Mrs. Wakeman vs. the Antichrist (14 page)

Treasure hunting was part of the European magical tradition and remained a popular, if little discussed, pursuit in the United States until the twentieth century. Small groups
went out at night to perform ceremonies that revealed the whereabouts of treasure, casting spells that protected them from the supernatural forces standing guard.

Though treasure hunting was seldom successful, its practitioners would have understood exactly what was happening at Mt. St. Helens.

Beyond the daily round of séances, phantom arrows, and apports, Fred Beck found time to have unusual experiences on his own.

At some point he was off by himself and feeling lonely when a young woman appeared. They chatted and Beck was invited to visit the campsite she shared with her father.

When I arrived at her camp, I did not see her father, and never did see him. She had a fire going, and a light colored blanket was spread out and she was sitting on it. It was a warm summer evening, and we held another pleasant conversation. I remember her telling me how she liked the fresh air of the mountains, and how wonderfully she loved nature.

She would be talking on a subject, then pause and say, “Isn't that right, Dad?” This she said several times. There was no tent, cooking utensils, no food, and certaiply [
sic
]
no visible father. The most amazing thing was I did not at the time think her different than any other person. When she spoke to her invisible Dad, I felt just like her Dad was there.

I left her and walked back to camp, but my mind seemed like it was a thousand miles away. I could hear the other men talking, but it seemed like they were below me, and their voices sounded soft and distant.

I do not know anyone who had seen her but myself.

Beck was the only miner to enjoy a pleasantly surreal night out, but the group experienced other phenomena together. Thumping sounds were heard inside the earth and footprints discovered whose size and origin defied explanation.

There in the center of the sand bar were two huge tracks [nineteen inches long and] about four inches deep. There was not another track on that sand bar!

There we were standing in the middle of the sand bar, and not one of us could conceive any earthly thing taking steps 160 feet long. “No human being could have made these tracks,” Hank said, “and there's only one way they could be made, something dropped from the sky and went back up.”

Though the prints made Marion Smith uneasy, “no one was really worried about the tracks as regarding any threat to
our safety.” Nor was it fear of the footprints' makers that led to the men building a permanent dwelling; they had been living in a tent, but mining required more supplies and equipment and a safe place to store them.

With endless amounts of raw material available, the men turned pine trees into squared-off logs, piled them into thick windowless walls, and chinked the spaces between with pine branches. The roof was built to withstand heavy snow, a stone fireplace provided heat, and water came from a spring a hundred yards away. They did not know it at the time, but the cabin was strong enough to withstand both the elements, and the residents, of Mt. St. Helens.

In July 1924, ore samples from the Vander White were assayed, and the claim's value estimated at approximately $2,000 a ton; if this proved accurate, the miners were on the verge of becoming rich men. Any anticipatory pleasure Beck felt was dulled by a toothache, and when he asked his father-in-law to drive him into town to get it pulled, the older man replied that “‘God or the Devil' could not get him [Smith] away from there.” It was also around this time that the thumping noises grew louder and more insistent.

For about a week they heard booming, “like something was hitting its self on its chest,” which was joined by a “shrill
peculiar whistle each evening . . . coming from one ridge, and then . . . an answering whistling from another ridge.”
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The sounds made Smith wary. He carried his Remington automatic when going for water on July 11 and asked Fred to accompany him and bring his .30-.30 Winchester.
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According to the July 18, 1924,
Kelsonian
, they were on their way to the spring when a figure appeared on the other side of a small canyon, a hairy blackish-brown creature standing seven feet tall. Smith yelled and raised his rifle, and it dodged behind a pine tree. When the beast peeked around the trunk, he fired three times and exclaimed, “Don't worry about that devil, Fred, I got him right in the head!” The devil had a hard head and it reappeared two hundred yards away, running “fast and upright,” giving Fred the chance to loose three more shots before the retreating figure was out of sight.

The men returned with water and told the others what happened, and everyone agreed that it was time to go. Smith's Ford was too far away for them to reach it before sundown, and not liking the idea of being in the woods after dark, they decided to wait till morning. After dinner they smoked their pipes, fastened the door shut, and went to bed: two in a bunk built into the wall and the rest on pine boughs on the floor.

Between cooking, smoking, and unwashed clothes, the atmosphere in the cabin must have been close, yet its inmates doubtless slept better having thick walls between themselves and the moonlit forest.

The assault began around midnight and, according to
I Fought the Apemen
, it started with a bang. Something struck the cabin with enough force to dislodge the chinking from between two of the logs onto Marion Smith and jolt the men awake. Smith was yelling, kicking, and waving his rifle, and, as Fred cleaned the debris off him, they heard what sounded like “a great number of feet trampling and rattling over a pile of our unused shakes.” Everyone grabbed a pistol or rifle, and Beck and Smith looked through the space where the chinking had been and saw ape-men outside. The cabin was being pelted with rocks, and the miners improvised a plan to defend themselves.

The only time we shot our guns that night was when the creatures were attacking our cabin. When they would quiet down for a few minutes, we would quit shooting. I told the rest of the party, that maybe if they saw we were only shooting when they attacked, they might realize we were only defending ourselves. We could have had clear shots at them through the opening left by the chinking had we chosen to shoot. We did shoot, however, when they climbed up on our roof. We shot round after round through the roof. We had to brace the hewed-logged door with a long pole taken from the bunk bed. The creatures
were pushing against it and the whole door vibrated from the impact. We responded by firing many more rounds through the door. They pushed against the walls of the cabin as if trying to push the cabin over, but this was pretty much an impossibility, as previously stated the cabin was a sturdy made building. Hank and I did most of the shooting—the rest of the party crowded to the far end of the cabin, guns in their hands. One had a pistol, which still is in my family's possession, the others clutched their rifles. They seemed stunned and incredulous.

A humorous thing I well remember was Hank singing: “If you leave us alone, we'll leave you alone, and we'll all go home in the morning.” He did not mean it to be humorous, for Hank was dead serious, and sang under the impression that the “Mountain Devils” as he called them, might understand and go away.

At one point a hairy hand reached through the opening in the wall and grabbed an ax by the handle; Fred “swiftly turned the head of the axe upright, so that it caught on the logs; and at the same time Hank shot, barely missing my hand . . . [the] creature let go, and I pulled the handle back in, and put the axe in a safe place.
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They never saw more than three creatures at once, and there were quiet intervals, but the attacks continued until just before dawn, at which point the apes withdrew. When it was light enough to see clearly, the men ventured out and
saw one of the creatures standing at the edge of the canyon eighty yards away. Whether it was a straggler from the night before or an innocent giant hairy bystander, the men were not taking chances and Beck fired three times, toppling it over the cliff and down a gorge four hundred feet deep.
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Taking nothing but their packs and firearms, the men abandoned the cabin along with “about two hundred dollars in supplies, powder, and drilling equipment.”

As they drove down the mountain, Fred suggested that they keep the attack a secret. Everyone agreed, including Marion Smith, who immediately told the rangers at Spirit Lake and then his friends in the Blue Ox Tavern at Kelso. According to Fred's son, Clifford, “my grandfather went down to the corner tavern and got a snootful. He blabbed the whole story.”
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Sportsmen, reporters, and police converged on Mt. St. Helens in what became known as the Great Ape Hunt of 1924. The woods were full of people “armed with rifles and shotguns and pistols, and they're shooting at anything that moves.”
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Beck returned with two reporters and a detective to find the miners' possessions strewn about the cabin, the blasting powder missing, and at least one giant footprint. It was photographed, and pictures were taken of Fred and LeRoy Smith reenacting the siege.

Many dismissed the story as a hoax. Deputy game warden Justus Murk declared it was “[a]ll bunk.”
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When forest
rangers J. H. Huffman and W. M. Welch found a four-toed footprint, “Huffman . . . with the knuckles and palm of his right hand duplicated the imprint perfectly with the statement: ‘They were made that way.'”
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Over the years, the attack would be dismissed as either a hoax or a figment of the miners' imagination. It could have been group hysteria brought on by a rockslide, teenagers from the nearby YMCA summer camp rolling stones into the canyon, or prankster Rant Mullens, who claimed that he and his friends threw rocks at the cabin and made the tracks with giant carved wooden feet.

Wildly exaggerated versions of the story also appeared in print. On July 14, 1924, the
Berkeley (CA) Daily Gazette
reported that the miners were surrounded by “a cordon of thirty gorillas” and “200 rocks crashed through the roof to the floor of the shack.” Newspapers also printed allegedly authentic Indian legends about mountain giants and renegade tribes, “much like giant apes in appearance who lived like wild animals in the secluded caves of the High Cascades.”
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While reporters turned in their copy, Fred got his tooth pulled. He was leaving the dentist when a group of Yakima Indians told Beck about the “Selahtiks,” beings that were “not like a man and not like a spirit, but in between.”
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They traveled the mountain ranges, floated down rivers at night “like logs,” and ran off with Indian women. Fred learned that if he ever saw one “to make sure I expressed to them that I was friendly [by taking] some cedar boughs and
[waving] it at them, and in that way they would know I had come in peace.” The Yakima also told Beck something he already knew—ape-men hold grudges: “'If you ever harm one they will get even . . . They never forget.'”
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Nor was the miners' adventure likely to be forgotten around Mt. St. Helens, where it is preserved in local folklore and geography. The narrow gorge where the attack occurred has been “Ape Canyon” since 1924, and when an immense lava tube was discovered nearby in 1951, it was christened “Ape Cave.”
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Meanwhile, Fred Beck returned to a more or less ordinary routine of work, family, and psychic experiments.

Traumatic Sasquatch encounters have been known to sour people on the outdoors. When a Nootka trapper named Muchalat Harry was kidnapped by hairy giants in 1928, he escaped but never left his village again. There is nothing to suggest that Fred Beck suffered similar long-term effects, and though little has been written about his life after Ape Canyon, members of the Beck family tend to put their thoughts on paper.

Our Uncle Fred impressed us. There was [a] uniqueness about him that filled the three of us with awe. It was our feeling that he could read our innermost thoughts.

As a child, I always tried to keep a chair between Uncle Fred and me. I felt he had “x-ray eyes,” remembers June. “I didn't want him looking through me!”

The fifth son of the William Becks did seem to have currents of energy that were lacking in the other Becks. He seemed engrossed in various phases of “psychic phenomena.”
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There is no evidence that Beck continued to hold séances or prospect for gold, but he did pursue an interest in psychic healing. Ronald Beck told a friend that “his Father [
sic
] Fred was very similar to Edgar Casy [Cayce]. He claimed Fred had psychic powers. That he could go into a trance and predict things.”
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(Edgar Cayce [1877–1945], “the Sleeping Prophet,” gave countless trance readings. Most concerned people's health, with occasional departures into more arcane subjects, like Atlantis.) Some of Fred's family found the “faith-healing period” embarrassing.

Strangers drove out the Coweeman valley road looking for the residence of Dr. Beck. They came from places out of state and stopped to ask for direction to the “Doctor.”

Well, our Uncle Fred was a self-appointed doctor. We didn't think of him as a real doctor so we tended to look the other way and ignore the requests. However, our parents politely gave out directions to the Alfred Beck home.
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At some point, Beck also overcame his reluctance to discuss what happened at Mt. St. Helens and “delighted in telling the story to family members whenever he got the chance.”
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One history includes this unexpected detail:

Clifford said his dad received a telegram from the Federal Bureau of Investigation Washington, D.C. He remembers reading it. “Do not shoot the creatures [ape-men]. The Federal Government knows all about them. They are on official record.” Or words to that effect, Cliff added.
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