Seven Timber Crew Vanish in 1830s Oregon, Leaving Giant Bigfoot Tracks

So I was scrolling through YouTube the other night and stumbled across something that genuinely gave me chills. There's a channel called Cryptid Stories that posted this absolutely wild historical account from 1820s Oregon — and let me tell you, this one hits different. The video tells the story of Elias Mercer, a carpenter working for the Hudson's Bay Company at Fort Vancouver. In the fall of 1820, his brother Caleb was part of a seven-man logging crew sent across the Columbia River to harvest timber near a creek they called Alder Creek. When the crew didn't return after their scheduled 10 days, the company finally agreed to let Mercer and three others go looking for them on day 14. What they found at the camp was... unsettling, to say the least. The crew's canoe was tied where it should have been, holding nothing but rainwater and a dead mouse. At the camp itself, a kettle hung over cold ash with peas dried hard inside. Seven blanket rolls sat beneath the lean-to. Six full axes and one broad axe rested in the tool rack. Caleb's light axe was missing. His tally book was gone too. But his spare shirt, his horn comb, and his badly-rolled blanket were all there. Then Mercer saw the boots. Seven pairs, arranged neatly beneath a standing tree that had been chopped all the way through but somehow hadn't fallen. Forty feet of fur — that's roughly 12 meters of hair-covered trunk — balanced on a stump no wider than a palm. Caleb's boots were third from the left, and Mercer recognized the half-moon patch he'd nailed under his brother's right heel. Then came the axe blows. Three, evenly spaced, from the ridge above. That was the signal Mercer and his brother had used since childhood. It meant "come here, I found something." But the treetop was moving against the wind. Not with it. Against it. The tree came down. The seven pairs of boots vanished under the branches. And from the ridge came a fourth axe blow — one more than their signal. Mercer realized then that the sound hadn't been asking him to come up. It had been checking whether he would answer. The search party followed a trail with seven sets of footprints — not eight. Caleb's were easiest to identify because of that distinctive half-moon patch. The tracks led to mud beside the creek, where they found something else entirely: a single print measuring 18 and 3/4 inches from heel to longest toe, with five toes, a broad ball, and a deep split across the left heel shaped like an old wound. The boatman with them pointed out the obvious: one track tells you the men passed north. This one faced south. The Sasquatch had been waiting beside the creek while all seven workers walked toward it. This account is remarkable for a number of reasons. First, the timeframe — the 1820s — predates most of the famous encounters people typically cite. The Hudson's Bay Company was actively operating in the Pacific Northwest during this period, and their journals and records have been a treasure trove for researchers interested in historical encounters with these beings. Indigenous