Four Gold Miners Killed by Sasquatch!
Posted by: Craig Woolheater on April 11th, 2015
Four Gold Miners Killed by Sasquatch!
That headline never appeared when it happened! Truth is that this story was hushed up until uncovered by noted author Zane Grey!
The event took place in 1922. The Almeda mine on the Rogue River employed close to 250 miners just south of Galice, Oregon. That spring, five miners decided to search for their own gold strike, and took off downriver to find their fortune.
After two weeks with no discovery, four of them decided to return to Galice hoping to be re-hired at the Almeda. Only one man made it back, and he told a tale of two giant “ape-men” attacking them and the “giant forest monsters” killing his friends!
A search party was dispatched in order to stop the stories and wild tales in fear that the rest of the miners would start quitting en-masse. It took the searchers a week to find the attack site, and they only found two of the men.
Their report stated, “The men had been killed by a savage attack on them from some unknown animals of the forest.” The third man was never found, but part of his pants and his hat were among some “enormous-sized” footprints all around the men’s bodies!
The party returned to the mine with the dead men’s packs, and the foreman told them to keep quiet about their discovery or “lose their jobs!” Since the Almeda paid well, no one talked!
The lone survivor disappeared and the story was never released until the famous author Zane Grey, who owned a remote cabin about 15 miles downriver from the Almeda mine, heard about the incident and through his research, found enough factual evidence to make an interesting story.
Zane Grey is said to have written an article on this bigfoot event, but we have been unable, at this point, to identify the magazine that published it. We’re still searching.
Source: Sasquatch Watch
Co-founder of Cryptomundo in 2005.
I have appeared in or contributed to the following TV programs, documentaries and films:
OLN's Mysterious Encounters: "Caddo Critter", Southern Fried Bigfoot, Travel Channel's Weird Travels: "Bigfoot", History Channel's MonsterQuest: "Swamp Stalker", The Wild Man of the Navidad, Destination America's Monsters and Mysteries in America: Texas Terror - Lake Worth Monster, Animal Planet's Finding Bigfoot: Return to Boggy Creek and Beast of the Bayou.
Interesting how something that’s not supposed to exist, according to debunkers, skeptics, and many others, can kill four men. Or, should I say, SOMETHING killed four men, which hasn’t been explained?
Oh, Zane Gray (whose actual name was Pearl Z. Gray), now there’s a reliable source. Gray, along with Frederick Remington created the romantic cowboy culture that never really existed and persists to this day.
A few facts about Zane Gray. He was not a Westerner having been born in Ohio. He attended the University of Pennsylvania where he studied dentistry and played baseball. He actually played minor league ball in New Jersey and became a practicing dentist. Although a notorious philanderer, his wife Dolly supported his writing endeavors an edited and promoted his authorship. In 1920 He settled in Altadena Ca. and bought a mansion on “Millionaire’s Row”. His western novels were highly criticized at the time for being very fanciful, highly romanticized and extremely violent.
This is not to say that Gray wasn’t a creative talent – he certainly was and was one of the first”Millionaire Writers”
of the 20th Century but as a credible source for Bigfoot incidents…you may as well rely on Verne or Burroughs.
My spelling is spot-on as usual…I of course meant Grey and I’m not being critical of him. His books are very entertaining and started a literary genera all their own. I merely have doubts that a romantic fiction writer in the 1920’s would be a reliable source for factual data of such an encounter. As for the actual incident…well gold can make men do strange things. Just ask Fred C. Dobbs.
cryptokellie: The Zane Grey info was interesting, thank you for sharing that. Just one thought regarding your doubts about the story……….where would Grey get the idea to use “giant Ape-men” for his story? That’s not something I would think many people would just pull out of their hat back in the 1920’s, when trying to create a fanciful tale. What are the odds? Interesting story, nonetheless.
Grasshopper;
The story is just that and you can take it for what it’s worth. The legends of giants and ape-men in the Northwest span the centuries from the First Nations through gold rushes and on to the present day. My only point, such as it is, was that as a purveyor of fanciful myths and one of the co-creators of a time and culture that didn’t actually exist in reality, Zane Pearl Grey wouldn’t be the best choice to harbor this incident and have the truth – if any – be related when being recounted at last. I do admit that there is a good story possibility here for any screenwriter/producers out there.
“Just one thought regarding your doubts about the story……….where would Grey get the idea to use “giant Ape-men” for his story?”
Maybe the first step would be to make sure that the story actually exists, rather than just assuming that a second hand story told on a Facebook page is 100% true? Always, ALWAYS, go back to primary sources.
And even if the story exists, it’s not like gorillas and ape-men were some unthinkable subject in the 1920s. Tarzan of the Apes was first published in 1912, and had two movie adaptations before 1922. So yes, believe it or not, people in the 1920s had there ability to pull such a story out of their hats.
cryptokellie,
You’ve lectured all of us poor knuckle-dragging drooling slack-jawed lowlies on how unreliable and useless Zane Grey is.
Grey moved to Altadena, California, you say. Yeah, he moved to the actual Old West, to a site which was beginning to be developed during the Civil War years, near the foot of the San Gabriel Mountains. God forbid that Grey should have actually moved to the Old West. What a crazy concept for a Western writer.
Your dismissal of Jules Verne begs a reply and correction:
Verne correctly predicted the future US rocket launch site to be Cape Canaveral. If you had “relied” on Verne to imagine and predict the NASA launch site, you would have chosen your source wisely.
Verne correctly predicted other things. You claim Verne is unreliable. Re-read Verne then.
A more recent example of those you would dismiss as unreliable would be Michael Crichton, who imagined the DNA cloning of dinosaurs in the 1980s, revealed in his 1990 novel, Jurassic Park. You must recall scientists snorting their dismissals of Crichton’s ideas after the publication of the novel, and after the 1993 film.
Yet, what have we now? The cloning of a woolly mammoth is being scrutinised as possible, due to DNA breakthroughs in 2008 with mice and an extinct ibex.
The lesson is that it would be beneficial to you to respect and listen to the imaginers as much as you do the scientists. The imaginers are years ahead; they imagine and predict these things years or decades before they come to pass.
The world of fiction is replete with imagined scenarios which have come to pass. Keep your eye on Bradbury’s work, for instance. Read “The Pedestrian”. After that, take a look at the exploding world of drones and robots. We are just about there.
I object bitterly to your claim that a fiction writer cannot be a reliable reporter or witness. A fiction writer can be as reliable a witness or reporter as anyone else. When you write fiction, you go into a trance, a different world. It’s separate from the regular tasks and experiences of daily life. The fact of being a fiction writer is not going to detract from the writer’s ability to recount the events of a road accident or other incident. Probably on the contrary, since fiction writers are exacting observers, the testimony of a fiction writer might be more accurate and valuable than that of those of other professions.
Roald Dahl’s eye witness testimony of a police beating was thrown out of court on the grounds that he was a fiction writer. This amounts to bigotry, and is what you support. Congratulations.
Fiction is a creative art. If Zane’s and Dahl’s testimonies are worthless due to their art (God what an insane ludicrous thought!!!), then likewise all testimonies of painters, poets, sculptors, songwriters, composers, cartoonists, and go down the line, should be regarded as worthless. The testimony of all creative artists is, then, worthless. That is your view, and it’s appalling.
You must learn to respect the imagination, at least as much as you respect science. Einstein did. What is the holdup? What is the barrier? What is the ignorance preventing you?
Percy Bysshe Shelley, in his “A Defence of Poetry”, called the imagination “The great instrument of moral good.” One aspect to this is perhaps that the imagination enables empathy, which induces to goodness, to heroic action. Shelley’s writing makes that of “science writers” look like utter rigor mortis. Maybe that’s because he was a bloody genius. Science people should read the Romantic Poets. It would be a great help, and would spare me the task of crafting long comments such as this one.
“A Defence of Poetry” should be required reading for all science majors. It’s absolutely vital. They should know it intimately. It would save alot of grief, ignorance, and misunderstanding.