Legends, filed as legends: sightings documented as sightings, stories told as stories, beloved and labeled. A legend is not a failed fact; it is a different kind of record, and the ledger keeps the kinds separate.
Legend, told as legendShanghai Astoria
Astoria tells of its crimping years: men drugged, tricked, or dropped through waterfront trapdoors, carried through tunnels under the streets, and delivered to ships short of crews, waking at sea. The tunnels are the town's favorite story about itself, told as folklore and filed here as folklore. What is documented stands in the record above: a working port, a labor market that could be brutal, and a town that turned its darkest story into a summer melodrama. The Astor Street Opry Company has staged Shanghaied in Astoria every summer since 1984 or 1985; its record stands with the annuals.
Source: Astoria's told history; the Astor Street Opry Company's Shanghaied in Astoria, staged since the 1980s.
Folklore record, Pacific NorthwestApe Canyon, Mount St. Helens, 1924
In the summer of 1924, five gold miners working a claim on Mount St. Helens said their cabin was attacked at night by ape men who threw rocks and pounded the walls. Fred Beck, one of the five, told the story for the rest of his life and published his account in 1967. The canyon kept the name the story gave it: Ape Canyon. This ledger files the account as what it is, a sighting told by the men who said they lived it, dated and placed, beloved and labeled. The mountain's own visitor centers tell the story to the public today, an easy drive from the river. The name the region learned to call him by stands in this ledger under its own entry, Sasquatch, just below.
Source: Beck, Fred. I Met the Apemen of Mount St. Helens. Published account, 1967.
Mount St. Helens visitor centers and the Johnston Ridge Observatory
The mountain's own visitor infrastructure, where the Ape Canyon story is told today. A sighting record's neighborhood: stand where the story is set, then hear it from the mountain's own desks.
Sasquatch
He has a name, and the name has owners. Sasquatch is the English spelling J.W. Burns gave to sásq'ets, a word in Halkomelem, the Salish language of the Sts'ailes people of the Harrison River country in British Columbia, where it means 'wild man' or 'hairy man'. Burns, the government agent assigned to the Chehalis Band, now the Sts'ailes First Nation, printed the Sts'ailes' own stories of the being in Maclean's magazine in 1929, and the word traveled from there. This ledger uses the name as he passed it on: borrowed, and credited. The lower Columbia had the story long before it had the word. In March 1847, the artist Paul Kane, sketching Mount St. Helens from the mouth of the Lewis River, wrote down what the Native people of the river told him: that the mountain was inhabited by a race of beings of a different species, cannibals, whom they held in great dread, the 'Skoocooms', or evil genii, and that no one would accompany him up the mountain whatever he offered. Kane printed the account in his Wanderings of an Artist in 1859. The mountain still stands over the river, and the story the river told about it is the oldest dated entry in this part of the ledger. The region's best-dated account stands in this ledger at Ape Canyon, 1924, where five miners said ape men attacked their cabin in the night. Portland's Oregonian carried the miners' story on July 13, 1924, and the lower Columbia's own daily, the Longview Daily News, covered the Mountain Devil hunt on July 16, so the tale was read on both banks of the river within the week. What Clatsop County itself has filed under his name is, honestly, thin: no verified sighting in this county under his name stands in the archives this ledger searches, and the sighting lists that circulate online are not archive records and are not carried here. What the county holds is the woods, the river, and the mountain on the horizon. The ledger judges that to be enough, and files him where the record puts him: in the region's story, dated where it can be dated, beloved and labeled.
Source: Thomas, Nicki. Sasquatch. The Canadian Encyclopedia, Historica Canada. Burns, J.W. Introducing B.C.'s Hairy Giants. Maclean's, April 1, 1929. Kane, Paul. Wanderings of an Artist among the Indians of North America. London, 1859 (the Mount St. Helens passage is quoted by the U.S. Geological Survey). The Oregonian, July 13, 1924. The Longview Daily News, July 16, 1924.
Sasquatch, in The Canadian Encyclopedia
The name's own record, kept by Historica Canada: where the word came from, the people who held the stories first, and what the seekers since have and have not found.
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The woods at the edge of the ledger
The sighting ledger is a Pacific Northwest record: Mount Hood's sightings and Mount St. Helens above all, where in 1924 miners at Ape Canyon reported an attack by ape men, and the canyon kept the name. The record above is filed the way every sighting here is filed: dated, placed, and labeled. Nothing on this page proves anything, and the page likes it that way.
If you keep an eye on the treeline long enough, something may cross. It will be distant, out of focus, and gone. That is all any photograph of him has ever been.