Incredible Tales – The Trouble with Ape Canyon

Synopsis – The Ape Canyon incident continues to be presented as one of the “classics” of bigfoot encounter literature both in online collections and in books by major authors, even though there have been good reasons to doubt its veracity since at least 1967. Acknowledging that Loren Coleman and David Daegling have begun the re-examination of the Ape Canyon story, this article examines those reasons, using comparative techniques, to show that the six original sources for the story do not agree sufficiently for us to have confidence that the tale represents a real encounter, and we ought to throw the story out as a tall tale.

Incredible Tales

Fred Beck’s Ape Canyon incident, originally recorded in a July 13, 1924 Oregonian article, has become one of the “classics” of bigfoot encounter literature. It has been recounted in many popular books by major authors in the field, including recent publications like Chris Murphy’s 2004 book Meet the Sasquatch and Janet and Colin Bord’s 2006 title The Bigfoot Casebook Updated. These authors mention the story as it has been received, they do not mention the problems with it that have been obvious since around 1967. Two authors who have noticed problems, Loren Coleman, in his 2003 work Bigfoot! The True Story of Apes in America, and bigfoot skeptic David J. Daegling, in his 2004 book Bigfoot Exposed, focus on the autobiography of Fred Beck, arguing that the high-strangness in that work make anything Beck might have said suspect. I agree with their sentiment, but I think it is possible to go much further than they have with the evidence we have at hand.

The first author to note problems with Beck’s story was John Green. In his On the Track of the Sasquatch, first published in 1968, Green notes:

I got the impression that Fred Beck had told his story so often that he had established a set pattern of things to say and there wasn’t much use in asking further questions. To my understanding there was a difficulty in fitting all the elements of his story in a logical order, but I was not able to clear that up.

Green followed this discussion with, “Did all this really happen? I think so .” Green’s faith in Beck, he admitted, came from the inability to imagine why the miners would continue telling the story after all these years. What was in it for them? I think its possible to imagine that Beck enjoyed the attention he got from bigfoot researchers, or even perhaps, if he hoaxed or was part of a hoax, that he enjoyed the feeling of “putting one over” on people. For these, or even reasons we can’t imagine, someone might go to great lengths to tell something untrue and stick with it. Our failure to imagine why they would act like they do isn’t a sufficient reason to believe an incredible story.

And it’s possible to test the story by comparing the different versions of it to see where they agree and disagree. If the agreement is vast and the disagreement small, perhaps we would have some cause to credit the tale. It would be awfully hard to concoct a story and then stick to it for years without any discrepancies. And we have the benefit of four separate interviews of Beck, plus his own autobiography. Also, Roger Patterson’s account might have been based on more than one interview, so it’s possible we have the result of five interviews and an autobiographical account covering one event, and spanning the entire time from when the event occurred until at least 1967, when Beck wrote his autobiography, or 1968, if that was when Dahinden interviewed him, as is suggested by photographs of Dahinden and Beck together, taken in 1968. Since there is some evidence that when people are faced with a traumatic experience, they can remember the events quite well, we should expect all of the interviews to agree most of the time.

There are some complicating factors, however. It appears that the 1924 Oregonian article sources Beck’s father-in-law as the interviewee. It is an account of the alleged events, but it may not be Fred Beck’s account. And there is a gap of thirty-six years between the Oregonian article and Beck’s interview with Peter Byrne, which Byrne says occurred in 1960. It is possible that the 1960 interview with Byrne is truly Beck’s first public statement of the events of 1924. As it is the earliest of the more recent interviews, it ought to be considered closely as well, since it was done some years before Beck’s name became synonymous with Ape Canyon in the mind of anyone outside the general region. It wasn’t until Roger Patterson’s 1966 book Do Abominable Snowmen of America Really Exist that Beck got anything like national notoriety, and it was shortly after that book was published that his photograph was taken, sitting in his chair with the rifle he allegedly used to shoot the bigfoot creature across his knees. That photograph should alert us to something – Beck is being treated like a celebrity by this time. A minor celebrity, but nonetheless it’s worth noting Beck has begun getting an emotional payoff for his story.

So we have a timeline that goes something like this:

• 1924 – the Oregonian article appears, apparently sourced to Beck’s father-in-law, Marion Smith.
• 1960 – Peter Byrne visits Fred Beck and interviews him about the Ape Canyon incident. Byrne also goes to the site of the incident but is not able to stay long enough to find the cabin. He says other “bigfooters” did find it, and the mine as well.
• 1966 – Roger Patterson interviews Fred Beck several times and includes the event in his book. He records one of the interviews; this is later reprinted in Green’s books.
• 1967 – Fred Beck’s son Ronald copyrights Beck’s autobiography. The text has a date of September 1967, and internal clues agree with this general time-frame.
• 1968(?) Rene Dahinden interviews Beck and uses the interview to construct his retelling of the Ape Canyon incident in his book of 1974.
• 1966-68(?) – John Green interviews Beck briefly, discovering some discrepancies in the account, but passes the story on unchallenged in his 1968 book and after.

This is a good number of independent interviews of the same witness. We ought to be able to get a good idea of whether we think the story passes the “smell” test or not after consulting these texts.


Stories, Sources and Transmission Failures

I began with the thought that whatever was attested in all six sources is probably something that one might have some confidence really happened. First I created a listing of facts in the order presented in each story. Then I combed through the lists to take out only what was common among them all, appearing in the same order. I got a list that looks like this:

• The miners had been seeing bare footprints, but they thought they belonged to Indians out fishing.
• Someone shot at an apelike figure that was peeking out from behind a tree.
• Rocks were thrown at their cabin at night.

Those are the facts that are common and unchanging, always told in this order, in all the sources. There is one other story, that Beck shot a bigfoot which subsequently fell over the cliff, that is also told in all six accounts, but it changes places and is told in somewhat different ways, so it isn't a story that is without problems and I disqualified it from the list for that reason. We will examine this account and how it is handled in the writing of our authors later.

Don't Axe Me Again

Another story that is told three different ways in three of the accounts serves as a good illustration of how things can change from source to source. I’m thinking of the story of the axe supposedly grasped by a bigfoot during the “seige”.

The story of the axe handle is absent from the newspaper accounts and also from Byrne and Patterson’s written accounts. In Patterson's interview, it is Marion Smith who grabs the handle, turns the head and then shoots down the length of the handle, causing the Sasquatch to let go. In Dahinden's account, it is Beck who turns the axe head and shoots down the length of the handle. In Beck's autobiography, Beck turns the handle, while Smith shoots down the handle, nearly hitting Beck's hand. Obviously, no two of these stories about the axe match. Coupled with the fact that the axe-grabbing scene ratchets up the tension in the reader/listener (the BF haven't been able to break into the cabin, but if they get that axe they can start chopping their way in) I think we have good cause to believe that the axe story is simply a literary device with no basis in truth. And, further, if we really think that the axe story is a literary device then we have good cause to be suspicious of any detail that isn’t common to all the accounts. We might think that Beck embellished the story, as some commentators have argued, for instance, Coleman, citing Hall in his aforementioned work:

Mark A .Hall pointed out to me recently that when Fred Beck told his story in the 1960s, the tracks were said to be nineteen inches long and the creature’s height was said to be eight feet or more. However, the Bigfoot was shorter and tracks smaller in Beck’s 1924 account. Hall believes that Beck in his later years gave a version of the story that was altered to meet the larger, modern expectations of Bigfoot, as opposed to the more modest, realistic figures given in the 1924 reports.

I don’t think I agree that the original report was more realistic, but I do agree that it was very different from a modern account. In addition to the bigfoot having only four toes (which Coleman mentions), the Ape Canyon bigfoot are reported to have four-inch-long ears sticking up. Add to that something that hasn’t really been properly appreciated – the newspaper reports appear to be written as told by Marion Smith, Beck’s father-in-law, not from Beck’s point of view. If the original reports do not come from Beck, we don’t know what story he might have told in 1924. We do know that what he began telling Roger Patterson in 1966 was a substantially different tale, and by that time, it appeared that none of the other witnesses were available to be interviewed.

Other experts have ventured an opinion on Fred Beck’s story as well. Recall for instance Green’s generally supportive discussion in his 1968 book. So while Green acknowledges that Beck seems to be repeating a story that he’d rehearsed over the years, he believes there is an underlying truth to it. That seems to be the prevailing wisdom concerning the Ape Canyon story, and it was the end point I expected to find myself occupying as well. But I haven’t gotten there. Instead, I’ve become increasingly skeptical of the story.

Is it all Bunk?

There are two main reasons for my skepticism. The first is that there is little factual agreement between Beck’s interview with Roger Patterson and the story as printed in 1924 newspapers. The bigfoot has grown from seven feet to eight feet, it has lost its cat ears in favor of human-like ones, its feet have increased in size, even the description of the hair has been modified. Meanwhile, some of the events narrated come in a different order, with different material facts, and notable omissions. A side by side demonstration of this is available in John Green’s book (TboSB), in which Green includes a reprint of the article from the July 13, 1924 Portland Oregonian and a transcript of Patterson’s interview with Beck.

The second reason for my skepticism has to do with Roger Patterson’s interview of Beck itself. In that interview, Patterson asks leading questions, and even corrects Beck subtly. What Beck was telling prior to Patterson’s interview in 1966 we don’t know in detail, though we do have Byrne's short account (which we'll bring up again later). We can surmise that it was a story in some ways different from what Patterson recorded, since Beck seemed fairly compliant in the face of Patterson’s corrections. Only a year later, in his autobiography Beck was telling a different tale. Since the first accounts are not even based on Beck at all, but based on his father-in-law’s interview, there’s an argument to be made that we could and should throw out all of Beck’s statements since they are unreliable. If we do that, we are left with the account in the Oregonian and associated followup accounts from 1924. This isn’t very satisfying either, for there is at least one detail in Smith’s account that is contradicted by Beck in all of his, that of Beck being knocked unconscious. If Beck had really been knocked unconscious by a large rock for two hours, you would figure that would be the one detail he would be certain to remember, but he never included that detail in any of his accounts.

John Green discovered this discrepancy when he found the original newspaper account he includes in his book, but it doesn’t seem to have rocked his overall faith in the story. As he puts it, “there isn’t a shadow of a suggestion as to why they would make up such a story and keep telling it all their lives.” Yet we don’t know whether “they” told that story all their lives. I’ve never seen any indication that anyone besides Fred Beck was telling the tale in the 1960s. And while I don’t have any idea why they might make up such a tale, I don’t think that proves that they didn’t.

If the event really did happen, you would think it would have been very traumatic. I have heard people say about traumatic events in their lives, “I remember it like it was yesterday.” Beck doesn’t seem to have that level of memory about the Ape Canyon events. For instance, on the question of when he shot one of the creatures, the Oregonian puts that event on the night before the “attack”, but Beck, in his interview with Patterson, says, “Well that was the next morning, I guess it was, if I remember that.” Patterson asks if he means “after the attack” and Beck replies “Yeah”. Perhaps Beck is truly remembering a real event here, but if he is, he doesn’t seem to have that clarity that we might expect someone to have after a truly traumatic experience. And this isn’t the only source of trouble here, or even the main thing I’m driving at. If Beck’s story and the newspaper account don’t jibe, where is the source of error? Beck goes on to describe the event:

I, down the ridge there a couple of hundred yards, no it wasn’t that far, why there was one of them fellas run out of a clump of brush and run down the gorge, and I shot him in the back, three shots, and I could hear the bullets hit him and I see the fur fly on his back. I shot for his heart. And he stopped and he just fell right over the precipice, and I heard him go doonk, zoop, down into the canyon.. And the sun came out in the afternoon, that water was really a torrent goes down there, it’d wash anyting out fall in there. And that’s the reason I don’t know if they’re human or not, ‘cause I couldn’t kill ‘em and I hit.

The question of whether or not these are human is an interesting one, and Patterson doesn’t pursue it – a point we’ll take up again later. I am sure Beck had another word in mind but didn’t strike on the right one as he spoke. (Later, in his autobiography, Beck perhaps made himself more clear -- he didn't think they were mortal creatures.) In any event, Beck was clear about the fact that the shooting was after the night of the attack, “if I remember that,” and of course, he should remember that very clearly, as traumatic as it would have been.

But the newspaper account has Beck’s shooting before the night of the attack, a true contradiction. Perhaps we can blame the reporter for the error, but if we do, then we have no right to assume anything else in the report is accurate. Indeed, since the reporter wrote that Beck had been knocked unconscious, but Beck never repeats that story, there is some question whether the reporter invented some facts to sensationalize his tale. As it happens, Beck actually disavows this event in his autobiography:

This was the start of the famous attack, of which so much has been written in Washington and Oregon papers through out the years. Most accounts tell of giant boulders being hurled against the cabin, and say some even fell through the roof, but this was not quite the case. There were very few large rocks around in that area. It is true that many smaller ones were hurled at the cabin, but they did not break through the roof, but hit with a bang, and rolled off. Some did fall through the chimney of the fireplace. Some accounts state I was hit in the head by a rock and knocked unconscious. This is not true.

It would seem, if Beck can be trusted at all, that Beck’s shooting of the bigfoot and his being knocked unconscious were both handled incorrectly in the original newspaper report. These are two key details. If the reporter got these wrong, then what did he get right?

Filtered or Unfiltered?

So now we have come the other way – the newspaper account is probably wrong, and we have to rely on Beck’s memory if we are going to use the story at all. I don’t think this is a viable solution either. In this circumstance, one could argue that maybe it would be better to throw the whole event out. Something might have happened at Ape Canyon, but the event has been so clouded by an overlay of story telling and forgetting that perhaps there isn’t any way to recover what really happened there.

But Patterson and Dahinden took a different tack. Instead of dismissing the story, with its incredible details of bigfoot surviving gunshot wounds, multiple bigfoot massing for an attack on a cabin, and one possibly surviving after a great fall -- all details that are not reliably attested anywhere else in other stories -- they chose to use it, and each of them recorded a different version. Patterson and Dahinden didn’t tell the same stories, and this is our problem. If we are going to throw out the newspaper report as unreliable sensationalism and instead rely on Beck’s account from the 1960s, we are going to find out that Beck doesn’t seem to have told the same story twice, or anyway, the same story isn’t told twice about Ape Canyon, whatever Beck might have said in interviews.

Patterson’s account is the most divergent. Interestingly enough, Patterson’s account agrees with the newspaper that the rocks were large. Patterson’s words are “tremendous boulders” and he adds the detail that the boulders were accompanied by “loud wailing screams.” Neither of these details is in the interview Patterson did with Beck, nor are they in Dahinden’s account, based on his own interview with the witness. Patterson also agrees with the newspaper that the cliff-falling scene happens before the night attack on the cabin, even though he had asked Beck in his interview to clarify this point, and Beck had made it clear the cliff fall happened the morning after the cabin attack. Dahinden’s account is in agreement with Beck’s statements in the interview.

I think if you were inclined to rule that Patterson’s written account was as unreliable as the newspaper stories at this point, you would be justified. Both of those accounts seem to have arranged things in the most dramatic way possible, with little regard for the facts. But one thing has been bothering me – if Patterson is looking to be the more dramatic, why didn’t he include the axe handle scene, which is in his interview with Beck? It is completely missing from Patterson’s written account of the story. One would almost want to guess, just from comparing Patterson’s written account and the newspaper accounts, that Patterson simply adapted the Oregonian’s account for his own writing, adding in sensational words where appropriate. In fact, if Patterson didn’t mention in his written account that Beck had allowed him to tape an interview, I would lean toward thinking perhaps that interview came after Patterson’s written account was finished. Perhaps Patterson obtained two taped interviews, and the transcript we have comes from an interview done after Patterson’s book was finished. Perhaps, but I think the solution to this conundrum is simpler. I think Patterson probably wasn’t very diligent when he wrote his book, and that he didn’t carefully consult his own interview. I think he mostly relied on the newspaper clippings.

Patterson didn’t simply delete things from the story, or include details from the newspaper that Beck hadn’t told him. He also seems to have invented things. I already mentioned the “loud wailing screams that echoed hideously off the canyon walls” which appears only in Patterson’s account. There is another interesting passage that appears only in Patterson’s account:

Halfway to town they met two young prospectors and one of the party spilled the beans, telling them of the terrible night before. The two laughed and said they must have had a whiskey party and dreamed the whole thing up. This made Beck furious and he threatened to shoot their heads off if they said another word. The two went quietly on their way and the miners resumed their trip to town.

This passage is completely at odds with Beck’s interview with Patterson. There, Beck says the story came out this way:

Well, we come out, out of there. Come down, and my father-in-law was so excited and scared. I told him, he promised never to tell anybody, ‘cause I said it wouldn’t do, people wouldn’t believe it, don’t tell anybody. He say, “I won’t, I won’t,” but he did. Went down to the lake and the rangers down there knew him. He was so excited they found, took him in the other room and talked to him an’ he acknowledged what the trouble was. They said they believed him, because the old man had been a hunter, they knew him. All his life...hunting until no little thing would ever scare him, no animal or anything like that. Then he went to Kelso and told some of his friends down there. Then the newspaper reporter gave us a merry time, day and night.

And the interview is also in agreement with Beck’s account in his autobiography:

I tried to persuade everyone not to relate the happenings to anyone, and they agreed, but Hank [Beck’s father-in-law] soon let the cat out of the bag. We made our way to Spirit Lake, and Hank went in to the ranger station. He had told the ranger earlier about the tracks, and the ranger had replied, "Let me know if you find out what they are." That was just what Hank did, to the puzzlement of the ranger.

When we were back home in Kelso, Washington, he told some of his friends, and somehow the story leaked out to the papers, and the Great Hairy Ape Hunt of 1924 was on.

Why would Patterson’s story diverge so widely from its supposed source? There is a loose thread here, and though I’m not going to pull it in this essay, I’m pretty sure the answer will have to do with Roger Patterson’s own obsessions, not with Fred Beck’s story. For our purposes, it is enough to say that Patterson’s version of Beck’s story has passed through the filter of his own concerns to such a degree that it has been substantively changed. We can’t use Patterson’s written account of the Ape Canyon event. It is just too unreliable.

We started with six sources of the story, but now we’ve ruled two of them out, the newspaper account, and Patterson’s written account, as likely sensationalized and unreliable versions. That still leaves us with four accounts - Byrne’s account based on his interview, the Patterson interview, Dahinden’s account based on his interview, and Beck’s autobiography.

How Not to Conduct an Interview

Unfortunately, Roger Patterson’s interview with Fred Beck is another source of trouble with the story. Patterson several times corrected Beck on details in a way that no interviewer should if what he wants to do is get the story as the witness would tell it. In fact, it almost looks like coaching.

For instance, when Patterson is asking Beck about the physical description of the creatures he saw, Beck seems somewhat at a loss, saying one thing, then another.

Q-Well how would you describe, Mr. Beck, as far as what they look like in their body and their head?
A. Well, they was tall, I dunno, they looked to me like they was eight foot tall, maybe taller, and they was built like a man, little in the waist, and big shoulders on, and chest, and their necks were kinda what they call bull necks, you know how they are.
Q-No neck at all, hardly.
A-That’s it, and their ears, turns out like ours do, and so big, you know, and hair all over, you couldn’t tell nothing about them.
Q-Did they have hair on their face, or could you, did you ever . . .
A-No, let’s see, I don’t believe they did . . . I believe they did have hair on their face.
Q-But not as much as. . .
A-No (cough) can’t have whiskers.

Note how Patterson makes declarations about what the creatures looked like rather than trying to elicit Beck’s own descriptions. And at the moment when Beck says they don’t, then that they do have hair on their face, one wonders if he wasn’t responding to something in Patterson’s demeanor? At any rate, with the interference from the interrogator, we don’t really know what Beck would have said if left to form his own words. And this isn’t the only example of “witness leading” in the interview. Consider these examples:

Q-They did, though, walk upright. Did you ever see . . .
A-I never seen one on the four.
Q-Their arms, probably, was they . . .
A-Arms down below the hips, long, I figured . . .
Q-Below their knees?
A-Yeah, their knees. Long arms. And big arms.

Patterson’s declaration and leading question in the above series make sure that we don’t really know what Beck would have said if he had been left to use his own words. I look at the line “I figured . . . " and I wonder what might have come next if Patterson hadn’t interjected? And what we don’t know is what kind of physical cues Patterson was giving off to which Beck might have responded. Just reading what we have reprinted here, it looks as if Beck is fairly compliant. He seems to want to conform to Patterson’s expectations. It looks as if we aren’t going to be able to trust Patterson’s interview, either. Where does that leave us? We have Byrne’s short account from his 1960 interview, Dahinden’s written account based on his own interview of Fred Beck, and Beck’s autobiography. We are down to three.

Byrne’s afterthought

Byrne was the first of the contemporary investigators to interview Fred Beck, but he was the last to publish anything about it. And his account is almost cursory, as if the event hadn’t really gotten his attention. Given what we’ve already uncovered, perhaps this is to Byrne’s credit. By the time he got around to writing his book, the interview was already more than a decade old. But it’s important because it was the first statement by Beck since the original Oregonian articles (which we recall may not even have used Beck as a source). So how does this retelling stack up?

Once again, we have problems. Let’s focus in on a few examples.

There are two accounts of someone shooting at a bigfoot in most of the stories. In one of them, as told in the original Oregonian account, Beck’s father-in-law fired upon the first bigfoot with his revolver, which he was carrying with him. In Byrne’s retelling, the shooter isn’t named, and there is a difference in how the event unfolds:

One day one of the men saw what he thought was a large ape, peering at him over the top of a big rock. The man, Beck’s companion, ran to the cabin they had built close to the mine and got a rifle. He fired a shot at the creature, which disappeared.

Dahinden’s account specifically names the weapon as “a .38 automatic Remington”, which I believe is a handgun, while Beck’s autobiography says it is a rifle. Both accounts agree that his father-in-law had carried the weapon with him, whichever it was.

Once again, there’s no agreement. But wait, if it’s disagreement you are after, there is more. About the siege itself, Byrne writes:

That night and for several nights afterwards the cabin was the target of showers of rocks that fell on its roof and against its walls from the surrounding trees.

Beck said that he and his companions rushed out with guns several times to see who or what was throwing the stones. They saw and heard nothing. As soon as they went inside the stoning started again and after a few nights of this, unnerved, they left the cabin and returned to Kelso.

Here we have two new variations -- that the siege lasted for “several nights”, and that they “rushed outside with guns several times to see who or what was throwing the stones.” These details are completely missing from the other accounts left to us. If we remove these divergent events from Byrne’s account, there isn’t much left, but what is left is perhaps telling. Beck had apparently told Byrne that he was the “only known survivor of what became known as the Ape Canyon incident”, when in fact this was not true in 1960. With this in mind, a possible deception, added to the other discrepancies, it seems wise to rule out Byrne’s account altogether.


Don’t Tell Me What I Don’t Want to Hear

The problem with our remaining sources is that they are fairly incompatible. Dahinden is still famous for his utter contempt for the paranormal whenever it touched his favorite subject. I can’t remember where I got this story, but there is an account of a time when Dahinden came to view a series of footprints, supposedly from a bigfoot, that simply ended in the middle of a field. He asked the finder of the prints, “Where are the rest of them?” She made an upward motion with her hands. Without another word, Dahinden turned and left the scene and never gave it another thought. Or so the story goes, at any rate. Is it possible that someone so famously disinterested in the paranormal would have elicited a true retelling of the Ape Canyon story, if that story was only a little earlier told as an autobiography chock full of the paranormal, including angels, fairies, floating lights that lead the men to a gold mine, a curse, spiritualism and other facets as far way from the scientific mind of Rene Dahinden as it is possible to get? The two stories cannot possibly both be true. Either Beck wrote the autobiography, and therefore whatever he told Dahinden was not true, or the autobiography is not true and Dahinden got the real beef. Either way, Beck isn’t telling the whole tale in one or the other, and that makes them both suspect. Then there is this strange bit in the headnote of Beck’s autobiography:

He [Fred Beck] tells the real facts after 43 years of silence.

Surely Ronald Beck would have known that his father had already spoken to Byrne (whom he does seem to mention) and Patterson, and that his story had already been included in Patterson’s book? If he did, what does he mean by “tells the real facts after 43 years of silence”? Is he acknowledging that Fred Beck never told the truth to the others? That is what it looks like. So then what did he tell Dahinden and Green only a year later?

Well not so fast – it is possible that Beck dictated the autobiography to his son before he was interviewed by Patterson. This seems possible since the text mentions the mistakes of the newspapers, but doesn’t mention that Patterson’s book had gotten the same things wrong. But where does that leave us, since the story he told Patterson, Dahinden, and Green was completely different? We are still in the same boat.

So no matter what Dahinden got out of Beck, apparently it wasn’t the truth. It was probably only whatever Beck thought Dahinden wanted to hear. Poof, just like that, we are out of versions of the story!

We were headed straight for this train-wreck all along. Beck’s autobiography is so weird that no one will credit it. Maybe there is something to the Ape Canyon story. It would have been good to get independent accounts from all the miners involved, from interviewers who knew a thing or two about getting a good interview. But that didn’t happen. All we are left with are six different versions of the same story that don’t agree very much, but even where they do agree, they are completely undercut by Beck’s very strange autobiography. I’m afraid we are going to have to give up on the Ape Canyon story. It was a good one, probably too good to be true.

(By now you may feel like reading Fred Beck’s autobiography for yourself. You should:

http://www.bigfootencounters.com/classics/beck.htm )

The Upshot of it All

If Fred Beck’s autobiography has been available since 1967, one wonders why so little has been made of it? Amongst the major authors in the field, why did it wait until Loren Coleman in 2003 to even mention the weirdness in Beck’s autobiography? And why were the discrepancies so apparent in Roger Patterson’s writing versus his transcribed interview with Beck not remarked upon until now? And while John Green gets the best marks of our major writers from “back in the day” for having noted some of the trouble with Beck’s story, one wonders why he reissued his book unrevised in light of the information that has become widely available since he first wrote? Or did none of them ever begin to cringe that they had given Beck their blessing by placing the Ape Canyon story so high in the pantheon of Bigfoot tales after reading his autobiography? Perhaps Patterson never had a chance to read it, but did the others? If they didn’t, it would indicate that there was some trouble in the lines of communication (not at all hard to believe), for, surely, if any one of them had read the autobiography, he would have known that there were problems. Indeed, if any one of them had read what the others had written, he would have know that there were problems.

In the end, it looks as if we have no recourse but to retire the Ape Canyon incident once and for all. But it should have been retired a long time ago.



NOTES:

I mentioned David Daegling somewhat approvingly, but I do have some criticisms for him. Daegling understood that there were problems with the Ape Canyon story, but he wasn’t able to sort it all out either. The trouble with Daegling is that he doesn’t seem to have really become familiar with the available literature. He has taken bits from it, but he hasn’t mastered it. For instance, he insinuates that Patterson and Dahinden might have ignored the paranormal aspects of Fred Beck’s account on purpose, but does not take notice of the fact that we have a transcript of Patterson’s interview, which shows that there was no mention of paranormal aspects of the story, nor does he seem to know that Dahinden was notoriously outraged by any hint of the paranormal, both facts that he ought to have known.

Also, I realize that there was more than one newspaper account from 1924 (and several reprints after, also) but my understanding from reading the available sources is that they are all based on one reporter’s interview with Beck’s father-in-law.