The Battle of Ape Canyon

The summer of 1924. Five prospectors from Kelso, Washington, were working a gold claim on the southeast shoulder of Mount St. Helens. Fred Beck, Marion Smith, his son Roy Smith, Gabe Lefever and John Peterson called it the Vander White Mine. Their cabin stood below Pumy Butte, near a narrow gorge on the edge of the Plains of Abraham.

For about a week, the evenings were not quiet. The men heard "a shrill, peculiar whistling." Then there was "a booming, thumping sound," Beck later wrote, "just like something was hitting its self on its chest." Around the camp they found large footprints that looked human. Some were 14 inches long and pressed 4 inches into the ground. Beck wrote that "the largest measured nineteen inches long."

One day Beck and a companion walked to a spring. Something was there. "It was a hairy creature, and he was about a hundred yards away," Beck recalled, "about seven feet tall with blackish-brown hair." They fired. By one account, they missed.

That night the attack began at about midnight. First came "a tremendous thud against the cabin wall." Outside, it "sounded like a great number of feet trampling and rattling over a pile of our unused shakes." Beck remembered that "many smaller ones were hurled at the cabin, but they did not break through the roof." The creatures pounded the walls and jumped onto the roof. They reached through gaps in the walls to grab an axe. Then they came to the door. "The creatures were pushing against it and the whole door vibrated from the impact." It went on for roughly five hours, until daybreak.

At first light, Beck saw one "standing about eighty yards away near the edge of Ape Canyon." He fired three times. Beck wrote that "it toppled over the cliff, down into the gorge, some four hundred feet below." The men abandoned their gear and left. Their reasoning was simple: "it's better to lose them, than our lives."

The papers had the story within days. On 12 July 1924 the Longview Daily News ran "Kelso Miners Back With Tale of 'Mountain Devils'." The Oregonian in Portland said one of the animals looked like a huge gorilla. The story was reported widely. In Beck's words, "the Great Hairy Ape Hunt of 1924 was on."

U.S. Forest Service rangers J.H. Huffman and William Welch climbed down into the canyon, which was said to be inaccessible. They found nothing. They showed that the 14-inch footprints near the cabin could easily be faked. They concluded that the miners had probably placed the stones near the cabin themselves. A local game warden called the whole story "bunk." A search party found no gorillas and no devils.

Other theories followed. Teenagers at a nearby YMCA summer camp had a tradition of throwing stones down the hill. Then, in April 1982, Rant Mullens spoke up. He was a retired logger from Toledo, Washington, and 86 years old. He said that he and his uncle, coming back from a fishing trip, had rolled rocks over the edge onto the miners and then run. Mullens also claimed that he later carved giant feet from green alder wood to scare huckleberry pickers. "I tell you, people will believe just about anything." His prank does not easily explain the footprints, though. The miners had found them days before the attack.

Beck had his own answer. In 1967 he published I Fought the Apemen of Mt. St. Helens, written with his son Ronald A. Beck. In it he described psychic experiences he had throughout his life, and he suggested that the apemen were not purely physical.

Beck believed the cabin had burned, and the 1980 eruption destroyed the area. In July 2013, surveyor Marc Myrsell said he had found the site. The gorge still carries the name the story gave it. Many call this the founding Bigfoot story of the Pacific Northwest.