The Battle of Ape Canyon

Summer, 1924. Five men were working a gold claim on the east side of Mount St. Helens, in Washington. They were Fred Beck, his father-in-law Marion Smith, Marion's son Roy Smith, Gabe Lefever and John Peterson. According to the Rainier Review, they had been prospecting in the St. Helens area for six years. Their cabin stood by the Vander White mine, near Pumice Butte, close to Spirit Lake.

For about a week, the nights were not quiet. Beck remembered "a shrill, peculiar whistling each evening." Then came booming, thumping sounds, as if something was beating its own chest. Large tracks appeared. The Rainier Review put them at 13 to 14 inches long, "resembling those of a man." Beck later wrote that "the largest measured nineteen inches long."

Then Beck and Marion Smith went to fetch water. By a pine tree stood "a hairy creature," seven feet tall, with blackish-brown hair. Marion fired three shots. Beck fired three more as it ran.

A second confrontation followed, with about 16 shots fired in all. Beck described a creature "standing about eighty yards away near the edge of Ape Canyon. I shot three times, and it toppled over the cliff, down into the gorge, some four hundred feet below."

That night, the men said, the creatures came back. It began with "a tremendous thud against the cabin wall." The blow knocked chinking from between the logs onto Marion. Rocks followed. Smith told the Rainier Review of "rocks falling through the hole in the roof of our cabin which served as a smokestack."

Something jumped on the roof. Something rammed the door. "We had to brace the hewed-logged door with a long pole," Beck wrote. One creature reached through a gap and grabbed an axe. The men took it back, and Marion shot at the arm.

Smith said the bombardment ran from about eleven until after two in the morning. Beck remembered it lasting until dawn. Afterwards the men left their equipment behind and came down to Kelso. Beck reasoned that "it's better to lose them, than our lives."

They reported the ordeal to ranger Bill Welch at the Spirit Lake ranger station. Within days the story was in The Oregonian, the Longview Daily News and the Kelsonian. Hunting parties rushed to the mountain. U.S. Forest Service rangers J.H. Huffman and William Welch climbed into the canyon and found nothing. They showed that 14-inch footprints were easy to fake and concluded that the miners probably placed the stones themselves. The local game warden called the story "bunk."

Others pointed elsewhere. In 1952 the Seattle Times reported that Orville Hunt and Al Coleman said they had led two troops of boys from a YMCA camp near the cabin on the night of the attack. In 1982 Rant Mullens claimed that he and his uncle had rolled rocks toward the miners to scare them. Beck himself went another way. In his 1967 booklet he called the creatures supernatural. "No one will ever kill one, nor would they ever be captured."

The gorge where the creature fell has been known ever since as Ape Canyon. The 1980 eruption badly damaged it. In 2013 surveyor Marc Myrsell and the Dark Waters Paranormal Group said they had relocated the cabin site, uncovering a buried log, nails, a spoon and a coil of wire. Today the Ape Canyon Trail draws hikers and mountain bikers. And the 1924 attack is still told as the founding Bigfoot story of the Pacific Northwest.