The Wendigo: Part I

The Story of Jack Fiddler

From the cover of the horror comic, Wendigo Wood. If you’re interested, check it out here at After Light Comics.

I did not set out to tell this story. The Wendigo, as I understood it, was the flesh hungry creature depicted in pop culture, most notably to me, in Stephen King’s Pet Sematary. In his rendering, King writes about a manipulative, ancient monster who feeds on grief and reanimates the dead in the cursed ground just outside of the pet cemetery. The depiction, an enormous, two-legged creature, shaggy haired with a deer skull for a face. That was the monster I expected to tell you about. I figured I would give you a couple of descriptions, hit the highlight reel on the comic books and horror depictions, and be on my merry way.

Instead, I came upon the true story of Jack Fiddler. The chief of the Sucker people, a First Nations clan in northwestern Ontario. A respected and well known shaman and healer, and in the final months of his life, a prisoner.

In the summer of 1907, Jack Fiddler was arrested, taken from his ancestral home by mounted police, and brought before a Canadian courtroom. He was 87 years old. His crime, the murder of a woman, the wife of his own nephew. In the eyes of the authorities, a sick woman, delirious with fever. To Jack and his brother Joseph Fiddler, a windigo¹. She was the fourteenth windigo he had killed in his lifetime. Newspaper headlines circulated, rumoring devil worship in the forests of Ontario. The people of Canada wanted justice.

His case would never go to trial. During a walk outside under the supervision of a guard, Jack Fiddler escaped and took his own life. Joseph Fiddler would go on to be tried and convicted of the murder. His sentence, death by hanging. It is the only recorded trial of its kind, a historical artifact in the story of the Canadian government’s final reach into the territories of the Oji-Cree First Nations people.

A photograph of Robert Fiddler, son of Jack Fiddler and his successor as chief of the Sucker people. By Indian and Northern Affairs Canada, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=3338934

On March 16th, 1907, Constable J.A.W. O’Neill rode his dog sled team to the Island Lake post in Northwestern Ontario. It was one of only two Hudson Bay Company posts accessible to the Anishinabeck people at Sandy Lake. Rural, untouched by the west aside from handfuls of fur traders and a couple of Methodist missionaries who met with the Indians who lived there. It was far from any trade routes, established by fur traders eager to capitalize on the forest resources.

O’Neill, a soldier in the Royal North-West Mounted Police, made his way to the harsh land under strange circumstances. He had been charged with investigating rumors of homicides carried out by the pagan natives who lived in the remote forests of Northwestern Ontario. The story, related by a William “Big Bill” Campbell, a manager of the outposts for the HBC (Hudson Bay Company), had traveled from the isolated river routes of the HBC posts deep in the boreal forests to the headquarters of the North-West Mounted Police.² Commissioner Aylesworth Bowen Perry was so disturbed by the letter, he instructed a patrol be made to find out if it was true that the Indians were murdering the sick. An investigation was to be conducted with full reports on the findings.

Like in the United States, the Canadian government at the time had extended its power over every First Nations tribe and clan. Indian schools were legalized in 1876 through the Indian Act, and an amendment made them compulsory nearly two decades later in 1894. The children were removed from their families, stripped of their cultures and languages. Missionaries reached out to convert pagan tribes to christianity. Their ways of life were being eradicated.

But the Sandy Lake people, comprised of five clans, were still untouched in those ways. No western settlement had taken root in the boreal forests and lakes of the territory considered “as inaccessible as the North Pole.”³ Indeed, the people belonging to the Suckers, Pelicans, Crane, Caribou and Sturgeon clans were among the very last tribes to rule themselves without the interference of the Canadian government.

Their isolation, the harsh winters in the north, the forests stripped of resources by the fur trade, all lent itself to the hands-off approach the Canadian government had heretofore taken. Travel was nearly impossible in the thick forests. Hunters from the clans came by canoe to trade furs for sugar and flour, tools and weapons. In 1906, the last year of total freedom for the Sandy Lake people, Jack Fiddler, chief of the Sucker clan, was among the last aboriginal people on the continent to govern and live independent of the white man.

“Now in the ebb of his forest journey, Jack Fiddler is one of the last leaders in North America who has never signed treaty; never accepted missionaries; never accepted hand-outs; never been defeated. This Sucker clan leader still directs the affairs of his people in the upland forests.”

- James R. Stevens and Thomas Fiddler, Killing the Shamen

The spring of 1907 brought a sweeping change to the Sucker people. By April 15th, 1907, Constable O’Neill is joined by another red coat, Constable Cashman. He is a soldier from Norway House⁴, sent to help O’Neill in his investigation. The accused men are brothers, Jack and Joseph Fiddler. The victim, a woman, Joseph's daughter-in-law, who had been strangled to death the previous fall.

It is hard for me to imagine, though I am admittedly ignorant, that a single murder in the far reaches of Canadian wilderness would have resulted in this investigation. No soldier had ever been to Sandy Lake. The forests and lakes there remained a mystery to most of Canada, and certainly to the two men who were sent to ascertain the nature of the rumors. I think it is more likely that the reason for the murder, a woman turned windigo, aroused the government’s suspicions. Perhaps they were even curious. The note written to the commissioner was penned by Sergeant Daisy Smith, and he noted the following:

“…at Sandy Lake, about three days travel from Island Lake, there is a band of pagan Indians and it is generally believed that these people are in the habit of killing one another whenever one gets delirious through fever or other causes. They are very superstitious and kill through superstitious belief not through malice.”

- James R. Stevens and Thomas Fiddler, Killing the Shamen (71)

The government’s interest in the Sandy Lake people had been piqued a few years before this. Driven by public interest after a newspaper article⁵ was written detailing the terrible condition of tribes in the forest after a particularly brutal winter, missionaries were sent to check on the tribes to find out if the rumors of starvation were true.

Indeed they were. The drive of the fur trade had led to the near eradication of beaver in the forests. For generations, beaver was the main staple of the people there. The loss of their main source of food combined with the cyclical ebb of rabbits, lynx, foxes, and other animals (every 7 or so years according to the clans), resulted in routine starvation. When bleak winters came, only the strongest survived.

The Indian Agent Reverend John Semmens wrote an answer to the Commissioner with the following conclusion:

“I believe that special destitution did exist in the winter of 1899 and 1900, and that fourteen persons died by the Chief of Sandy Lake and a companion…In fact there was a sickness and the hunters lingered watching by the sick until scarcity was upon them…at intervals of seven years old residents say the rabbits mysteriously disappear. Naturally, foxes, lynx and other animals…disappear also and there follows a time of scarcity..plenty follows famines.”

- James R. Stevens and Thomas Fiddler, Killing the Shamen (67)

There was a public outcry after the publication of the story. How can the Indians be left to starve, to eat the lichen off rocks and trees when Canada is so large and bountiful? Can a township be made for them? Is the government so cruel as to leave the indigenous peoples to starve to death in the wilderness? It wasn’t long after that some clans of the Sandy Lake people sent their children to Norway House to go to school.

Robert Whiteway, a Hudson Bay Company trader, noted that on June 15th, 1903, a missionary named Mr. Lowes took five canoes of children and hunters toward Island Lake. They were headed to a residential school. Unbeknownst to them, the Sucker clan was slipping into the control of a bigger world. They would have to answer to a nation of laws of which they knew nothing about.

In this regard, there is nothing surprising about this story. Indeed, any reader remotely familiar with the colonizing of North America will hear the same themes echoed in the history of the Plains Indians, the Sioux Nation, the Blackfeet, the Cheyenne, the Apache, the Comanche. Countless tribes that existed for millennia. The sad takeover of the vast, resource rich lands of America and Canada. The near total eradication of the old ways.

Some will even read and sympathize with the Canadian officials and soldiers who first heard of the murder of a sick woman of the Sucker clan. The red coats who were sent to find out if human life was being snuffed out in the name of some strange superstition or belief. Was it true that the chief of the Sucker clan was killing people with fevers? If so, anyone can see the urgency that drove O’Neill and Cashman on through hard, snowy country. It would take them months to finally meet with the accused, Jack Fiddler, and from what we know they did not falter in their search for him.

Photo by Patrick Mueller on Unsplash

I can picture Sergeant Daisy Smith, the man who first heard the story of the windigo killings and wrote to his superior. He sits in casual conversation with Bill Campbell at Norway House, a drink in hand. Campbell, a man of the wild, a fur trader who manages the Hudson Bay Company outposts at the edge of Canadian control, shares stories from an old world in the boreal forests.

“They kill windigos there.”

“Windigos?”

“Yeah. Evil spirits. They say they come in harsh winters, when the people are hungry. Turn them into cannibals.”

“Have you ever seen one?”

“No,” he’s laughing now. “They’re just sick people. Flu or fever or both. Maybe crazy. But the Indians are superstitious. They kill them to keep them from turning into cannibals.”

“How many have they killed?”

“I only know of one woman for sure. Was about seven years ago now. Strangled her to death.”

You can picture the imprint such a story left on Sergeant Smith in the dark privacy of the evening when he left to find his own bed. The tale followed him into his dreams, plagued his waking thoughts the next day. His stomach, uneasy. His mind, tormented by the strange tales from the wild places of Canada. He feels he must do something, the burden heavy on his mind. He writes to his superior, explains that the Indians kill people when they are sick as part of some nonsense superstition. And three days after Christmas he receives a letter back. The investigation and eventual trial and conviction of Jack and Joseph Fiddler is set in motion through the lips of one man.

Here, dear reader, I ask you to suspend disbelief. To hear the story as the people who lived and survived in that harsh land tell it. The western angle is always to apply logic. The scientific method. All the products of the Enlightenment that we can muster. To destroy superstition, especially superstitions that harm people, wherever we go.

I have brought you to the crux of two worlds. The old one of the forests, where dreams lead the clans of Sandy Lake to find meat, to cure worm-infested fish through intuited medicine, where curses can kill you, and shamans are both hated and revered for their powers. And the new one in which we live today. Of machine and metal, of red coats and industry, of police and trials and death by hanging.

To tell this story rightly, I will cite the pages written by Jack Fiddler’s grandson, Chief Thomas Fiddler. His book Killing the Shamen, written together with James R. Stevens, is where I collected most of the facts presented in the first parts of this series. To fully capture the legend of the windigo, I will cover stories from others. Some are tribes with their own legends. Others are fur traders and missionaries who spent time in the forests of North America at the turn of the century.

I have never spent a night in the old forests, certainly never a winter in the north. Most people who will read this haven’t. Can we really say what happened in the dead cold, far from doctors and asylums? Perhaps the killing of windigoes was the Sucker clan’s form of euthanasia for the sick and the insane. Perhaps it was something more.

In the coming weeks, I will present to you the legend of the Wendigo through the first and second hand accounts of the people who recorded them. I will detail Jack Fiddler’s story as told by his grandson and the trial transcripts that document the only known case of a windigo killer. I will present the windigo through the eyes of the Jesuit priests who wrote of them as early as 1661, as well as the psychiatrists who went on to label a cannibalistic condition marked by mania and a desire to eat human flesh, windigo psychosis. I will tell you the stories detailed by the fur trappers who knew the forests as well as any white man could. In the end, I’ll leave it up to you to decide what’s what, if it is truth, or legend.

1. The spelling varies in different documents. Wendigo or windigo was used alternately in many of the texts I read.

2. The headquarters of the North West Mounted Police was in Regina, half a world away from the Sandy Lake people.

3. Sandy Lake First Nation Treaty No. 5

4. A population center in modern day Manitoba, Canada. An establishment of the Hudson’s Bay Company for most of the 19th century.

5. The Manitoba Free Press printed the following: “INDIANS STARVED TO DEATH: MEMBERS OF SALTEAUX TRIBE IN NORTHERN KEEWATIN PERISHED LAST WINTER OWING TO FAILURE OF GAME”