion of his.

And he was known as a very amicable, nice man, but he was also known as being very square, that when he said he did something, you can bank on it. When he said he was going to do something, you could bank on that. Marion was a very straight guy, right? And he had been in the mountains his entire life with his dog.

He had shot, he had fished, he had seen everything that there was to see up in the mountains. And he wasn't like a, like a Yosemitey Sam, root and tutin, tough guy. But it's just the facts that he had been in the mountains and he was known as a crack shot, square guy, very dependable guy. But Marion Smith was one of the first ones

who admitted that he was extremely disturbed, very early on by the weird whistling noises going on from ridge to ridge that started about two years previous. There was something spooky going on so that when they would go up, Marion ordered everybody, you will not leave the campsite without a gun. So they were very terrified. They found tracks, didn't they? Yeah, they did.

Let's see, the mine got started in 1922, and at the time, this was two years prior, at the time they were just tent camping at the base of Pomas Butte, and they would camp and leave their camp there, and then before at the end of the season, at the end of the year, they'd take everything back down. While they were tent camping, I believe it was the first year of the mine in 22, they found an extremely large track in the sandy area of the creek just before it falls into ape canyon. So they had found everything that pretty much we would find today in some sort of evidence or encounter up in the woods. Yeah, it reads like a modern-day type of encounter.

It sure does. It sure does. Except that, you know, most of the most of the same. Most of us don't shoot into the creature and it just turns around and walks out. Yeah, you know, I'm amazed too when you hear about how many shots were taken. A lot. At this thing. How many times did those guys hit it?

Well, we do know that this was, of course, before the cabin attack. So the first one was three. The next one with Leroy was three. And then the next one Thursday Day was about 16 to 18. So it plugged it a good 20, 25 times if it was the same creature in the period of a week or two. Now, when the cabin got attacked, there started with a big, big bang against the cabin that knocked out a piece of split-log chinking. And you could, it left a hole. There weren't any windows in the cabin, but this chinking fell out and there was a hole.

And they peeked through. I checked the lunar record. It was a full moon that night, like they said. And they could see seven or eight creatures dancing around the cabin, and they're starting to get on top of the cabin. They're starting to try to get through the door. These guys tore apart all their beds that they had made out of fur, branches and bows, and they blockaded the door like crazy. And, you know, something's trying to get in.

Oh, one thing that really was brought out in contemporary writings, something was digging underneath the cabin during the attack to try to get in. And one of the reporters that visited the cabin later did note that they did see that something pretty darn big had almost made it inside through two. through digging in the hole trying to get in there, you know. I'm surprised they made it out. They left the next day, didn't they? Yeah, as soon as dawn broke.

And so it's summertime. And so dawn was coming around like four or five o'clock. By that point, everything was super quiet. And they peeked through the tour. Nothing, rocks everywhere. They had piled up a leftover bundles of split, dug-fur shingles when they had, you know, had shake to the roof of the cabin.

Those were scattered everywhere. footprints everywhere. And there was like, frankly, let's get the hell out of here and go back home. Don't you find it amazing, though, they made it out that day? Like, their creatures retreated and they just kind of left them alone that they were, maybe because they were leaving. Maybe so. Maybe so.

Maybe it was, you know, we don't want to hurt them. We just want to scare them kind of. Yeah. You know, and it worked. But mind you, the cabin today, and as it was then, was it good six miles to the truck, because the closest place you could park the truck was at Spirit Lake at the time. So it must have been the longest life. Exactly.

Yeah, that's right. And when they got there, the two people that they met at the Ranger Station was Bill and Wilma Welch. Bill was the ranger at Spirit Lake. And that's the famous story where Marion is talking to Bill. And he says, I got one. I told you just in case, you know, you wanted to know if I got one of them. I got one. A, you know, Cougar?

No, no. A mountain devil. A Wolverine? Because there were still Wolverines up there. I guess they're coming back to Mount Sin Island. No, no, no, I got a mountain devil. Okay, Marion, whatever. And so Marion rounds around to get into the truck.

The rest of guys are in there. Bill, the Ranger, goes up, and Bill said later, when he was interviewed in 1968, he said he had never seen a group of more scared men in his life. These other four guys in the truck, he said they were badly shaken. There was something very wrong that happened up there. Yeah. No, it's God, it's an amazing account. You know, I love the story.

I love the fact that they, I'm so glad that they came out with it. Even though it was a drunken night, you know, spilling his guts. But I'm glad he had those beers, man, because, you know, when he has something like that happened, you have to talk about it. Who couldn't? I think people who have encounters, they want to tell someone. They want to, you know. Today. Today, you know, we're here hanging out to the International Bigfoot Conference.

I mean, you're a West Gurm. Oh, the famous West German. No, no, no. And I'm just the Kenyan dude. But nonetheless, people do come up and they do recognize that you're part of the Bigfoot community. And they're compelled to share their story. It's very, very important. And I was talking with...

Tumbling, isn't it? Yeah. Well, yeah, you bet. It's very nice. Because it's something very private, something very personal. Well, you and I were hanging out with a cat last night. And he and I were talking about... And I am no expert or no therapist, but I recognize it.

I see similarities between people's Sasquart stories and, frankly, PTSD. A lot. They have this video, this image that's looped in their brain, and they can't get rid of it, and they need to talk about it, right? And so I see that a lot, particularly this weekend. Yeah, absolutely. There's definitely a lot of PTSD when it comes into encounters. Tell us about your encounter.

You were up there. I never had an encounter. No, anyway. I really have it. I really can't classify this as an encounter. It's interesting. I had an encounter, man. I had an encounter with something up there.

And oddly enough. Tell us about it. Were you up there looking for the cabin? Yeah, it was, oddly enough, it was 2013 in the summer of the third week of June, the day that we found the initial evidence of the cabin, right? And so, of course, you know, I am in dream. I can't even believe that this is real that actually this stuff and I see it's amazing.

So Gabe and I get back and the rest of the guys are there and my friend Brad is like, oh, you didn't find anything, did you? It's like, okay, look, we need a press conference, sit down. And so we're rapping about that and we're eating. And this is basically at the very, very base of the glaciers. Actually, there are friends who could walk like, you know, 100 feet from camp and you would be in the glaciers. So it was that close to the mountain.

It was June, and so it was about the 9, 10 o'clock. And the sun, you could not see the ball of the sun. It had just gone down, but there were just enough, a little bit of light in the sky, a certain amount of lumens in the sky for that time. And then, you know, it's been, or I don't know who it was, but someone said, shut up, shut up, shut up, listen, and about a quarter mile away up on a ridge,

just do straight west of us, maybe three or four hundred foot elevation gain, there's some loud creature, loud something up there talking, and either they're talking to us or talking about us. And it was sort of a loud howling, you know, staccato chattering. And it's a really, really, it goes on for about two or three minutes. next thing you know, do south of that first voice, there's a second one, about a thousand feet south. And they start talking back and forth to each other.

Okay, but another two or three minutes, there's a third one further south, and the three of them in turn, you know, south, middle, north one. And you can tell what was a conversation going on? Sure, it sounded like a conversation to me. And then after a few more minutes, there's a fourth one, and then really, really quiet. Everyone shut up. this was something that not everybody heard, but I could hear it. There was a fifth one way down the mountain.

So these five things were talking back and forth to each other. And the weird thing is that kind of spooked me was that at that 1924 attack, there were five men. In 2013, there were five of us up there. And there's a famous story of Fred Beck breaking his tooth during that, during that, adventure. I do remember something about that. And he was begging Marion Smith. Let's get back in the truck. My tooth is killing me. I got to get back to the Nettison Marion. I was like, no, no, no. The night before, I was chewing on some nuts, and I broke my tooth. And so all these things are kind of like coming together. I'm like, oh, I can know what's going on. Yeah, and up there, too,

it wasn't a happy encounter those men. Exactly. And so somebody is up there talking to us. It's like, oh boy it's amazing man I really hope I can't wait till you go back up there again I hope you find the mine it's such a cool because I always assumed it was lost

to history I didn't even know what you were doing I don't think until like 2015 or 16 until I heard about it and then I was like wow you found the cabin that's awesome I want to go and it's it is man

it is a ridiculous hike under the best conditions I mean, in the worst conditions, you're not getting up there. Oh, absolutely not. Yeah, absolutely not. And that's one reason why they built this cabin is because they knew that apparently the assays on the line were getting good. They were getting gold out of there.

And so enough to build a formidable log cabin, right, to keep their tools where they didn't have to haul their cookies up there and take it all back down, a formidable cabinet, keep some supplies up there, formatable enough to withstand the yearly snows, right? And so it's a long ways. It's a long ways to the truck, right? And so that's one of the other strange things about it is that I am estimating that the cabin got started or was completed around late May, maybe early June, strictly because there was 24. Yeah, of 1924. Strictly because there was too much snow. Assuming the weather cycles were the same, there was simply too much snow up there, so they could not have gotten up there. The earliest I've ever gotten up there

is about the third week in June when there's not too much snow. So they built this cabin and it's not easy to build a 20 by 10 foot log cabin, you know, just with the handsaw essentially is what they were using. And then three or four weeks later, that's it, we're out of here.

They gave it all up. And one poignant part, one of the punch lines to this whole story, it has to do with a mining record, right? They were working on, they were making a claim, you know, you don't automatically get a mining claim. You have to work it.

You have to file regular affidavits that say, I'm working at you do that for a statutory amount of time. And then the mineral rights are yours. You know, it's like a homesteading or donation land crime, right? And so the last document that was filed was filed in September in 1924. And it was by Fred and it was witnessed by Marion. And they said in this affidavit, This is the mine, and we've worked so many days, and we've worked, we've hauled so much ore.

These are the men that worked on the mine, and it said all work was completed on July the 10th, 1924. That was the night of the attack. Really? Wow. So you did find a one. They filed the affidavit that said all the things. They had a good, another three or four months worth of good weather, get good gold. They had just built this cabin, but they said, no, we're out here. July the 10th.

Wow. That tells you something right there, too. Yeah. Those guys saw something. Yeah. And that's weird. That's exactly right. You know, I have an old family friend who has done wonderful, wonderful historical research.

And he's not a big footer, but he's an adventurer. And he's been always kind of like calling me up, hey, what's going on with Dave Canyon? And I told him that about the affidavit saying that all work was done. And that's exactly what he said. He said something was to scare him. Yeah. No. Well, I can't wait to, uh,

see more of your work mark thanks and uh i loved hearing thank you so much for coming on oh yeah i know it's been a long time coming yeah no i'm so glad that it came on and for the audience mark morsel we are out at the international bigfoot conference and uh mark what do you think of the conference real quick oh are you serious this is great i'm awesome i am um really humbled to have russell accord invite me here yeah you know i've told i've told other people this that you know you know i've told other people this that, you know, I'm just the historical research dude, but since I've gotten involved in the community, I am so impressed at the amount of smarts and big brains. I've met some incredibly experienced, well-educated, very smart people who are really into Bigfoot. It's true. And so I got

invited and the speaker list started filling up when Russell was organizing this and then the final speaker list came out. I was like, holy smokes. You know, there's David Ellis. There's, you know, Dr. Jeff Beldrum, Cliff Bairn. Ericman, you know, there's Shelley, Covington, Montana. There are a lot of experience, really cool speakers at this conference, and there's a lot of good vendors. West Germers here, right? You know, and so the conference is really terrific.

I'm really, I really thank the life's invited here. Yeah, no, and thank you again for coming on, Mark. And that's it for tonight, everyone. If you've had an encounter, shoot me an email. My email address is west at saskwatchpronicals. Thanks again, Mark. Thank you, Wes. Have a good night, everyone.

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