Bigfoot

Also Known As: also Big Foot, the name used by the Bluff Creek road crew in 1958; Sasquatch, an anglicisation of the Halq’eméylem word sásq’ets
Region/Culture: North America
Mythos: Cryptids, Urban Legends & Contemporary Folklore
Primary Type/Nature: Monsters and Beasts
Mythical Attributes: A very large upright walker credited with enormous strength, a stride of four feet or more, and an ability to keep out of sight in country that people cross every day.
Role in Mythos: Bigfoot is the animal North America keeps almost finding, the gap in the map that a continent of logging roads and trail cameras has not managed to close.
Relation to Humans: The creature is watched for far more often than it is met, and even the men who first reported it said the watching felt incurious rather than hostile. It has been blamed for missing equipment, dead dogs and noises in the dark, and credited with almost no actual violence.

The graded dirt took the prints the way wet cement takes a handprint. Jerry Crew climbed down from his bulldozer on a logging road above Bluff Creek in northern California, in the last week of August 1958, and found a line of humanlike tracks sixteen inches long pressed deep into ground he had smoothed flat himself. His first thought was that one of the crew was having him on. He drove back to camp in the heat to tell the foreman about it.

That is the origin of the most famous monster in North America, and the ordinariness of it is the point. No shrine, no chant, no elder handing something down. A tired man in work boots and an aluminium hardhat, on a road that had not existed the year before.

The crew had material to add. Wilbur Wallace, the foreman, remembered a four hundred and fifty pound drum of diesel that had gone missing from a lower stretch the previous summer and turned up at the bottom of a gully with the brush above it unbroken. There was a seven hundred pound spare tire that had somehow found a ditch. Vandals, they had been told at the time. Maybe not. The men argued it out, decided nothing, and went back to work, and by the end of the season they had a name for whatever it was. Big Foot, two words, and nobody ever doubted he was a he.

Then it got into a newspaper. Coralie Bemis, whose husband was clearing land on the creek, wrote to Andrew Genzoli at the Humboldt Times, a columnist with a taste for local nostalgia. Genzoli thought his leg was being pulled and put the letter aside. On 21 September his column came up short, so he ran it anyway with a line about a relative of the Abominable Snowman. The response astonished him. In October Crew brought a plaster cast into Eureka, and the photograph of him holding the thing went out on the wires. Genzoli closed the name into one word because it read better in print, and Bigfoot went national inside a fortnight.

What made the story hold was that the tracks kept arriving. Every new stretch of road seemed to be inspected overnight. The men, Genzoli wrote, were often convinced they were being watched, and believed it was not an unfriendly watching, as though the thing had a supervisory interest in the work. Nine years later, on 20 October 1967, Roger Patterson and Robert Gimlin were on horseback in the same drainage when they claimed to film a dark upright figure crossing a sandbar. Nine hundred and fifty-two frames, shaky, the animal turning its head over one shoulder without breaking stride and then walking into the trees. Anthropologists who have gone through it frame by frame conclude that the camera movement and image quality make the subject impossible to identify with any confidence, which is not the same as debunking it and is not the same as proof.

The other name is older and comes from a different world. In 1929 Maclean’s published “Introducing B.C.’s Hairy Giants” by J.W. Burns, a schoolteacher on the Chehalis reserve in British Columbia, who anglicised the Halq’eméylem sásq’ets into Sasquatch. Burns collected accounts from the people he taught among, including a man he named Peter Williams, who described raising his rifle at what he took for a bear on a boulder until the thing stood up, roared, and turned out to be a hair-covered giant. Burns noted that when Williams told the story at home the elders nodded, and seemed for reasons he did not understand to want it kept quiet. He published it on April Fool’s Day.

For the Sts’ailes, the nation Burns was posted to, sásq’ets is not a cryptid at all. He is a caretaker who watches over the land and moves between the physical and the spiritual world, and can shift shape inside this one. The nation’s logo and its flag both carry his image. Red ochre paintings at Sa:sq’etstel are thousands of years old. Kelsey Charlie of the Sts’ailes Sasquatch Dancers has put the difference plainly: “we were always told we were not to be scared of him”. A wild animal that scientists might one day shoot and a being who grants an encounter as a responsibility are not the same idea, and the second one was here first.

Whatever leaves the tracks is supposed to be very strong, very fast over broken ground, and almost impossible to corner. Witnesses describe a stride that eats fifty inches at a walk, an ability to climb banks and cross deadfall without slowing, and a smell that arrives before the animal does. Its real talent, though, is absence. It walks away and there is nothing left to argue with.

That is also the weakness, and it is fatal. Nobody has ever produced a body. No skeleton, no roadkill, no tooth, no scat that survives a laboratory. When Bryan Sykes and the Oxford-Lausanne project ran thirty-six samples submitted as cryptid remains, they came back as bears, horses, porcupines, sheep and one human being. A 2017 study of purported Yeti material found bears again, and a dog. In December 2002 the family of Ray Wallace, brother of that Bluff Creek foreman, announced after his death that he had made the original tracks with carved wooden feet, and produced them. The feet do not match Crew’s cast, and they cannot account for prints reported before 1958 or for the decades of them since. The confession settled nothing, which by now is the most predictable thing about the whole business.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is Bigfoot?

Bigfoot is a large, hair-covered, upright creature reported across the forests of North America, most heavily in the Pacific Northwest and northern California. It is a cryptid, meaning a creature claimed to exist but never confirmed by science. No body, bones or verified remains have ever been produced.

Where does the name Bigfoot come from?

It came from a logging crew. Men building a road above Bluff Creek in northern California in 1958 called the maker of a set of sixteen-inch tracks “Big Foot”, two words, and the columnist Andrew Genzoli of the Humboldt Times closed it into one word when he wrote the story up that October.

Is Bigfoot the same as Sasquatch?

The two names are used interchangeably today, but they come from different places. Sasquatch is J.W. Burns’s 1929 anglicisation of sásq’ets, a Halq’eméylem word, and for the Sts’ailes people sásq’ets is a spiritual caretaker of the land rather than an undiscovered animal. Bigfoot is an American newspaper coinage from 1958.

What is the Patterson-Gimlin film?

It is 952 frames of 16mm footage shot at Bluff Creek on 20 October 1967 by Roger Patterson and Robert Gimlin, showing a dark upright figure walking away and glancing back over its shoulder. It remains the single most argued-over piece of Bigfoot evidence. Anthropological analysis has concluded the subject cannot be identified with confidence either way.

Was Bigfoot proved to be a hoax?

Not conclusively. In 2002 Ray Wallace’s family said he had faked the first Bluff Creek tracks with carved wooden feet, but those feet do not match Jerry Crew’s plaster cast, and they explain neither the reports that predate 1958 nor the thousands that followed.