1889 Alaska Deposition Reveals Trapper's Encounter with Mysterious Giant Tracks

So I just came across this absolutely gripping video that drops you right into 1889 Alaska, and I had to share it. It's presented as a formal deposition — a sworn statement given to a territorial inquest office in Juneau, Alaska, on February 14, 1889 — and the man giving it, Callum Ree, is recounting what happened to a four-man hunting party on the Kenai Peninsula four months earlier. The setup is incredible. Four experienced hunters — Thomas Aldridge, Wendell Cross, Joseph Puit, and Ree himself — headed into the Alaskan backcountry on October 17, 1888, under a territorial fur license. They were working the surveyed corridor southeast of Cook Inlet, heading toward the foothills above the Castle drainage. These weren't greenhorns. Thomas had been hunting professionally since he was 19 and had three prior seasons on the Kenai. Joseph was a former cavalryman with six years of Alaskan trapping experience. These were hardened woodsmen who knew the country. They made camp on a sheltered flat about 11 miles from the trailhead — a spot Thomas had used before. The first night, Ree woke to something strange. A sound like two very heavy things striking frozen ground in quick succession. A double impact, heavy enough that he could feel it slightly through the ground beneath his bedroll. Then nothing. He dismissed it at the time as a tree branch coming down under frost weight or some settling of the frozen ground. He didn't mention it to the others. He calls it his first mistake. The next couple of days were productive by any normal measure — they took an elk cow on the 19th, Wendell caught two marten and a lynx in his snares. Ordinary backcountry work. But on the afternoon of the 20th, Ree found tracks. And these tracks are something else. Nineteen inches long. Twelve inches wide at the widest point. For reference, Ree's own boot was 11 and a half inches long, and these prints were considerably longer than his boot and half again as wide. The stride between them was approximately five feet. The depth of the impressions in the partly frozen mud was striking — Ree's own weight pressed into the same surface left a mark about half an inch deep. These prints were close to two inches deep in the unfrozen sections, and in one spot where the ground was softer, nearly three inches. Nineteen-inch-long tracks with a five-foot stride in 1888 Alaska. That footprint morphology — the length-to-width ratio, the depth suggesting enormous body weight, the long stride — lines up with what researchers have been documenting in Sasquatch reports across the Pacific Northwest and Alaska for generations. The 19th century actually has a surprising number of well-documented historical encounters like this one, particularly in the Pacific Northwest and the remote regions of Alaska and Canada, where Indigenous oral traditions had long described large, hair-covered beings in the wilderness long before any European settlers arrived. What makes this video particularly compelling is the framing. It's not presented as a campfire story or a sensational claim. It's presented as an official deposition, with Ree explicitly noting that the examining officer may challenge contradictions with prior accounts given informally at the trading post. There's a Sharps rifle sitting on the table between them as he speaks — "what remains of it," he says — and he asks that it be moved. The examiner says no. It stays. The deposition cuts off right as Thomas is about to respond to Ree's description of the tracks, so there's clearly more to the story. The video itself goes further into what happened to this hunting party, and honestly, the way it's been put together — with the period-appropriate language, the careful pacing, the attention to the sensory details of that Alaskan cold — it lands differently than your typical content on the subject. The detail about the sound of the country is worth noting too. Ree describes how sound travels differently in that kind of cold — arrives sooner than it should, stays longer than it should. You learn to listen more carefully, and you also learn to be wrong more often about what you're hearing. That's the kind of observation that comes from someone who actually lived in that environment and paid attention to it, and it adds a layer of authenticity to the whole thing. If you're into historical Sasquatch encounters, or if you appreciate well-crafted storytelling that treats the subject with the seriousness it deserves, this one is worth your time. The video is on YouTube and runs through the full deposition. I'd recommend watching the whole thing — the setup alone is worth it, and whatever comes after that cutoff point is clearly where things get intense.