James Kincaid's 'wild man' at the Little Qualicum schoolhouse

December 1904. Four Qualicum hunters came back from Horne Lake with a strange story. A.B. Crump, James Kincaid, T. Hutchins and W. Buss had seen a wild man with long matted hair and a beard. The Victoria Colonist called them “four sober-minded settlers of Qualicum.” The Province reached for Kipling's The Jungle Book and gave the figure a name. A Mowgli. By May 1905, Indigenous canoeists at Union Bay had shot at one they first took for a bear digging clams.

Sunday, 18 June 1905. Kincaid was riding past the Little Qualicum schoolhouse on Vancouver Island, near the mouth of the Little Qualicum River, about two miles up the coast from Qualicum Beach. Ahead of him walked a figure. “I thought it was a man,” he wrote, “and was going to get off my bike and walk with him.” He whistled for it to get out of the way. It turned its head. Then, “when he saw me coming he made a jump in the bush and ran away.”

Kincaid had been about three yards from it. “He is a man about six feet high, and a very stoutly built fellow.” And it was familiar. “It was the same looking thing I saw up at Horne Lake last fall when I was hunting up there.”

He wrote to Marshall Bidwell Bray, the Government Agent at Nanaimo, a man who also served as sheriff, gold commissioner and police magistrate. Kincaid signed himself “Sgt. James Kincaid,” a rank no source explains. His question was simple. “Would it be advisable to shoot him if seen again?”

The answer reached print in the Colonist. “Bray has informed Kincaid that it is unlawful to shoot Mowglies within the province of British Columbia at any time.” What Bray actually wrote, and which law he meant, is unclear. The letters may survive in the Nanaimo Community Archives or the BC Archives. They have not been traced.

In October 1905 the tale reached Ohio. The Van Wert Daily Bulletin, crediting a Nanaimo correspondent of the San Francisco Call, told of “Thomas Kincaid, a rancher near French Creek” cycling from Cumberland. Here the figure was “covered with long black hair” and “uttered a shriek and disappeared into the woods.” The reply to his letter: “there was no law permitting such an act.” Name and place are garbled, but it is almost certainly the same encounter. The paper added that “no less than eleven persons coming to Nanaimo from Cumberland have seen the wild men.”

No source accuses Kincaid of a hoax. Others offered answers for the wave. In 1904 The Province suggested the Horne Lake figure was a young local man who had disappeared years earlier and gone wild. A Victoria Daily Times column, two weeks before Kincaid's sighting, proposed a surviving mixed Chinese and Nootka group. Then, in August 1905, after another sighting near Little Qualicum, a man of about 75 with “long and shaggy hair” was arrested and released as a harmless beachcomber. Bears were another candidate. More than one Mowgli was first taken for one.

John Green reprinted the Colonist item in The Best of Sasquatch Bigfoot. Loren Coleman revisited the Mowglis in 2009, and Hammerson Peters transcribed Kincaid's letter in 2025. The Courthouse Library BC now treats Bray's reply as the province's earliest Sasquatch law. A man on a bicycle asked his government whether he could shoot the wild man. The answer, it seems, was no.