Union Bay wild man shot at on a clam beach (1905)

By the spring of 1905, Vancouver Island was in the grip of a wild man scare. In December 1904, four men at Horne Lake near Qualicum, A.B. Crump, James Kincaid, T. Hutchins and W. Buss, had reported a young, hairy figure with "long matted hair and a beard." It "ran like a deer." He became a "modern Mowgli," after Kipling's Jungle Book. Researcher Thomas Steenburg notes that before the word "Sasquatch" was coined in 1929, Vancouver Islanders often used "Mowgli."

The place was a beach near Union Bay, just south of Comox. The exact spot was never named. A group of Indigenous men were out in a canoe. None of them is named in any account that survives. On the shore they saw a figure crouched low. They took it for a bear, digging for clams on the beach. One retelling says a deer.

One of the men raised his shotgun and fired. The figure jumped up and issued a terrible howl. Then it ran on two legs into the woods. In one account the marksmen were shocked to see a "naked man." The Montreal Star called it "a Strange Creature Covered With Hair."

The shooters went back to the settlement. Friends and family returned to the beach, expecting to find the creature dying. They found nothing. The body was never recovered. No tracks, hair or blood were recorded either.

On 5 May 1905, the Vancouver Daily World reported that some Qualicum residents thought the wild man might still be alive. They were organising another search. How it ended is not known.

The story reached print second or third hand. The canoeists told John Fraser, a Union Bay merchant of Fraser & Howe. It passed to Captain Owens, who had once captained the steamer Jean, and he brought it to reporters.

On Monday, 1 May 1905, it ran in the Nanaimo Daily News, the Vancouver Daily Province and the Vancouver Daily World. The Province headline read "Wild Man is Shot: Story of Tragic End of Vancouver Island Mowgli." The next day the Toronto Star, the Montreal Star and the Morning Oregonian carried it too.

The first explanation came from the shooters themselves. They thought it was a bear. A bear can rear up when struck. But the running on two legs and the howl are what convinced them it was something else.

Owens had another idea. Some 10 to 12 years earlier, a young man who sailed with him on the Jean stayed with Buss at Qualicum over the holidays, wandered into the woods and vanished. Owens "thinks that possibly he lost his way and ultimately his reason." Local legend tied the island's Mowgli to a white youth who disappeared from Qualicum. Others point to a press already primed by months of wild man stories.

Modern writers, among them Hammerson Peters, now place the Union Bay shooting in histories of the Sasquatch. A hair-covered figure. Upright. Howling. It was not the last report that year. On 18 June, James Kincaid wrote that he had seen the wild man again and asked whether it would be advisable to shoot him. The reply, as published and attributed to government agent Marshal Bidwell Bray, said it was unlawful to shoot Mowglies in British Columbia. By then, someone already had.