Campbell River wild man shot by the Kyuquot hunter Joe

The summer of 1905 was a strange season on Vancouver Island. Newspapers were full of wild man reports, and the press had a nickname for the figure: Mowgli. Four Qualicum hunters had reported one at Horne Lake in December 1904. On 1 May 1905 at Union Bay, Indigenous men in a canoe shot at a figure they took for a clam-digging bear. It howled and ran off on two legs. In June, James Kincaid reported sightings near Little Qualicum.

Joe was a hunter and guide of the Kyuquot, a Nuu-chah-nulth people whose home lies on the west coast of the island. That summer he was guiding William McTavish of Nanaimo and a friend from Seattle up the Campbell River, near Buttle Lake, about 65 miles northwest of Qualicum. Joe spotted a small black bear. He stalked it into thick berry bushes on a hillside cleared by a rockslide.

A humanlike creature about 6 feet tall, covered in reddish-brown hair, sprang from an overhanging ledge of rock. It went after the bear. In one hand it brandished an enormous club.

Joe knew what it was. The massache ikta. The bad thing. In Chinook Jargon, mesachie means bad or evil, and ikta means thing.

He raised his rifle and shot the figure in the shoulder. In the retelling by Hammerson Peters, the creature "snarled with rage and terror and clamped an enormous hand over its wound." Joe "fled back to camp as fast as his legs would carry him." No return to the scene, no body, blood, hair or tracks were ever reported.

The Vancouver Daily World ran the account on 4 August 1905, under a headline that began "Crop of Wild Men Increases: Two of them Now at Large on Vancouver Island." It shared the page with a second tale from Little Qualicum, where a Nanaimo man had chased and questioned a hairy recluse of about 75. Joe, the paper said, believed the wild man descended from "a great ape that escaped from one of the Spanish ships during the first exploration of Vancouver Island." The country southward to Cowichan Lake, it added, was shunned by the native tribes. Neither McTavish nor his friend is reported to have seen the creature.

Within days the wave began to deflate. On 4 and 5 August 1905, papers across the region ran sceptical pieces. The Little Qualicum man turned out to be a harmless old beachcomber, arrested by the Provincial Police and promptly released. The Nanaimo Daily News called the affair a "Midsummer Night Dream." The World itself printed "The Mowgli Explained."

Those stories were aimed at the beachcomber. None is known to have addressed the shot fired on the Campbell River. Peters observes that the papers put the Qualicum story to bed while the Campbell River account was the more frightening one. Possible explanations remain open. Another human recluse would suit the club. A bear rearing on its hind legs was the answer offered at Union Bay. A summer tale embellished by the press is a third. No explanation was ever put forward for this case itself.

The place is hard to visit now. The Strathcona Dam, built from 1955 to 1958, raised Upper Campbell Lake by 30 metres and joined it to Buttle Lake. Much of the old upper Campbell River lies under the reservoir, inside Strathcona Provincial Park. The original 1905 article has not been found online, and the story survives through Hammerson Peters and his 2025 articles for Mysteries of Canada. It stands beside Union Bay as the second time that year a wild man was reportedly shot on Vancouver Island.