From the Yukon to the bluffs of northern California’s Klamath Mountains and High Sierras the continent from high above would appear as a tempestuous green sea of furry pines. Like gigantic ocean swells the forests follow the contours of the land, rolling over hills and dipping down into valleys, concealing below as does the sea a world seldom seen. This vast area, this Dark Continent, has been mapped only from these dizzying altitudes. From here rivers appear as silver veins of liquid mercury in the bright sunlight, and those mountain peaks that rise above the forest-line are dangerous, craggy islands swaddled by gusting winds. Intimidating rock precipices are crests of forested waves; their sheer cliffs are streaked with mold and appear to weep mournfully over the dank valleys.
This is as close as most have ever come, and many a seasoned mountain man has never come back. Although we may only guess what happened to them, clues are omnipresent even on a short walk along the fringes of this great unknown. Broken tree stumps form crowns of deadly spikes. Snakes are abundant and lurk in the thickets, and mountain lions have no fear of coming into your camp.
For the most part the dangers seem far from our daily endeavors. We keep within the safe pockets of coastal cities. Then our habitation trickles into outlying small towns. Then it is dabbled into little villages, hamlets, and isolated cabins and logging camps. Our knowledge of the wilderness, even today, is only of its fringes. We follow its life-giving arteries of rushing rivers so far as it is necessary or convenient to hunt and fish, and where they narrow into the veins and capillaries of still creeks and foggy bogs and dells we seldom reach. Even the topography beyond the river banks is shielded from sight, blanketed under the dank silence of the thick underwood, where brambles, thickets and lush ferns and old fallen trees choke from view narrow game paths.
The mystery of the Pacific Northwest therefore is a mystery not of the unexplained but of the unknown. What lies deep within beyond the fringes of the forest lies within the depths of an abyssal sea, one that is harder to access than any ocean, impossible to sound or even consistently to dredge. The sounds we hear are distant echoes: a log rolls, bark cracks, twigs and branches snap; crunches are made by the loping of deer; squirrels scratch their way up and down bark; and there is the chatter of birds and chipmunks, the skipping of the stream, and the hoot of sentinel owls. But there are never blunt sounds. Most everything skulks or is careful in the forest. There is the distant sound of the banjo, the honky-tonk, the logger’s buzz saw, the crackle of splitting wood and a swoosh as a tree falls. Man mixes only indistinctly with the quiet sound of the deep forest glades.
This is the true Dark Continent. Whether viewing it from northern California, Oregon, Washington State, Alberta, British Columbia, Yukon and Alaska, it remains the same as it has for thousands of years; it is a quiet, brooding place: foreboding, uninviting and yet alluring.
This is the terra incognita, the great unknown; and many have sought to profit by that unknown by selling speculation and potential. The unknown allows us to imagine all sorts of facts and realities behind it. That is the great advantage of mystery— its reality may be anything we wish. Mystery spawns interest. Interest generates hype and hype always gives way to hyperbole, that dreaded world of distorted facts and overblown reactions; that world where synthesis of hearsay and false impression create the reality.
We now stand on the shoulders of 50 years of just such debate on “Bigfoot,” an era that saw these dense coniferous forests of the Pacific Northwest become the center of one of the most fascinating modern legends, a legend that tells us either a primitive “missing link,” a bipedal hominid, or “Gentle Giant” ape thrives within its hidden recesses. Although never having been consistently described, clearly seen, filmed or even proven beyond a doubt to actually exist, the last incarnation— Bigfoot the giant ape —has received popular recognition as a “real species” and even achieved a shaky sort of scientific classification as Gigantopithecus Americanus— in other words a giant ape of America. Though indeed it be Latin, the classification is hardly official. It is made only by those who are self-styled Bigfoot investigators or “crypto-zoologists,” the latter those who catalogue things unproven and officially nonexistent.
Unproven species no doubt exist all over the world, with a number of 20th century discoveries such as the African okapi even having previously existed in native legends long before their irrefutable establishment as real and not imaginary or mythological creations. The okapi was not even a composite creation, but was faithfully preserved in native accounts as a real animal, though perhaps sometimes embellished. The controversy about accepting the existence of Bigfoot is that it has undergone remarkably inconsistent and diverse metamorphosis in the last 50 years of general public awareness, changing in shape, size, type of footprint and even its traditional habitat. That in 50 years of verbose theorizing it could transform from missing link or relic hominid and lastly into giant ape is proof of the paucity of sound or consistent evidence.
Prior to this last 50 years of hype, however, there was remarkable consistency. Old newspapers and frontier journals may have reported infrequently upon the matter but when they did they spoke of frightening encounters with a hairy “wild man” or something “after the fashion of a gorilla and unlike anything ever known.” Then later witnesses who knew what apes looked like confessed that what they had seen could only best be called an “animal human.” Except for a few rare occasions, whatever was being seen— man, animal or phantasm— was the size of a human being.
No great legend or public interest came of these encounters because they were so few and far between. Moreover, because they mostly occurred in the remote wilderness of the Pacific Northwest only a fraction of this small number made it to print; and along with this there came the expected ridicule, discouraging any future witness to tell his story. To make such stories harder to believe, the Indians remained adamant and vocal that these were the remnants of barbaric tribes they referred to as a “different species of men.” Another “species of men” was something neither science nor religion at the time wanted to hear about. Since apes were only proven to exist in the “Old World,” such stories were written off as primitive folklore.
It was thus far from hype when J.W. Burns, Canadian teacher and Indian agent for the Saskahaua district of British Columbia, first introduced fellow White Man to the stories of his Chehalis Indians in MacLean’s Magazine (April, 1929). It took him 3 years of “plodding” to uncover a few Indians who claimed to have had direct contact with the near-extinct wild men of the Saskahaua, the area of British Columbia where the Indians believed the last remnants of the degenerate tribe to still be living. “Their story,” he wrote, “is set down here in good faith.” There was in Burns’ tenor an anticipation of disbelief.
Among the witness stories in his groundbreaking article Introducing B.C.’s Hairy Giants was the experiences of Indian brave Charley Victor. From his encounter with one Saskahaua klootchman (woman) who could speak and understand the Douglas dialect, Victor lamentably had no choice but to conclude they were somehow related to the Indians. This was a bold statement for any Indian to make. Each Indian tribe had naturally always insisted these degenerates were descendants of enemy tribes and had no relationship to any true Indian.
Victor described the Saskahaua woman in unusual terms for an Indian. “The hairy creature, for that is what it was, walked toward me without the slightest fear. The wild person was a woman. Her face was almost negro black and her long straight hair fell to her waist. In height she would be about six feet, but her chest and shoulders were well above the average in breadth.” Like all Sasquatch she went about totally naked.
Burns’ April 1929 article set in motion something he had never intended. Its stories of “ape-like” giant hairy people spread more by the dynamism of the concept rather than by circulation of the article— and as such a terrible misperception was created and never dispelled. Specifically, “giant” to the shorter Indian races of the Pacific Northwest, as Burns clarified, had always meant 6 to 6.6 feet tall average but twice the thickness of an ordinary man. Giant to White Man naturally meant something taller. Thanks to Burns’ slight Anglicization of the composite Indian name, “Sasquatch” entered White Man’s language but thanks to White Man’s hearsay it erroneously became an ogre 8 or 9 feet tall.
Only a few years later in 1934 this error became critical. In that year Harrison Hills, 50 miles east of Vancouver, and several Indian settlements on the nearby Chehalis Reservation, were terrorized at night by what the Indians insisted were “Sasquatch men.” Jolted from their beds by “eerie wolf-like howling,” Whites and Indians alike armed themselves. Morning proved fences were down, livestock released, and storerooms broken into. The rash of events continued over several nights, meriting reports in papers from Vancouver’s Daily Province to the Fresno Bee of California. Finally, the community formed a group of vigilantes to “track the marauders down.” Journalist C.S. Lambert later summarized: “However, no specimen of the primitive tribe was captured, and many white people became openly skeptical of the existence of the giants. ...According to Alan Roy Evans, in the Montréal Standard (‘B.C.’s Hairy Giants’), the Indians are now very sensitive to any imputations cast upon their veracity in this matter. During the 19th century they were ready to tell enquirers all they knew about the Susquatch [sic] men; but today they have become more reserved, and talk only to government agents about the matter. They maintain that the ‘Wild Indians’ are divided into two tribes, whose rivalry with each other keeps the number down and so prevents them becoming a serious menace to others...”
By 1954 when Lambert was summarizing those bizarre events, some 20 years of Indian silence had only reinforced White Man’s last impression that Sasquatches were Indian fairy-tale mountain ogres. After all, how could giants leave no trace whatsoever? The events at Harrison Hills had simply been written off. Thus no one thought it worthy to backtrack and investigate what was perhaps one of the most intriguing events in British Columbian history. And for those who did believe there was truth behind the Indian legends, the vandalizing of Harrison Hills was just the last hurrah of an aboriginal tribe mistakenly thought long extinct.
The tenor of J.W. Burns’ last major article— The Hairy Giants of British Columbia —also seemed to reflect this same conservatism. This appeared in 1940 in The Wide World, the London based magazine for the British Empire. In it he concludes: “Is it possible that primitive ‘hairy giants’ still inhabit the mountain solitudes of British Columbia? Scientists and others may scoff at the very idea, but many Indians are sincerely convinced that ‘Sasquatch’—or at least a few of them— live to this day in the vast, unexplored interior. And, like my Indians, I also believe.”
This article introduced a very interesting bit of evidence upon which Burns in some ways relied to justify both his continuing belief and those of his beloved Indians. “Although I have never personally encountered a Sasquatch,” wrote Burns, “there is ample proof that hairy giants formerly inhabited the Chehalis district in considerable numbers. Its ancient name— ‘The Place of the Wild Men’— was until recently accepted as an echo of primitive superstitions, but the accidental discovery a few years ago of two crude cave dwellings confirmed the Indian legend that the later Troglodytic period of this region was the abode of human beings of huge stature.”
Burns was reaching in his conclusion, of course, for abandoned cave dwellings can neither tell us if the inhabitants were giants or hairy. But Burns’ leap of faith does not minimize the discovery of those enigmatic caves. They echo legends told over the whole Pacific Northwest that together supports his conclusion better than faith.
Almost every tribe, in fact, had told similar stories about a gradual extinction of these gross “wild men” from being tribes to no more than being conclaves living in mountain caves. For example, as early as 1847 the Chinook and Klickitats of Washington State had told artist Paul Kane that Mount St. Helens alone was the remaining abode of the cannibal Skoocooms. The great difficulty in understanding Indian regard for them found its way into Kane’s published journal in 1859 in which he described them by the redundancy “race of beings of a different species.” The Indians could never qualify such gross violent creatures as humans or as animals. Their reputation made them the embodiment of evil, and Kane even referred to them as “Evil Genii.” Far from removing the “species” from the real world, it took very real and violent acts to even merit this status. The term Skoocoom was applied to any evil predator. Casanov, chief of the Klickataats, was known to have kept a hired assassin. According to Kane, this hated henchman was known by no other name than “Casanov’s Skoocoom.”
Considering how consistently these stories speak of a tribe of “people” near extinction— the Skoocoom are just one case in point— it is amazing that they have been resurrected today and used to support the notion of a 9 foot tall rogue Gigantopithecus roaming all over North America. It is equally amazing that the significance of “two tribes” could ever be overlooked; thus overlooking something very piquing— that there existed something similar enough to be considered roughly the same thing but different enough for the Indians to draw distinctions.
Curiously, a similar stance was also held by many native peoples in Eurasia concerning the existence there of more than one type of hairy “wild man.” Fortunately gigantism, that mistake of Canadian and American Whites, never crept into the Eurasian stories. Therefore descriptions of the “wild men” appeared all the more human in terms, and this led to more serious consideration and study...and this led to the formation of the famous Soviet “Snowman Commission” in the 1950s. Amazingly, its members reached the exact opposite conclusion as that held in America. They determined that humans were indeed involved.
The Russians had one thing we did not: an authenticated case. The Snowman Commission was able to determine that one of the “Abnauayu,” a tribal name applied by the people of the Caucasus Mountains to their ‘wild men,’ was indeed a human being. A number of the Commission even went so far as to insist that she was a clear case of a living “relic” Neanderthal, a type of cave-dwelling human we thought long extinct. Today, we can say with hindsight’s added focus that the descriptions of this “wild woman,” who lived in the 19th century, fit that of Charley Victor’s savage cannibal Sasquatch woman. While this adds weight to some form of Victor’s otherwise improbable story, more concretely it adds weight to the supposition that one of the two Sasquatch “tribes” could indeed have been human, as the Indians themselves always insisted.
The most impressive part of the evidence in Eurasia is that footprints very similar to prehistoric Neanderthals have indeed been found by members of scientific expeditions, some in remote wildernesses. In America no such footprint has been found. Rather the modern American pursuit is documented by nothing more than dozens of different, often times comical, feet, all of them now said to support Gigantopithecus. Turning to old 19th century frontier newspapers for support, however, only reveals 2 distinct types of prints. There is indeed the report of a large footprint with 5 toes; but its humanness can merely be deduced by the fact the hunter does not elaborate on the print or suggests the person making the print would have to wear a huge shoe size. More often than not old journals describe a 4-toed footprint or a footprint that is unusually long and narrow, tapering toward the heel, the latter two clearly not human.
A B C D
Corroborating these various old Indian and frontiersmen accounts are very rare 20th century discoveries. The first Sasquatch foot ever traced was in 1941 by deputy sheriff Joe Dunn at Ruby Creek, British Columbia (A). It was 16 inches long. Conservational officer R.H. Uchtmann found some similar prints 21 inches in length at The Pass, Manitoba, 1973 (B). They were different only in that they had 4 and not 5 toes. Manitoba, 1988, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police dug these prints out of a muddy road 200 miles north of Winnipeg (C). This is the right foot; also 4-toed. (D) Dunn Lake near Berrière in April 1980, British Columbia; also 4-toed.
These prints are not those of apes or humans. Nor are they anything in between like the fabled apeman. They suggest rather a type of primate we have never considered, something more between a monkey and a man. One thing they most certainly are not. They are not the “Bigfoot” that modern legend has impressed upon us. Yet they are, in fact, the only tangible fragment of truth that underlies the Sasquatch and the Skoocoom, those nebulous hairy wild men that in turn underlie “Bigfoot.” Ironically, they were hidden not by time but by being merely a few oddities within the vast vault of comical feet that became “Bigfoot.”
It was not until October 1958 that we even first hear of the shadowy bearer of big feet. He emerged from the forests far from the Saskahaua in the form of enlarged human footprints and nothing else. And by a stroke of hyperbole and even greater irony he was declared a “New Sasquatch.” A lot has happened since then— myth, exposure, denial. Sadly, all three have only served to cloud the truth of Saskahaua George. The plaster casts of strange funny feet at Bluff Creek, California, have now become a footnote— no pun intended— and with them unfortunately that kernel of truth that underlies the old reports of the “animal humans” has also been archived.
How can one— I, in this case— erase 40 to 50 years of the hype and hyperbole from the popular imagination to reveal again the actual reality? That has been my chief aim ever since beginning to investigate the “world of the unexplained.” It takes more than restarting with a blank piece of paper. Popular hearsay survives upon the gasses we breathe. We cannot avoid taking it in, and, unfortunately, unlike the gospeline teaching it is not harmlessly dispelled in the draught.
It is the purpose of this book to both trace and expose the falsehood of Bigfoot and then reestablish the facts that underpin a truly fascinating reality— that another type of primate exists that is neither man, ape or monkey; and that one tribe of Sasquatches was indeed human. This volume, I think, will prove a fascinating journey through time and history into fact and science, from the past to the present, and in between there is that era of hyperbolic fantasy to give us pause to chuckle.
Quite a few of the “old buffs” of Bigfoot may recognize some of the early reports that will be used. They should not fear that they are about to delve into just some collection of odd stories. This is not a compilation of interviews, a recycling of overused vignettes passed on uncritically, or a dossier of claims. This is a work of analysis, discovery and prediction. The purpose of this book is to weed out fact from fiction and then retrace the steps and follow the true tracks of Sasquatch, not the garish, fake and make-believe. First we must start at the beginning of the evidence. Then we will do the weeding and then we can follow the track of something that even today has only one truly undeniable and tangible characteristic: a big footprint.
Introduction
Hype and Hyperbole
Bogus Bigfoot Ruby Creek Incident Bluff Creek Incident Skoocums Home Footprint Comparisons Gian Quasar
