Table of Contents

• The Monster of Partridge Creek

• This Week in Weirdness

• Lore and Legends: Living Mammoths

• Reader Story: Mississippi Pterosaur

The Monster of Partridge Creek

Just after the Klondike Gold Rush, French writer and prospector Georges Dupuy recounted a harrowing encounter he allegedly had near Partridge Creek. Dupuy published his tale in the April 1908 issue of French magazine Je Sais Tout, and later in English in The Strand Magazine, claiming the events to be true. According to Dupuy’s article, James Buttler, a banker from San Francisco pursuing riches on the Klondike River, was tracking moose with a group of local hunters when the herd suddenly bolted in terror. The men discovered an imprint of a massive body and immense, deep tracks leading into a rocky gorge. Intrigued, Dupuy suggested they go after the creature and, the next day, Dupuy and Buttler along with Father Pierre Lavagneux (a missionary), Tom Leemore (a miner) and a handful of First Nations guides set off in search of the unknown beast. They scoured the frosty woods for days with no sign of anything out of the ordinary. Then one evening, as the party camped atop a cliff, the quiet was shattered by the sound of tumbling rocks and a “primeval roar” ripping through the valley.

Gripping their rifles, the men crawled to the brink and peered down. Across the ravine, a massive grey-black beast heaved itself up the opposite slope, its clawed feet dislodging boulders that crashed below. By Dupuy’s estimate the creature was around 50 feet long and stood around 18 feet tall. Its snout bore a horn like a rhinoceros, and its hide was “garnished with thick bristles” like a shaggy boar, clumped with mud and blood from a recent kill. For a full ten minutes the stunned hunters watched this nightmare from prehistory struggling up the icy slope. Father Lavagneux identified the creature as a Ceratosaurus. Finally, the beast abandoned its climb and bounded off on two legs with startling speed, vanishing into the night.

Dupuy claims that when he and Buttler reported the encounter in Dawson City, they were ridiculed. Yet the legend grew. That Christmas, Father Lavagneux wrote Dupuy a chilling follow-up: the monster had appeared again. The priest and his congregation saw it run across a frozen creek, a caribou dangling from its jaws, frost coating its fur and its “little eyes gleaming like fire in the twilight”.

Dupuy’s story set imaginations ablaze. Could a relic dinosaur truly haunt the Canadian Arctic? Some characterize Dupuy’s story as a real tale of a living ceratosaurid theropod, a type of horned meat-eating dinosaur thought extinct since the Early Cretaceous. Enthusiasts point out uncanny details: the shaggy bristle-covered hide Dupuy described was unheard of in 1908 (scientists then assumed dinosaurs had scales), yet modern discoveries show some large theropods were indeed feathered or filamented for cold climates.

The tale also resonates with other cryptid legends around the world. Reports of “living dinosaurs” in remote corners have persisted for centuries, feeding our fascination with lost worlds. For example, deep in the Congo swamps, Mokèlé-mbèmbé is said to be a sauropod-like creature. In Central Africa’s rainforests, explorers spun yarns of the Kasai Rex, a giant T. rex-like predator rumoured to tear rhinos apart. The Australian Outback has its own legend, the Burrunjor, described as a scaled-down Tyrannosaur that stalks cattle in Arnhem Land. Even Scotland’s Loch Ness has famously been linked to tales of a Mesozoic survivor. The Partridge Creek Monster fits right into this rogues’ gallery of prehistoric cryptids, fueling speculation that a few dinosaurs (or dinosaur-like creatures) might still lurk in earth’s forgotten fringes.

Of course, the scientific consensus firmly dismisses the Partridge Creek Monster as myth or hoax. Skeptics note that Dupuy has written multiple works of Northwestern fiction, including translating a story by The Call of The Wild author Jack London titled “A Relic of the Pliocene” in which a hunter encounters and kills a living Woolly Mammoth. No physical evidence was ever produced for the Partridge Creek Monster (despite claims that one hunter took pictures). In response to the article, naturalist Richard Lydekker scoffed at the existence of a carnivorous dinosaur in the frozen North, noting how the great reptiles were thought to prefer tropical climates. In 1955, zoologist Dr. Karl Shuker remarked in his book In Search of Prehistoric Survivors that believing in Dupuy’s dinosaur “calls for our belief not only in the post-Cretaceous persistence of an endothermic hairy dinosaur but also its existence in what must surely be the least compatible habitat… its lack of cryptozoological credibility should hardly come as a great surprise!”. In other words, one must accept a lot of implausible twists for the story to be true.

Within cryptozoological circles, many treat the Monster of Partridge Creek as folklore rather than fact. Comic artist Stephen Bissette called it “great northern Yukon fiction” that some have wrongly enshrined as real. Famed cryptozoologist Loren Coleman bluntly labeled Dupuy’s story “pure cryptofiction” when discussing it on social media. Indeed, subsequent research failed to verify key details of Dupuy’s narrative; the named personalities and even an indigenous “Klayakuk” tribe in the story appear to be fabricated. It seems likely Dupuy, perhaps inspired by frontier tall tales, concocted a gripping story and presented it with a journalistic veneer for effect. This wouldn’t be the first time a turn-of-the-century writer blurred the line between fact and fiction to captivate readers.

True or not, the legend of the Partridge Creek Monster endures as a quirky chapter in Yukon lore. The story was reprinted in newspapers across North America, and even inspired a wealthy British duke to mount an expedition to capture the beast (he reportedly commissioned a huge steel cage for it). In the world of cryptozoology, the monster often earns a footnote alongside better-known “living dinosaur” legends. A creepy Arctic creepypasta long before the internet existed.

This Week in Weirdness

• The Pharoah’s Curse may cure cancer

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• Dracula’s tomb may have been discovered in Italy

• Scientists studying algae in Lake Erie discovered a new life form and called it “ShipGoo1”

• Scientists discovered the ruins of an ancient lost temple in the Andes

Lore and Legends: Living Mammoths

Whispers of living mammoths have long haunted the frozen wilds of northern Canada. As early as 1803, Hudson’s Bay Company trader Thomas Pollock wrote of a terrifying encounter in the wilderness: he and his guide “suddenly came upon an animal of an enormous size”, a hulking beast “about 20 feet in height,” and dirty black in color. A few years later in 1811, explorer David Thompson and 4 indigenous guides stumbled across enormous footprints in the snow while crossing Alberta’s Athabasca Pass. Each track was a 14-inch circle with four toe marks, far too large for any bear. Thompson’s guides believed that the tracks were made by a young woolly mammoth as they were rumored to linger in that region. They cautioned that the beast stood about 18 feet tall and was too dangerous to pursue. Thompson himself was skeptical, suggesting a giant grizzly might have made the prints. Yet even he admitted “the sight of the track…staggered me,” and the mystery of that day haunted him for decades.

By the late 19th century, prospectors and natives in the Yukon and northern British Columbia continued to report impossible sightings. In the Stikine River Valley, Tlingit hunters spoke of massive, shaggy creatures roaming the forests. One hunter followed a line of “large tracks, each the size of the bottom of a salt barrel,” pressed deep into the moss, until he suddenly came face-to-face with the beast responsible. He described the creature as “as large as a post trader’s store, with great, shining, yellowish-white tusks and a mouth large enough to swallow a man”. Other hunters claimed to have seen the same monster browsing on remote riverbanks, in lands where ancient mammoth bones litter the ground. In 1887, an Alaska-based trader named Cola Fowler returned from the wilds with a shocking tale: he had inspected some ivory tusks acquired from local Inuit, only to find fresh blood and bits of flesh on them. The Inuit hunters then revealed they had killed two “big-teeth” creatures just a few months earlier. Fowler sketched the animal from their description: a 20-foot tall, long-haired, elephant-like giant (curiously, the Inuit drew the beast with multiple pairs of tusks, a detail cryptozoologists later noted matched Eubelodon, a prehistoric four-tusked elephant unknown to science at the time). Mammoth fever seemed to grip the world at this time. In 1899, for example, newspapers worldwide trumpeted a story that an Alaskan hunter named Henry Tukeman had shot a live mammoth and sent the carcass to the Smithsonian, only for it to be exposed as an elaborate hoax.

Cryptozoologists and believers have long speculated on these accounts. Perhaps a tiny population of mammoths really did survive into modern times, hidden in some unexplored valley or lost world of the North. Indeed, mid-20th century lore spoke of a mysterious warm oasis in the Mackenzie Mountains; a hidden valley where dinosaurs and mammoths from a bygone age still splashed in hot springs, isolated from the modern world. More grounded speculation holds that many “mammoth” sightings might have been misidentifications. A lumbering wood bison or moose seen through fog, or gigantic bear tracks distorted in snow, could easily spark mammoth legends (Thompson’s party themselves theorized a very large, worn-clawed bear might explain the prints they found, though they were skeptical of this explanation). Some Russian researchers have even suggested that a few reports, especially in Siberia, were not mammoths at all but surviving woolly rhinoceroses mistaken for mammoths.

Mainstream science, however, remains intensely skeptical. Most scientists agree mammoths died out 10,000 years ago at the end of the Pleistocene. There were some populations of dwarf mammoths that survived on remote Arctic islands like Wrangel but even they went extinct around 4,000 years ago. No reliable evidence of any recent mammoth has ever been found and experts regard modern “sightings” as the result of finding preserved mammoth remains or folkloric tales past on for thousands of years.

Yet the cultural memory of the mammoth refuses to fade. Across the north, indigenous oral traditions preserve uncanny details about great shaggy beasts. Cree and Dene elders spoke of an elephantine monster that once haunted the remote forests, so huge that it shook the ground as it walked. In eighteenth-century Quebec, French Jesuit chronicles recorded an Algonquin legend of a “great Moose” with legs so tall that eight feet of snow didn’t reach its belly and with “a kind of arm, which comes out of his shoulder, and which he uses as we do ours”. Far to the east, the Naskapi people of Labrador told of a dreaded giant called Katcheetohuskw, described as a huge, hairy ogre with a long nose and enormous ears that could smash humans with a swing of its trunk-like snout. One Naskapi storyteller, upon seeing a picture of an elephant, remarked that it resembled the monster of their legends. Such details, especially the trunk, a feature no bear or moose possesses, led scholars to suggest that these tales preserve a dim memory of real mammoths. Generations ago, the ancestors of these First Nations peoples might have passed down stories of the last mammoths, keeping the specter of the “big hairy elephant” alive in folklore long after the beasts themselves vanished.

Reader Story: Mississippi Pterosaur

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