Ape Canyon, 1924

Ape Canyon is a real place, a gorge on the southeast shoulder of Mount St. Helens in Skamania County, Washington, along the edge of the Plains of Abraham. The Washington Trails Association lists the hike as Ape Canyon (#234), 11.0 miles round trip, 1,400 feet of gain, high point 4,200 feet, starting parallel to a wide lahar flow and climbing through "one of the only remaining swaths of old-growth forest on Mount St. Helens, this with Douglas-, silver, and noble firs." DOCUMENTED WTA calls the formation "named after a possible Sasquatch sighting in 1924."

The name is younger than the events. It does not appear in the July 1924 accounts read for this entry, which place the men in the Spirit Lake country. Even the distance was printed two ways: the Alaska Daily Empire said 40 miles northeast of Kelso, the Associated Press said 45. Fred Beck wrote in 1967 that the canyon "was so named after an account of the incident reached the newspapers."

The men and the claim

Five men were working a gold claim called the Vander White, and the names come from newspapers rather than from the men's best-known account. The Seattle Star of July 14, 1924 names only four: "Marion and Roy Smith, J. Peterson and Fred Beck." The next day's Star quotes "Roy Smith, Fred Beck and Gabe Lefevre, three of the party of five prospectors." That is where the fifth name enters, and nothing read here expands "J. Peterson" to a first name. Beck's own 1967 booklet names none of the others, saying he withheld them "to avoid embarrassment to the relatives."

Marc Myrsell's research, reported in The Reflector in 2024, gives Roy Smith's full name as Leroy Perry Smith and identifies his daughter Betty Mitchell, who knew the story but "had no idea her father was tied to it." Christopher Murphy states that Marion Smith was Beck's father-in-law.

What the men said happened, in outline: whistling and thumping for about a week; two of them saw and shot at a large hairy biped near a spring; that night creatures pelted and pushed at the cabin until nearly dawn; and in the morning Beck shot one near the rim and watched it fall in. ALLEGED No one outside the party reported seeing an animal. Within days one physical detail was checked and confirmed, and another was checked and not confirmed.

What the first reports actually said

Daniel Perez's compiled bibliography lists a Longview Daily News item of July 12, 1924, "Kelso Miners Back With Tale Of 'Mountain Devils,'" the earliest dated entry in his list. Perez dates the Oregonian piece "Fight With Big Apes Reported By Miners" to July 13; the Wikipedia article on Bigfoot, citing page 131 of Robert Michael Pyle's Where Bigfoot Walks, gives July 16. CONTESTED Both cannot be right, and it matters, because later writing treats one Oregonian article as the origin point. Neither was read for this entry.

The Washington coverage is recoverable in full. The Seattle Star of July 14, page 7, under "Savage Beasts Hunted," reported that the prospectors said they had "succeeded in killing one and wounding several" and had been "held prisoner an entire night by a cordon of 30 gorillas," and that "more than 200 rocks crashed thru the roof to the floor of the shack, they asserted." It called it an "intermittent three-day battle." The Alaska Daily Empire of July 15, page 1, described animals "with hairy bodies and faces, clawlike fingers, black hair and long arms," whose "footprints measured 14 inches." DOCUMENTED

That same Empire item also asserted, naming no source and quoting no one, that "an Indian legend 60 years ago in Cowlitz County" held that Indians "could not be killed because they were protected by a band of giant gorillas." ALLEGED It is a newspaper sentence, not a tribal statement. Notice this early how freely such material got attached to the story.

The next day the Star printed the men in their own words, under "Gorillas or Something Perturb Kelso Hunters": "We expected that people would disbelieve us; but we ran into the beast ... four times, and finally packed up and left a perfectly good mine to get away from it." The article ends with a line almost never quoted: "Beck denied the reports that were current here yesterday of spiritualistic seances held by the prospectors." DOCUMENTED That sentence matters more than any other in the 1924 file, and it is taken up below.

The investigators

Kelso emptied into the hills. The Star of July 14 reported an expedition leaving that morning "led by Forest Ranger C. Parker," with Frank Meim and R. S. Bailey, armed for big game and carrying photographic equipment.

The returns were thin. A dispatch datelined Kelso, July 16, in that day's Star, said people returning from the cabin "partially confirm the story," in this precise sense: "The rocks are still inside the cabin, according to these returned investigators, but no footprints of mysterious men or beasts were to be found in the vicinity." DOCUMENTED The Associated Press version of July 17 put it the same way. Rocks inside a cabin is a fact about rocks. No wire credit is printed on the Star page, so it is called only a dispatch here.

The same page reported four new expeditions outfitting, one of them involving Kelso police chief George Millar and county game warden Chester Leichardt. The accounts differ mildly: the Star says the two men "have taken their families for an outing" and would look for traces while there, while the AP version says the expedition "is headed by" them. On the same page, deputy game warden Justus Murk of Woodland, who had spent twenty years in the Spirit Lake district, called the report "all bunk" and said he had never seen signs of such animals nor heard of them.

Forest Service men went to the cabin with reporters. A 1924 photograph reproduced by Murphy identifies the party as Burt Hammerstrom, a freelance writer; Bill Welch, forest guard at the Spirit Lake Ranger Station; Frank "Slim" Lynch, a Seattle newsman; and Jim Huffman, forest ranger for the Spirit Lake district.

What those rangers concluded is repeated confidently and rests on a thin chain. The Wikipedia entry on Ape Canyon says Huffman and Welch "descended into the supposedly 'inaccessible canyon' but found nothing," "demonstrated how 14 inches long footprints found near the cabin could easily be faked, and concluded the miners probably placed large stones near the cabin themselves." That sentence cites one source, Douglas Perry's January 2018 piece for The Oregonian, which could not be opened from any route tried here. So it is reported as Wikipedia's summary of an article not read, and the hedge "probably" is Wikipedia's own. CONTESTED Showing that a track could be faked is not showing that it was.

Perez does independently confirm that the rangers' negative finding reached print within a week, listing the Oregonian headlines "Tale Of Gorillas Branded As Myth. Forest Rangers Find No Support For Story" (July 18) and "Spirit Lake Cabin Harbors No Apes. Rocks Declared Taken From Diggings In Mine" (July 20). Those are headlines in a bibliography. The articles behind them were not read.

Two other 1924 explanations ran alongside. Portland papers pursued a group of boy campers, in headlines Perez catalogs as "Ape-Man Story Is Jolted. Six Shooters Greet Boys" (Portland Daily Journal, July 21) and "Boys Explain Ape Hoax" (Morning Oregonian, July 22). Only the titles were read, and nothing is claimed here about their contents. A later version of the same idea attributes to William Halliday, director of the Western Speleological Survey, the view that the throwers were boys from the YMCA's Camp Meehan at Spirit Lake pitching pumice into the canyon. ALLEGED The only source located is a 2023 blog post, which cites no publication of Halliday's and calls the story one "shared by generations" of camp counselors around a fire. A camp legend explaining a legend is not evidence.

The Seeahtik claim, and who made it

An Associated Press story of July 17, datelined Kelso and carried under an explicit "(By the A. P.)" credit in the Bismarck Tribune, reported statements attributed to "George Totsgi of the Clallam Indian tribe" that the ape-men were members of a people called the Seeahtik: "seven to eight feet tall with hairy bodies, like bears," who "talk the Clallam language," are "adept in imitating the sounds of birds," and are "great hypnotists" with "a gift of ventriloquism."

Three things about that usually get lost. The name is one. The AP printed "George Totsgi"; Perez catalogs him under the byline "Jorg Totsgi," with the note "aka Philip Hugh Howell, as per Marc Myrsell." Second, he was not an anonymous informant. Perez lists three bylined pieces by him in July 1924, including "Apes Declared To Be Seeah-tik Indians" in The Real American of Hoquiam, Washington. He was a writer publishing his own account in his own venue, and he named his sources: Henry Napoleon of the Clallam, P. J. James of the Lummi, and George Hyasman of the Quinault. Three nations, three people, not one undifferentiated legend.

Third and most important, the account as printed does not place these beings at Mount St. Helens. Totsgi said the Seeahtiks "made their home in the heart of the wilderness on Vancouver island and on the Olympic range," and had been "last heard of by the Clallam Indians about fifteen years ago," by then believed extinct. CONTESTED That is a long way from a claim on the southeast flank of Mount St. Helens. The link was made by newspapers working a running story, not by anyone quoted putting Seeahtiks in Cowlitz or Skamania County. This site does not speak for the Klallam, Lummi, or Quinault Nations, and does not treat a 1924 wire rewrite as any nation's account of itself.

Where the popular version came from

Beck's booklet is the most cited source on the case and the least read. I Fought the Apemen of Mount St. Helens, WA. was told by Beck, of Kelso, Washington, and written by his son on September 27, 1967, copyright Ronald A. Beck. Perez records it as privately published at Kelso. People quote the first chapter. The rest argues something quite different from what is attributed to it.

Beck wrote that he had been clairvoyant since boyhood, that "eventually I was holding spiritual meetings," and that "after 1924 I spent many years in healing work." The mine itself was found by psychic means: in 1922 "a spiritual being, a large Indian dressed in buckskin," whom the party called the Great Spirit, appeared and sent a white arrow ahead, which they followed up the Muddy River for four days until "it hovered near the top of the north cliff of Ape Canyon. That was the site where we later blasted out our shaft." He wrote that "they are not entirely of the world," that "the Abominable Snowmen are from a lower plane," and that "when the condition and vibration is at a certain frequency, they can easily, for a time, appear in a very solid body." He made a flat prediction: "No one will ever capture one, and no one will ever kill one." ALLEGED He offered his own failure to find the body he believed he had shot as evidence for this, not against it.

Anyone citing Beck as a witness to a flesh-and-blood animal is citing a man who spent most of his testimony arguing that the thing was not one.

The 1924 seances

The usual framing is that Beck bolted a spiritualist reading onto the case in old age, forty-three years later, during the mid-1960s Bigfoot boom. The 1924 record does not support that framing. Papers were working the seance angle within about seventy-two hours. Perez lists "Did Seance Make Bear Ape Man?" in the Portland Journal of July 14, "Gorilla 'Spooks' Seance Is Blamed" in the Tulare, California, Advance-Register of July 15, and "'Mountain Devil' Witnesses Were Spiritualists" in the Stockton Daily Evening Record of July 15. Only those listings were read. What was read in full is the Star of July 15, recording Beck's denial.

So the sequence runs the other way from the standard telling. Spiritualism was attached to the case in 1924, by reporters, as a debunking. Beck denied it at the time. In 1967 he embraced it and made it the point of the book.

Rant Mullins, 1982

In 1982 a retired logger from Toledo, Washington, then 86, said publicly that Bigfoot tracks in the region were his work. Even the name is unsettled. Michael Dennett's article "Bigfoot Jokester Reveals Punch Line, Finally," Skeptical Inquirer 7(1), Fall 1982, pages 8 to 9, printed it "Rent Mullens." Bigfoot Encounters, reproducing the article, appends a note that the correct spelling is "Rant Mullins." The Chehalis Chronicle in 2007 printed "Rant Mullens." CONTESTED An Associated Press photograph dated April 12, 1982 at Vancouver, Washington, reproduced by National Geographic, captions him showing "one of several pair of wooden feet he has whittled since 1928," a date that does not match Dennett's account, which puts the Forest Service prank in 1930.

Most of what he described is the wooden-feet hoaxing, and it is circumstantial and specific: working for the Forest Service in 1930, he carved a pair of nine-by-seventeen-inch feet from alder with a hatchet and a jackknife; Bill Lambert walked them around huckleberry pickers' cars at the base of Mount St. Helens; the pickers came to the ranger station to report the tracks. He said he made eight sets in all.

Here is where skeptical retellings overreach. He said he supplied a sixteen-inch pair to Ray Wallace in 1969. The Bluff Creek tracks that gave Bigfoot its name were found in 1958, eleven years earlier, so a 1969 pair cannot have made them. CONTESTED The Wikipedia article on Bigfoot nonetheless says Wallace "collaborated with him to obtain a pair of the large wooden feet and subsequently used them to create footprints on the 1958 construction site." Dennett's date and that claim are not compatible, and this entry does not resolve them.

The Ape Canyon claim is different again. In Dennett's account it is one sentence: in 1924, Mullins and a companion named George Ross rolled some rocks onto a cabin at Ape Canyon and "may have been responsible" for Beck's encounter. ALLEGED It is a single uncorroborated recollection offered fifty-eight years later, hedged by its own teller. He said he would take a polygraph; the Bigfoot Encounters reproduction adds that, according to his family, he never was.

Rolled rocks would account for rocks. They would not account for the daylight sighting at the spring, the shooting, or the tracks. That residue rests on the testimony of five men, three of whom were quoted once in a newspaper and never again.

What happened to the place

The May 18, 1980 eruption sent mudflows down the Muddy River, Pine Creek, and Smith Creek. The Wikipedia entry says Ape Canyon "was heavily impacted." Myrsell told The Reflector that a forest ranger had told him the area was never commercially logged and that the eruption "hadn't affected the leeward side of the mountain where the miners had said their cabin once stood." CONTESTED The stronger claim sometimes made, that the eruption erased the site, is supported by neither account, and the trail still passes through old growth.

Myrsell said that in 2013 he and companions found rotting stumps, then used a metal detector to locate the cabin's foundation along with nails, a bucksaw, baling wire, and .30-30 casings. That is one researcher's report of his own fieldwork, uncorroborated here. It is compatible with Beck, who wrote that the cabin "stood for years afterward, and was visited by many sight seers until a few years ago when it was burned to the ground," adding, "the circumstances of the fire, I do not recall." A burned cabin leaves a foundation and metal.

Ape Canyon is a good case for one habit this site tries to keep. Before repeating a famous story, find out which version you are repeating, who first told it, and whether that person later told it differently. Here the earliest telling is more extreme than the witness's own later account, the witness's own later account is stranger than almost anyone admits, and the confession that supposedly settles it is one sentence from 1982 about rocks.

Sources

Newspaper pages below were read as full-page OCR text from the Library of Congress Chronicling America collection, via its word-coordinates text service, because the page-viewer URLs were returning 403 at the time of writing.

• The Seattle Star (Seattle, Wash.), July 14, 1924, page 7, "Savage Beasts Hunted." Library of Congress, Chronicling America. https://www.loc.gov/resource/sn87093407/1924-07-14/ed-1/?sp=7
• The Seattle Star, July 15, 1924, page 7, "Gorillas or Something Perturb Kelso Hunters." https://www.loc.gov/resource/sn87093407/1924-07-15/ed-1/?sp=7
• The Seattle Star, July 16, 1924, page 14, "Story Told by Prospectors Declared Partly Confirmed" and "'Devil' Animals Are Called Bunk." https://www.loc.gov/resource/sn87093407/1924-07-16/ed-1/?sp=14
• The Alaska Daily Empire (Juneau), July 15, 1924, page 1, "Armed Party Going After Giant Gorillas in Washington State." https://www.loc.gov/resource/sn84020657/1924-07-15/ed-1/?sp=1
• New Britain Herald (New Britain, Conn.), July 17, 1924, page 1, Associated Press, on the Seeahtik statements and the returned investigators. https://www.loc.gov/resource/sn82014519/1924-07-17/ed-1/?sp=1
• The Bismarck Tribune (Bismarck, N.D.), July 17, 1924, page 1, "Tribe Of 'Ape Indians' Reported Found In Pacific Northwest," the same AP dispatch under an explicit "(By the A. P.)" credit, printing the name "George Totsgi." https://www.loc.gov/resource/sn85042243/1924-07-17/ed-1/?sp=1
• Daniel Perez, compiler, Bibliography on Ape Canyon Incident, 1924, Bigfoot Times, February 2022 (8 pp.), listing roughly 100 newspaper items with dates and pages, and describing itself as "preliminary and certainly not free from errors." https://www.bigfoottimes.net/wp-content/uploads/2022/05/1924-ape-canyon-bibliography.pdf
• Fred Beck, I Fought the Apemen of Mount St. Helens, WA., told by Fred Beck of Kelso, Washington, written September 27, 1967 by his son, copyright Ronald A. Beck, 1967. Full text as reproduced at Sasquatch Close Encounter Network. https://scenicsasquatch.com/2019/02/20/i-fought-the-apemen-of-mt-st-helens-by-fred-beck-1967/
• Michael Dennett, "Bigfoot Jokester Reveals Punch Line, Finally," Skeptical Inquirer 7(1): 8-9, Fall 1982, as reproduced with bracketed editorial notes under the title "The Rant Mullins Saga," Bigfoot Encounters. The original Skeptical Inquirer printing was not consulted. http://www.bigfootencounters.com/articles/mullens.htm
• Brian Clark Howard, "6 of the Most Audacious Science Hoaxes Ever," National Geographic, February 12, 2015, reproducing the AP photo caption dated April 12, 1982, Vancouver, Wash. https://www.nationalgeographic.com/history/article/150211-science-hoaxes-history
• "Toledo Retiree Admits Bigfoot Hoax in 1982," The Chronicle (Chehalis, Wash.), April 11, 2007. Cited only for the name spelling and age in its free opening lines; the remainder is paywalled and was not read. https://www.chronline.com/stories/toledo-retiree-admits-bigfoot-hoax-in-1982,212478
• Brenna Witchey, "100 years later, legend of Ape Canyon Sasquatch attack continues to draw interest," The Reflector, September 3, 2024, on Marc Myrsell's fieldwork and the cabin site. https://www.thereflector.com/stories/100-years-later-legend-of-ape-canyon-sasquatch-attack-continues-to-draw-interest,361024
• Christopher Murphy, "Fred Beck & the Apemen of Mt. St. Helens," Know the Sasquatch, pp. 30-31, including the 1924 photograph identifying Hammerstrom, Welch, Lynch, and Huffman at the cabin. https://www.sasquatchcanada.com/uploads/9/4/5/1/945132/kts_p30-31.pdf
• "Ape Canyon," Wikipedia, whose "Legend" section rests entirely on Douglas Perry, "How a 1924 Bigfoot battle on Mt. St. Helens helped launch a legend," The Oregonian, January 2018. The Perry article returned 403 on every route tried and was not read. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ape_Canyon
• "Bigfoot," Wikipedia, for the July 16, 1924 Oregonian date sourced to Robert Michael Pyle, Where Bigfoot Walks: Crossing the Dark Divide (Houghton Mifflin, 1995), p. 131, and for the claim that Wallace used Mullins's carved feet at Bluff Creek in 1958. Pyle's book was not consulted. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bigfoot
• "Ape Canyon," Washington Trails Association, for Trail #234 statistics, the forest description, and the canyon's naming. https://www.wta.org/go-hiking/hikes/ape-canyon
• Luke Phillips, "An Ape-tley Named Legend: 99 Years of Ape Canyon," July 16, 2023, the only located source attributing the Camp Meehan pumice explanation to William Halliday of the Western Speleological Survey. It cites no publication of Halliday's, and none was located. https://blackbeastsandboogeymen.com/2023/07/16/an-ape-tley-named-legend-99-years-of-ape-canyon/