Mrs. Wakeman vs. the Antichrist by Robert Damon Schneck

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 ofwhich 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
IFought 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