Episode
Montana: The Shunka Warak'in
- Podcast
- Backwoods Bigfoot Stories
- Published
- Aug 19, 2026
- Duration seconds
- 3658
- Processing state
not_requested
Actions
POST https://stenobird.com/v1/public/podcasts/backwoods-bigfoot-stories-6739689/episodes/montana-the-shunka-warak-in/transcription-requests
Idempotently request low-priority transcript generation for this episode.GET https://stenobird.com/podcast/backwoods-bigfoot-stories-6739689/montana-the-shunka-warak-in.md
Read the agent-friendly Markdown representation of this episode resource.
Summary
Montana is the only stop on this road trip where the animal is sitting in a display case. In 1886, in the Madison River Valley, a settler named Israel Ammon Hutchins killed something that had been coming into ranch yards after geese and dogs across fifteen miles of valley. He gave the carcass to a grocer named Joseph Sherwood over at Henry Lake, Idaho, who mounted it, called it the Ringdocus for reasons nobody has ever explained, and put it in his store. It sat there into the 1980s and then it vanished. For two decades the only proof it had ever existed was a black-and-white photograph in a naturalist's 1977 autobiography. In 2007 a descendant named Jack Kirby tracked it to a storage room at the Idaho Museum of Natural History in Pocatello and brought it home to Ennis, and before it went on display he drove it to the cemetery and parked it next to the old man's grave. It's still there, four feet long, dark, high in the shoulder and low in the hip, with the ghost of stripes on its sides. Nobody has ever run its DNA. This episode covers where the name Shunka Warak'in actually comes from and why it doesn't belong to Montana at all, what Lance Foster told Loren Coleman in 1995, and what an earlier anthropologist recorded about the same word. It covers what a dog was worth on the northern plains and on a homestead, and why an animal that carries off dogs earns its own name. It covers the forty-year campaign that emptied Montana of wolves, including the 1905 state law that required the veterinarian to infect wolves and coyotes with mange and turn them loose, and what it does to a landscape when the main predator is removed and then put back. And it covers the two modern cases everybody brings up, the Creature of McCone County that killed roughly 120 head of livestock in 2005…