1958: how Bigfoot got its name

A road into Bluff Creek

In 1957 and 1958 a construction crew was cutting a timber access road up the Bluff Creek drainage in the mountains of Humboldt County, California. The contractor was Wallace Construction, run by two brothers from Toledo, Washington, Ray Wallace and Wilbur Wallace. Wilbur, known on the job as Shorty, was the foreman on site. Joshua Blu Buhs puts about thirty men on the job, "whites from surrounding small towns and Hoopa Indians from the reservation." DOCUMENTED

Odd things were reported on the job before anyone used the word Bigfoot. A 450-pound drum of diesel fuel went missing and was found at the bottom of a gully. A 700-pound spare tire ended up in a ditch. Those are crew accounts, collected by writers afterward rather than recorded at the time, and no contemporary document of them has been produced. ALLEGED

August 27, 1958

On the morning of August 27, 1958, Jerry Crew, a catskinner (a bulldozer operator) who lived in the hamlet of Salyer and had been on this job two years, found a line of deeply pressed, human-shaped tracks in fresh-graded dirt around his machine. The prints circled the bulldozer and walked off. DOCUMENTED A second set appeared in mid-September.

Crew told Shorty Wallace, who connected the tracks to the drum and the tire. Crew himself refused to smile for photographers. "If I did," he said, "then someone would accuse me of trickery."

One detail deserves more attention than it usually gets. The stride figures that made the story impressive came from Ray Wallace. He measured the trackmaker's pace at fifty inches walking and nearly ten feet running. ALLEGED The man later named as the hoaxer was a source for the numbers.

What made the tracks is the whole question. That they were found, reported, and cast is not in dispute.

The cast, and a good Sunday morning story

Crew took the matter to Bob Titmus, a taxidermist in Anderson, not far from Redding. Titmus was not impressed at first. He and Al Corbett, a fellow taxidermist visiting from Seattle, suggested the crew were pranking each other. Titmus later went to the site and reversed his opinion. DOCUMENTED Crew made a plaster cast of one print. It was sixteen inches long.

Widely repeated figures for the width of the prints (usually seven inches) do not appear in any source consulted here, so no width is given.

The Humboldt Times in Eureka had already touched the story. Andrew Genzoli, who wrote the paper's "RFD" column, ran a reader's letter about the tracks on September 21, 1958, and joked in print, "Maybe we have a relative of the Abominable Snowman of the Himalayas," proposing "our own Wandering Willie of Weitchpec." Genzoli said later he had simply thought the footprints "made a good Sunday morning story." DOCUMENTED A second Humboldt Times journalist, Betty Allen, visited the camp in late September and filed a number of articles.

In early October, Crew came into Eureka with his cast. The photograph of him holding it ran on the front page with a Genzoli story. Sources disagree on the day. Buhs, Wikipedia, and Mental Floss all give October 6, 1958. Loren Coleman gives October 5. No scan or microfilm image of the page was reachable, so this entry does not pick one. The weight of available sources is on October 6. CONTESTED

Who turned "Big Foot" into "Bigfoot" is also disputed, and the disagreement is rarely acknowledged. Buhs says Genzoli chose the one-word form deliberately, because he "thought it played better in newspapers." Coleman says Genzoli simply repeated the name he heard from the crew and their families. Either way, the crew's two words went into the paper as one, and the one word is what traveled. CONTESTED

How fast the name moved

Genzoli's own description is the best measure of the speed: "On Monday, Tuesday, and for the rest of many days, we had reporters from all the wire services pounding on our doors." The story reached both The New York Times and The Los Angeles Times. The television game show Truth or Consequences offered $1,000 to anyone who could explain how the tracks were made, less than two weeks after publication. DOCUMENTED

Nothing about an animal was established in October 1958. What was established is narrower. A cast exists. A photograph exists. A word entered general American English and never left.

The name is about twenty-nine years younger than "Sasquatch," not the half-century the comparison is often given. J. W. Burns, an Indian agent and schoolteacher at the Chehalis Reserve in the Fraser Valley, among the people now known as Sts'ailes, published his collected accounts in Maclean's on April 1, 1929 and anglicized a Halkomelem word into "Sasquatch." That word and the distinct accounts Burns consolidated under it are handled properly in early accounts, which is where the question belongs. It is not a Bluff Creek story and this entry does not summarize it further.

2002: the family comes forward

Ray Wallace died of heart failure on November 26, 2002, in a Centralia, Washington nursing facility, aged 84. He was born in Clarksdale, Missouri and came west as a boy. He built logging roads and cut timber, and in 1961 settled in Toledo, in Lewis County, where he opened a free zoo, the Wild Animal Farm, off Interstate 5; it stayed open about thirteen years, and his wife ran an adjacent hamburger stand.

On December 5, 2002, the Seattle Times published Bob Young's account of what the family said. Wallace's oldest son Michael, a home builder in Castle Rock, put it flatly: "Ray L. Wallace was Bigfoot. The reality is, Bigfoot just died." A nephew, Dale Lee Wallace, said he had the alder-wood carvings of the feet. By the family's account, Ray asked a friend to carve the sixteen-inch feet, and he and his brother Wilbur slipped them on and made the Bluff Creek prints as a prank. ALLEGED The friend is not named in the article, and Ray Wallace had been dead nine days when the claim was published.

Michael Wallace also said his father called the Patterson film "a fake" and said he had nothing to do with it, but that his mother "admitted she had been photographed in a Bigfoot suit." "He had several people he used in his movies," he said. ALLEGED

Widely circulated further details, that Wilbur Wallace and a nephew named Mack McKinley stamped prints elsewhere in northern California, and that Ray made hair samples from bison on his animal farm and left fake droppings for researchers, are not in the Seattle Times article, though Wikipedia cites that article for them. The other work cited there could not be opened. Treat those details as unverified pending the original.

What Ray Wallace demonstrably did circulate is on the record and does not need embellishing. He offered to sell a Bigfoot to the Texas millionaire Tom Slick and backed out when Slick made a serious bid. He put out a press release saying he wanted to buy a baby Bigfoot for $1 million. He cut a record of supposed Bigfoot sounds and printed posters. Mark Chorvinsky, editor of Strange magazine and described by the Seattle Times as one of the leading proponents of the theory that Wallace fathered Bigfoot, said he had received several hundred pages of correspondence from Wallace. DOCUMENTED

Rant Mullens does not supply the 1958 feet

Rant Mullens (the family spelling is Mullins) is often folded into the Bluff Creek story as an earlier source of carved feet. On the best available source, Michael Dennett's 1982 Skeptical Inquirer interview, that does not work chronologically: Mullens said he supplied a sixteen-inch pair to Ray Wallace in 1969, eleven years after Crew found the tracks. ALLEGED Mullens's own 1930s huckleberry-picker prank near Mount St. Helens is a separate matter, covered in Ape Canyon. Whatever Mullens did, he did not carve the feet that would have made the 1958 prints.

What the 2002 claim establishes, and what it does not

Press coverage in December 2002 announced that Bigfoot was dead. That does not follow even if the family is entirely right about Bluff Creek, because a hoax at one site in one year is not a general theory.

A correction to the previous version of this entry. It claimed that Benjamin Radford, writing in Skeptical Inquirer, argues the Wallace hoax cannot be the general explanation because tracks vary too much to come from one template. That reverses him. Radford writes that the Bluff Creek tracks "turned out to have been the work of Ray Wallace, who is acknowledged to have made countless hoaxed tracks, using various carved wooden feet, throughout the 1950s and 1960s," and he deploys track variation in the opposite direction, as evidence against a real animal: "Contrary to many Bigfoot enthusiasts' claims, Bigfoot tracks are not particularly consistent and show a wide range of variation." Radford is more confident about Wallace than this entry is, not less. His article also dates the Bluff Creek tracks to 1959, which is wrong by a year.

The objections come from the other side. Jeff Meldrum, then an associate professor of anatomy and anthropology at Idaho State University, told the Seattle Times he had casts of forty to fifty footprints he judged anatomically genuine: "To suggest all these are explained by simple carved feet strapped to boots just doesn't wash." He added that accounts of such creatures go back to the 1800s. "How do you account for that?" Chorvinsky's published answer was that the historical accounts "were mistakes, myths or hoaxes," and, on Meldrum specifically, "Jeff Meldrum is not an expert in creating hoaxes. I was a professional magician and special-effects film director; anything can be faked." CONTESTED

The Bigfoot Field Researchers Organization argues that the 2002 feet are not the same size and shape as the 1958 casts, that a foot large enough to make those impressions would act like a snowshoe in soft soil rather than compress it, and that some later casts show dermal ridge detail. Those are real arguments. The same page also asserts that Wallace "wasn't in that part of California when the first tracks were found," attributed to Al Hodgson of Willow Creek. That is the kind of claim that needs a payroll record, and none is shown. ALLEGED

Christopher Murphy has reported that Ed Schillinger, described as the only living witness from the Bluff Creek job, disputes the family's account. Murphy's book was not consulted here, so the interview cannot be weighed. ALLEGED

No published, measured, side-by-side comparison of the surviving wooden feet against Crew's 1958 cast exists. Assertions of match and mismatch are both being made without one.

Ray Wallace cuts both ways

A man who fabricated constantly is a plausible fabricator, which supports his family's account. He is also a worthless witness for any proposition, including the proposition that he faked Bluff Creek. That is why the 2002 claim has to be carried by his relatives and by physical objects rather than by anything he said.

And he never said it. The Seattle Times is explicit that Wallace and his family "had never publicly admitted the 1958 deed until now." The case for the hoax is the company's control of the site, the timing, the feet, and the on-the-record statements of people who knew him. That is a real case. It is not a confession, because there was never a confession.

What 1958 settled is a matter of language, not zoology. A newspaper in Eureka, California gave the continent a name for something, and the name proved far more durable than any of the evidence gathered for it since.

Sources

• Bob Young, "Lovable trickster created a monster with Bigfoot hoax," The Seattle Times, December 5, 2002. Read in full. archive.seattletimes.com
• Joshua Blu Buhs, Bigfoot: The Life and Times of a Legend, University of Chicago Press, 2009. Publisher's excerpt covering the 1958 Bluff Creek events, source for Crew, Salyer, the crew composition, Titmus, Corbett, the stride figures, the "RFD" column, and the Genzoli wire-service quote. press.uchicago.edu
• Becky Little, "How the Bigfoot Legend Began," History.com, July 30, 2018, for the September 21 column and the "good Sunday morning story" remark. history.com
• John O'Connor, "The Hoax That Led to the Word 'Bigfoot'," Mental Floss, for the October 6 date and the wire pickup by the New York Times and Los Angeles Times. mentalfloss.com
• Loren Coleman, "This Date in Bigfoot History: October 5, 1958," Cryptomundo, October 5, 2008, the dissenting date. cryptomundo.com
• Benjamin Radford, "Is Bigfoot Dead?", Skeptical Inquirer 48(1), January/February 2024. skepticalinquirer.org
• "Wallace Hoax Behind Bigfoot?", Bigfoot Field Researchers Organization. bfro.net
• Jake Morgan, "The True Legend of Toledo's Bigfoot," Lewis County Tribune, 2018, largely built on Wallace family testimony. lewiscountytribune.com
• Michael Dennett, "Bigfoot Jokester Reveals Punch Line, Finally," Skeptical Inquirer 7(1): 8-9, Fall 1982, for the Mullens-to-Wallace date of 1969. Used here as cited in this site's Ape Canyon entry; the original was not reached from this page.
• "Raymond L. Wallace" and "Bigfoot," Wikipedia, consulted for dates and chronology. Note: the Raymond L. Wallace article cites the Seattle Times obituary above for the Mack McKinley, bison hair, and fake droppings claims, and that article does not contain them.

Not consulted, and named here so the gap is visible: Timothy Egan, "Search for Bigfoot Outlives the Man Who Created Him," The New York Times, January 3, 2003 (not retrievable); Christopher Murphy's 2009 book, source of the Ed Schillinger interview; Ivan Sanderson's 1959 True magazine account; and the Humboldt Times pages themselves, which would settle the October 5 versus October 6 question.