The Horne Lake Wild Man: Four Qualicum Hunters and the Modern Mowgli

In 1904 the word sasquatch had not yet been popularised. That came in the 1920s, through J. W. Burns. Before then, settlers on Vancouver Island spoke of a "wild man", or a "Mowgli".

Horne Lake lies in the centre of the island, between Mount Mark to the north and Mount Horne and Mount Wesley to the south. Its outflow, the Qualicum River, runs northeast to Qualicum Bay. On the coast sat the settlement of Qualicum, today Qualicum Beach.

Saturday, 10 December 1904. Four men from Qualicum were out hunting. Later accounts name them as A. B. Crump, James Kincaid, T. Hutchins and W. Buss. On the banks of Horne Lake, or in the bush nearby, they saw a figure. He was evidently young, with long matted hair and a beard, and covered with hair all over the body.

He did not wait. The Province said he ran away "with the swiftness of a deer." The Daily Colonist put it more vividly. He "ran like a deer through the seemingly impenetrable tangle of undergrowth," and "pursuit was utterly impossible." The Province called the four men reliable individuals, and the Colonist noted that their accounts did not vary in detail.

The Province carried the story on 13 December, with a headline comparing the creature to Kipling's Mowgli, and the Daily Colonist followed the next day. The Province also offered answers. Perhaps he was a man who vanished in 1892, aged twenty, while hunting near Horne Lake, or a Qualicum boy who disappeared about nine years earlier. A head injury and lost memory, the paper suggested, could explain a man living wild. It added that "scores of Indians" and settlers on the Englishman River had seen the wild man, and that an effort to capture him was under way.

18 June 1905. James Kincaid was cycling near the Little Qualicum schoolhouse, close to the mouth of the Little Qualicum River. He saw the figure again. He whistled to clear the way. About ten yards off, the figure "jumped into the bush and ran off."

Kincaid wrote to Government Agent Marshall Bidwell Bray at Nanaimo about shooting the "wild man of Horne Lake". The Colonist reported the answer. "Bray has informed Kincaid that it is unlawful to shoot Mowglies within the province of British Columbia at any time." That letter was the only official contact with the case. There was no formal investigation. The Courthouse Library BC later found no provincial statute mentioning a sasquatch under any name, and the legal basis of Bray's reply remains unclear. The item survives through a Colonist report reprinted by John Green in The Best of Sasquatch Bigfoot.

Horne Lake was not alone. Through 1904 and 1905 Vancouver Island produced a wave of wild man reports, from Campbell River to Cowichan Lake and Union Bay. In several of them, witnesses first took the figure for a bear or a deer. In August 1905 a Nanaimo man chased down an elderly, shaggy prospector, who was later arrested by provincial police and released, a reminder that men like him were in the woods. Yet no hoax allegation against the four hunters has surfaced, and no tracks, hair or photographs were ever reported.

Cryptozoology writers later recast the island's Mowglis as early sasquatch reports. The four hunters of 1904, though, described a hairy man, not an ape. The Horne Lake community history even suggests the area's first resident may have been a sasquatch. More than a century on, he remains exactly what the hunters reported. A young, hairy figure, running like a deer into the undergrowth.