The Sasquatch legend is as old as the history of the Oregon territory itself. But as a few miners of Almeda mine near Galice, Oregon found out in 1922, the legend can turn out to be a nightmare.
Early in the spring of 1922 the Almeda Mine was a constant source of ore for the hungry ING Mining Co. of Denver. They employed over 230 men to mine the ore. Some of these miners decided that maybe they could find their own ore deposits on down the river. One morning five of them set out to try their luck.
The miners headed into the vast forest of the Rouge River wilderness. After looking for two weeks some of them decided that prospecting wasn't for them. They left to return to Galice in hopes of getting their jobs back.
Somewhere along the trail back, something took place that most men can only imagine. One of the miners returned to Galice to tell of his friends being attacked by giant forest monsters. The miner insisted that three of his comrades had been killed by two giant ape-men looking creatures.
A search party was quickly dispatched to the area to stop the flood of wild tales that would certainly spread and make miners quit by the scores. After a week of travel the search party found two of the three missing men dead of an apparent savage attack on them from some unknown animals of the forest. The third man was nowhere to be found. Only part of his pants and hat were still present at the sight. The ground was moist and showed footprints of enormous sizes all around the men's bodies.
After looking for the missing man the search party returned to Galice with the packs of the dead men. The foreman at the mine told the men to keep quiet about their find or lose their jobs. The searchers went back to work in the mine and nothing was ever said.
The man that returned with the story disappeared and thus the story was hushed until Zane Grey a resident of Galice wrote about it in a magazine.
(Oregon Trail Magazine, 1925)
Posts
