Balsam Lake Bear Boy?

Balsam Lake, WI

January 29, 1871

Today I am going to cheat just a bit and go slightly east of the Minnesota border to Balsam Lake, WI. This story is from the Minneapolis paper of the same date relayed from the Taylor’s Falls Gazette.

The article reports that a band of Native Americans captured an unusual ‘creature’ and that was currently being kept in their encampment.

The article describes it as follows:

“It has the semblance of human form; is fleet of foot and has surpassing strength. It is about four feet in height; its skin is hard, bronzed and as tough as an elephant’s. In appearance throughout it much resembles average humanity save that it has a head like unto a bear’s, and fingers and toes of four to five inches in length, with nails thereon proportionately long. Its utterances are incoherent and unintelligible and yet, it can now make what it wants passably understood by signs and motions.”

The creature was kept continuously bound but seemed to offer little or no trouble to its captors. It is noted that the creature would become extremely agitated on the approach of a white man.

It seems that the creature was not entirely strange to its captors as they recounted a narrative regarding such a being. It was told that some twenty five years prior a young Chippewa woman was to be united to a young man of that tribe until a white man appeared and became her ruin. A child was born with the hideous deformity of a bear’s head coupled with elongated fingers and toes. Shortly after the birth mother and child disappeared. The body of the dead mother was found in the woods but the child was never located. Since that time there had been sightings of the being in the woods but mostly at a distance and was unapproachable. The party was still unsure of what the final disposition of the creature would be.