I. W. Stevens and the Wild Man of the Grand Canyon

Spring, 1903. A tale from the canyon country began moving from paper to paper. The earliest confirmed printing ran in The Williams News of Williams, Arizona Territory, on May 23, 1903, headlined "Wild Man in Grand Canyon." The Arizona Republican in Phoenix carried it on June 3. By July 3 it had reached the Ann Arbor Argus-Democrat in Michigan as "Wild Man of Arizona."

The story opened by admitting its own family tree. "Many strange stories have been told of the 'wild man' of the Grand Canyon of the Colorado, and while some persons have credited these weird tales, they have for the most part been regarded as the ingenious inventions of imaginative travelers..."

His name was I. W. Stevens. He gave his home as Cedar, Colorado. Two years earlier, he said, he had been in northwestern Arizona on business. A broken arm left him idle. So he went down to the river "to kill time and catch a few beaver." He placed himself in "the neighborhood of the extreme lower end of the Grand Canyon of the Colorado river in Mohave county, Ariz."

First came tracks. Bare, human-like footprints in the sand along the river. Then the third day. "The third day of my stay I saw the head of a man on a bench of rocks on the north side of the river." Then the rest of him. "I saw sitting on a large bowlder a man with long white hair and a matted beard that reached to his knees." The figure wore no clothing. A coat of gray hair nearly covered his body, with here and there a spot of dirty skin showing. His face was seared and burned brown by the sun. His eyes were fiery green. On his talon-like fingers were claws at least two inches long.

The wild man saw him. He picked up a club. With a wild whoop and a leap he was off over the rocks and cliffs like a mountain sheep. He shrieked and chattered. Faster and faster he came.

Then a female cougar came out of the rocks with her cubs, ready to spring. Stevens "drew a hasty bead on the cougar and pressed the trigger." She was dead. When he looked again, "the wild man was standing over the two cubs, which were also dead, he having beaten the life out of them with his club." By some accounts he drank their blood. Then he fled up from ledge to ledge until he reached the top. And disappeared.

"The sight sickened me," Stevens said. He closed with a single line. "That was the strangest adventure of my life."

The Arizona Republican printed the tale with open sarcasm. Its headline announced that "An Additional Attraction Has Been Provided at the Great Gorge." The editor also took a jab at the San Francisco Examiner, hinting that the story had come from there. No hoaxer was ever named, and no retraction appeared. Wild-man stories were common filler around 1900, passed from paper to paper, much like the Wild Man of the Navidad in Texas. Only one witness ever spoke, and nothing is known of Stevens beyond his story.

Today the account is usually cited as the earliest written record of the Mogollon Monster, the creature often called Arizona's Bigfoot. Arizona Highways named the Williams News printing the legend's "urtext." Yet Stevens met his wild man far to the north of the Mogollon Rim, and he described a white-haired, sunburned man, not the reddish-brown, ape-like beast of later reports. NAU emeritus biology professor Stan Lindstedt calls the creature mythology. Jeff Meldrum argues the missing evidence reflects a small population.