“A Mixture of History, Myth, and Bullshit”: The Legend of Headless Valley and the Colonization of Nahʔą Dehé, the South Nahanni River Valley

Abstract

In February 1947, Pierre Berton led a daring, mid-winter expedition into the South Nahanni River Valley (Nahʔą Dehé) in the Northwest Territories to find a secret tropical paradise. Berton’s syndicated reports for the Vancouver Sun created one of the most exciting and bizarre media spectacles of the early postwar period, and it set in motion a series of events that would lead to the establishment of Nahanni National Park Reserve. Placing Berton’s expedition to the Nahanni in a broader context, this essay traces and examines the narrative origins and evolution of a series of lurid tales about the Nahanni wilderness that are collectively known as the Legend of Headless Valley. The Legend of Headless Valley—which includes stories about a secret tropical valley, a lost gold mine, murdered and decapitated prospectors, evil spirits, prehistoric cave-dwelling monsters, and a tribe of head-hunters—remains one of the most enduring legends in the Canadian North and a fundamental feature of the Nahanni wilderness. In examining the narrative history of this northern legend, this essay helps reinforce the idea that stories about northern Canada—however lurid, speculative, or even untrue—are constitutive parts of northern geographies, both real and imagined, and mediating factors in their colonization by outside forces.