Prehistoric Monsters of the Nahanni Valley

[Music] in this video i'm going to read an abridged version of the last chapter of my book legends of the nahani valley a non-fiction which explores the history in folklore surrounding a remote region in northwestern canada infamous for the many mysterious disappearances and beheadings which took place there throughout the 20th century this particular chapter treats with the various prehistoric monsters which legend says abide in the watershed of the south nahani river from wooly mammoths to giant bears to a mysterious predator which i briefly alluded to in my video on the wahila this video contains references to several frontiersmen adventurers and legends with which the casual viewer may be unfamiliar any viewers interested in putting these characters and legends into context can of course do so by reading my book legends of the nahani valley which you can find by clicking the link in the description without further ado here are the prehistoric monsters of the nahani valley enjoy [Music] they have tales of enormous animals such as the mammoth and spiders as large as a full-sized grizzly bear and long worms that are supposed to be alive today and nobody can save them from these animals but their doctors some of the indians will tell you they have seen these animals pool field in a letter to john jack moran february 8 1913 [Music] geographers describe the south mahony as an antecedent river a rare sort of waterway older than the ancient mountains that surround it millions of years ago that lagacho sunblood and ragged ranges rose up around the south nahani sheltering it from the enormous destructive ice sheets that reshaped the face of north america throughout the four ice ages of the pleistocene epoch due to its unique geological makeup the nahani valley has remained unaffected by glaciation for at least a hundred thousand years over the millennium all manner of flora and fauna have taken refuge in this secluded haven in the mackenzie mountains some of them have left behind fossil evidence of their habitation intriguingly indian reports and frontier legend suggests that descendants of some of the prehistoric animals that made their homes in the nahani particularly massive fearsome pleistocene monsters still reside there to this very day [Music] in many of his articles on the nahani valley philip godsell related a story told to him by frank beaton who served as the chief factor of fort st john bc beaton had heard this story from a scientific party whose members had heard it from one of their indian guides a cree named chakina who had in turn heard the tale from his father a great wanderer shakina's father once traveled to the upperlyard river country where he fell in with quote a primitive tribe armed with bone-shot javelins and clubs made from the jawbones of the moose around their fires these stone-age people had told of a medicine valley to the north inhabited by monsters of fearful size and ferocity unquote one of the cree's new den acquaintances produced a scrap of buckskin from his medicine bag on which had been burned the image of one of these monsters the cree managed to acquire this charm and treasured it for years he eventually passed this artifact down to his son chiquina who showed it to the scientific party he was tasked with guiding the scientists told an incredulous beaten that the figure depicted on the buckskin scrap was a dinosaur drawn in flawless anatomical detail legend has it that a forgotten veil tucked away somewhere in the watershed of a south mohani is home to relic populations of woolly mammoths giant hairy elephant-like creatures generally believed to have gone extinct around 4500 years ago as philip godsell put it in romance of the alaska highway this ravine was said to be quote a palm gert oasis that had escaped the impact of the last ice age where living dinosaurs and mammoths of a forgotten age disported themselves in steaming pools rich with luxuriant vegetation unquote godsell in one of his pieces went on to speculate that quote perhaps these ideas originated from indian reports brought down from the lower mackenzie of frozen mammoths being exposed in the falling away of ice cliffs leaving their flesh though millions of years old still fit when thawed for dog feed unquote [Music] indeed the north country once abounded with stories of trappers and prospectors happening upon frozen mammoth carcasses during their boreal wanderings for example the 1935 book the golden grindstone the adventures of george m mitchell relates a tale told by a yukon prospector named angus graham who claimed to have come across the remains of a mammoth ensconced in ice in 1898 unfortunately the specimen disintegrated when it was finally exposed to the air on october 21st 1937 a mammoth washed up on the shores of wrangle island situated in the chukchi sea north of the bering strait its frozen flesh in near perfect condition and during the gold rush of 98 stampeders came across as pierre burton put it in the mysterious north quote the bones and skulls and even the flesh of animals that have long since vanished from the earth the hairy mammoth the great tusked mastodon and varieties of bison deer and horse long extinct unquote all of these things embedded in the frozen muck of the klondike fields frozen corpses aren't the only vestiges of woolly mammoths to show up in the north country on particular stretches of the yukon river and along the shores of williston lake in peace river country one can find ancient mammoth footprints baked into stone reminiscent of the giant three-toed tracks reported by hank russell jack lee and frank perry in their tropical valley accounts mammoth tusks are also found in surprising abundance in the northland frontiersmen would often decorate their cabins with ancient bones they picked up in the wilderness and trinkets fashioned from mammoth ivory were once a staple of northern gift shops denae mythology is filled with tales of giant monstrous animals called yeredi which roamed the world in ancient times these creatures typically lived underground or beneath lakes and rivers and every once in a while people come across their bones which are called katyantigna or the bones of the underground game some of these monsters are simply gigantic versions of modern animals for example then a legend has it that ferocious giant beavers once wandered about the north country terrorizing the natives they met along the way three of them lived on lake athabasca and drowned people by slapping their huge tails on the water another giant beaver built his home on great slave lake at the mouth of the yellowknife river while another inhabited nahani butte the beaver dam rapids on the liard river constitute the remains of one of his lodges interestingly there is another year lady a huge elephant-like monster called nuti which is almost certainly based upon the mammoth in his ethnographic reconstruction of the kaska indians john honigman related an old casket legend featuring one of these creatures this particular story along with the concept of the new tea in general seems to imply a strong cultural recollection of living mammoths in other words the evidence suggests that the den or perhaps their nomadic ancestors lived alongside mammoths and dramatized their interactions with them in their oral history however this is not the only way in which pre-contact denney might have developed the notion of giant elephantine monsters on the southern bank of the yukon river about 30 miles downstream from the mouth of the tanana is a considerable deposit of petrified mammoth bones buried long ago when a section of the riverbank caved in the local tanana indians refer to this place as na retinola catlana or the cut bank of the spirit land believing that disembodied human souls hunt yaradi on their way to na radinil nata the transitional paradise that they dwell in before being reincarnated and that the fossils on the riverbank are the bones of their giant prey leavings from their ghostly journey in the late 19th and early 20th centuries frontiersmen returned from the wilderness of alaska yukon and the northwest territories with tales of mammoths and mastodons that still inhabited the most desolate reaches of the northland some of these tales found their way into newspapers and magazines and a few of these made it into ed farrell's book strange stories of alaska and the yukon farrell began his chapter on relic mammoths with an article first published on may 5th 1889 in the philadelphia press in this article the writer a fur trader named cola f fowler described a story that he heard in 1887. that summer fowler left kodiak island alaska and traveled to the headwaters of the snake river a waterway which empties into the bering strait at noam alaska there he met with the chief of a local inuit band and proceeded to inspect some of the ivory tusks that the natives had collected in the wilderness i subjected the ivory to a rigid inspection fowler wrote and upon two of the largest tusks i found fresh blood traces and decomposed flesh unquote after the traitor pointed this out to the chief the inuit informed him that three months earlier he and a handful of young men had encountered a small mammoth herd about 50 miles north of their present location and had managed to kill an old bull and a cow with their large caliber muskets at fowler's insistence the inuit drew his impression of the creature on the soft clay of the riverbank using a stick the animal which he maintained made loud shrill trumpet-like calls resembled a woolly mammoth albeit with smaller ears bigger eyes and a longer more slender trunk interestingly the creature had four four foot tusks in addition to two curved 15 footers in a commentary at the end of the article farrell observed that the monster that the inuit drew is consistent in appearance with a yubladon or foretuscar an ancient relative of the woolly mammoth which lived during the myosin epoch and which was unknown to science at that time farrell included several more stories of living subarctic mammoths in his book including a story in which a man named dr j.p frizzle found fresh mammoth tracks in the snow of unamac island one of the aleutian islands situated off the pacific coast of alaska in 1903 the account of a talton hunter's 1892 brush with a woolly mammoth in the valley of the stickeen river and an incredible tale later proven to be a hoax describing a successful mammoth hunt in the alaskan wilderness in the early 1890s [Music] many old magazine and newspaper articles maintain that some of the moose that live in the nahani valley are twice as big as elsewhere in the early 1970s an rcmp officer turned television host named tommy tompkins caught one of these legendary creatures on film and showcased it in an episode of his tv show this land entitled nahani tompkins estimated that the antlers of this massive bull sported were a whopping 12 feet from end to end double the antler spread of the average moose when considered alongside some of the theories purported to explain other faunal freaks reported in the area the legend of the giant moose of the nahani evokes the irish elk an old world servid which lived during the pleistocene epoch and the largest deer that ever lived in addition to giant moose there have been many reports of colossal grizzly bears in the nahani valley in dangerous river for example raymond patterson described seeing quote a very large grizzly in dead men valley unquote which gordon matthews named slim jim this creature was said to be quote enormous as a boxcar and as timid as a deer unquote both gus kraus and nazar zinchak in their parks canada interviews spoke of giant grizzlies in the nahani krauts krauss recalled a monster grizzly quote the size of a two-year-old moose unquote that obliterated a trail near bennett creek zinc on the other hand described coming across a 12-foot tall grizzly in the wilderness according to the alaska department of fish and game kodiak bears the largest subspecies of grizzly bear seldom exceed a height of 10 feet in sir ranolf finds his book the headless valley an oblate missionary named father mary recalled finding grisly paw prints in the snow which dwarfed the tracks that he made with his size 11 overshoes similarly frank graves in a letter to ivan sanderson described coming across a real horror during his nahani valley excursion in 1965. these were definitely bear tracks he wrote but if i told you their size and i measured them with my collecting tape you would just laugh at me they were bare tracks all right and the indians said that they were made by giant brown bears that as far as i could make out from his pacing things off between the trees would make any kodiak brown look like a black bear cub unquote one man to see one of these bruin behemoths with his own eyes was adventure writer d h coaster who paddled the south mahani with his 12 year old stepson mark in the 1970s in his 2015 book canoe and the nahani coaster described how he and his stepson capsized their canoe on the cash rapids just upstream from the first canyon mark managed to pull himself up into a rock ledge alongside the river while coaster crawled into a gravel bar downstream that night while trying to keep warm on the gravel bar coaster saw a massive grizzly emerge from the forest on the other side of the river wade through the current to an island in the middle of a south nahani and set about demolishing the trees there he was the size of an abrams tank coaster maintained bigger even than any polar or kodiak he must have stood 12 feet tall taller than the trees he was busy slotting down and massive his arms were the size of tree trunks and his paws twice as big unquote these enormous nahani grizzlies in the context of the other giant animals detailed in this chapter evoke the arctis simus or the short-faced bear one of the largest land-dwelling mammals to ever live this monstrous animal believed to have disappeared from north america about 11 000 years ago could reach a height of 12 feet interestingly in his book the beast that hides her man british cryptozoologist dr carl shuker mentioned that extremely large snow white bears known to local chukchi hunters as irukuyam have been reported in russia's kamchatka peninsula sandwiched between the sea of okhotsk and the bering sea and that russian zoologist professor nikola verashegen opined that they might be modern-day representatives of the short-faced bear in his letter to ivan sanderson the anonymous letter writer mentioned in the previous chapter learned from his dna informant googo that the wahila was quote almost invincible but he has one enemy now hang on to your hat that enemy is a lion i thought he meant puma which i wouldn't have believed anyway but no he meant a lion the lion is itself a giant at least as big as the bloody dog and apparently afraid of nothing very hairy with a large woolly mane extending nearly all over its body the lions kill everything when in the mood including the bears moose and what would appear to be mammoths the latter being described as creatures bigger than all the others with long noses i assume that this is what he meant by the description as google didn't have a name for it and the interpreters seemed rather amazed in keeping with the pattern we have been following in this chapter this enormous lion of the nahani valley conjures up images of not only the famous smilodon or sabertooth tiger but also the north american cave lion an extinct subspecies of lion that lived in north america during the pleistocene epoch the north american cave lion is believed to have measured 1.6 to 2.5 meters that's 5 feet 3 inches to 8 feet 2 inches from nose to the base of its tail with a shoulder height of 1.2 meters or 3 feet 11 inches it is believed to be one of the largest felines to ever live for watching if you enjoyed this video and would like to help support this channel please check out my book legends of the nahani valley which you can find by clicking the link in the description [Music] you

Channel: Hammerson Peters

Views: 132,826

Keywords: nahanni valley, nahanni, nahanni national park, headless valley, valley of headless men, canada, canadian, northwest territories, nakani, waheela, mammoth, mammoths, prehistoric, monsters, cryptozoology, cryptozoology documentary, cryptozoologist, cryptid, cryptids, cryptid documentary, cryptid video, cryptids video, cryptid videos, hammerson peters, arctic, sasquatch, bigfoot, monster documentary, spooky, creepy, ice age, saber tooth tiger, saber toothed tiger, north american cave lion, beardog

Id: vkCpblwtCuo

Length: 17min 42sec (1062 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 12 2021