North Dakota: Miniwashitu & Bigfoot

Backwoods Bigfoot Stories

This episode of Backwoods Bigfoot Stories explores the cryptid legends of North Dakota, focusing heavily on the Miniwashitu, a mysterious creature said to

Key takeaways

• Melvin Randolph Gilmore documented the Miniwashitu in his book 'Prairie Smoke', describing a red-haired creature with a saw-toothed back.
• In 1961, Lorraine witnessed a red, saw-toothed shape moving upstream through breaking ice on the Missouri River.

Main topics

• The Miniwashitu legend
• Missouri River ice breakup

Notable quotes

Don't look at it. Not in daylight.

Conclusion

A haunting compilation of regional folklore and personal accounts that

Transcript preview

Speaker 1 (0:01) For decades, people have disappeared in the woods without a trace. Some blame wild animals. Others whisper of creatures the world refuses to believe in. But those who have survived, they know the truth. Welcome to Backwoods Bigfoot Stories, where we share real encounters with the things lurking in the darkness. Bigfoot, dogmen, UFOs, and creatures that defy explanation. Some make it out. Others aren't so lucky. Are you ready? Because once you hear these stories, you'll never walk in the woods alone again. So grab your flashlight, stay close, and remember, some things in the woods don't want to be found. Hit that follow or subscribe button. turn on auto downloads and let's head off into the woods if you dare. Every spring the Missouri River in North Dakota tears itself apart. It starts with a sound. People who live along the water say you hear it before you see anything. A crack that runs for a mile, then a groan, then a boom like a shotgun going off inside a barn. The ice that's held the river shut since December starts to move. Slabs the size of a house ride up over each other and grind. The whole surface, three feet thick in places, six in others, breaks and heaves and starts downstream. And for a few days the river sounds like something big. is loose in it. Along that river, in a book printed more than a hundred years ago, there's a story about what's doing the breaking. It swims upstream, against the current, and it has a back like a saw. It's covered in red hair, and it roars. And the people who told that story to the man who wrote it down said one more thing. Don't look at it. Not in daylight. Because the last man who did came home blind. And then he lost his mind. And then he died. We've come up out of Nebraska on Highway 83, straight north through the Sandhills and across the South Dakota line, and the country's flattened and opened even more than it already had. This is the next stop on the road trip, and we're going to spend most of it on the water. Where I live, the ridges close in on you. Down home in Appalachia, deep in the woods, you can go a whole day and not see more than 100 yards in any direction. You learn the country by sound. A rock kicked loose on a slope above you. A limb that cracks with nothing to crack it. A call from the next hollow over that doesn't belong to anything you can name. That's where this show gets made. In a studio at the end of a gravel road with timber on all four sides. North Dakota's the opposite of that, and the drive-in makes you feel it. There's nothing here to stand in front of the sky. You cross the Missouri at Bismarck on a bridge that's longer than some towns I've lived in, and the river underneath it is wide and brown and slow. And along both banks, there's a line of cottonwoods that runs off in both directions until it's just a smudge. That line of trees is the only real timber for a long way. Everything else is wheat and pasture, and the occasional shelter belt somebody's grandfather planted to keep the wind off the house. So it's the river. Everything in this episode comes back to the river. The Missouri here isn't the river it was. In the 1950s, the Army Corps of Engineers built Garrison Dam upstream of Bismarck, and it backed the water up into Lake Sakakawea, nearly 200 miles of reservoir. Downstream, they built Owy in South Dakota, and that lake reaches all the way back up into North Dakota. So the free-running stretch of the Missouri and the state is really just the piece between the two dams. From Riverdale down past Bismarck and Mandan, to somewhere around the Cannonball, about 80 miles of open river, still wide, still brown, still cold, and still freezing solid every winter, and still breaking up every spring. That breakup is where this starts. In 1921, a man named Melvin Randolph Gilmore published a small book called Prairie Smoke. Gilmore was a curator at the North Dakota State Historical Society for a few years. and before that he'd spent a long time working with the native nations of the upper Missouri, writing down how they used the plants of the prairie, how they lived on the river, what they told him. Prairie Smoke was his attempt to put some of what he'd been told into a book a regular person could read. It went through more than one edition. The one most people quote is from 1929. There's a short passage in it, not much more than a page. and it's where the mini-washitu comes from as far as the written record goes. He wrote that in the long ago there was a mysterious being within the stream of the Missouri River. It was seldom seen by people, and it was dreadful to see. Sometimes it was seen in the water in the middle of the stream, and where it passed there was a redness in the water, shining like fire as it went upstream against the current with a terrific roaring sound. If anyone saw it in the daytime, that person soon went mad and stayed restless and writhing as if in pain until death came and relieved them. Then Gilmore wrote that one time, not so very many years before, a man had seen it and had lived long enough to tell how it looked. The man said it was of strange form and covered all over with hair like a buffalo, but red. It had one eye in the middle of its forehead and above the eye a single horn. Its backbone stood out notched and jagged like an enormous saw. As soon as the man saw it, everything went dark to him. He was just able to get home. He lost his reason, and soon after that he died. And Gilmore closed the passage by writing that the mini-washitu was said to still live in the Missouri, and that in spring, as it moved upstream against the current, it broke up the ice of the river. That's it. That's the whole of the written source. And everything anybody's printed about the creature in the centuries since has been built on those few paragraphs. Gilmore didn't name the person who told him the story, and he didn't name the nation the story came from in that passage. His work on the Upper Missouri was mostly with the Dakota, the Mandan, the Hidatsa, and the Arikara, and the word itself is Dakota. Many is water. Later writers have mostly called it a Dakota story, and a few have called it Mandan. and the book doesn't settle it. What the book does make plain is that this wasn't a monster in the way a lake monster in Nebraska is a monster, something a newspaperman could invent for a slow week. It's a being with a place in the year. It belongs to the breakup. When the river opens in March and April and the ice starts moving, that's the mini washitu going upstream. And the sound the ice makes is the sound it makes. The single eye and the single horn. and the red hair belong to a kind of being that shows up in the traditions of a lot of the river nations. Water beings with horns. Powerful, dangerous to look at. Tied to specific rivers and lakes. They aren't one being, and the nations they belong to don't treat them as one. The mini-Washitu is the Missouri's. That's as far as Gilmore takes it. The rule that matters most, or what follows, is the one about seeing it. Gilmore's informant didn't say it attacked anybody. Didn't say it took livestock or pulled a man under. What it did was be seen. And being seen was enough. Blindness. Then madness. Then death. The man in the story didn't run from it. He looked at it and went home. That rule and the roar and the red in the water and the timing. Breakup. Spring. The ice going out. Those are the pieces. And for the last hundred years, off and on, people along that river have described one or another of those pieces without ever having heard of Melvin Gilmore or his book. We start in 1961. Lorraine was nine the year her father told her not to look at the river. Her family had a place on the east bank of the Missouri north of Washburn, a farm that ran down to the bottoms where the cottonwoods were. And her father cut his firewood down there every March when the ground was still frozen hard enough to get the wagon in and out. In 1961, the ice went out early. She remembers that because they'd been down cutting wood the week before. and the river had been white and still all the way across, and when they went back on a Saturday morning, it was moving. Her father heard it first. She said they'd just gotten the team stopped at the woodpile, and he put his hand up, and they both stood there, and from downstream came a sound she'd never heard before. It was low, and it went on a long time. She said it was like a bull bellowing but stretched out, and under it there was the ice, cracking and grinding, and the two sounds were coming together. so she couldn't have told you which was which. Her father told her to get up on the wagon seat and turn around and look at the horses. She asked him why. He said, because he said so. She got up on the seat, and then she did what any nine-year-old does when they're told not to look at something. She turned her head and looked. The river was about 200 yards from where the wagon stood, and the ice was in pieces, big flat slabs of it riding down on the current and piling up against the bend. In the middle of the channel, going the wrong way, going upstream, there was a line of broken water. The ice was coming apart ahead of it, splitting and lifting the way a board splits ahead of an axe, and the thing that was splitting it was under the surface. She could see aback. A long hump of it, dark, wet, and along the top of the hump there was a ridge that stuck up out of the water in points. She said it looked like a row of teeth on a saw blade, but each tooth was as tall as a fence post, and they were moving, going by, one after another. The sun was low behind them and it was shining on the water, and where the light hit the back she said it was red, a dull red, like rust on a piece of iron. She watched it go by. She watched the teeth go past for as long as it would take to count to 20, and then the last one went by, and the water closed, and the ice slid back together over the place. The roaring stopped. The ice kept grinding. Her father was standing between her and the river with his back to her, and when it was quiet, he turned around and saw where she was looking. He didn't say anything. He got up on the wagon and turned the team and drove them back up out of the bottoms without cutting a stick of wood. and the wood they'd already stacked stayed down there until May. That night at supper, he told her mother that the river had gone out. Her mother asked if he'd got the wood, and he said no, and that was the end of it at the table. Lorraine wrote the rest of it herself, years later. That spring, her father's eyes started giving him trouble. He'd always had good eyes. By summer, he couldn't read the paper without holding it at arm's length, and by fall, he'd quit driving at night. The doctor in Bismarck said it was cataracts and he was young for it, but it happened. He had the surgery in 1964 and it helped some. She said that when she was grown and he was old, she asked him once whether he'd looked at the river that day, and he said he'd seen enough of it, and he changed the subject. He never told her what he'd heard about it or from whom. She said he was the kind of man who'd have heard a lot of things working the river bottoms his whole life. but he wouldn't have passed a one of them on to anyone. She's 74 now. She lives in Minot. She said she's never once in her life put a boat on the Missouri, and her husband fished it for 40 years and could never get her to go. The breakup on the free-running stretch below Garrison Dam isn't what it used to be, because the dam holds the water steady and the ice doesn't get the chance to build the way it did when the river ran wild. But below the dam, In the tail race and the first miles downstream toward Washburn and Stanton, it still freezes, and it still goes out, and in 1974, Gene was there when it did. He worked for the Corps at Garrison. He'd been there about 10 years, on the maintenance side, and part of the spring routine was checking the shoreline below the powerhouse for ice damage after the breakup, walking the riprap along the bank and noting anything that had shifted or washed out. It was late March. He was alone. The crew had split up to cover more ground and he'd drawn the stretch on the west bank, about a mile down from the dam, where the river's still narrow and fast before it spreads out. The ice had gone the night before, and there was a jam at a bend below him. A pile of slabs shoved up against a sandbar, maybe 20 feet high at the top of the pile, and the water was backing up behind it and running over it in sheets. He heard it from the jam. He was standing on the riprap with his clipboard, and the sound came up out of the pile of ice, and it wasn't the ice. He'd been listening to ice all morning. He said this was an animal. It was a roar, one long roar, and it had a vibration in it he felt through his boots, and it went