Bigfoot, the legendary primate-like creature of the Pacific Northwest, is a primarily North American phenomenon inhabiting the folklore of Canada and the United States with sightings rarely occurring in South or Central America. Resembling large (seven to eight feet tall), hairy, bipedal apes, the Bigfoot, also sometimes called Sasquatch, are said to live solitary lives. They have been reported from California to Idaho, Texas, Oklahoma, Florida, New York, and many places in between. Sightings of such creatures date back to pre-European settlement and are part of the folklore of a number of Native American societies.
The word “Sasquatch” is of Native American origin, first brought into prominence in the 1930s by Chehalis Indian Reserve agent and teacher J. W. Burns, who observed Native Americans cultures in the Pacific Northwest. Sasquatch is thought to be an Anglicized variation of a Halkomelem Indian word for hairy giant. Sasquatch would have remained part of local folklore if not for the invention of a startling new moniker—Bigfoot. While sightings date back hundreds of years, widespread modern interest began in the mid-twentieth century.
This famous photo derived from a 16mm film made by Ivan Marx in 1977 purportedly shows legendary Bigfoot glimpsed in the hills of northern California. Bigfoot, or Sasquatch, is said to be an ape-like humanoid living in the Northwest U.S. and adjoining regions of Canada. Sasquatch could be said to be a North American cousin to the Himalayan Yeti. (AP Photo)
On August 27, 1958, a road construction gang working in a remote part of the northern California wilderness near a place called Bluff Creek came across something unusual. During the night someone, or something, had left enormous footprints in the dirt near their bulldozer. The men found more tracks over the next few weeks, though they never saw what made them. One of the workmen fascinated by the tracks, Jerry Crew, contacted a local taxidermist, Bob Titmus, and asked for instructions on how to make plaster casts of the prints. Armed with instructions, Crew soon had a giant plaster foot. He took it to local journalist Andrew Genzoli of the Humboldt Times. Genzoli had heard legends of wild men roaming the forest. Crew told Genzoli that the men on the construction gang had taken to calling the unseen visitor Bigfoot. Genzoli wrote up the story and put it on the AP wire service. The swift reaction caught them all off guard. As Genzoli put it, “it was like loosening a single stone in an avalanche.” A turn of phrase by workmen gave birth to a phenomenon. Now a generation of monster enthusiasts undertook to investigate. That generation included Canadian journalist John Green, Swiss immigrant René Dahinden, and American oilman turned monster hunter Tom Slick.
The most popular and lucid theory to explain the Sasquatch, in biological terms, related it to the fossil primate Gigantopithecus. German anthropologist Ralph Von Koenigswald (1902–1982) discovered the fossil remains of this creature in the 1930s in China. He found several large primate-like teeth of a kind he had never seen before being sold in Peking apothecary shops. Used as traditional herbal medicines, fossils, or Dragon Bones as they were locally known, were popular folk remedies. Because of their primate morphology and large size, Von Koenigswald dubbed the big teeth Gigantopithecus. Subsequent anthropological excavations in China showed that these teeth did indeed come from a very large extinct ape-like primate. Later cryptozoologists (those who study folkloric creatures thought to be genuine) saw Gigantopithecus as proof that Sasquatch-like creatures had and probably still existed.
The first flurry of interest in anomalous primates such as Bigfoot began in the 1920s when reports of such creatures began to come out of the region of the Himalayan Mountains. British anthropologists had little of scientific value to say about the Yeti, though some commented on the possibility of its existence. Then in 1951 mountaineer Eric Shipton took a photo of a “snowman” footprint, which caused great excitement in the public and interest in the scientific community. With all the interest in the Yeti, attention soon shifted across the ocean. While reports and legends about hairy humanoids in North America preceded the arrival of Europeans, it was in the 1950s that an outbreak of sightings occurred in the U.S. Pacific Northwest and in western Canada. This excitement helped inspire a group of amateur naturalists to begin a new field of study in search of the Abominable Snowman’s American cousin. With few exceptions, they had little formal higher education in the sciences but were passionate about wildlife.
Not long after Franz Weidenreich and fellow anthropologist Ralph Von Koenigswald published their work on Gigantopithecus, cryptozoologists enlisted their findings as a way to explain the Abominable Snowman or Yeti of Asia. Cryptozoology pioneer Bernard Heuvelmans first applied knowledge of the creature to support a possible origins theory for the Yeti in a 1952 French-language article. The English translation of Heuvelmans’s work made the idea of a fossil progenitor for the Yeti, and by analogy for Sasquatch, accessible to a wider English-speaking audience, especially in North America where reports and legends of a creature just as Weidenreich had described had persisted for years.
Inspired by the growing number of popular magazine and newspaper articles on Sasquatch, Roger Patterson and his friend Robert Gimlin headed off on an expedition to Bluff Creek hoping to film a Sasquatch. Patterson had dreams of entering the movie business. Reading Ivan Sanderson’s article “The Strange Story of America’s Abominable Snowman” in 1959 was a transformative experience. He became determined to go and find the creature. Following the pattern of nascent anomalous primate enthusiasts, Patterson began scouring the media collecting everything he could on big hairy monsters. In 1966, playing off Sanderson’s article, he published Do Abominable Snowmen of America Really Exist? More a compilation than an original written work, Patterson’s book contained reprints of important newspaper accounts and articles written by others with a bit of introductory commentary here and there along with a clutch of drawings Patterson made himself.
In 1964 Patterson made his first trip to Bluff Creek. While there, he met Forest Service worker Pat Graves who told him he had seen many tracks in the course of his official duties in the area and took Patterson to see some. His excitement growing, Patterson immersed himself in Sasquatch studies and began to put his book together. While doing so, he met John Green and René Dahinden. After putting out his book the next year, Patterson planned to make a documentary film on Bigfoot. The choice of Bluff Creek as a filming location came easily. Since Jerry Crew’s famous discovery, there were reports of considerable activity in the area.
Patterson rented a hand-held 16mm movie camera from Sheppard’s Drive-In Camera Shop in Yakima, Washington. He and Gimlin and their mounts had gone a few miles through the dense but beautiful terrain when they came around a corner that opened onto a clearing at the edge of Bluff Creek itself. As they approached the creek, they saw what they believed to be a Sasquatch standing on the opposite bank. Patterson’s horse reared when it saw the creature, almost falling over and crushing Patterson. He managed to get out the camera and started filming the creature as it walked away from them. This footage, known as the Patterson-Gimlin Film, went on to become the most famous piece of footage ever taken of a Sasquatch and has been shown around the world.
Ironically, the amateurs were in part inspired by two academically trained men who straddled the line between amateur and professional. Scottish naturalist Ivan Sanderson (1911–1973) and Belgian zoologist Bernard Heuvelmans (1916–2001) had higher degrees but no institutional affiliations. Heuvelmans wrote the first influential book on the subject of anomalous wildlife, On the Track of Unknown Animals (1958), and Sanderson wrote the central work devoted completely to what he called ABSMs, Abominable Snowmen: Legend Come to Life (1961). Both the amateurs and semiamateurs rejected claims by professional zoologists discrediting Bigfoot. In response to such skepticism the amateurs put forward thousands of eyewitness reports, hundreds of plaster casts of footprints, and even an image or two daring the professionals to explain them away.
Despite popular enthusiasm, there were a few professional scientists who showed interest in anomalous primates, at least for a time. American anthropologist Carleton Coon (1904–1981) and archaeologist George Agogino (1921–2000) were interested in the Sasquatch and Yeti and investigated sightings. William Charles Osman-Hill, a noted British primatologist working in America, was sent artifacts and other materials for comment, while another British-born scientist working in America, John Napier (1917–1987), who had worked on African hominids like Homo habilis, wrote Bigfoot: The Yeti and Sasquatch in Myth and Reality (1973). Agogino generally kept a low profile, whereas Coon was a Harvard-trained scientist and established senior faculty member who enjoyed being controversial. Osman-Hill was always circumspect in his pronouncements, and while Napier went out on a limb with his book, he waffled so much that he was interpreted as going either way on the issue. They all drifted from the search, however, when little more evidence was forthcoming.
A scientist who gained a high profile on the subject was American anthropologist Grover Krantz (1931–2002). Born into a family of Utah Mormons, Krantz early abandoned religion for science. After serving in the military he went to the University of California at Berkeley to study physical anthropology, eventually being awarded a doctorate with a concentration in human evolution. He became interested in anomalous primates while in high school when he read reports of the Yeti. His interest grew as he heard of and collected reports of Yeti-like creatures roaming the North American wilderness. He also read the works of Ivan Sanderson and Bernard Heuvelmans. In 1964 he traveled to Bluff Creek, California, to visit the spot where the famous Bigfoot tracks had been found by a logging crew in 1958.
In December 1969, Krantz saw what came to be known as the Cripplefoot tracks. These enormous human-like footprints had two large bulges on the outside of one foot and misshapen toes. This seemed to indicate to Krantz that the foot had been broken and then healed oddly. The morphology of the foot appealed to Krantz’s anatomical training. He concluded that no hoaxer could think to forge such a convincing fake. He also saw Sasquatch hand prints from the same area. These too had details only someone well versed in primate anatomy could have imagined. Krantz was now convinced the creature was real.
As a scientist, Krantz knew he needed two things: one was a theoretical model to explain how such a creature might come to inhabit the Pacific Northwest, and the other was a body. His answer to the first was in choosing the extinct Asian primate Gigantopithecus as a likely progenitor. The second was to promote the idea of shooting a Bigfoot and dissecting it (an idea that appalled most of the amateurs). Krantz threw all his professional training and knowledge—and the rest of his thirty-year career—into proving the connection between Bigfoot and Gigantopithecus. He collected footprint casts, argued for the existence of dermal ridges in their detail, worked out biomechanical data for the creature, and attempted to establish scientific names for it, which included Gigantopithecus canadensis. Despite his credentials and efforts, Krantz met with as much resistance from scientists as had the amateurs.
As the years went by more people became convinced that Sasquatch was a genuine creature. Hundreds, if not thousands of sightings were recorded by a growing number of clubs and organizations dedicated to proving the creature’s existence. Despite all this activity, little convincing evidence came forward. A veritable flood of blurry pictures and indistinct video had begun to appear on various Internet sites, but mainstream science remained unconvinced.
This situation was not helped by a string of hoaxes. From the beginning Sasquatch studies have been plagued not only by misidentifications of animals, but outright scams. For example, the family of the foreman of the construction gang that found the original Bigfoot tracks in California claimed he had faked those tracks as a joke on his men. Many have also accused Roger Patterson of faking his film. In 1968 the infamous Minnesota Ice Man made its appearance. What looked like a Neanderthal frozen in a block of ice, this creature first appeared in carnival sideshows but later was investigated by Ivan Sanderson and Bernard Heuvelmans, who thought it real. The find created much controversy, then disappeared as mysteriously as it appeared. Most historians agree the case was a hoax created by a carnival operator named Hanson that spun out of control.
The late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries saw other hoaxes as well, in particular the Georgia Bigfoot. In 2008 a pair of Georgia men, Matthew Whitton and Rick Dyer, claimed they had come across a dead Sasquatch in the woods. They recovered the body, stored it in a refrigerator, and made announcements to the media. Following a press conference, the story received widespread coverage by major news outlets. It was then discovered to be a hoax: a readily available gorilla costume with genuine dead animal entrails draped over it.
Despite the peculiar history of Sasquatch, believers still argue the creatures are real. Several scientists have pointed out that of all the monster legends and myths of North America, Sasquatch is the most plausible in evolutionary terms. If real, these creatures are primates of some kind. Tests of supposed Sasquatch DNA performed by Texas researcher Dr. Melba Ketchum seemed not only to indicate the validity of Bigfoot but also demonstrate its close kindred with Homo sapiens. These results, of course, are highly controversial and Ketchum has come under great scrutiny and criticism.
As of this writing, none of the evidence put forward by Sasquatch researchers has been accepted as valid by mainstream science. In the end, the Bigfoot or Sasquatch stories comprise an intriguing legend believed by many but supported by little or no evidence. What will be needed to end the controversy and turn Bigfoot from a legend into a reality will be the physical remains of a dead creature or the capture of a live specimen.
Brian Regal
See also Bear Man of the Cherokee; Fearsome Critters; Mogollon Monster; Myths; Pope Lick Monster; Pukwudgie; Skunk-Ape of the Everglades; Wild Man of the Navidad
Further Reading
Coleman, Loren. 2003. Bigfoot! The True Story of Apes in America. New York: Paraview Books.
Green, John. 2006. Sasquatch: The Apes Among Us. Surrey, BC: Hancock House.
Loxton, Daniel, and Donald Prothero. 2013. Abominable Science. New York: Columbia University Press.
Regal, Brian. 2013. Searching for Sasquatch: Crackpots, Eggheads and Cryptozoology. New York: Palgrave-Macmillan.
Bigfoot or Sasquatch—Primary Document
Theodore Roosevelt, The Wilderness Hunter (1892)
Bigfoot is by far North America’s most infamous cryptid. While the term first came into use during the 1950s, believers like to note that encounters with large bipedal apes can be found in earlier pioneer accounts and Native American stories. Theodore Roosevelt, though a skeptic, loved to retell thrilling tales from the frontier—including those with fantastical elements. In this account, Roosevelt tells of a trapper that he met who had encountered a mysterious monster in the wilderness. The details—such as its smell, its vocalization, and its tracks—are all consistent with later descriptions of Bigfoot.
Frontiersmen are not, as a rule, apt to be very super-stitious.
They lead lives too hard and practical, and have too little imagination in things spiritual and supernatural.
I have heard but few ghost-stories while living on the frontier, and those few were of a perfectly common place and conventional type. But I once listened to a goblin-story which rather impressed me.
It was told by a grizzled, weather beaten old mountain hunter, named Bauman, who was born and had passed all of his life on the Frontier. He must have believed what he said, for he could hardly repress a shudder at certain points of the tale; but he was of German ancestry, and in childhood had doubtless been saturated with all kinds of ghost and goblin lore, so that many fearsome superstitions were latent in his mind; besides, he knew well the stories told by the Indian medicine-men in their winter camps, of the snow-walkers, and the specters, and the formless evil beings that haunt the forest depths, and dog and waylay the lonely wanderer who after nightfall passes through the regions where they lurk; and it may be that when overcome by the horror of the fate that befell his friend, and when oppressed by the awful dread of the unknown, he grew to attribute, both at the time and still more in remembrance, weird and elfin traits to what was merely some abnormally wicked and cunning wild beast; but whether this was so or not, no man can say.
* * *
At midnight Bauman was awakened by some noise, and sat up in his blankets.
As he did so his nostrils were struck by a strong, wild-beast odor, and he caught the loom of a great body in the darkness at the mouth of the lean-to. Grasping his rifle, he fired at the vague, threatening shadow, but must have missed, for immediately afterwards he heard the smashing of the underwood as the thing, whatever it was, rushed off into the impenetrable blackness of the forest and the night. After this the two men slept but little, sitting up by the rekindled fire, but they heard nothing more.
In the morning they started out to look at the few traps they had set the previous evening and put out new ones. By an unspoken agreement they kept together all day, and returned to camp towards evening. On nearing it they saw, hardly to their astonishment, that the lean-to had again been torn down.
The visitor of the preceding day had returned, and in wanton malice had tossed about their camp kit and bedding, and destroyed the shanty. The ground was marked up by its tracks, and on leaving the camp it had gone along the soft earth by the brook, where the footprints were as plain as if on snow, and, after a careful scrutiny of the trail, it certainly did seem as if, whatever the thing was, it had walked off on but two legs. The men, thoroughly uneasy, gathered a great heap of dead logs and kept up a roaring fire throughout the night, one or the other sitting on guard most of the time.
About midnight the thing came down through the forest opposite, across the brook, and stayed there on the hillside for nearly an hour. They could hear the branches crackle as it moved about, and several times it uttered a harsh, grating, long-drawn moan, a peculiarly sinister sound. Yet it did not venture near the fire. In the morning the two trappers, after discussing the strange events of the last 36 hours, decided that they would shoulder their packs and leave the valley that afternoon.
They were the more ready to do this because in spite of seeing a good deal of game sign they had caught very little fur. However, it was necessary first to go along the line of their traps and gather them, and this they started out to do. All the morning they kept together, picking up trap after trap, each one empty.
On first leaving camp they had the disagreeable sensation of being followed. In the dense spruce thickets they occasionally heard a branch snap after they had passed; and now and then there were slight rustling noises among the small pines to one side of them. At noon they were back within a couple of miles of camp.
In the high, bright sunlight their fears seemed absurd to the two armed men, accustomed as they were, through long years of wandering in the wilderness, to face every kind of danger from man, brute, or element. There were still three beaver traps to collect from a little pond in a wide ravine near by.
Bauman volunteered to gather these and bring them in, while his companion went ahead to camp and make ready the packs.
* * *
He took several hours in securing and preparing the beaver, and when he started homewards, he marked with some uneasiness, how low the sun was getting.
* * *
At last he came to the edge of the little glade where the camp lay, and shouted as he approached it, but got no answer. The camp fire had gone out, though the thin blue smoke was still curling upwards.
Near it lay the packs wrapped and arranged. At first Bauman could see nobody; nor did he receive an answer to his call. Stepping forward he again shouted, and as he did so his eye fell on the body of his friend, stretched beside the trunk of a great fallen spruce. Rushing toward it the horrified trapper found that the body was still warm, but that the neck was broken, while there were four great fang marks in the throat.
* * *
Bauman, utterly unnerved, and believing that the creature with which he had to deal was something either half human or half devil, some great goblin-beast, abandoned everything except his rifle and struck off with speed down the pass, not halting until he reached the beaver meadows where the hobbled ponies were still grazing. Mounting, he rode onwards through the night, until beyond the range of pursuit.
Source: Roosevelt, Theodore. The Wilderness Hunter. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1892.