Exploring the Big Muddy Badlands
Guided tour of this gem gets you into hard-to-reach places that take you back to the past
NEAR CORONACH, SASK. — To get to Sam Kelly’s Outlaw Caves in the Big Muddy Badlands, we first have to get through the locked gate with a sign that warns: “Trespassers will be given a fair trial then hung!” There’s even a picture of a noose for dramatic effect.
Luckily, Tillie Duncan has a key — and permission to bring tours to Giles Ranch — so she doesn’t even comment on the tongue-in-cheek death threat. We slowly drive down a farmer’s makeshift road, carefully dodging free-ranging cows and park near a funky wooden outhouse.
“There are two caves here — the house cave and the horse cave,” Duncan tells us as we brave the dry summer heat and take a short walk. “They used to be wolf dens and they were enlarged.”
Inside the small caves, which have been shored up by tourism, we use our imaginations to travel back to the late 1800s when these caves were the northernmost stop on Butch Cassidy’s outlaw trail from Canada to Mexico.
Horse and cattle thieves such as the Dutch Henry and Nelson Jones (alias Sam Kelly) gangs operated in Saskatchewan and Montana — hence, the cave to hide stolen animals.
From the caves, you can make out a flag on a nearby hill and the hint of a fence that marks the U.S. border. It’s patrolled by satellite. Some people hike up to it, but it’s too far and too hot today. There are no outlaws to be found and, apparently, the most dangerous things around here these days are rattlesnakes, but Duncan hasn’t seen any for two years. Besides cows, the only living thing we see is a mule deer.
The first Big Muddy Badlands tour ran as a 1973 pilot project charging $1 a carload. It was a hit and the Big Muddy Guided Tour Association was formed the following year.
Forty-plus years later, the guided tours continue every summer. There are half- and full-day tours with the choice to hop into a bus with others or have a guide join you to explore a part of Saskatchewan that still flies under the radar.
My young kids can’t hack the ninehour, full-day tour, so Duncan, a re- tiree and 25-year tour guide veteran, comes in our minivan for a private tour. We see almost everything in a five-hour day cut short by a temperamental 4-year-old.
You could do some of the tour yourself, leaving from Coronach, population 648, but the best stuff is on private property and it’s hard to navi- gate the maze of unmarked gravel roads.
At Castle Butte — once an important landmark for Indigenous people, early settlers and North-West Mounted Police and now one of Saskatchewan’s seven wonders — we duck into a tiny cave at the base and then scramble to the top for a sweeping view. We have to slide back down on our butts.
“It looks like a castle, and it is a butte,” says Duncan, of the name for the free-standing sandstone, clay and coal formation from the Ice Age that’s 60 metres high and 400 metres around its base.
“Castle Butte has quite a few caves in it, but we don’t recommend anyone go into them. They’re deep — and we don’t know how deep they are.”
The wide valley in this area was once a river that dried up. People travelling by wagon to Willow Bunch for supplies would often get stuck in the mud, so what was once known as Pleasant Valley was renamed Big Muddy Valley.
We stop in the hamlet of Big Beaver for three things — to go to the bathroom, snap shots of the taxidermied timber wolf and other local wildlife in the Big Muddy Nature Centre and Museum and buy treats at Aust’s General Store, where the motto is: “If we don’t have it, you don’t need it.”
What we really need is a reminder that Indigenous people were here first and the Big Muddy Badlands tour delivers with a ceremonial circle and turtle and buffalo effigies. Each is a pattern of stones laid out on the prairie and carefully preserved. Dakota Siksika legends use turtles to represent wise and highly respected people. Buffalo were the “staff of life” for Indigenous people and this effigy is believed to be the only one in Canada, if not North America.
We hear that Sam Kelly was never jailed. He and three friends left the outlaw life and quietly homesteaded about six hours away near Debden, paying cash and keeping low profiles. They liked him up there — and even named a lake after him. Jennifer Bain was hosted by Tourism Saskatchewan, which did not review or approve this story.