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Abominable Science

Page 5

by Daniel Loxton


  One day, not far from camp, my brother and I came across a giant footprint stamped deeply into the mud at the side of a dirt road. We surmised that the other tracks were lost in the debris of the forest floor—evidence of the giant stride of the Sasquatch.

  Was it a genuine Bigfoot track? I doubt it—now. The tree planters loved to play practical jokes, and my brother believes that later we may have been tipped off that this was a prank. But it doesn’t matter. The point is that I know, deep in my bones, how the mystery of Bigfoot can take root in the imagination. For my entire life, I’ve wondered, “Could Sasquatch really exist?” Answering that question is one of the reasons I became a skeptical investigator. Here is some of what I have learned.

  THE HISTORICAL VIEW

  When discussing the possibility of the existence of Sasquatch, most books, articles, and news reports start in the same place. First, they describe the pop-culture notion of Bigfoot and ask if the animal is real. Then, they point to an accumulated “mountain of evidence” for the creature and look back to historical accounts that appear to resemble modern Sasquatch lore.

  This approach (common in the coverage of all cryptozoological claims) starts at the wrong end of history. Talking about the myth in its current form is beside the point. We know that a legend now exists, and, as anthropologist John Napier warned, “Few would deny that today the tales of the Sasquatch are subject to intense cultural reinforcement.”1

  What we want to discover is: Where the heck did the Bigfoot idea come from in the first place? Has the legend changed over time? Does the story feel compelling only because we are so steeped in decades of Bigfoot folklore and popular culture? Even before considering the scientific plausibility of Sasquatch, the historian’s view may reveal that the “mountain of evidence” is an edifice built on sand. Where does Bigfoot come from? The answers may lie as far back as the origin of storytelling itself.

  Ogres

  The Field Guide to Bigfoot and Other Mystery Primates is an odd but intriguing pro-Sasquatch book that attempts to describe the many varieties of human-like creatures reported in eyewitness testimony around the world. It is certainly surprising to learn that modern witnesses have routinely reported Bigfoot-like creatures as large as 12, 15, or even 20 feet tall,2 but many readers may be most taken aback by the decision by the authors of the guide to include the monster Grendel (from the Anglo-Saxon epic poem Beowulf) as a “mystery primate.” This seems like an outrageous stretch, but it does help to spotlight an important truth: fantastic tales of humanoid monsters, ogres, and wild men were common in almost all cultures for thousands of years before the emergence of a canonical portrait of “Bigfoot.” It is natural that giant lore should be a universal feature of human storytelling. After all, giants are the easiest monsters to imagine: bigger, stronger, wilder versions of ourselves.

  Like other peoples worldwide, Native Americans told stories of ogres and wild men. Today, many Bigfoot enthusiasts (“Bigfooters”) retroactively link these ancient stories to the modern conception of Bigfoot: “The first Americans acknowledged these hairy races, and their tales come down to us in the records that ethnographers, folklorists, and anthropologists have preserved in overlooked essays on hairy-giant legends and myths. Examining these closely, a pattern begins to emerge of Bigfoot revealed.”3 Making this connection has the effect of conflating a rich variety of diverse cultural traditions into a single, modern composite. At best, the projection of modern monsters into Native American stories flattens context and nuance; at worst, it may become a naive and even ugly sort of paternalism in which whites tell Native Americans what their tales “really” mean. As a practical matter, many of these appropriated stories are also a very bad fit. For example, Bigfooters routinely cite tales from eastern North America that feature man-eating “giants” whose bodies are literally covered with stone.4 These stories are detailed right down to the creatures’ use of magical talismans to locate human prey and their Achilles-heel weaknesses that allow warriors to escape (such as their inability to swim, look up, or gaze on menstruating women).5 These stone-covered cannibal-wizards are clearly not close analogues to the fuzzy, gentle, largely herbivorous Bigfoot.

  To their credit, some monster advocates are uneasy about this wholesale co-optation of Native American lore as evidence for Bigfoot. Pro-Sasquatch anthropologist Grover Krantz thought that “Native stories that can confidently be related to the sasquatch occur throughout the Pacific Northwest” but complained that “it is only with some difficulty that a sasquatch image can be read into” tales from elsewhere on the continent.6 (In particular, Krantz doubted that legends of stone giants “who strike with lightning from their fingers” had “any physical referent at all.”) Yet even in the Pacific Northwest, Native stories include a wide variety of monsters with human-like forms. Are the underground dwarves or the underwater people described by the Twana of the Skokomish River drainage “really” Sasquatches? What of the soul-stealing “wet-cedar-tree ogre”?7 Should we project our expectations of Bigfoot onto the giants described by the Quinault of the Olympic Peninsula who look almost the same as humans—except for a 6-foot-long quartz spike growing out of the big toe of their right foot? (Recording this story in the 1920s, anthropologist Ronald Olson deadpanned, “If a human is kicked with this he will likely die.”)8 And what are we to make of the cannibal-ogress tales widespread throughout the region? In her depiction by the Kwakwaka'wakw, called Dzunuk'wa (figure 2.1),9 the ogress is frequently presented by Bigfoot proponents as a distorted, mythologized representation of their modern monster.10 However, there is little to justify this cultural appropriation. The Native peoples of the Pacific Northwest typically drew a sharp distinction between the cannibal ogress, on the one hand, and any of several more Sasquatch-like races of giants or feral humans, on the other.11 The cannibal ogress was usually regarded not as a race but as a terrifying singular character, similar to Hansel and Gretel’s witch or eastern Europe’s Baba Yaga. Luring or snatching away unwary children, the cannibal ogress carried them off in the basket on her back, roasted them over a fire, and ate them. She is not Bigfoot.

  Figure 2.1 The cannibal ogress depicted as Dzunuk’wa on a Kwakwaka’wakw heraldic pole. Carved in 1953 by Mungo Martin, David Martin, and Mildred Hunt, it is in Thunderbird Park at the Royal British Columbia Museum, Victoria. (Photograph by Daniel Loxton)

  Bigfooters sometimes resolve the discrepancy between stories of cannibal giants and of gentle Bigfoot by simply inventing additional species of mystery primates as needed. “In eastern North America,” writes Loren Coleman, “a specific subvariety of manlike hairy hominid allegedly exists. It exhibits aggressive behavior…. A few hominologists have labeled these unknown primates Taller or Marked Hominids, and others have written of them as Eastern Bigfoot. What may be in evidence is actually an Eastern geographic race, perhaps a subspecies, of the more classic Bigfoot.”12

  Whether this retrofitting forces Native traditions into one or several Big-foot-shaped boxes, it is an exercise in confirmation bias. Bigfoot enthusiasts look back over Native lore with an expectation of finding Bigfoot. They seize on any tales about a fabulous creature that resembles the Bigfoot they expected to find, while ignoring or reinterpreting the stories that do not. Then, having projected a modern Bigfoot into disparate Native legends, enthusiasts make the circular argument that Native American traditions confirm the existence of Bigfoot.

  The Origin of the Sasquatch

  It is inappropriate to link all Native tales of ogres or wild men to Bigfoot, but it is true that Bigfoot mythology has its roots in specific Native stories.

  There is a ground zero for Bigfoot, a place and time when the legend can be said to have originated. In the 1920s, in British Columbia’s lush Fraser Valley, a man named John W. Burns collected the original eyewitness reports of encounters with “Sasquatch.” (This was a term that Burns apparently coined as an anglicization of a word in the mainland dialects of the Halkomelem language of the Coast Salish people.)13 All of moder
n Bigfoot mythology grew from this regional seed: spreading across the North American continent and beyond, mutating and hybridizing with later reports, hoaxes, and popular fiction.

  The earliest, purest accounts are as important for historians of Bigfoot folklore as they are problematic for those who advocate the existence of a living mystery primate. Unfortunately, the descriptions of the original Fraser Valley Sasquatch are almost completely different from those of the modern “Bigfoot.”

  Burns was a schoolteacher and bureaucrat (“Indian agent”) who worked at the Chehalis Indian Reserve, near the town of Harrison Hot Springs. His friends told him of local legends about a race of giant wild people who lived in the mountains. “Persistent rumors led the writer to make diligent enquiries among old Indians,” Burns recalled in a magazine article. His questions led, “after three years of plodding,” to eyewitnesses: “men who claim they had actual contact with these hairy giants.”14

  Burns quoted these encounter stories at length. To those used to the modern Bigfoot, the original Sasquatch stories sound very strange. The witnesses repeatedly describe Sasquatches as “men,” and for good reason. As pioneering Bigfooter John Green explained, “The Sasquatch with which Mr. Burns’ readers were familiar were basically giant Indians. Although avoiding civilization, they had clothes, fire, weapons and the like, and lived in villages. They were called hairy giants it is true, but this was taken to mean they had long hair on their heads, something along the lines of today’s hippies.”15 For example, a man named Charley Victor reported having accidentally shot a young Sasquatch. As he examined the injured boy, an older wild woman came out of the woods. Her “long straight hair fell to her waist.” She conversed with Victor and performed a magic ritual to assist the boy. Victor concluded, “It is my own opinion … because she spoke the Douglas tongue these creatures must be related to the Indian.”16 It was common for the original witnesses to describe such conversations with the mountain giants. Burns quoted a speech that had been given before an approving crowd of 2,000 Chehalis Natives: “To all who now hear, I Chief Flying Eagle say: Some white men have seen Sasquatch. Many Indians have seen Sasquatch and spoke to them. Sasquatch still live all around here.”17 Indeed, a Chehalis woman told Burns that she not only had spoken to Sasquatches, but had lived among them—and had given birth to a baby fathered by one of the wild men!18

  Were Burns’s informants pulling his leg about these personal interactions with Sasquatches? These stories certainly sound like tall tales. (Victor claimed in an aside that “I have in more than one emergency strangled bear with my hands.”) It could be that the locals were teasing the white schoolteacher. Or it could be that Burns was in on the joke. (It is hard to know whether to take this comment as naive racism or as a knowing wink to his Native friends: “The Chehalis Indians are intelligent, but unimaginative, folk. Inventing so many factually detailed stories concerning their adventures among the giants would be quite beyond their powers.”)19 In any event, it is clear that the original Sasquatch lore did not describe the modern Bigfoot. How did the one legend give birth to the other? It all began with a publicity stunt …

  HARRISON, BRITISH COLUMBIA

  In 1957, the provincial government made funding available for projects celebrating the centennial of British Columbia. The town of Harrison Hot Springs would qualify for $600 of that funding if it could propose a suitable project. The village council brainstormed and settled on a scheme to dust off and exploit a largely forgotten local legend: Why not fund a Sasquatch hunt? The council took the proposal to the British Columbia Centennial Committee.

  Bigfoot researcher John Green (who was then a newspaper owner in tiny, nearby Agassiz) put this in perspective. “It was, of course, a bid for publicity,” he recalled, “and it was tremendously successful. Papers all over Canada played the story on the front page.”20 The Sasquatch hunt proposal was rejected (on the grounds that it was not a “permanent project”), but that hardly mattered. The Sasquatch was a hit as a marketing ploy. As Green explains, “Perhaps never before has a tourist resort achieved such publicity without actually doing anything…. Newspaper and radio reporters flocked around, and a tide of delighted stories rolled around the world touching Sweden, India, New Zealand and points between.”21 One of the news stories underlined the incentives involved in the rejuvenation of the Sasquatch legend. “The government spends large sums annually for tourist trade advertising and promotion,” raved the Vancouver Sun, “without getting anything like the publicity Harrison has received before one red cent has been spent.” Noting that this publicity was directly boosting the restaurant and resort industry, the newspaper urged locals not to express skepticism about Sasquatches to visitors.22

  Meanwhile, the Sasquatch was back in a big way. Although it had rejected the up-front funding request, the British Columbia Centennial Committee offered a reward of $5,000 to anyone who could “bring in the hairy man alive.”23 (It was wisely stipulated that conveying Bigfoot to the ceremony could not involve kidnapping.) Small-scale expeditions were launched—one led by a very driven Swiss fellow named René Dahinden, who (like Green) would remain a leading figure in the search for Bigfoot for the rest of his life. (Dahinden’s expedition investigated caves in the area, since original Sasquatch lore held that the wild people built rocky shelters or lived in caves, unlike the modern Bigfoot.)

  Hoaxing was already a factor. In a pattern to be repeated often throughout Bigfoot history, some investigators were themselves hoaxers. When a different expedition set out from Lillooet, a newspaper happily reported that the men “hope to return here May 20 with ‘definite proof’ the Sasquatch live in the area.”24 The team’s confidence was understandable, although ultimately foiled by a rockslide and a raft accident: when the men returned from their botched wilderness adventure, they admitted that they had intended to create Sasquatch tracks using plywood feet.25

  Despite the silliness of much of the press coverage, this was the watershed moment for the Sasquatch. As Dahinden put it, “The widespread publicity appears to have been the genesis of the serious consideration that the Sasquatch might indeed be a creature of considerably more substance than myth.”26 In the midst of the hubbub, John Burns, the original recorder of Sasquatch lore, returned to affirm that Sasquatches were large human beings. As the Vancouver Sun reported, “Burns believes the sasquatch originated in British Columbia and is of Salish descent. Various Indians he has talked to say sasquatches they encountered speak the same language.”27

  But all that was about to change.

  A SERIES OF SIGHTINGS

  William Roe: The Most Important Sasquatch Case in History?

  As the Harrison Hot Springs media storm wore on, a new witness named William Roe went to the press with a dramatic story that is now recognized as the first fully modern Sasquatch sighting. Roe’s close-encounter tale effectively created the modern Sasquatch, giving the cryptid its now canonical appearance and behavior.28 As pioneering pro-Bigfoot researcher John Green explained, Roe “was the very first to describe a Sasquatch as an ape-like creature rather than a giant Indian.”29 Before Roe’s sighting, eyewitnesses in the Fraser Valley had described Sasquatches as fundamentally human in appearance and behavior: using fire, speaking fluently, living in villages, and so on.30 With Roe, the Sasquatch transformed into a mystery primate—a primate that white people could see (figure 2.2).

  Figure 2.2 The Sasquatch as described by William Roe. (Illustration by Roe’s daughter for John Green; redrawn by Daniel Loxton from John Green, On the Track of the Sasquatch [Agassiz, B.C.: Cheam, 1968])

  In a sworn statement, Roe claimed that he had been hiking one afternoon in 1955 when he came across a large animal at the edge of a clearing. As he sat down to watch, “It came to the edge of the bush I was hiding in, within twenty feet of me … close enough to see that its teeth were white and even.” The creature squatted down in the open to eat leaves. Roe’s description is so precise, and so influential, that it is worth quoting here at length:

>   My first impression was of a huge man, about six feet tall, almost three feet wide, and probably weighing somewhere near three hundred pounds. It was covered from head to foot with dark brown silver-tipped hair. But as it came closer I saw by its breasts that it was female…. Its arms were much thicker than a man’s arms, and longer, reaching almost to its knees. Its feet were broader proportionately than a man’s, about five inches wide at the front and tapering to much thinner heels. When it walked it placed the heel of its foot down first, and I could see the grey-brown skin or hide on the soles of its feet…. The head was higher at the back than at the front. The nose was broad and flat. The lips and chin protruded farther than its nose. But the hair that covered it, leaving bare only the parts of its face around the mouth, nose and ears, made it resemble an animal as much as a human. None of this hair, even on the back of its head, was longer than an inch…. And its neck also was unhuman. Thicker and shorter than any man’s I had ever seen.31

  In this account, we may see the seeds of every subsequent Sasquatch tale—and the inspiration for one famous film in particular. “Finally,” wrote Roe, “the wild thing must have got my scent, for it … straightened up to its full height and started to walk rapidly back the way it had come. For a moment it watched me over its shoulder as it went, not exactly afraid, but as though it wanted no contact with anything strange.”32

 

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