TACOMA — Deep in the rain-soaked foothills of the Olympic Mountains is a clearing filled with shrines framed with elk bones, photos and artifacts more than a century old. Some are rusted with age, others have a palpable sense of just being touched.
They’re all devoted to a man the press once called a “Beast Man,” “Wild Hermit” and a “Mad Desperado.”
His name was John Tornow, a man either heralded as a misunderstood loner or reviled as a remorseless killer who slayed law enforcement officers and his own nephews.
A century has passed since he spread fear through the Pacific Northwest, including in Tacoma and Olympia.
His legend has only grown.
A stone monument in the secret clearing where he ultimately met his fate after killing his final two victims asks, “Friend or foe, we’ll never know.”
Now Tornow’s story is the subject of a new musical that opened Thursday in Port Townsend. “Wild Man of the Wynoochee” mixes fact with artistic license as it recounts the story. The show runs through Oct. 27 at the Key City Public Theatre.
‘Mangy Cur’
Tornow was born in 1880, near Elma. He wasn’t like the other boys of his time, content to work on the family farm. At age 10, he left home and began living in the woods for long periods of time.
He eventually grew to over 6-feet-tall and more than 200 pounds. As historian Murray Morgan put it in 1974, “He was powerful. He was cunning. And he was at home in the forest as nowhere else.”
According to an April 20, 1913, newspaper story, Tornow snapped when one of his brothers killed his “mangy cur.” He retreated to the forest. Some time after the dog’s death, Tornow’s brothers captured him and committed him to a sanitarium in Portland in 1911.
Tornow escaped the facility a few weeks later and made his way back to the woods he knew so well. He would also, according to the story, occasionally visit the only relative he had a good relationship with, his sister.
After his return to the woods, the sister’s twin sons, John and Will Bauer, went looking for their uncle. They tried to persuade him to return to civilization. He refused, declaring that he’d shoot anyone who came looking for him again.
In September 1911, the twins went missing during a hunting expedition. A few days later, searchers found the young men shot dead and buried under a windfall. Nearby was a cabin, the carcass of a steer and a dead bear, evidently belonging to Tornow, according to newspaper stories and numerous historical recounts.
The theory was that Tornow had stolen the steer and butchered it. The twins came upon the bear feeding on the carcass and shot it. Tornow, thinking they were shooting at him, fired back.
On the hunt
From that point on, Tornow’s fate was sealed, but many more would die before it was over.
After killing his nephews, Tornow retreated further into the woods. A 200-man posse turned up nothing.
In March 1912, two Chehalis County (the predecessor to today’s Grays Harbor County) sheriff’s deputies, Colin McKenzie and A.V. Elmer, went on the hunt for Tornow near Matlock in Mason County. They figured they could move more stealthily, compared to a large posse.
They weren’t heard from again.
A search party found Tornow’s camp two weeks later. According to a March 21, 1912, story in the Tacoma News Tribune, one of the men noticed the ground beneath his feet was soft. Under a few inches of soil, they found the bodies of the two deputies. Tornow had taken their boots, clothing, firearms and ammunition.
Today, a commemorative plaque to the two slain men is fixed inside the Grays Harbor County courthouse in Montesano.
A few days later, the Tacoma Daily Ledger reported that trappers, hunters and settlers “were in haste” to leave the upper Wynoochee country.
“These have dubbed Turnow the ‘Devil of the Wynoochee’ and say they decided to take no chances,” the newspaper reported, misspelling his name.
The 60-mile-long Wynoochee River begins high in Olympic National Park and runs south, eventually emptying into the Chehalis River near Montesano. Today, the lower valley is filled with bucolic farms and the upper valley is timber land. The name comes from a Chehalis tribal word meaning “shifting,” according to the book, “Exploring Washington.”
In the press
The press covered every twist and turn of the story, whether reporters could confirm the facts or not.
A teenager thought he had a rifle duel with Tornow in the Bald Hills of Thurston County, according to The Tacoma Times in 1912.
“The youth was confident it was Tornow, the beast man,” the story states.
Soon, every missing person was speculated to be a Tornow victim.
“Fear Wild Man has added new victim,” the Tacoma Daily Ledger screamed in July 1912.
“Wealthy Puyallup lumberman believes missing brother slain by John Tornow,” the story states.
A week later, the newspaper reported the missing man was “… alive and well at Centralia.”
In a June 6, 1912, front page editorial, The Tacoma Times lamented the failure of a posse to locate Tornow.
“Beast-Man may now roam wide domain unmolested,” the editorial stated. Not afraid of hyperbole, it continued, “It is, perhaps, civilization’s most remarkable defeat. The beast-man has halted ‘the march of progress’ in the foothills of the Olympics.
“He chose his own battleground — such a battleground as the beast would choose, an impenetrable, trackless forest.”
“Turnow may be near,” the Tacoma Daily Ledger headlined an April 1913 story. “A rumor reached Tacoma yesterday that John Turnow, the outlaw, had forsaken his hiding place in the Olympic mountains and is now hiding in Pierce county.”
The story continued, “A mysterious character came out of the woods near Puyallup and asked at a farm house for food. His grotesque appearance frightened the farmer’s wife.”
Politics
Tornow became a political asset. Deputy sheriff Schelle Matthews was elected sheriff in 1912 on the promise he would catch Tornow, according to a 1965 recounting of the story in The News Tribune.
As soon as he took office, Matthews organized posses to search for Tornow but kept coming up empty-handed.
Then, while he was on a train to Tacoma to appear in federal court, Matthews met a real estate dealer. J.B. Lucas of Hoquiam told him about a lake in the Wynoochee valley located near settlers’ abandoned cabins. He had stumbled upon a camp on an island in the lake.
Matthews figured no one would be camping in that area with the Wild Man of the Wynoochee on the loose. It had to be Tornow’s camp. When Matthews returned from Tacoma, he organized another posse which included two trappers, Charles Lathrop and Louis Blair.
Last encounter
On April 16, 1913, Matthews sent his brother-in-law, deputy sheriff Giles Quimby along with Lathrop and Blair, to recon the camp. Their instructions were to observe but not engage.
According to numerous historic and newspaper accounts, they didn’t follow orders.
Blair was shot first as he crawled out from some brush into Tornow’s camp. Quimby and Lathrop returned fire. After a period, Lathrop advanced, and he was soon shot dead.
Now, it was just the deputy and the fugitive, each behind trees. Then Quimby saw Tornow’s head emerge from behind a hemlock. Quimby fired.
At that point, the deputy thought it was best to retreat. He ran four miles to a Simpson (now Green Diamond) logging camp and told the assembled posse about the shootout.
When the posse returned to Tornow’s camp, they found the Wild Man of the Wynoochee dead, shot through the heart, his rifle across his chest. He was wearing McKenzie’s boots and Elmer’s hat.
Newspaper reporters and photographers were in the posse. Tornow’s body was propped up in a field and placed against a tree for photos. A few days later, his body was put on display in Montesano, according to an April 20, 1913, story (“Crowd of curious awaits arrival of body from woods”) in The Washingtonian newspaper.
“1,500 men and women, many of them former friends and acquaintances of John Tornow, for two years the terror of the Olympic foothills … all fired by the same idea, a curiosity to see in death this thing of human form, but in mind, a devil incarnate, viewed the remains of the slain murderer last evening at Montesano.”
Living legend
The current Port Townsend production isn’t the first work of art to feature Tornow’s story. A 1914 advertisement in The Tacoma Times promoted “John Tornow The Beast Man,” a film by D.P. Lea, “made exclusively for the Melbourne Theater.” That silent film is probably lost to the ages. Lea was an actor and cinematographer who worked in the 1910s.
Since then, Tornow has been vilified, exonerated, convicted and martyred in a variety of books and other media. There seems to be no consensus on where he falls on the good v. evil divide.
John Larson, the director of Hoquiam’s Polson Museum which is devoted to the history of Grays Harbor County, hears from many of Tornow’s defenders.
“The general premise is that Tornow was really made out to be more of a killer than he was,” Larson said this week. “Obviously he, under self-defense, killed those officers that were after him. But was he actually the murderer of his own nephews? Well, that’s there’s a lot of speculation on whether that happened or not.”
Shrines
Way up the Wynoochee valley, after the farms have given way to forests so thick sunlight rarely touches the ground, the Tornow legend comes alive.
It’s easy to miss the pullout on the side of Wynoochee Valley Road, nearly 27 miles north of Montesano. It’s carved out of tangling blackberry bushes and gray cedar stumps. A small opening in the brush soon reveals a narrow but well worn path into the woods. Someone has used a chainsaw to clear fallen trees.
It takes just a few minutes to walk to the shooting site, surrounded by vine maple and covered in soft moss.
“John Tornow, Shoot-Out, Friend or foe, we’ll never know,” reads a plaque atop a solid square of mortared stones. Smaller plaques name his victims.
Around the site and attached to trees are shrines framed with elk jaws and antlers and displaying photos of Tornow and the posse. Benches, found artifacts and a log book round out the rest of the unofficial monument.
The book contains hundreds of names and sentiments.
“Heard stories all my life and finally happy to see all the sites,” one visitor wrote in 2021. “Long live the legend of John Tornow,” wrote another in May.
Rusty items, including part of a kettle, are on display, reputed to be Tornow’s.
A small box contains a tin of chewing tobacco, casings and other trinkets. A sign inside cautions, “Remember, Tornow never took anything without leaving something behind.”
Glorifying a killer?
Less than 10 miles away from the shrines and monuments is Tornow’s grave site at Grove Cemetery in the Satsop valley. His marker stands front and center.
“From loner — to outcast — to fugitive,” it reads. It’s clear Tornow’s spirit still draws pilgrims to the sites associated with him. A shiny rifle round rested on the top of the gravestone during a recent visit.
Because he never had a trial, Tornow was never convicted of committing any of the killings.
The marker was erected in 1987. About 300 people attended the event, according to an Associated Press story. Previously, it had been marked only by a rusty can and rocks, according to the story. His parents are buried next to him.
“We are not glorifying a killer but recognizing a legend,” then Grays Harbor County Commissioner Mike Murphy said at the dedication which was attended by four generations of Tornows.
This is still wild country in the foothills of the Olympics, filled with the independent, live-off-the-land people from which Tornow came. Nearby Tornow’s grave in Grove Cemetery, a recently deceased occupant is memorialized by a cross made from chainsaw blades, spent rifle cartridges, beer cans and a camo cap.
Larson said Tornow had a skill many strive for, or at least admire: The ability to rely on only yourself.
“He just wanted to be left alone,” Larson said.
