My grandfather passed away seven months ago. He was ninety four years old.
He had gone fishing on one of his favorite streams and he happened to fall
in. He seemed to be all right after he made it home, but
he ended up taking the pneumonia and he passed in the hospital bed five days
later. It was the only time in his life he had ever slept in
a hospital bed, and probably the last place on earth he wanted his life
to end. He lived his entire life on a piece of property that his
grandfather had staked and claimed in northwest Idaho. So my great great grandfather was
born in eighteen seventy four. He didn't start putting this place together until about
nineteen oh one, but he left home in Missouri in eighteen ninety four.
My family wasn't big on remembering and revering when members of my family did what
all that. I know that I've learned through my own research and reading,
and I wasn't particularly interested in doing any of that until my grandfather passed away.
It was while I was cleaning the personal things from his house after he
had passed on, that I found a thing that aroused my curiosity. I
was always fond of my grandfather, though I never did get to see him
as often as I would have liked. My father chose not to stay on
the property when he became old enough to marry and settle down. We moved
to Billings and that is where I grew up, but I would spend vacation
weekends with my grandfather, especially after I was no longer required to go on
family vacations. They would go somewhere they thought would be interesting, and I
would go and stay with Papa for a few days. He would tell story
upon story, and I liked hearing every one of them. So it came
as a real shock and surprise to me when I was going through his things
that I found a platte of acreage that had been created when he had built
his house. He had been dated off a certain amount of property at the
time, and the platte showed just where his house would be on the property
that surrounded it. His father had also chosen not to stay on the place.
Papa had come back to it when he was ready to set up housekeeping
with my grandmother, but the platte did show where his grandfather's original house was
until I had seen it on the platte. I had never known anything about
where my great great grandfather had lived. It had never been mentioned, I
guess because no one ever thought it to be important since it had been so
long ago, and I had never thought to ask about it. Like I
said, our family didn't talk a lot about familial ancestors, and that is
something I regret more and more the older I get. But finding this plat
knowing where my grandfather's grandfather lived what stirred a real interest in me just to
go and see if I could find any ruins that might remain. I can't
tell you why it had become important to me, but it had. I
had driven a jeep fourwell drive, so the next morning I put a few
things I thought might be useful into the back of it, and I took
off. I loaded an axe and a shovel and a machette, things of
that nature. I didn't know what conditioned the old place might be in,
but I imagined that if there was anything to find still, it would almost
have to be overgrown. So I drove through some very rough terrain for nearly
forty five minutes. My papa owned a rather large track of real estate,
but not as large as you might be imagining. It was just so rough
that in many places I had to creep the jeep along, and in several
places it would have probably been faster walking than it was driving. But I
finally came up on a stand of trees that didn't look like the others that
I had passed. These trees looked more organized. Well that's not a great
way to say it, but everywhere else trees just seemed to grow wherever,
but these seemed different. Since it was right about where I thought the original
home place should be, I stopped and had a look around. The trees,
for lack of a better word, formed a perimeter, and once you
went inside past the trees, it was more or less hollow. That didn't
mean that everything was neat and tidy. It was terribly overgrown with bushes and
nettles and vines. But even so there was no way to walk forward until
a path had been chewed out. But there weren't any other trees, and
I was glad I had thought to bring him a chetty, and I went
back for it. For more than an hour, I swung and chopped and
hacked until I took a swing and the machete blade hit something so solid that
it rang back through my arm so stingingly that I dropped the blade. I
thought I had hit some sort of boulder. It was a rock, all
right, but not a large one. It was a collection of rocks that
had been mortared together with mud and clay. I just knew that I had
found the chimney to my great great grandfather's house. But as I moved limb
after vine, the rock structure just kept going. It wasn't the chimney I
had found, but instead I had found the house. My papa's grandfather had
built his entire house out of stone, and I had finally found it.
I cut where I could, and I inched along until I tripped over more
rocks, and I went sprawling into the bushes that obscured any and everything from
being seen. Now that I knew the rocks were there, I could see
them, and I followed them with my hand and used them as a guide.
I had my hands on the front steps of the place. I ducked
under the vines that were growing everywhere, and he walked my way up the
steps, and there were four of them. I was exhausted. I was
sweating like a hooker in church, and I was bleeding from a thousand scratches.
But I was also very excited, and once I was through all the
tangle, I could see that the house was still relatively in good condition,
at least from the outside. The trees had protected the bushes and vines so
that they could grow to immense heights and thickness, and the bushes and vines
had protected the house all of these years. There was no furniture of any
kind on the porch, of course, but I sat down on the rock
surface, and I imagined that I was sitting there with my ancestor, as
he used to sit there when he was tired, like I was. I
looked up and behind me, and I saw that there was a window.
There wasn't any glass in it, just a wooden shutter to cover it that
could be swung open to let the air and the light in the house.
I nudged it open. I was afraid it would fall because of how old
the hinges were, but it held. What fell was about a thousand half
eaten acorns that some animal had packed ratted away in between the window shutter and
the house. I opened the window further, and I looked inside. The
place was a total mess. Vines had grown up through the floorboards, the
furniture had been gutted down to the frames for nest over the past hundred or
so years. Cabinet doors hung by threads or had fallen off the walls completely.
But the mantelboard above the huge stone fireplace sat there in such a pristina
condition that it would have just been hung the day before. I crossed the
porch to the front door, and I pulled down on the latch, and
of course it refused to give. I gave the whole door a push and
found that it had swelled and warped over time until it was seated firmly in
place inside the doorway. I could have kicked at it until it gave way
or splintered, but I really didn't want to destroy anything if I could help
it. And I walked back over and waded into the piles of acorns,
and I pulled myself up into the window with as much care as I could.
I lowered myself inside, and I had no idea how solid the flooring
was, and I didn't want to jump down, only to drive myself through
the wood. Many times I had wondered about the possibility of snakes or the
hurtful kinds of spiders that might be living in the house, and especially under
it. I didn't want to get wedged half in and half out of the
floor where they could get it in me and I wouldn't be able to run.
I slid on down and found that there was some give to the boards
of the floor, but all in all it was fairly solid. The window
let in some light, and one light there was underneath all those trees and
bushes, but it was still dim. I looked and found one more window
in the main room and one in the kitchen, and I opened them both
and I could finally see rather well. There were a lot of cobwebs and
dust, but underneath all of that you could tell that at one time it
had been a very cozy and unique home. It was empty by and large,
but at one time it had been an nice house. And I eased
through the rest of it, and there was only two other rooms, and
they were in similar condition to the main room. I looked and saw nothing
that would have been worth picking up and keeping as a memento of my visit.
I had known there would be nothing as I looked around, but it
would have been special to have spotted an old white and I for something like
that. I was getting tired of breathing the dust and droppings from animals that
had been dead for a hundred years, but I sat down on the hearth
so that I could take a last moment to wonder what it had been like
for my grandfather's grandfather to have sat in this very room. And past the
evenings, I didn't know when or if I would ever get to come back
to this place, so while I was here, I wanted to make the
most of it. After some time, I decided that it was time to
go, and I still had the jungle out in front to navigate myself through,
and then the kidney rattling drive to make before I got back and returned
to work that I had left unfinished. And I suppose I scooted forward a
little as I was standing up, and I heard and felt a stone rattle
or grind, as if it was loose from its housing. I turned so
that I could make sure that it was sitting as it was supposed to be.
But nature might claim this old house, but I wanted to leave the
house itself in much the way that I had found it. But when I
looked, I saw why the stone had been loose. It had been intentionally
left that way. Instead of seeing dusty and crumbling jake leg mortar around the
edges of where the stone would have been firmly seated, there was a cast
iron rim around the whole thing. It was only then that I noticed that
the edges of the stone had been chiseled away to make it more or less
rectangular in shape. I quickly picked up the stone and set it aside.
Dark and completely lined with iron, was a box. The stone had only
been the lid camouflaged as well. I guess this was my papa's grandfather's version
of a safe or a safety deposit box. I was a little afraid to
reach down inside hole. It was as dark as the dungeon in there,
and I didn't know that something may or may not have made its home in
there. But I shifted around and allowed just a little bit more like to
fall onto it, or into it, I suppose would be a better way
to say it. I could see that something was down there, but I
couldn't see just what. When I finally put my hand down there, I
went as deep as my elbow before I finally felt something besides iron sides.
I bumped it and I felt it move, and I took a deep breath,
and I pulled out a wooden box, not so much larger than a
cigar box, a bit deeper and a bit longer, but roughly the size
of a cigar box. I wanted to see what, if anything was inside
of it after all these years, but I knew that if I did and
something was in there, I would get distracted. I set the box aside
and tried to see if anything else was down in the small vault, but
I couldn't see anything. And I retrieved the stick from the porch and I
began swishing it and prodding it around down in the hole, and I felt
the stick hit nothing, and I heard it slap against nothing but those iron
sides. Whatever was in the wooden box was going to be the prize to
take from this trip. And I replaced the stone and made sure that it
looked just right, and then I collected the box and I went outside again
through the window. This was my third time doing that, and I was
glad I wouldn't be doing it again. And I could never have made a
career out of being a cat burglar. Dawn windows are too hard to crawl
in and out of, but I very much wanted to sit down on the
stone porch and see what I held in my hands, but I crawled back
down the steps instead. I picked up my machette and made my way back
out of the tangle until I could once again see the trees. It was
easier getting out compared to what it had been going in, but not by
much. I walked to the jeep and I threw the machete in the back
and planted myself behind the steering wheel with the wooden box in my lap.
I kept reminding myself that even if nothing was inside of the box but ruined
scraps of something in the skelter remains of insects, the box itself was an
incredible find, especially given how I found it, But truthfully, I wanted
to see something amazing inside of it. I wasn't even thinking about stacks of
antique money or deeds. No one in my family I had ever heard about
had been wealthy, but I wanted there to be something. One of the
small nails that was holding the latch onto the box had completely rusted, away,
so I was careful upon opening it in case the latch just fell away.
I didn't want to lose any part of my find. The first thing
I saw was a very badly cracked photograph of a fairly young man standing behind
a plain looking woman that was wearing a light colored dress. It was mounted
on something as thick as cardboard, but it was more rigid. It reminded
me of the photos that you always see in the Civil War documentaries. But
underneath the photograph laid a handkerchief that had yellowed with age, and when unfolded,
you could see that originally it had been white. Someone had embroidered a
capital A onto it in very fine curse of stitching. My first thoughts were
whose name had started with the letter A, and whilemast's handkerchief so important to
my ancestor. I turned the photo over carefully and saw that it read a
faint script Leander and Amelia Munroe, wedded seventh May eighteen ninety three. My
last name is Munroe, and my family's middle name is Leander. I was
looking at the only photograph that I was aware of of my great great grandparents.
I knew this to be a prize that I had been hoping I would
find or I thought I knew that, but then I saw the sack of
papers laid neatly in the bottom of the box. I pulled at the corner
of the first sheet and it broke off in my finger tips. I was
so mad that I was going to have to wait to find out what was
on the papers, but I couldn't take the slightest risk of destroying them just
to try to read them. So I put everything back in the box and
I made myself focus on getting back to my grandfather's house in one piece,
and once there I could learn what was on the papers. The way back
to my Papa's house was rougher than I had remembered, even though it had
only been a couple of hours, but I finally made it back. The
rest of my family. My parents and my wife were going to come and
help with the clean out. For now, I was just glad that I
had come for the day or two to work without them, because he gave
me some time to myself with the contents of the box. Unless I was
taken completely by surprise by what was inside, I will tell them all about
finding it when I saw them, but for now, whatever was inside was
all mine to spend time with. My Papa had a work bench of sorts
and a spare bedroom of his house. It's where he used to work on
and tweak all of his fishing gear. On that bench sat one of those
big magnifying lenses with the light bulbs set in the housing so that everything you've
looked at was very large and bright. And jewelers used them for watch repair
and such, and Papa used his for tying flies. He used it a
lot during the last twenty years of his life. I moved all of his
bits and Bob's a site so that I could have a clear and clean place
to look at. It was in the box, and with a lot more
care than earlier, I lifted the papers from the box and laid them on
the bench so that I could see them plainly. There weren't many sheets,
but he had written them pretty full, and the first page was the hardest
one to read it, seeing that the lower and the stacke went the more
sheets were protected somehow, But with the light and the big lens, it
wasn't so terrible reading what he had written. He wrote about him taking work.
Soon after he and Amelia had married. They both took jobs. He
was cutting timber to be used in the making of cross ties for the railroads,
and she was working as a chambermaid. They were living in Shelby,
Montana, after they had gone west from Missouri. He said that every time
he would go into town, all anyone wanted to talk about was where the
latest big gold strike had been found. I guess Leander got the edge,
and he told him that he was going to go and give looking for gold
to try. They hadn't been married a year yet, but he was going
to leave her and see if he couldn't find a way for them to live
without working themselves to the bone every six days out of seven. If Amelia
argued about his leaving, he didn't write that down. And to the east
and north of Shelby was still where a good many Blackfoot Indians made their home.
Relations weren't at all that great between them and white people. But Leander
didn't have anything against any Indian, and he doubted that he would run into
any anyway, And if he did, surely they wouldn't have a problem.
With one man out in the woods washing a few pans of dirt and a
creek, he told Amelia that everyone finding some gold, there wasn't any reason
why a bit of it couldn't be theirs. And so he gathered a few
things and set out to get rich, and Amelia stayed behind, and she
kept working. He traveled until it seemed that he was walking nearly uphill all
the time, and that was where he had wanted to go. He wanted
to be close to the Canadian border. He traveled until he had gone two
weeks without seeing another soul, and that was when he figured he was alone
enough, and he started trying to make his fortune. He wrote that he
had panned and dug test holes for many days before he found the first bit
of color, and after he found that, he began to see it more
and more often, not much, just a few flakes now and then,
and wants a little nugget about the size of a sweet pea, but mostly
dust. He said that after a month he had almost enough to fill a
thumble, but the knowledge of that gold was out there hadn't left him,
and he kept on looking all through the remainder of the spring and through the
summer months he worked. He said in his writings that the only time he
stopped his search for gold was when he finally slept or checked the trap that
he had fashioned fort fish. He caught some small animals from time to time
in a steel trap, and he fished the rest of the time, and
that's what he lived on, sleeping when he had to and eating when he
could. Everything else was all about finding a way to give more to his
wife than a future as a maid, and he wanted her to have a
life of ease and to be free from worry. Once he returned, he
wrote that he had started to notice some frost in the mornings, and so
far he had been living in a lean to made from a sheet of canvas
that he had brought. It had worked well enough during the warm months,
but with fall approaching, he would have to do it differently or he would
have to return home. There wasn't a way to survive the cold months with
the little that he had, and he wrote that even though he desired to
see his dear Amelia again very badly, he dreaded going back and showing just
what a failure that he had proven himself to be. Demated that his accumulated
goal to weigh less than half a pound far from enough for his wife to
abandon her work. He wrote that even when he could see ice formed on
the edges of the stream, he was working, and he was still trying
to find a way to stay and work until he had made a success of
himself. He was fearful that if he went back was so little to show
for his efforts, his wife would think lowly of him, he wrote.
And when he had finally resigned himself to going back, he packed up what
few belongings he had so that he could leave. The following morning, he
wrote in the saddest words of how he lay there, regretting his having to
leave, so much so that he was unable to sleep. And he wrote
that he had laid there and he heard the sound for the first time.
That he had been in that place or near it for almost six months,
as far as he could tell, and he had heard many things, but
he had ever heard anything of the likes of what he had heard. That
night. He sat up, and he listened more intently, and even crawled
outside of his lean to shelter so that he could hear better. And it
came to him again on the breezes, and once every three or four minutes
it would begin as a rumble, like someone breathing with their lungs full of
the cold, but much louder, and then it would increase in volume and
pitch until it became a keening, the kind of keening that humans can't make.
Only animals that are in pain make those types of sounds. He wrote
that he picked up his knife in his axe, and he wanted to be
able to defend himself if he needed to, but he was prepared to put
the animal out of its misery if he found it and saw that it would
be for the best. But he searched in the darkness for nearly two hours
and walking a few steps and then listening for the whaling. The last time
he heard it he almost ran all the way back to his shelter. The
sound had come from only a few feet away, and in the darkness caused
by the night in trees. He had brought himself very close to the animal
without even knowing it was there. He stood trying to know what he should
do next, and he wrote that he could hear it breathing. He knew
he was very close, and he was very afraid a bear was what he
had been assuming this animal would be. But when he moved a branch so
he could see what he saw laying there. Was nothing resembling a bear or
any other kind of animal he had ever heard of. It lay there under
the cedar bows, breathing shallowly. It was looking back at my ancestor with
large eyes filled with fear and pain. He wrote that if this thing could
have, it would have either run away or assaulted him. But it didn't
either because it couldn't. But he wanted to stand there and simply marvel at
the sheer size of the beasts. But once he saw the wound, that
was where his attentions gathered. Now this thing lay there half again, as
long as any man, and was covered head to heel with a coarse,
matted hair or fur. And when it would snarl from the pain, he
could see two massive rows of blunted yellow teeth surrounded by thick, swollen lips.
It was brutish looking, but it was also helpless. It had thighs
the size of a man's waist, but a large section of a tree limb
was buried into one of them. Only a few inches of it was visible,
but that part looked as big around as the handle of a shovel.
And the part that protruded pointed downward towards the thing's huge and grotesque feet.
He knew part of that limb had been driven in and also upward into the
thing's thigh. Heaven alone knew how deeply it went, or what calamity had
befallen this thing for it to have been injured so terribly. And my grandfather's
grandfather wrote that if this beast was ever going to walk again or even live,
that stob had to be removed. But what he didn't know was how
the thing would react if that stob was touched or pulled on. One swipe
from either of those massive arms could recommend snack, and God help the fool
who let his head get caught between both of those enormous hands. But the
thought of turning around and allowing this creature to die crossed his mind, but
his conscience would not permit him to do that. He wrote that he felt
the fool by asking the thing if it could any way understand him when he
spoke, because he knew that it was only an animal of some bastardized variety.
And the beast snarled and then relaxed again as the pain overwhelming it once
more. Leander told the beast that he would return in short order. Was
supplies to help, and he knew that the thing did not understand, but
he felt better for leaving the animal with the knowledge that he would be coming
back. He would have preferred taking the thing to where the shelter was,
but that was out of the question, and he doubted that three men could
have budged the creature. Being as all of his things had been packed away
for what was to have been his departure, Lander thought it best just to
move the shelter to the creature. Now that he knew where the animal was,
he knew that it wasn't so far from the stream. He had been
working for months, and to find the creature he had walked in a variety
of patterns, and now he walked in a straight line back for his belongings.
Once back, he laid all that he owned off to the side,
and he stared at the beast. His better two shirts were in his pack,
so he removed the one from us back and tore it into a few
strips as best as he could. His eyes never left the eyes of the
beast, who stared constantly at Leander. It was slow, easy movements.
He eased himself between the creature's long, thick legs and he touched the wound
as gently as he could. The creature howled, but Leander would not move
his hand. The creature eventually calmed, as if in resignation of what was
going to happen. He had a canteen full of water, but there wasn't
an endless supply, and he decided washing the wound beforehand would be a waste,
and he wrote that he patted the thigh of the uninjured leg until the
creature breathed more easily, and then closed its eyes. Having no idea if
the creature would gush its life blood and expire or grab Leander and a fit
of pain and rage, he began to pull out the limb that was stabbed
into the thing's thigh. He pulled more than half a foot of bloody wood
from the leg, with the creature bellowing and hirling the whole time, but
it never raised a hand in protest. And when the stab was out,
Leander washed the wound and bound it tightly with the strips he had made from
his shirt, and he wrote that the hole should have been sown closed,
but he had neither the light nor the material to do that, And once
he had bandaged the leg, he poured some of the remaining water into the
thing's mouth for it to drink. And it was lying very still in an
effort to control the pain, and Leander took his canvas and spread it over
the creature as a blanket. Fever was still a threat, and he would
ward it off if he could. Only when he saw that the animal was
sleeping did he retrieve one of his shirts, and sitting back against a tree,
to watch over the beast. For four days he tended to this thing,
and bringing it water to drink, and bringing it fish to eat when
he could trap one, and cleaning the bandages and redressing the wound. He
did all of this in silence, and he wrote that he had tried talking
to it the first day, but that only served to confuse and enrage the
creature. So each day, when his nursing details were completed, he would
sit and study the small amount of gold that he had collected. The thing
would lay there and watch Leander sift the goal from one palm to the other,
And on the fifth morning, after having found the creature, Leander awoke
to find that this monstrous animal was gone. How anything that size could move
so silently was a complete wonder. But it had. But it hadn't just
left. It had left and come back and left again, all while Leander
was totally unaware. Atop the canvas that had served as a blanket for the
creature were more than a dozen stones, made up mostly of gold. Some
weren't much larger than apples, but a couple were the size of a man's
fist or larger, and when the trash bits had been cleared, he had
more than twenty pounds of gold. For more than two hours, Leander's searched
for the creature, but not even a track could be found. He assumed
that the creature considered its debt repaid, and further contact was needless. My
grandfather's grandfather began the journey home feeling quite wealthy in a way that had nothing
to do with the gold he was carrying. Eventually, he used his reward
for the assistance to purchase this property in Idaho. I do not know if
Amelia or anyone else ever heard how Leander came upon the funds to begin his
life here, but judging by the way it was written. I have to
believe this was something he kept to himself. I debated long about sharing this
story with you, and I've shown the papers to one in my family.
They have seen the photograph and the handkerchief, but not his words. Those
words I will keep to myself, the way I believe he kept the story
to himself. I was able to go back to the stone house one more
time before all the work was completed at Pap Paul's place. I wasn't expecting
to find anything additional, and unfortunately I was right. I found nothing more.
Even though I prodded and jiggled every stone that I could put my hands
on. I wanted there to be more to the story. I wanted to
hear his thoughts on what he believed the creature to be. And now we
call them bigfoot. Most of us want to see one, even if they
would be terrified. At the time, my grandfather's grandfather did more than see
one, and while he may not have been friends with one, a partnership
had been formed with one, if only for a short time. I would
have enjoyed hearing what Leander would have said to those who were certain that no
such creature exists. Maybe the very few and rare times that one is spotted
now is because my grandfather's grandfather saved the life of one, and maybe that
act of kindness allowed a species to continue. I like to think about it
in that way. I think Leander would also