The Wendigo's Acolyte
The wendigo is the darkest of spirits, described as having too-tight skin, towering antlers, and an inexhaustible appetite for human flesh.
Many think the wendigo is just a character out of Native American mythology, and the word roughly translates to “the evil spirit that devours mankind”. Not strangely it is associated with winter, the north, coldness, famine, and starvation.
According to the Algonquin tribe the wendigo will make cannibals of the unsuspecting by possessing them. During the 1800s several natives did feast on other humans even when other food was available, in a mental disorder later identified by psychologists as “wendigo psychosis”.
As early as 1661, the Jesuit missionaries (in a Jesuit Relations document) described the native belief in the wendigos what the symptoms were:
What caused us greater concern was the intelligence that met us upon entering the Lake, namely, that the men deputed by our Conductor to summon the Nations to the North Sea, and assigning them a rendezvous, where they were to await our coming, had met their death the previous Winter in a very strange manner. Those poor men (according to the report given us) were seized with an ailment unknown to us but not very unusual among the people we were seeking. They are afflicted with neither lunacy, hypochondria, nor frenzy; but have a combination of all these species of disease, which affects their imaginations and causes them a more than canine hunger. This makes them so ravenous for human flesh that they pounce upon women, children, and even upon men, like veritable werewolves, and devour them voraciously, without being able to appease or glut their appetite – ever seeking fresh prey, and the more greedily, the more they eat. This ailment attacked our deputies, and, as death is the sole remedy among those simple people for checking such acts of murder, they were slain in order to stay the course of their madness.
In 1879, the best documented case involved a Cree by the name of Swift Runner. He was born in Alberta, and his birth name was Ka-Ki-Si-Kitchin. He was a popular man in his community, and made a living as a trapper who traded with the Hudson's Bay Company. He also served as a guide for the North West Mounted Police.
Swift Runner was finally overcome by alcoholism, and this got him fired by the police, and then he was shunned by his tribe due to his violence.
In the winter of 1878, Swift Runner took his wife Charlotte, six children, his mother-in-law and brother out into the forest. The months passed, and in August he appeared to a Catholic mission. The priest asked him what was wrong, and he said his family had all starved to death since he had not been able to find any food.
The priest, and later the police became suspicious when they noticed that Swift Runner was healthy and did not appear to have suffered from lack of food. It was also known the Cree had been successful hunting for food during the winter.
The priests also observed Swift Runner was suffering from nightmares almost every night, where he woke up screaming at the top of his lungs.
Suspicion turned against him when Swift Runner tried to lead a group of orphaned native children into the woods. The St. Albert missionaries had cared for them after their parents died from a smallpox epidemic that swept through the area.
The missionaries at St. Albert now suspected his family had met a worse death than starvation. They went to the authorities believing he had killed them.
Swift Runner was arrested and he was ordered to take the police to his winter campsite, which was about 75 miles from the settlement. There are different versions as to what happened next. In one story he led them directly to the spot, in another he intentionally tried to mislead them. Only after he was drunk did he cooperate. Captain Sévère Gagnon along with other police came upon the campsite, and what was found was truly horrifying.
Bones were scattered everywhere, some hollowed out, others broken in half. This could only mean they were snapped in order to suck out the marrow. They found a pot full of human fat. In the ashes of the old campfire sat a pile of rotting, half-charred entrails. The only one spared this devilish end, was his eldest son who was buried about a mile from the camp, and who was the first to die from lack of food.
While being interrogated and presented with the skeletal remains of his family, Swift Runner put his fingers into the eyeless sockets of a skull and holding it up, coolly remarked, "This was my wife."
Faced with the accusation of killing and cannibalizing his family, Swift Runner claimed he was possessed by an evil spirit. The wendigo he said, is what drove him to commit the heinous crime.
He described that his family had died from starvation, and his wife shot herself from despair. He said his mother and brother had left the camp, and he did not know where they were. There were two other skulls besides those of his wife and children, which the authorities believed belonged to them, even though he refused to admit to this.
The police did not believe he had acted under the direction of the wendigo, and neither did the jury when he was put on trial for the murders. After 20 minutes of deliberation they sentenced the man to death.
Some said Swift Runner was invaded by the spirit of the wendigo years before. According to The Last of Canada’s Cannibals by Major Fred Bagley (1874-1946) he had gone on a hunting trip deep into the north forest, with only a young boy for company. Instead of the game he thought to find, there was hardly any and the pair soon faced starvation. The boy died from lack of food, and Swift Runner ate him, which made him vulnerable to a craving for human flesh.
He asked to be shot instead, but Swift Runner was hung on December 20, 1879 at Fort Saskatchewan, making him the first man legally executed in Alberta, Canada. In attendance were sixty or so native members, the garrison soldiers and two priests, Rene Remas and Hippolyte Leduc, French Oblate priests from the nearby Catholic missions at Lac La Biche and Lac Ste. Anne. Prior to his death he converted to Catholicism, and while standing on the gallows in -40 o F weather, he gave a speech admitting to his guilt.
Jim Reade, a California “49er” commented of the execution: “That’s the purtiest hangin’ I ever seen, and it’s the twenty-ninth!”
Swift Runner was buried in the snow outside the fort. Some believe his remains were taken by his relatives who dismembered and incinerated his body to make sure he didn’t return to torment the living.
Legends also describe the wendigo as being a creature all unto itself. According to Basil Johnton (1929-2015), an Anishinaabe (Ojibwa) and Canadian writer, storyteller, language teacher and scholar:
The Wendigo was gaunt to the point of emaciation; its desiccated skin pulled tautly over its bones. With its bones pushing out against its skin, its complexion the ash gray of death, and its eyes pushed back deep into their sockets; the Wendigo looked like a gaunt skeleton recently disinterred from the grave. What lips it had were tattered and bloody. Its body was unclean and suffering from suppurations of the flesh, giving off a strange and eerie odor of decay and decomposition, of death and corruption.
Swift Runner made a confession to Father Hippolyte Leduc three days before his execution. Leduc later submitted the confession for publication in the press. It reads:
We were camped in the woods about eighty miles from here. In the beginning of the winter we had not much to suffer. Game was plenty. I killed many moose and five or six bears; but about the middle of February, I fell sick, and to complete our misfortune those with me could find nothing to shoot. We had soon to kill our dogs, and lived on their flesh while it lasted. Having recovered a little from my sickness, I travelled to a post of the Hudson’s Bay Company, on the Athabasca River, and was assisted by the officer in charge, and returned to my camp with a small amount of provisions. That did not last us long. We all – that is, my mother, wife, and six children (three boys and three girls), besides my brother and I – began to feel the pangs of hunger. My brother made up his mind to start with my mother in search of some game. I remained alone with my family. Starvation became worse and worse. For many days we had nothing to eat. I advised my wife to start with the children and follow on the snow the tracks of my mother and brother, who perhaps had been lucky enough to kill a moose or bear since they left us. For my part, though weak, I hoped that remaining alone I could support my life with my gun. All my family left me with the exception of a little boy, ten years of age, who obstinately refused to leave me.
I remained many days with my boy without finding any game, and consequently without having a mouthful to eat. One morning I got up early. Suddenly an abominable thought crossed my mind. My son was lying down close to the fire, fast asleep. Pushed by the evil spirit I took my gun and pointed it at the poor innocent, while turning my head away, I shot him. The ball entered the top of his skill. Still he breathed. I began to cry; but what was the use? Impossible now to recall him to life. I then took my knife and sunk it twice into his side. Alas! He still breathed, and I picked up a stick and killed him with it. I then satisfied my hunger by eating some of his flesh, and lived on it for some days, extracting even the marrow from the bones.
Some days afterwards, in wandering through the woods, unfortunately I met my wife and children. I said to them that my son had died of starvation but I remarked immediately that they suspected the frightful reality. They then told me they had not seen either my mother or brother. No doubt both have died of starvation, otherwise they would have been heard of, as it is now seven months since then. Three days after joining my family the oldest of my boys died. We dug a grave with an axe and buried him. We were then reduced to boil some pieces of our leather tent, our shoes, and buffalo robes, in order to keep ourselves alive.
I discovered soon that my family wanted to leave me from fear of meeting the same fate as my boy. One morning I got up early, and I don’t know why – I was mad. It seems to me that all the devils had entered my heart. My wife and children were asleep around me. Pushed by the evil spirit, I took my gun, and placing the muzzle against her chest, shot her. I then without any delay took my hatchet and massacred my three little girls. There was now but one little boy, seven years old, surviving. I awoke him and told him to melt some snow for water at once. The poor child was too much weakened by long fasting to make any reflection on the frightful spectacle under his eyes. I took the bodies of my little girls and cut them up. I did the same with the corpse of my wife. I broke the skulls and took out the brains, and broke up the bones in order to get the marrow. My little son and I lived for seven or eight days on the flesh – I eating the flesh of my wife and children, and he the flesh of his mother and sisters.
At length I left there all the bones and started with the last of my family. Snow began to melt. Spring had commenced. Ducks arrived and flew every day around us, and I could find enough to live upon; but I felt reluctant to see people. I then told my son that after some days we would meet people; they will know very soon that I am a murderer, and they will certainly make me die. As to you, there is no fear; say all you know; no harm will be done to you. One day I had killed many ducks. I was a few miles from Egg Lake, where some relations of mine lived. I was sitting at the camp fire, when I told my son to go and fetch something five or six paces off. At that moment the devil suddenly took possession of my soul; and in order to live longer far from people, and to put out of the way the only witness to my crimes, I seized my gun and killed the last of my children, and ate him as I did the others.”