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
upone's 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 plat of acreage that had been created when he had built
his house. He had been deeded off a certain amount of property at the
time, and the plat showed just where his house would be on the property
that surrounded it. His father had also chosen not to stay on the place.
Paupaul had come back to it when he was ready to set up housekeeping
with my grandmother, but the plat did show where his grandfather's original house was.
Until I had seen it on the plat. 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 four wheel 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
machete, things of that nature. I didn't know what condition 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 and 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. 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 to 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 a machette,
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. 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 use 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 me 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 sh 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 one thousand half eaten acorns that some animal had packed ratted away in between
the window shutter and the house. 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 could 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 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. 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 a 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 watch, and I for
something like that. I was getting tired of breathing the dust and droppings from
animals that had been dead for one hundred years, but I sat down on
the art 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 pass
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 of the way that I had found it.
But when I looked, I saw one of 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 Paupall's grandfather's version of a say or a safety deposit box. I was
a little afraid to reach down inside the 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 in sight of it after all these years, but I
knew that if I did and something was in there, I would get distracted.
I sat 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 a
stick from the porch and I began swishing it and priding it around down in
the hole, and I felt the stick hitting 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. Now 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. Damn 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 machete
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 life, lap I kept reminding myself that even if nothing
was inside of the box but ruined scraps of something and the skeletal 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 lights 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 cord, 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 cursive stitching.
My first thoughts were whose name had started with the letter A, and
why was this handkerchief so important to my ancestor. I turned the photo over
carefully and saw that it read a faint script Leander and Amelia Monroe, wedded
seventh May eighteen ninety three. My last name is Monroe, and my family's
mental 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. 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 fingertips. 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 focused 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 Pappa'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 it gave me some time to myself with the contents of
the box. Unless I was taken completely by surprise by what was inside,
I would tell them all about finding it. When I saw them, but
for now, whatever was inside was all mine to spend time with my pau.
Paul 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 repairing such and Paul Paul 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 bobs aside so that I could
have a clear and clean place to look at what 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 me sheets, but he had written them pretty full, and the
first page was the hardest one to read. It seemed that the lower in
the stack you 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 itch, and he told Emilia 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 them 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 we 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. That was where he had wanted to
go. He wanted to be close to the Canadian border, and 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. After he found that, he began
to see it more and more often, not much, just a few flakes
now and then, and once 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 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 for catching 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, in eating when he could. Everything else was all about finding a
way to give more to his wife than a future as a maid. 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 coal 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.
He estimated that his accumulated gold 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 when the 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 with 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 never 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 and 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, walking a few steps
and then listening for the wailing. 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 neither because it couldn't. But
he wanted to stand there and simply marvel at the sheer size of the beast.
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 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.
What he didn't know was how the thing would react if that dog was
touched or pulled on. One swipe from either of those massive arms could recommand's
neck, 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 with 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 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 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 his 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 with 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
grabbed, Leander, in a fit of pain and rage, he began to
pull at 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 hireling the whole time, but it never raised a hand in protest.
And when the sty 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 sewn clothed, 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 sit back against the 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 gold 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 apple's, 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 searched for the creature, but not even a track could be
found. He assumed that the creature considered its debt repaid, in 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 no
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
if 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 pau 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. 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 informed 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 great 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