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Revenants · Spectral creatures and night demons

Swift Runner and the Wendigo – the Fort Saskatchewan Case

When
1879 date from records made at the time
Where
Fort Saskatchewan, Alberta, Canada
Verdict
Explained

A Cree man who killed and ate his family in the winter of 1878–79 said a wendigo had possessed him. He was hanged at Fort Saskatchewan in December 1879.

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53.71°, -113.21° · dimmed: other phenomena within 1,500 km

What happened

Swift Runner (Ka-Ki-Si-Kutchin in Cree) was a tall Cree hunter from what is now central Alberta who traded with the Hudson's Bay Company and worked as a guide for the North-West Mounted Police. Addicted to smuggled whisky, he was sent back to his people by the police, and in time they cast him out as well. He spent the winter of 1878–79, a time of famine among the Cree, in the bush with his wife, mother, brother and children. In spring he came back alone, saying they had all starved and his wife had killed herself. The police noticed he did not look starved; taken back to the camp, where scattered bones and skulls were found, he confessed to killing and eating his family. He said a wendigo had entered him – the spirit of Algonquian belief that fills a person with an insatiable hunger for human flesh. In August 1879 a jury, working with an interpreter, found him guilty, and on 20 December 1879 he was hanged at Fort Saskatchewan, the first legal execution in what is now Alberta. The hangman, a retired soldier, had to repair the trap first, and the condemned man reportedly joked that he could kill himself with a tomahawk and save him the trouble.

Witnesses

Mounted Police records and the trial of August 1879; contemporary press reports (including an account of the hanging in the Daily Evening Mercury). The case was studied by Colin A. Thomson in his book Swift Runner (1984).

Explanations and hypotheses

The crime is historical fact, and the court did not accept the wendigo as a mitigating circumstance. Accounts differ on the number of victims: Thomson lists his wife, five children and three other relatives; other sources give his mother, brother, wife and six children. The case has long been cited as an example of so-called “wendigo psychosis,” a supposed culture-bound disorder in which a person believes they are turning into a cannibal; anthropologists such as Robert Brightman (1983) have questioned whether any such distinct illness exists. Thomson points to hunger, alcohol and the breakdown of Indigenous life under settlement. It is also noted that other food was available at the camp, so this was not simple famine cannibalism.

Explained The phenomenon has a widely accepted, down-to-earth explanation.

Sources

  1. Colin A. Thomson, Swift Runner (Detselig Enterprises, 1984)
  2. RCMP Veterans’ Association Vancouver – First Person Hung By NWMP
  3. Executed Today – 1879: Swift Runner, wendigo

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