Real or Legend

Some of what this coast holds is record, and some of it is telling. This page keeps the tellings, each labeled on its face: what is documented, what is told, and what nobody knows. Nothing here is dressed as fact, and nothing here is mocked, either: a legend is a different kind of record, and the town is richer for keeping both kinds straight.

Keep an eye on the treeline. If something crosses, it will be distant, out of focus, and gone. That is all any photograph of him has ever been.

Sasquatch and the Lore

The name first, because the name has owners, then the region's best-dated account: the miners of Ape Canyon, 1924.

Folklore record, Pacific Northwest

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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Folklore record, Pacific Northwest

Ape 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.

Sightings and Strange Encounters

The sightings stand above, dated and placed: beings on the mountain in the telling Paul Kane wrote down in 1847, and the ape men of Ape Canyon in 1924. The town's own newspapers printed stranger things in their day, and the Archive carries those pages here: the Desk finds every place the carried papers print the word itself. What you find there is the word as the papers printed it, in their own columns, and it is labeled here as exactly that.

The word 'ghost', in the carried newspapers

Every place the town's carried newspaper pages print the word, found by the Research Desk.

The word 'serpent', in the carried newspapers

Sea serpents were the coast's standing wonder of the newspaper age; the carried papers print the word in their own columns.

The word 'phantom', in the carried newspapers

Phantoms, in the word the papers themselves used, on the pages the Archive carries.

The Beeswax and the Buried Treasure

Part record, part legend

The Beeswax Wreck and the Treasure of Neahkahnie

South of the county line, at Nehalem Bay, the beach gave up beeswax for three hundred years: great blocks and candles of it, some carved with Spanish shipping marks, washed out of the sand after storms. The Nehalem-Tillamook people knew the wreck the wax came from, and their oral histories of it are the story's first record; the fur trader Alexander Henry wrote in 1813 that the Clatsop were trading beeswax from a ship lost near Nehalem. The research record now names the ship, with the caution the evidence earns: a Manila galleon, most likely the Santo Cristo de Burgos, which sailed from the Philippines on July 1, 1693, bound for Acapulco with beeswax and Chinese porcelain, and was never seen again. Porcelain shards and wax dug from the Nehalem country date to her years, and ship timbers raised from a cove below Neahkahnie Mountain in 2022 tested to her time. A marked block of the wax stands at the Tillamook County Pioneer Museum, and the Columbia River Maritime Museum in Astoria holds beeswax and a rigging block from the wreck. The treasure is the legend's layer: a chest said to have been carried up Neahkahnie Mountain and buried there by survivors, with marked stones to find it by. It has never been found, and this ledger files it exactly there, as the story the mountain keeps.

Source: Williams, Scott S., and others. The Beeswax Wreck of Nehalem: A Manila Galleon in Oregon. Oregon Historical Quarterly (Oregon Historical Society).

The Beeswax Wreck research paper, at the Oregon Historical Society

The research project's own account: the wax, the porcelain, the timbers, and the evidence for the ship's name, weighed in the open.

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The Town's Own Favorite

One more telling stands in the ledger, the one Astoria loves best: the Shanghai story, trapdoors, tunnels, and all. It stands here in its ledger form; the documented trade it grows from stands in Crime and the Underworld.

Legend, told as legend

Shanghai 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.