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The Yeti begins it all. Any concept of a “hairy hominid” begins with this very nebulous entity of the far-distant Himalayan mountains in Nepal and Tibet. But how does the Yeti truly relate to the “animal humans” of the Pacific Northwest?
In substance it does not. Nothing like the Yeti was ever reported in the old journals or recounted in Indian histories. Nothing even close to resembling the Yeti footprint has ever been found or described.
The Yeti is relevant to the “animal humans” of the Pacific Northwest only because it has become confused for the same thing as contained in the old frontier accounts. This came about by an interesting turn of events. In 1951 Eric Shipton took a photo of a strange anthropoid track in the Himalayas. This ignited the world’s curiosity over all things “Yeti,” the manbeast of Sherap legends in Nepal. He as said to be a strange cone-headed ape that walked on two legs and was very human in behavior. Throughout the 1950s Yeti was subject to more news reports; he was also the object of a huge expedition of 250 people looking for it; and he was even the center piece of several movies. In 1958 when Big footprints appeared at Bluff Creek, California, people began to fancy they too had this exciting denizen of Eurasia in their own backyard. As a result the Yeti stepped across the Bering Sea and landed in America . . .but with only its cone-head intact.
Bigfoot had a flat enlarged human foot. It was nothing Yeti. But, sadly, White Man began to fancy that they had the cone-headed Yeti over hear too. Stories of the Sasquatch and Skoocoom were dug up to add history to the new quest. Yet although the Sasquatch and Skoocoom had substance on their own, there was nothing about them and the Yeti that actually jived. Nevertheless, the image of the Yeti is the image of Bigfoot today. It is an image of some giant walking cone-headed apeman. But the one tangible bit of evidence behind Bigfoot— the Sasquatch and Skoocoom prints— give us a very different thing, something very non-Himalayan.
Alas, it even seems we’ve confused the Yeti for the Abominable Snowman. To everybody in the West these two names are also synonymous with the same giant albino monster of the Himalayas. But when the Sherpas said Metoh Kangmi, the actual snowman, they apparently meant people. H.W. Tilman (Everest— 1938) and Ronald Kaulbak both relate the Sherpas speaking about “mountain men with long hair on their heads and shoulders.” It is at seeing these human type prints that the Sherpas declare the famous words “metoh kangmi.” When they spoke of the Yeti, they actually meant the Mi-teh or “man-thing.”
It is interesting how we confuse things or how things are lost in translation. Ironically, we’ve overlooked the Abominable Snowman for the Yeti, and then we’ve overlooked the Sasquatch for Bigfoot and then Bigfoot for the Yeti and then we’ve fingered a giant ape jaw found in India as giving form to all of them.
The Pacific Northwest holds something far different. But one thing it does hold in common: the Indians too claim that humans are involved as one “tribe” of the Sasquatch men.”
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