Where Bigfoot Walks

by Robert Michael Pyle

  Al Hodgson, a slender, balding man with a storekeeper’s demeanor, had been the first person to talk with Patterson and Gimlin after their historic encounter. He agreed with the waitress that many people locally were believers in Bigfoot, though not everyone. As for himself, he was cautious but thought it likely. He carried a good line in Omah postcards, books, and paraphernalia. “Some tracks were found late last summer,” he told me. “We were accused of faking them for Labor Day and Bigfoot Days.” He knew all the major Bigfoot hunters. His favorite was Peter Byrne; Ray Wallace, he said, was “hokey.” As for the Indians, they were reluctant to talk. One 104-year-old Hoopa man had told him that there were Omah around in his youth, “but the recent stuff is all fake.”

  At nearby Roberts’ Mercantile, Mary Roberts carries Hoopa crafts, including the splendid work of Dolores Clark, whom she suggested I contact. When I asked my standard question, she smiled and shook her curled honey hair in mock exasperation but concurred that “there’s something up there, and most locals think so.” She mentioned fresh tracks found at Tish Tang Campground in September. “I have a warm feeling about him,” she told me. “He never hurts anyone—maybe turns a few things over. I don’t like the idea of him being shot, drugged, captured.” Then, with a sweet-natured shrug, Mary said, “I like to think of Bigfoot where he is.”

  I drove to Hoopa. The language of the Hoopa (or Hupa), an Athabascan variant, allies them with some northern tribes. They are thought to have come south about a thousand years ago. Hoopa tradition refers to an early epoch peopled by a race they call the Kixunai, whose satyrlike leader, Lost-across-the-Ocean, was their progenitor. About a thousand strong when first contacted by whites in 1850, the Hoopa had eleven hundred enrolled members in 1970. Though change came fast with the gold rushes, their eighty-seven-thousand-acre-square reservation, the largest in California, preserved most of their traditional homeland.

  I saw the museum, with its phenomenal collection of basketry, and purchased Dolores Clark earrings for my stepdaughter, Dory, and niece, Heather. I asked the clerk if anyone was likely to talk with me about Omah. “Talk to the man out there with the cowboy hat,” he suggested. “His name is Jimmy.”

  Jimmy Jackson, at eighty, looked sixty-five or less. His hard-worked hand with gnarled yellow nails was surprisingly soft and warm to the shake. He was watching people pulling punch-tabs in the concrete-floored gambling hall between the bingo parlor and the museum. I thought, If this isn’t contemporary American Indian culture as wrought by treaty and appropriation: baskets and bingo side by side! Jimmy and I worked slowly into conversation, talking about the rain, the lottery, and so on. His sister, Mrs. Badgeley, asked me, “Where are you from, sir?” That gave me an opening to pop the question, but it was a little abrupt. I should have taken a week to get to it, or a year.

  I spoke clumsily, jabbering about Omah, myths, and legends. Jimmy didn’t get my drift or didn’t want to, said they had their own problems, too. “Bigfoot,” I said.

  “Oh! Bigfoot!” Omah, he told me, is a Yurok word, not Hoopa at all. (If there is a truly Hoopa name for it, I never learned what it was.) Jimmy said he was not a believer, though he possessed a footprint cast. His womenfolk, however, all believed.

  “My wife and daughter saw tracks on the reservation, but I wouldn’t go look,” said Jimmy. His mother, still alive at 102, had told him there used to be people—human beings—out in the woods who made the big tracks, but no one ever saw them now.

  “What about the young?” I asked Jimmy. “Do they go into the forest to look around?”

  “Nah,” he snorted disgustedly. “They’re not interested in anything but . . .” and he made a sniffing gesture. “They don’t care about the old ways on the land or anything—don’t even ask.”

  I crossed the street to the post office, where I elicited giggles. I’d been operating under the belief that the Northwest Indians still accepted Bigfoot literally, even though most whites laughed it off. Here almost the reverse seemed to be the case. Yet what Jimmy had said echoed in my mind: he didn’t go into the forest, what was left of it, nor did the young people. Maybe Jimmy’s mother was right, and Bigfoot was a thing of the past.

  Next I dropped into Honeybunch’s Café. There I had coffee and a butterhorn that I hardly needed; between Honeybunch and Mountain Annie, I would soon roll off the rez. Two Indian women, undeterred by my presence, were speaking of Dolores and her six husbands. When it seemed polite to do so (though I knew profoundly that none of this was remotely polite), I butted in and asked if that was Dolores Clark, the artist of the earrings I’d bought. No, it was the sister of one of the ladies. But the other one, who turned out to be Honeybunch, was Dolores Clark’s sister. And the conversation evolved, somehow, to the point where I learned that she was also the former sister-in-law of Ray Wallace!

  Honeybunch insisted that Bigfoot was a creation of Ray Wallace and Yellow Creek Logging Company, that they had trumped it up in the sixties. “The Indians didn’t have it before, and they pay no attention to it now,” she said. None of the women present claimed to be believers, including Honeybunch’s daughter Tessie, who kept the café these days. When her kids came in with report cards, I wanted to ask their thoughts, but Jimmy had said, “Don’t even ask.”

  Honeybunch told me that Willow Creek and the whites benefited from Bigfoot. That was obvious from the Hodgsons and the Robertses and the Bigfoot Campground not far away. “But not Hoopa,” she said, “and hardly anyone here believes.” She laughed at the idea—but she was open to that of flying saucers, which was also an enthusiasm of Ray Wallace’s, I recalled. “There were six mills in Hoopa when Ray Wallace was here,” she said; “and now there are none.” Just baskets and bingo and 90 percent unemployment. The hospital closed and the BIA moved out when “big forestry” shut down the mills. Feelings ran deep here, and I suspected that most of them had little to do with Bigfoot.

  Recently, listening to a radio broadcast of President Clinton’s Timber Summit in Portland, I heard a statement by Margaret Powell of the Hoopa tribe. She said that Indian reservations were going through a healing process. The Hoopas, by practicing enlightened timber management, were continuing to harvest logs and attract spotted owls while national forests and private timberlands on all sides struggled with closures. She felt that the Hoopa approach could serve as a model for many of the issues being discussed at the conference.

  This was a different story from the one I’d heard at Honeybunch’s. Either things had really picked up since I was there, or I’d been snowed. Either way, it seems that some members of the tribe are much more involved with the woods than I had gathered from my informal visit. And that would not surprise me. When a fundament of your tradition has been co-opted by white adventurers and businesses, why even discuss it with another curious Anglo?

  I have since spoken with Stephen Suagee, a former Hoopa tribal attorney who worked on issues of fisheries, water quality, and forestry. A member of the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma, Suagee now works for the Colville Confederated Tribes in north-central Washington. The mills closed, he told me, because the former levels of timber harvest under BIA management could not be sustained—a theme familiar on the Gifford Pinchot too. Now under Indian control, the tribal timber business is gaining health as the Hoopas seek sustainability and economic diversification. Of course, forestry is subject to community debate.

  Similarly, the mix of attitudes toward Omah varies. Suagee had the sense that some Hoopas construed Bigfoot as flesh-and-blood animals, while others thought of it as more of a mystic entity; he wondered whether “belief” might be the wrong question. He mentioned having heard the term “forest Indian” used for Bigfoot, in contrast to the culturally developed people of the valleys. He felt that if something didn’t want to be found in that incredibly steep, remote, dense country, it needn’t be. “These hills seem enchanted,” he told me, “with the possibility that anything could be there. In spite of the logging, i
t’s still wild; that feeling survives.”

  Before I left Honeybunch’s, one of the women offered that she really wasn’t sure about Bigfoot. Tessie asked her, “Well, would you go out in the woods alone?”

  “NO!” she replied emphatically. But, she said, some of the older women who still gathered herbs did. And they were

  the ones who believed.

  In 1811, when explorer David Thompson crossed the Athabasca River in Canada, he found huge tracks, fourteen inches by eight, made by a biped in the snow. Some trackers-in-time, reading his description, have marked them down as more likely Bigfoot than grizzly. When the Hoopa left their Athabascan territory a millennium ago, did they leave Bigfoot back in the northern Rockies, only to find the Omah of the Yuroks waiting for them in the Trinities?

  If Lost-across-the-Ocean knows, he’s not telling; nor is anyone else. Maybe there are secrets here. But thanks to some twenty-five feet of film, the creature is out of the bag. Whether giants ever set foot in Hoopa, Bigfoot and its fans are here to stay.

  −−

  Back in Willow Creek, trucks rumbled past like giant Tonkas with Lincoln Logs, and still-forested hills tumbled down to the untidy strip of small-town commerce. The Bigfoot books are full of Willow Creek tales, like Ivan Sanderson’s account of two MDs who nearly struck a seven-foot Sasquatch while they were driving just east of town. But today the jumbo effigy was the most exciting thing in town. It was high time to follow its tracks back to the redwoods, where it came from. For not only had the effigy originated from a bole of a big tree, but the legend had its modern beginning among the sequoias as well. The first recorded reference to a manlike giant in California came from the vicinity of Crescent City in 1886.

  Down the Pacific slope from the Hoopas’ back lot in the Coast Range, I entered the shaggy landscape of badly barbered Sequoia sempervirens. The species name means “living forever,” but appallingly few of the precontact coast redwoods have made it this far, after living for many centuries. What’s left of the world’s grandest forest is there only because of the several state parks, the Redwood National Park, and the Save the Redwoods League. I recalled the stories of Georgia Pacific cutting around the clock to sabotage plans for the national park, as I scanned the cutover stumpland.

  My mother owned a palette-knife rendition of redwoods in thick oils, now hanging in my sister’s home at the southern end of the big trees’ range. It shows the massive pink-barked pillars holding their own behind a pasture fence that seems to protect them from the settlers. As a child I always pictured the world’s tallest trees that way . . . like the dark woods of fairy tales poised beyond the pale. Only in fairy tales the forest usually represents the malevolent; I’d never understood the fairy-tale admonition “Don’t go into the deep dark woods.” I saw the woodland border as the beginning of the good place.

  Later I served as a ranger naturalist in Sequoia National Park, the Sierran headquarters of the other species of California redwood, Sequoiadendron giganteum. Walking daily among the world’s most massive trees, I gained an even greater sense of the deepwood as the abode of what is truly good in the world.

  Fear of the forest is deeply ingrained in all the mythologies of forest ogres, trolls, lustful satyrs, and giant hairy apes. Greed-driven Georgia Pacific logged with a vengeance, as if by cutting everything they could rid the redwoods of evil spirits (as well as trees). Now, coming back to redwood country, I wondered whether the monster myths penetrated the shadows of these deepest of all woods.

  I paused in the rain at Prairie Creek Redwoods State Park. Stepping among the simian hulks of redwoods and the dark shadows they cast, picking a wet and pungent way through the thickets of tanoak and peppertree, I got the feeling that great beasts could easily secrete themselves here. A giant standing still in this company would be just another venerable tree; or it could merely step behind another and disappear, just as Ishi, the last of the Yahi Indians, hid himself from white eyes in northern California for much of the early twentieth century.

  In my conversations up and down the redwood coast—in the college-and-mill town of Arcata, the cafés of Eureka, the taverns of Crescent City, the campgrounds in the parks—I heard a lot more about the monstrous behavior of GP’s successor, Louisiana Pacific, than I did about Bigfoot. This was in the twilight of the passionate and violent Redwood Summer of 1990, and LP was talking about shipping jobs and raw-log redwoods to Mexico. Both the environmentalists and the workers were unhappy, and some were beginning to seek common ground, trying to find what the poet W. S. Merwin has called the “forgotten language” that will “tell what the forests / were like.”

  With forest fragments on everyone’s mind, mythic monsters seemed a trivial distraction. I wondered if that would be the case if 98 percent of the trees were left, instead of 2 percent. And yet something I heard on the sodden northern California coast would reverberate with the rails all the way back to Washington, and it wasn’t just the mumblings of moss monsters lurking in the burlwood.

  When I needed to return to Redding to turn in the Tempo and catch the northbound train, the snow had accumulated so thickly on the road over the Trinities that I couldn’t go back the way I’d come or by the next several passes to the south. In the end I was obliged to drive all the way south to Ukiah, then east across the Clear Lake country to pick up I-5 back north. It was a long drive, but I had enough time. I passed into darkness in the steely loops of the Eel River, somewhere beyond the looming Humboldt Redwoods. As I left the big trees for a countryside of hops and grapes, I realized that I would pass quite near Hopland. This most aptly named hamlet is the home of the esteemed Mendocino Brewing Company, one of California’s earliest microbreweries and a bright star in the zenith of the good ale revival, whose center of diversity is the Cascadian bioregion.

  Of course I stopped in at the brew pub. Mindful of the drive ahead, I sampled the fresh, cask-conditioned Redtail Ale only in modest amounts. If I’d had the leisure to stay overnight in the inn across the street, I could have paid better respects to the rich, coppery, magnificently hopped brew. Instead I sat and merely sipped at the new oaken bar beneath the stamped tin ceiling of the old original tavern, watching the publican draw pints from the six superb hawk’s-head beer pulls cast in brass, and enjoying the company of a cluster of brewery workers, retired hippies, and loggers. There was a fair smattering of feed caps, as well as cowboy hats, braids, and bald heads. I felt a lot more welcome than I had at Bub’s Place in Willow Creek.

  The off-duty brewers all cautioned me to avoid the steep and winding Route 175 east out of Hopland, each outdoing the other with tales of its meanness. They strongly recommended the main highway out of Ukiah instead. When the time came, we parted with promises to exchange microbrew T-shirts.

  As I was leaving, a tall, slim, weathered logger with a massive black mustache approached me, having overheard a snatch of the conversation. He put his arm on my shoulder and leaned near. He was neither drunk nor aggressive, and I wondered what was coming. He glanced around, then looked me in the eyes and said, “Bigfoot lives.” That was all. He returned to his pint, and I closed the door on the sweet-and-sour scent of hops, malt, and men.

  Of course I took the road they’d advised against. It was wild, curvy, and narrow, but my Rent-a-Wreck Tempo came into its own and tamed the terrors of the infamous 175. I’d finally managed to make the tape deck work, and with the help of Robert Johnson, Tom Waits, and David Lanz’s seven-minute version of “A Whiter Shade of Pale” played over and over, I made it across the Coast Range, past Clear Lake to the interstate, and all the way north to Redding, with two hours to spare for my three a.m. train.

  I waited cold on the platform. When the train came, I settled into the warm car and sleep. I slept all the way under Mount Shasta and Castle Crags, past snowy Klamath Lake, and most of the way to Eugene. Again and again I dreamed of a lean face peering through the frosty window, a great black mustache, and its owner’s
eyes; and over the organ strains of “A Whiter Shade of Pale” and the clacking rails, I heard his two plain words: “Bigfoot lives.” But it was Omah speaking.

  16

  Northern Spotted Bigfoot

  The trees crowded to the very edge of the water, and the outer ones, hanging over it, shadowed the shoreline into a velvet smudge. T’sonoqua might walk in places like this.

  —Emily Carr, Klee Wyck

  Have the United States Forest Service and certain timber companies collaborated to suppress Bigfoot sightings?

  This seemingly bizarre proposition became worth asking after I spent some time among people whose working lives are lived in the shadows of the tall firs and the open glare of the clear-cut. In asking it, I explored other large questions about our fundamental view of the forests’ future.

  When I left Indian Heaven, I dropped down to Goose Lake on the northern edge of the Big Lava Bed. In the lake, snags poked through a scum of dust and needles. I’d heard of a set of handprints supposed to be preserved in lava at the end of this lake. I joined some picnickers, a couple of families from White Salmon, who were talking about the prints. The legend, they told me, said that the handprints (now submerged) were those of an Indian woman who had fallen while escaping a lava flow.

  I thought of my “footprint” casting from a little way north, and asked one of the men what he knew of Bigfoot. He stroked his small, sandy mustache and patted his paunch. “When I was younger and skinnier,” he said, “I built a bridge to log a sale up the Lewis River. I went on foot in there for fifteen miles, spent days and days, and saw no sign of that Bigfoot.” He’d logged all over that territory, he said, and he noticed every broken twig, every bit of bear and elk sign: “I think it’s a hoax.”

  Then, as I was leaving Goose Lake for points south, he called after me, “I wouldn’t worry about Bigfoot.”