Bigfoot, Yeti, and the Last Neanderthal, page 6
The same uncertainty does not extend to sasquatch/Bigfoot prints, most of which are left on solid ground and are therefore not vulnerable to melt distortion. Dr Meldrum has examined hundreds of footprints from the US and further afield. Just like the Himalayan examples, many are too altered for easy interpretation. However many are not, and Dr Meldrum firmly believes that, after filtering out the fakes, there are just too many good prints showing the right anatomical features to come to any other conclusion than that these creatures, whatever they may be, are real.
As he concedes in his book Sasquatch: Legend meets Science, footprint evidence alone is never going to be enough to provide the unambiguous proof that these creatures exist. Nonetheless, the widespread occurrence of footprints, while not a sufficient proof in itself, certainly contributes to the creation and persistence of the enigma surrounding the Himalayan yeti and his American cousins.
6
Desperately Seeking Sasquatch
It was Peter Byrne who first cemented the connection between the mysterious Himalayan yeti and its North American counterpart, the sasquatch – or, as it is now much better known, Bigfoot. The letter from Tom Slick that the runner brought to Peter Byrne in his cave-shelter high above the Arun Valley in late 1959 instructed him to terminate the hunt for the yeti in Nepal with immediate effect. The same letter also invited him to consider switching to another elusive quarry. Slick was asking Byrne to drop the yeti in favour of finding Bigfoot. Byrne accepted at once, paid off his Sherpas and, with his brother, trekked back down the mountains to Kathmandu. Within three weeks he was in the small town of Willow Creek, Humboldt County, northern California. A very different country, very different people, though with much the same stories of mysterious primates roaming its montane forests.
Andrew Genzoli of the Humboldt Times, the local paper of Willow Creek, was the man who coined the name ‘Bigfoot’ when, in October 1958, the discovery of giant footprints in the mud at nearby Bluff Creek was first reported in the paper. The story, and the name, soon gained international attention when it was picked up by the Associated Press wire service. The find was made by a ‘catskinner’ – a bulldozer driver – by the name of Jerry Crew who discovered dozens of prints surrounding his machine when he came to work one morning. Each was about sixteen inches long and seven inches wide with the clear impressions of five toes. He made a plaster cast of one of the prints and, rather like Shipton's 1951 image from the Himalayas, the newspaper picture of a bespectacled Crew holding the giant footprint cast had an immediate impact. In an instant, America had its own mysterious giants ‘unknown to science’ and they had a name that no one could forget. It hardly matters that years later it emerged that Jerry Crew had probably been hoaxed.
The capture of a Bigfoot on home soil was obviously going to be much less of a major undertaking than sending an expedition to the Himalayas, and a lot less costly, a combination that Tom Slick found irresistible. Hence his letter to Peter Byrne. However, unlike the Himalayas where yeti-hunts were confined to well-financed expeditions, usually with professional naturalists taking part, in America anyone could go looking for Bigfoot – and many did, and still do.
Just as Shipton's was not the first indication of the yeti, neither were Crew's footprints from Bluff Creek the first sign that there might be a large biped in the forests of North America. Just as the yeti and its counterparts in the Himalayas were well known to the indigenous people and were deeply embedded in their cultural mythology, the same was true of the Bigfoot in America. Native Americans from northern California, Oregon, Washington and across the Canadian border into British Columbia all had their own stories of hairy creatures, half-man and half-animal, that lived deep in the forest. They had various names that were compounded by Canadian writer J.W. Burns in the 1920s to sàsq'ets, the indigenous Salish term for ‘hairy man’. ‘Sàsq'ets’ very soon became ‘sasquatch’. It was a Native American who provided the first graphic account of his encounter with, and abduction by, a family of sasquatch.
In the autumn of 1928 on Vancouver Island, British Columbia, a Nootka Indian trapper called Muchalat Harry set off on a hunting trip to the mouth of the Conuma River on the west coast of the island. We are indebted for the account of what happened next to Father Anthony Terhaar, a Benedictine monk who knew Muchalat Harry well and wrote down what he was told. Harry left his canoe at the mouth of the river and headed upstream by foot for about twelve miles and made his camp. That night he was woken by being lifted bodily, in his blankets, by a large creature and carried off into the forest for, he guessed, about three or four miles. At daylight he found himself under a rock shelter and surrounded by twenty gigantic hairy creatures standing on two legs. They were not acting aggressively towards Harry, just standing and staring at him. His fear turned to terror when he saw small piles of bones scattered around the camp, and he was sure they were going to eat him. Later in the day, with most of the creatures away from camp, he made his bid to escape, running all the way back to the river mouth where his canoe was stashed. He paddled straight back to Nootka where he arrived nearly frozen and completely exhausted. Father Anthony nursed him back to health, but after his terrifying experience Muchalat Harry never went back into the woods, indeed never left the village again. It is easy to dismiss this vivid account as a complete fantasy in the imagination of Muchalat Harry. He was alone and there were no other witnesses, but something scared him enough to turn his hair white overnight.
Among many other Bigfoot stories from the last century and before, there is another one that I want to tell you about. It has none of the uncertainties of Muchalat Harry's account of his lonely abduction. On this occasion there were plenty of witnesses and a creature was captured alive. It happened in July 1884 about twenty miles north of the small town of Yale, British Columbia on the banks of the Fraser River. According to the local newspaper, the Daily Colonist, a construction crew was heading to work to continue digging a tunnel through a series of rock bluffs. Ahead of them, on the track-way, they came across a creature, which they at first took to be a man, asleep close to the rails. Woken by the arrival of the train crew, the creature apparently stood up and dashed up the bluff at the side of the track. Four of the crew jumped down from the wagon and chased the creature up the rock face, where he was cornered and knocked unconscious. He was then tied up, lowered to the ground and taken back to Yale. The Daily Colonist goes on to describe his appearance in detail:
Jacko, as the creature has been called by his captors, is something of a gorilla type standing about four feet seven inches in height and weighing 127 pounds. He has long, black, strong hair and resembles a human being with one exception, his entire body, excepting his hands (or paws) are covered in glossy hair about one inch long. His forearm is much longer than a man's and he possesses extraordinary strength as he will take hold of a stick and break it by wrenching or twisting it, which no man could break in the same way.
Then the story goes cold. According to some sources, Jacko was taken by his captors to England to be become a ‘curiosity’ but died on the voyage and his body was thrown overboard. Other accounts have him exhibited by the showman PT Barnum as ‘Jo-Jo the dog-faced boy’. As I have repeatedly discovered, Bigfoot stories rarely have a clear-cut ending, and this one is no exception. Nevertheless there are few accounts that include the actual capture of a Bigfoot. Like so many others, the story of Jacko could be an elaborate hoax perpetrated by the Daily Colonist, as many believe it to have been.
There is another story that deserves a mention. Like Muchalat Harry's tale it concerns an abduction, but in this case the witness, far from being terrified by the encounter, spent several days with his captors and had plenty of time to observe their appearance and their behaviour. The victim, if you like, was one Albert Ostman and the incident took place in 1924. Ostman was a thirty-four-year-old lumberjack working the woods of western British Columbia who decided to have a short vacation and fit in a little gold-prospecting. He had heard stories of a lost mine at the head of the Tuba Inlet, one of the many fingers of sea that reach deep into the mountains north of Vancouver.
After reaching the head of the inlet with an Indian guide, Ostman set off alone. Two days later he found a flat piece of ground, clear of trees and with good views back down the inlet to the sea. He decided this was to be his base for the next few days and he set up camp. His pack was disturbed during the first night, but Ostman didn't think much of it. During the second night his pack, which he had hung from a tree, was emptied out and some supplies, including prunes and flour, were missing. This was more of a puzzle as the two main suspects from the night before, a porcupine or a bear, could either not have reached the pack or would have made much more of a mess of it.
On the third night Ostman slept in his clothes with his rifle close by, intent on catching the intruder in the act. At some point during the night he was picked up, then carried and dragged for about three hours before being dumped on the ground. At first he couldn't see anything, but heard creatures, whatever they were, chattering like monkeys. As the sky lightened with the approaching dawn, he found he was confronted by four large creatures. Once he could see them properly, he reckoned they were a family comprising a very large and muscular male about eight feet tall and around seven hundred pounds, a slightly smaller female and two youngsters around three hundred pounds. Each had exceptionally long forearms with large hands but small fingers and a covering of red-brown hair.
It is not clear how his kidnappers restrained him but after a couple of days he was allowed to wander around their living area. He found their sleeping quarters in a cave excavated beneath a large fir tree and could see that inside the floor was covered by bedding made from interwoven strips of bark and ferns. Over a period of a week, he came to befriend the youngsters and even the large male showed an interest in his possessions, among which was a large tin of snuff. The big male grabbed this from Ostman and swallowed the lot. Not surprisingly, this induced a violent fit of coughing and spluttering. The creature rolled around in agony, his eyes streaming from the effects of the overdose of snuff. Ostman used this opportunity to make good his escape and, after wandering for several days, finally found a logging camp from where he eventually reached Vancouver.
This is only a brief account of Albert Ostman's experiences. He made a far more detailed report that he subsequently swore on oath as a true testament in front of a magistrate. It was the magistrate's professional opinion that Ostman was in full possession of his faculties and certainly believed the story himself, though the magistrate did not commit his own opinion to paper.
One last, very famous case, concerns a violent night-time attack by a group of ‘apemen’ on a party of miners in July 1924. The miners were in their cabin deep down in a gorge on the northeast shoulder of Mount Saint Helens, a little north of the Oregon-Washington boundary. According to the account of one of the miners, Fred Beck, the creatures attacked the cabin with rocks and tried to break in. The miners, Beck tells us, fought back and fired at their attackers, killing at least one of them, though they did not recover a body. Ever since, the site of their terrifying encounter has been called ‘Ape Canyon’.
Though a famous case, the Ape Canyon attack is not free from controversy. In 1983 William Halliday from the Western Speleological Society wrote that it was customary in the 1920s for groups of youths from a nearby YMCA camp to go to the edge of the canyon and throw down the volcanic rocks that were scattered on the surface. Halliday's hypothesis is that on the night in question the campers threw their rocks into the canyon unaware that anyone was below. The frightened miners believed they were under attack and, looking up, saw only the moonlit silhouettes of their assailants, which they interpreted not as the youths but as ‘apemen’.
I could fill several more chapters with yeti and Bigfoot stories, but that is not my purpose in The Yeti Enigma. There are already plenty of books that do precisely that. I am merely making the case that there is a genuine enigma. How much notice to take of Muchalat Harry or Albert Ostman or the Daily Colonist is, as far as I am concerned, unimportant. I would certainly be wasting my time if I were sure that all accounts were patently false or complete fantasy. They well might be, but on the other hand some may be true. And that is the enigma.
I must mention the circumstances surrounding the only moving image of a Bigfoot that many believe is genuine. We are once again in northern California. It is 1968 and two friends, Roger Patterson and Bob Gimlin, decide, in their own words, to ‘go find a Bigfoot’. Their decision was triggered by reading an article by Ivan Sanderson, who we will meet later, and a reconnaissance trip that Gimlin made to Willow Creek. Patterson and Gimlin arrived with two pack-horses, camping gear and two weeks' supplies, as well as the all-important movie camera. Their modus operandi was to wait until the logging trucks had left, then ride up and down the tracks and stream beds looking for footprints. Around midday on 20 October, they left the camp together and rode in the direction of Bluff Creek and then started to go up the right-hand bank, Patterson first, closely followed by Gimlin. After several miles they came across a large fallen tree that had dammed the creek and a pile of logs washed down from a heavy flood four years earlier. Suddenly, from behind the log jam at the side of the creek, a creature stood up. It looked straight at them. Then all hell let loose and the horses panicked. Luckily both Patterson and Gimlin had been rodeo riders and stayed in the saddle. Demonstrating admirable presence of mind, not to mention extreme horsemanship, with one hand on the reins Patterson reached into his saddlebag, pulled out his movie camera and slid off his horse. The horse ran off and Patterson ran after the Bigfoot. Most people I have interviewed who have seen a Bigfoot actually run in the opposite direction. But not Patterson. Falling to his knees on a sandbar, he raised the viewfinder to his eye and flipped the button to start the film rolling.
The Bigfoot moved quickly, though without appearing to hurry, away from Patterson towards the edge of the clearing, looked back twice then melted into the forest. Gimlin, who had a better view of the creature than the cameraman Patterson put it at around 6′6″ tall and 250 to 300 pounds. At its closest approach, Gimlin was only sixty feet from the creature. He had his rifle in his hand, but did not raise it. It was only there for self-defence and at no time did either man feel threatened. Once the creature had moved into the forest, the two men examined and photographed the tracks it had left in the dust of the dried-up creek.
I don't suppose any piece of film has been so thoroughly examined as the 53 seconds of the Patterson-Gimlin footage. Each frame has been pored over with infinite care, trying on the one hand to learn about the creature and on the other to look for signs of fraud. Athletes of the same height as the creature were taken to the scene and walked the same route. Experts on human locomotion studied the way the body moved up and down. Frame 352, where the creature looks back over its shoulder, received particular attention and is immediately recognisable as the iconic Bigfoot portrait.
A few reputable scientists did take a look at the film soon after it was shot, but most kept well away, fearful of being dragged into perpetuating a hoax. Of those that examined the footage the most prominent was primatologist and expert on locomotion, the Englishman John Napier, then at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington. He did give the film serious attention and arranged for a showing to colleagues at the Institution, most of whom were unimpressed. Although in no doubt that Bigfoot did exist, Napier nonetheless had severe misgivings about the Patterson-Gimlin film and concluded that it was probably, but not definitely, a man dressed in a gorilla costume. Bernard Heuvelmans shared this opinion. Hollywood special effects wizard Stan Winston was less circumspect than the ever-polite Napier. ‘It's a guy in a bad fur suit, sorry!’ Bob Heironimus, a native Yakima Indian, even claims to have been the man wearing it.
However, Dr Jeff Meldrum from Idaho State University, who as we know from the last chapter has made the study of Bigfoot his principal research area, thinks the film is genuine, as does Peter Byrne. Even I, who have nothing useful to say about it, have been asked for my opinion, such is the enduring ambiguity of the film. It is another part of the enigma, and an example of the confusion surrounding pretty well all Bigfoot claims – confusion I was hoping to cut through wielding the scalpel of genetics.
There are thousands of recorded Bigfoot prints. Some are faked, such as the original tracks found by Jerry Crew at Bluff Creek in 1958. In 2002, following the death of Crew's supervisor Ray Wallace, his son announced that his father had admitted to making the tracks. Crude wooden models of large feet have been constructed in the past but the prints are easily dismissed as hoaxes by experts since they do not even begin to replicate the complex flexions in the walking human foot. Just take a look at your own footprints in wet sand on the beach. The first part of the foot to touch the ground is the outside of the heel, which is why that is the part of a shoe that wears out fastest. Then the contact moves across to the other side of the foot, then back to the ball and finally kicks off from the big toe. The other toes merely prevent slipping backwards, so leave only light impressions compared to the heavy print of the big toe. The rest of the foot, outside the contact zone, leaves hardly any mark at all. Most fakes never approach this degree of sophistication. With others either the hoaxers are really masterful, or the prints are real.
One set of convincing prints was found near Bossburg on the banks of the Columbia River where it bends behind the Cascade Mountains in eastern Washington State. Like Slick, Oklahoma, Bossburg is now a ghost town, its lead and silver mines exhausted. In December 1969 René Dahinden and John Green, both well-known Bigfoot hunters, found tracks, thousands of them, in snow by the side of the road. What distinguished these tracks was that the right foot was clearly deformed. Although the authenticity of the tracks of the Bossburg Cripple, as the Bigfoot was labelled, was confused by the later claim by a local man Ray Pickens that he had made the feet out of wood and nailed them to his boots, the find was significant enough for the primatologist John Napier to investigate. He did so because he could not accept that a faker would have had the skill or the anatomical knowledge to create a convincing model of a known deformity of the right foot together with an authentic left foot whose print showed the signs of compensation for its crippled partner. These footmarks certainly did not match the crude wooden flippers that Pickens later displayed on television. Another hoax within a hoax? Who knows? But Napier thought they were probably genuine as did another authority, Grover Krantz from Washington State University and, in a recent review of the prints, Dr Jeff Meldrum from Idaho State.
