Episode 18: Hunger Pains

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One of the most chilling historical events of the last 200 years, one that has fascinated me for most of my life, is the 1846 pioneer journey of the families and employees of James Reed and George Donner.

I can't think of a last name that evokes as much emotion, as much fear, and as much instant visual imagery as the Donner name.

In the years since that fateful winter, the name has become synonymous with mountain passes, frozen bodies huddled around dead campfires, and of course, cannibalism.

The Donder Party has a way of stopping us in our tracks.

We are morbidly fascinated with their tragic journey, but even more so, we're amazed at how far they went to stay alive.

Their story forces us to look straight into the face of a fear that most people buried deep beneath the surface.

People eating other people.

We can look for justification.

We can research the reasons behind their situation and write sterile and safe papers about the horrible plight they found themselves in.

But at the end of the day, we are simply and powerfully horrified.

From the story of Hansel and Gretel to the modern television show Hannibal, we have always maintained a repulsive fascination with those who cross the line.

We can't stand to think about it, and yet We can't look away either.

Maybe it has to do with the morbid symbolism of one body within another.

Perhaps it's the realization that, like cattle or wild game, humans can sometimes become food for something or someone else.

Or perhaps deep down, we're fascinated with cannibalism because we believe that maybe, just maybe,

it could turn us into monsters.

I'm Erin Manke, and this is Lore.

Humans have been confronted with cannibalism for a very long time.

Archaeologists have discovered signs of the act that date back tens of thousands of years.

In some instances, the reasons have clearly been ritualistic, while others have been driven by food shortages.

There's a lot we still don't know, but what we do understand has highlighted the fact that, long ago, it was far more more common than it is today.

In the realm of ancient history, Greek and Roman historians recorded instances related to war and conquering.

The Roman siege of Jerusalem in 70 AD, for example, resulted in scattered reports of cannibalism.

Decades later, when the Romans attacked Numadia, historians in Alexandria recorded similar stories.

One interesting observation is that over the centuries, the accusation of cannibalism has been a political and colonial tool.

The ancient Greeks assumed that all non-Hellenistic peoples were simply barbarians and cannibals, and used it to justify their hostility toward them.

For many empires, even up through the British Empire of the 17th and 18th centuries, it was a way to demonize a people group and to give themselves permission to come in and take over, to bring civilization, so to speak, which led to deep prejudice against these people groups.

One example from 1820 stands out.

That was the year a whaling ship called the Essex was rammed and sunk by one of the whales it was pursuing.

If that plot sounds familiar at all, it's because that story went on to inspire the novel Moby Dick.

After the accident, the captain and crew of 21 boarded three of their whale boats.

They had two choices for a route to safety.

They could sail 3,000 miles against the wind to Chile or half the distance with the wind to the Marquesas Islands.

But the Marquesans were rumored to be cannibals, so they took the longer route.

As a result, the crew spent months at sea and eventually resorted to cannibalism themselves to survive.

Reality can be cruel and ironic, apparently.

But something darker sits at the center of many cannibalism stories.

At the core of almost all Native American cultures across Canada and the northern part of what is now the United States, there are stories of the supernatural effects that eating other humans can have on a person.

Each tribe seems to refer to the stories with different terms, but they're all eerily similar.

Wabanaki legend speaks of the man-eating snow giant, Gewakwa.

The Cree tell tales of the Wittako, also a giant, and also a man-eater.

The Mi'kmaq tribes of northern Maine, up through Nova Scotia, tell stories of the Chinu, creatures that were once human but had been transformed through some horrible crime that was usually cannibalism.

The most common name for these creatures among Native Americans, however, is one we already know from popular culture.

They are the Wendigo, a creature that was once human, but had been transformed by their hunger for human flesh into a monster that can't ever be satisfied.

One Native American description of the creature claims that a wendigo is taller than a grown man, with a gaunt body and dead skin that seems to be pulled too tightly over its bones.

Tales speak of the tangle of antlers upon its head and the deep eye sockets that seemed to be dead inside.

And it smelled of death and decay.

In Cree mythology, though, the wendigo was simply a human.

who had become possessed by an evil spirit.

It would take over and then turn its hunger and hatred toward the people around it.

To the Cree, the Wendigo was most often just another person.

A neighbor, a friend, a sister, a son.

There was no hope for those who were transformed into man-eating creatures.

There was only one solution available.

These creatures must be hunted and killed.

It's fantasy.

It's a cultural meta-narrative about something else, something deeper.

At least that's what the anthropologists tell us.

But some have taken those legends at face value.

The Swift Runner was a Native American from the Cree tribe that lived in the western portion of Canada.

He was born in the early 1800s and worked as a hunter and trapper in the North Country near Fort Edmonton, as well as a guide for the Northwest Mounted Police.

He was a big man, standing over six feet tall, and according to the reports, he was well liked and respected among his people.

He and his wife had six children.

It was said that he was a loving father who cared deeply for his family, which is why the winter of 1878 will be remembered as a tragedy.

According to the reports, Swift Runner stumbled into a Catholic mission in St.

Albert sometime in the spring of 1879.

He was distraught and unfocused.

He told the priests that the winter had been harsh and that his entire family had starved to death.

He was, in fact, the only one to make it out alive.

But something didn't sit right with the priests.

For one thing, Swift Runner didn't look like a man who had endured starvation throughout the winter months.

He was a solid 200 pounds and seemed healthy and strong.

Another hint that all was not well were his nightmares, which often ended with him screaming in the night.

In the end, the priests reached out to the mounted police.

A group of investigators were dispatched to look into the matter, and they took Swiftrunner back to his winter camp.

To his credit, Swiftrunner was helpful.

He immediately showed the men a small grave near the campsite and explained that it was the grave of one of his boys.

They even went as far as to open the grave, and everything lined up with his story.

They were the bones of a child, and it was safe to assume the child was Swiftrunners.

But then the police found other clues that began to paint a darker picture.

Around the camp in scattered locations, they began to uncover more bones and a skull.

Not just a few, either.

There were bones everywhere.

Some of the larger bones were hollow and snapped in half, clearly the result of someone sucking the marrow out.

They also found bits of flesh and hair.

The evidence began to pile up, and they looked to Swiftrunner for an explanation.

And that's when he told them the truth.

According to him, a Wendigo spirit came into their camp during the winter.

It spoke to him and told him to eat his family at first.

He resisted, ignoring the voice, but slowly over time, the wendigo took control.

And then it took action.

Swift Runner's wife was the first to die.

Then one of the younger boys.

And one by one, his family was killed and eaten.

Then the creature moved on to his mother-in-law and his own brother.

To Swift Runner, it was cold fact.

The monster had eaten his family.

And the police agreed.

They simply disagreed on the identity of that monster.

The mutilated human remains were collected and transported to Fort Saskatchewan, along with Swiftrunner himself.

His trial began on August 8th of 1879, and it was about as cut and dried as it could be.

Both the judge and jury refused to accept the story of the Wendigo.

They saw the man as a murderer and sentenced him to be hanged.

Over 60 people gathered at the fort on December 20th to watch the hanging.

One witness to the execution, a man who had reportedly seen several hangings in his life, was said to have slapped his thigh and declared, Boys,

that was the prettiest hanging I've ever seen.

The Severn River in Ontario winds through the homeland of the Sandy Lake First Nation.

This area of Canada is so isolated that it wasn't until the early decades of the 20th century that the Western world really made an effort to reach out and connect with the people who live there.

It's way up in the far western corner of Ontario, in the kind of territory where lakes have islands that have their own lakes.

By the late 1800s, the Hudson Bay Company had closed down enough of its trading posts that the closest one to Sandy Lake was over 140 miles away.

That was a 50-hour walk across rough terrain.

I'm not really sure that isolated is a strong enough word to use here.

The place was practically alien.

Jack Fiddler was born in the 1830s, or maybe it was the 1840s.

Most people aren't sure.

But we know that he was a Cree Indian and he worked as a trader.

He made the trek between the villages and the trading posts for a living.

and in the process he met lots of people.

He was also the son of the Sandy Lake People's Shaman and over his lifetime, he had five wives and many, many children.

When Jack's father died in 1891, he took over as the leader of the Sandy Lake people.

Now that sounds fancy, but in reality, there were only around 120 people living in this community.

He had influence over the wider geographical area as well, but his real power came from his role as the tribal shaman.

The shaman's powers were a vital part of his leadership.

When Jack became the spiritual leader of his people, he became the keeper of their ancient traditions and their guardian against the approaching darkness that was Western civilization.

There are even legends that tell of Jack Fiddler curing illnesses.

But most importantly, Jack became their first and only defense against the Wendigo, often called upon to hunt down and kill them.

Now, I know this sounds like the stuff of comic books or Hollywood movies, but Jack Fiddler lives up to the hype.

In fact, over his lifetime, he claimed to have defeated 14 of the monsters.

But Jack didn't go looking for tall, monstrous creatures with antlers and bony bodies.

No, he understood the wendigo to be more subtle.

Some wendigos, Jack said, had been sent to attack his people by other shamans.

Others had been members of his own tribe who seemed to have been overtaken with an unstoppable urge to eat human flesh.

When it was his own people, people, Jack said that he and his brother Joseph were the ones called upon to do the hard thing and kill the individuals.

And not just kill them.

No, that wasn't enough to stop the possession.

You see, it was believed that the Wendigo spirit could actually hop from one body to the next.

So those who died as a result of their possession were often burned to stop the infection from spreading.

With the Sandy Lake people and many of the other Native American tribes that cover much of the northern half of North America, the Wendigo stories were more than just hearsay.

It was an idea that was rooted in ancient tradition.

Ceremonies were built around the legend.

People were warned and educated constantly about the dangers this creature posed to the community.

And then suddenly, all of that tradition and history ran headlong into the modern world.

And the results were disastrous.

Sometime in 1905, Joseph Fiddler's daughter-in-law was brought to Jack's village.

She was very sick, according to multiple first-hand accounts.

She was in deep pain that often drove her to cry out and moan and constantly make noise.

Some of the women tending to her would even have to hold her down to keep her under control.

Jack and his brother Joseph were brought in.

They were old men by then, both in their 80s and very frail.

But they knew what was causing her illness, and they they knew how to stop it.

They had done it many times before.

And so they did what they did best.

They took a thin rope and looped it over her head.

And then, slowly, they tightened it.

It wasn't done in cold blood.

It was a calculated decision that these men came to only after deep discussion.

But it was driven by fear.

If the Wendigo spirit inside her had been allowed to take control, there was no telling how destructive it might have become.

To them, this was preventative.

It was mercy, a form of euthanasia that protected the entire community.

The Fiddlers were mere instruments in the hands of a culture driven by superstition.

Witnesses testified to their quiet, dignified nature, but it didn't help.

The men were brought before a six-man jury later that year.

The Toronto newspapers printed sensational headlines about the trial, crying out against devil worship and murder.

And in response, people around the country cried out for a conviction.

And they were guilty, without question.

These men had killed a member of their family.

It might not have been a crime of passion, but they were still murderers.

So when the final verdict came down, it was far from a surprise.

Guilty.

The Cree people of Sandy Lake lost their leader.

They lost two of the most respected elders of their tiny community.

And most frightening to them, they lost their last remaining Wendigo hunters.

Real or not, these men had been a wall that kept the darkness and fear at bay.

And now that wall was gone.

Superstition has often served to answer our questions and calm our fears.

From the changelings of Ireland to the vampires of New England, the stories we tell have helped us explain the mysteries we don't understand.

That's not all superstition does, I know, but it makes up a lot of the examples we find.

We fear the unknown, and we come up with anything to explain it away.

Cannibalism is something that humans have feared for a very, very long time.

Not because we're actually convinced it could change us into supernatural monsters.

No, at the root of it all, cannibalism is just a line that we don't think we should cross.

And rightly so.

The history is littered with examples of people who have crossed the line.

Not because their life was at risk or because they had no choice, but because of something darker.

deep belief in the folklore of their upbringing, mental instability, premeditated violence.

Whatever Whatever the reason, every example reveals humans to be the true monsters, capable of anything, even the things we fear the most.

Maybe Jack Fiddler understood this.

Perhaps he knew that he represented the final entry in a vital ancient lineage.

He saw a world ill-equipped to defend itself against the evils he had fought all his life.

I have to imagine that the idea of it simply exhausted him.

On September 30th, 1907, while on a walk outside with a police constable, Jack escaped into the woods, where he strangled himself with a sash he wore.

His brother would later die in prison from tuberculosis.

On July 30th, 2008, a man named Tim McLean was riding a Greyhound bus along the Trans-Canadian Highway in Manitoba.

when one of the other passengers attacked and killed him.

The man, Vince Weguan, did more more than just kill McLean, though.

He stabbed him, beheaded him, and then proceeded to cannibalize the body.

Was the killer just insane, or did he perhaps meet an evil spirit there on his trip through Wendigo Territory?

That's a question that would be impossible to answer for certain, but the courts ruled in favor of insanity.

In the end, He was held in a high-security mental institute in Manitoba, but he stayed there for less than a decade.

Earlier this year, in May of 2015, he was released back into society.

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This episode of Lore was researched, written, and produced by me, Aaron Mankey.

Lore is much more than a podcast.

There's a book series in bookstores around the country and online, and the second season of the Amazon Prime television show was recently released.

Check them both out if you want more lore in your life.

I also make two other podcasts, Aaron Mankey's Cabinet of Curiosities and Unobscured, and I think you'd enjoy both.

Each one explores other areas of our dark history, ranging from bite-sized episodes to season-long dives into a single topic.

You can learn about both of those shows and everything else going on all over in one central place, theworldoflore.com/slash now.

And you can also follow the show on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.

Just search for lore podcast, all one word, and then click that follow button.

When you do, say hi.

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And as always, thanks for listening.

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