James Moon had become part of hotel lore: the archetypal “Guest Found Horribly Dead.”
Bigfoot’s Gold: The Secret of Ape Canyon
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One night in the summer of 1924, a small group of angry, rock-throwing, ape-men attacked a cabin with five miners inside, near Mt. St. Helens, Washington. While most Sasquatch are content to stare at human beings and then vanish into the woods, these creatures seemed determined to get in and commit mayhem. It was unusual behavior for Bigfoot and the culmination of a series of strange events involving séances, spirits, and gold mining. Depending on one’s perspective, what happened at Ape Canyon is either baffling and unique or utterly predictable, a twentieth-century example of a very old kind of story, not usually associated with our most prominent cryptid.
Thousands of encounters with hairy giants or their footprints have been recorded in North America, a handful of which have become famous. These include the Patterson-Gimlin film, Jerry Crew’s plaster casts, William Roe’s detailed sighting, Albert Ostman’s abduction, Ape Canyon, and a few other, more or less arguable, classics.
For scientifically minded Bigfoot investigators, these incidents involve living, breathing beings, possibly primitive men or apelike bipeds, which are no more paranormal than mule deer or yellow-bellied marmots. To Fred Beck, one of the miners at Ape Canyon the creatures were something very different.
It was not because their behavior was unusual. Bigfoot seldom threaten human beings, yet chimpanzees carry out organized hunts for red colobus monkeys, so there is no obvious reason why ape-men could not launch a coordinated assault on five of their small pink cousins.1 What makes Ape Canyon unpalatable for those who want Bigfoot hunting to be scientific is the firsthand account published by Beck in 1967, titled I Fought the Apemen of Mt. St. Helens.
The booklet opens with a description of how the cabin was besieged by ape-men, and goes on to explain that the creatures were actually “manifestations,” and just one of the many psychic phenomena experienced by the miners. Furthermore, they were Spiritualists who searched for gold with the help of spirits and saw visions. Beck describes childhood encounters with mysterious beings, discusses metaphysics, and makes passing references to flying saucers, the Fall of Man, and Ascended Masters. Taken together, they make I Fought the Apemen the redheaded stepchild of Sasquatch literature.
Anything involving Bigfoot attracts the attention of cryptozoologists and the story has always been discussed in the context of cryptozoology, the study of “hidden animals.” This is a scientific approach to creatures that might exist, like Bigfoot or the Loch Ness Monster, familiar species that appear outside their normal ranges (e.g., kangaroos in Wisconsin), and animals like the thylacine, which have been declared extinct, but could still survive. This chapter is an attempt to take I Fought the Apemen out of cryptozoology and consider Fred Beck’s account as a tale belonging to another, older tradition.
The Becks
Beck’s account is curious mixture of frontier life and mysticism, and reflects his background.
In 1880, William T. Beck; his wife, Ella; and their three small sons, Albert, John, and Jesse, arrived in the Washington Territory from Kansas.2 They moved several times but mainly lived at Kelso, in Cowlitz County, a lumber town with so many taverns and brothels that it was called “Little Chicago.” (In 1956, the chamber of commerce came up with the more wholesome sobriquet “Kelso, Smelt Capital of the World,” but the smelts ran out and it is now known as the “City of Friendly People.”)3 Mr. Beck planted apple trees and worked as a logger, so he was often away while his wife taught Sunday school, gave music lessons, and was active in Grand Army of the Republic veterans’ affairs. The Beck family also grew; Georgianna was born in 1880, William in 1885, Alfred and his twin brother, Edwin, on July 22, 1888 (Edwin died in infancy), and Arthur in 1891. Arthur wrote a series of reminiscences about his family’s history and life at Cowlitz County when it was still the frontier.
He described his mother as a “real pioneer woman” who helped deliver babies and “[t]o give the reader an insight as to how rugged life was in the early years . . . Coming home from school one day about 1898, I found my brother John seated on the porch sewing up a three-inch ax cut in his knee, using a darning needle and white cotton thread. If you doubt that requires grit, try it on your own knee.”4 School was four months a year, and a photograph taken in 1900 shows Miss Hargraves and her class from the Lower Coweeman School, with the younger boys wearing Little Lord Fauntleroy suits, the girls in pinafores, and all twenty-three students looking horribly serious except for Fred and Arthur Beck, who are smiling.5 According to I Fought the Apemen, Fred was already having visions, and it is not surprising that the twelve-year-old clairvoyant stands somewhat apart from the group.
Even ordinary childhood incidents could be mysterious for the young Beck:
When just a boy I was in the pasture playing with my beanshooter. I had bought it with some long earned coins. It had a twisted wire handle. I lost it, and as I was crying, a kindly woman came up to me and put her arms around me. I felt warm all over. “Little boy,” she said, “don’t cry. Go home, you will find your beanshooter there.”
I went home and found it, and as far as I knew then it was the same one. But years later I found the one I lost. It was weather beaten and the rubber was rotten.
Another woman was invisible to everyone except Fred:
I would be sleeping on the hard benches of the Adventist Church my folks used to attend, and I would have my head in a lady’s lap, only when I mentioned it to my folks, they said there was no one else there and took it to be a boy’s musings.
As the Becks matured they worked in blacksmith shops and mills and at various lumber camps. Logging was “more dangerous than war,” and William, the fourth-born son, was killed in an accident in 1909.6 At age twenty-two, Fred operated a donkey engine—a mechanical winch used for dragging heavy logs—and had his first encounter with an ape-man while working at a lumber camp near Kelso.
One night I heard a rustling outside, and I heard something pushing its way under our tent. A tall hairy figure stood before us watching us. It scared my brother, who afterward said it was a large bear. But I have seen enough bears to know that it was no bear. There was nothing else he knew to call it.7
It was around this time that Beck “became immersed in spiritualism,” the popular belief that the personality survives death and that it was possible to communicate with those who have passed on.
How he became involved is unknown, but it was typical, for “[t]hroughout his life, he espoused novel beliefs.”8 Meetings were held, and in time Beck “created a following of folks who sometimes gathered for séances. Some of his own brothers and his sister were intrigued with this activity. They enjoyed the experiences but their spouses were chagrined.”9
Like Adventism and the Latter-day Saints movement, Spiritualism emerged from the religious revivals and social reform movements that “blazed” across upper and western New York State until the area was known as the “Burned-Over District.” It began at rural Hydesville in 1848 with the Fox sisters, two girls who figured out how to communicate with a spirit haunting their farmhouse; from there it spread around the world with astonishing speed. Conversing with ghosts was not unprecedented: Twenty-seven years before Hydesville, a poltergeist spoke audibly, and insultingly, to the people of Adams, Tennessee, answering their questions and making predictions. It haunted the Bell family and, since witchcraft was believed to be responsible for poltergeists, was known as the “Bell Witch.” Spiritualists accepted the reality of such phenomena but not the traditional explanations.
Since Spiritualism “investigates, analyzes, and classifies facts and manifestations demonstrated from the Spirit side of Life,” it was scientific, a constituted sort of Industrial Revolution of the spirit comparable to the other developments transforming nineteenth-century life.10 For beli
evers, 1848 marked the beginning of a new era in which the veil that separated the living and dead was lifted and one could converse “with angels and spirits as man with man.”11 The possibilities seemed limitless, and Article 2 of the 1876 Platform and Constitution of the New Hampshire State Convention of Spiritualists stresses the application of Spiritualism to “practical life,” which would certainly include finding your own gold mine.12
Seance in the Pines
The prospectors were Fred Beck; his father-in-law, Marion Lefever Smith (called “Hank” in I Fought the Apemen); Smith’s nineteen-year-old son, LeRoy; Gabe Lefever (probably Smith’s cousin or nephew); John Peterson; and an unnamed man not present when the apes attacked.
Beck does not describe how they actually looked for gold beyond calling it “psychic,” though a contemporary newspaper states, “It is said all five men are Spiritualists and hold frequent séances in the woods.”13 Each member of the party was “psychically sensitive,” but as someone with experience in Spiritualist meetings, it is reasonable to assume that Beck played a leading role as medium.
Mediumship is the psychic ability to communicate with discarnate intelligences, including gods, angels, and spirits of the dead, through various mental and physical means. Mental mediums use automatic writing, automatic speech, clairaudience (psychically “hearing” voices, music, etc.), and inner visions, while physical mediums produce the more spectacular external phenomena: object movement, audible sounds and voices, levitation, ectoplasm (a polymorphic substance from the medium’s body), production of apports (solid objects like fruit, flowers, or live animals), and the materialization of spirits. Beck and his party experienced a variety of physical manifestations during their years at Mt. St. Helens.
One Comforting and One Great Spirit
The men began prospecting in 1916 reportedly by holding séances and contacting spirits. They included “Vander White,” who was a “comforting friend” but not much help in finding gold mines, and a second being that did not manifest until August 1922, but showed them where to dig. According to I Fought the Apemen, a large Indian dressed in buckskin appeared to us and talked to us. He was the picture of stateliness itself. He never told us his name, but we always called him the Great Spirit. He replied once, “The Great Spirit is above me. We are all of the Great Spirit, if we listen when the Great Spirit talks.”
More to the point:
The big Indian being told us there would be a white arrow [going] before us. Another man, who was not present during the attack in 1924, could see the arrow easily and clearly at all times. And I could see it nearly as well.
So we started by the Lewis River, south of Mt. St. Helens, and went up the Muddy River, and in all we followed the white arrow four days. The going was slow, for in those days it was very rugged territory. Hank’s temper was growing short as he climbed the hills. He had always been a believer of spiritual things, and afterwards he was a believer. But he lost his temper and cussed. He swore at the spirit leading us. His face was red and we could not stop him: “Just a wild goose chase,” he exclaimed, “they lied to us, and got us running all over the hills, and I want nothing more to do with them.” He went on and on.
If any member of the group could be called their leader, it is “Hank,” Marion Smith. He was older (b. 1866), and the father, father-in-law, and possibly uncle, to three of the men, as well as a “great hunter and good woodsman.” His impatience and lack of self-control, however, was their undoing.
Then just when he [Smith] had started to calm down, we all saw the arrow soar up high, change direction and swoop down. We had to follow in the general direction before we could find it again. It hovered near the top of the north cliff of Ape Canyon. That was the site where we later blasted out our shaft.
We got a little closer, and we all saw the image of a large door open, and the big Indian appeared in front of it. He spoke: “Because you have cursed the spirit leading you, you will be shown where there is gold, but it is not given to you.”
With those words, he disappeared. Then we saw the door slowly close. There was a huge lock and latch, but as the door shut, the lock did not latch: a closed door but it was not locked! “We just as well pack up and go home,” one of the party said.
After six years of looking, though, the temptation to dig proved irresistible, and they decided to make a claim. It required a written description and they had nothing to write with, not until a pencil spontaneously materialized, or apported, into Fred’s hand. Mabel Beck later recognized the pencil as one she bought when her husband was away. (Their four-year-old son Francis had been chewing on it, so she put the pencil away in a drawer, from which it later vanished.) On September 2, 1922, Beck and Smith filed a location notice for a mine named the Vander White, in honor of their spirit friend.14
It was located on a cliff side and the men had to lower themselves on ropes to reach a narrow ledge, which was enlarged with dynamite. From there they began burrowing into the canyon’s north wall. Despite this apparent progress they felt as though the venture would fail, a disquiet that reflects one of the failures of Spiritualism.
In separating themselves from superstition with its primitive, often grotesque, elements, the Spiritualists also abandoned its wealth of accumulated knowledge. One result of this was seen at Mt. St. Helens, where the mediums-cum-miners repeatedly made mistakes that were addressed, if not always solved, by countless generations of traditional magical treasure hunters. By the first quarter of the twentieth century, old-fashioned “money-diggers” were thin on the ground, but America once had them in abundance.
Treasure hunting was part of the European magical tradition and remained a popular, if little discussed, pursuit in the United States until the twentieth century. Small groups went out at night to perform ceremonies that revealed the whereabouts of treasure, casting spells that protected them from the supernatural forces standing guard.
Though treasure hunting was seldom successful, its practitioners would have understood exactly what was happening at Mt. St. Helens.
More Oddities
Beyond the daily round of séances, phantom arrows, and apports, Fred Beck found time to have unusual experiences on his own.
At some point he was off by himself and feeling lonely when a young woman appeared. They chatted and Beck was invited to visit the campsite she shared with her father.
When I arrived at her camp, I did not see her father, and never did see him. She had a fire going, and a light colored blanket was spread out and she was sitting on it. It was a warm summer evening, and we held another pleasant conversation. I remember her telling me how she liked the fresh air of the mountains, and how wonderfully she loved nature.
She would be talking on a subject, then pause and say, “Isn’t that right, Dad?” This she said several times. There was no tent, cooking utensils, no food, and certaiply [sic] no visible father. The most amazing thing was I did not at the time think her different than any other person. When she spoke to her invisible Dad, I felt just like her Dad was there.
I left her and walked back to camp, but my mind seemed like it was a thousand miles away. I could hear the other men talking, but it seemed like they were below me, and their voices sounded soft and distant.
I do not know anyone who had seen her but myself.
Beck was the only miner to enjoy a pleasantly surreal night out, but the group experienced other phenomena together. Thumping sounds were heard inside the earth and footprints discovered whose size and origin defied explanation.
There in the center of the sand bar were two huge tracks [nineteen inches long and] about four inches deep. There was not another track on that sand bar!
There we were standing in the middle of the sand bar, and not one of us could conceive any earthly thing taking steps 160 feet long. “No human being could have made these tracks,” Hank said, “and there’s only one way they could be made, something dropped from the sky
and went back up.”
Though the prints made Marion Smith uneasy, “no one was really worried about the tracks as regarding any threat to our safety.” Nor was it fear of the footprints’ makers that led to the men building a permanent dwelling; they had been living in a tent, but mining required more supplies and equipment and a safe place to store them.
With endless amounts of raw material available, the men turned pine trees into squared-off logs, piled them into thick windowless walls, and chinked the spaces between with pine branches. The roof was built to withstand heavy snow, a stone fireplace provided heat, and water came from a spring a hundred yards away. They did not know it at the time, but the cabin was strong enough to withstand both the elements, and the residents, of Mt. St. Helens.
Gold and Gorillas
In July 1924, ore samples from the Vander White were assayed, and the claim’s value estimated at approximately $2,000 a ton; if this proved accurate, the miners were on the verge of becoming rich men. Any anticipatory pleasure Beck felt was dulled by a toothache, and when he asked his father-in-law to drive him into town to get it pulled, the older man replied that “‘God or the Devil’ could not get him [Smith] away from there.” It was also around this time that the thumping noises grew louder and more insistent.
For about a week they heard booming, “like something was hitting its self on its chest,” which was joined by a “shrill peculiar whistle each evening . . . coming from one ridge, and then . . . an answering whistling from another ridge.”15
The sounds made Smith wary. He carried his Remington automatic when going for water on July 11 and asked Fred to accompany him and bring his .30-.30 Winchester.16 According to the July 18, 1924, Kelsonian, they were on their way to the spring when a figure appeared on the other side of a small canyon, a hairy blackish-brown creature standing seven feet tall. Smith yelled and raised his rifle, and it dodged behind a pine tree. When the beast peeked around the trunk, he fired three times and exclaimed, “Don’t worry about that devil, Fred, I got him right in the head!” The devil had a hard head and it reappeared two hundred yards away, running “fast and upright,” giving Fred the chance to loose three more shots before the retreating figure was out of sight.
Mrs. Wakeman vs. the Antichrist Page 12
