Bossburg and the Cripplefoot tracks

The dump, November 24, 1969

Bossburg is a ghost town in Stevens County, Washington, on the east bank of the Columbia River just south of the Canadian border. Lead and silver mines gave it a maximum population of 800 in 1892. By 1969 it was a scatter of houses with a community garbage dump.

On November 24, 1969, Joe Rhodes, a butcher from nearby Colville, found large humanlike tracks in soft soil near that dump, and one of the two feet looked badly deformed. DOCUMENTED The find was reported to Ivan Marx, a local resident who kept hunting dogs, shot 16mm film as an amateur, and had been on Tom Slick's Pacific Northwest expedition. John Napier's book adds a detail worth holding onto: he writes that Marx made casts of those first footprints. ALLEGED That is Napier's statement alone, and no second published account confirms it.

John Green telephoned René Dahinden in British Columbia. By Dahinden's own account he first phoned Marx, took three days to consider the details, and only then drove down. He gives no arrival date. Wikipedia's Bossburg article states he arrived November 27 and cites the Hunter and Dahinden book for it, but the passage cited says only "three days to consider." Treat November 27 as a reasonable guess, not a record.

By the time he got there the ground was churned by sightseers. Dahinden found one good right-foot print that somebody had covered with a cardboard box, photographed it, and cast it in plaster. Bob Titmus, a taxidermist, arrived, bought an eight-pound slab of beef and hung it in a tree as bait, and gave up after three days. Norm Davis, who owned the Colville radio station, hung a basket of fruit in a neighboring tree six feet off the ground. Dahinden moved into a trailer of Davis's, which was parked on the property Marx occupied.

December 13, and the trackway

Several inches of snow fell on the morning of Saturday, December 13. Dahinden, Marx, and a young local named Jim Hopkins drove about four miles along the bank of Roosevelt Lake checking meat scraps Dahinden had dropped in out-of-the-way spots. Near a railroad crossing they passed a parked jeep, stopped, and Marx got out to check a cache. He was gone seconds before running back shouting about tracks. In the account he dictated to Don Hunter, Dahinden says his first thought was of the jeep, so he told Hopkins to check its plates and Marx to look for a face he knew. They identified the occupants and asked them later whether they had seen the tracks. They had, and they said they left fast.

The measurements Dahinden published:

The right print was shorter, wider, and showed more compression than the left. The third toe was either badly twisted over or missing, leaving only a slight impression at its base. The little toe stuck out at a sharp angle. The whole foot curved outward, and two distinct lumps showed on the outer edge. DOCUMENTED

The line ran up from the river, across the railroad and the highway, over a forty-three-inch, five-strand wire fence (single left and right prints on either side of it), past a depression among the pine needles that held a clump of snow bearing the toe impressions of a left foot. Hunter and Dahinden note in the same breath that a cow or a deer could have made that depression, and that there were plenty of both. The line went on across flat ground, halfway up a hill, and back down. Between two side-by-side prints was a deep yellow patch in the snow, apparently urine. Nobody collected it, which Dahinden's own book calls a mistake. The line recrossed the fence about fifty feet from the first crossing, crossed road and fence several more times, reached a bank some 150 feet above the water, ran upstream about 200 feet to where the bank sloped, and left a single deep groove down to the rocks. Dahinden had checked the area the previous evening and found it bare, so he judged the tracks less than fifteen hours old.

The figure everyone repeats is 1,089 prints. That is one count, made and reported by Dahinden. ALLEGED Napier records it in his book as something Dahinden told him personally, which is as close to a citation as the number has ever had.

Five days later a U.S. Border Patrol officer reported similar tracks on the far bank, on ground whose access gates were kept locked by a logging company and which had been largely washed out by rain. Only toe marks were legible. ALLEGED That report comes from Hunter and Dahinden and from nobody else.

What Krantz actually argued

Grover Krantz published his reading as "Anatomy of the Sasquatch Foot" in Northwest Anthropological Research Notes 6(1), Spring 1972. The original is worth reading, because the popular summary of it is wrong in a specific way.

Krantz put the prints at about 17 inches and the trackmaker "perhaps in the 700 to 800 pound range." The right foot had only four toes, the middle one "either missing or held vertically while the adjacent toes turned in," with the forepart of the foot turned inward about 30 degrees from the heel. The animal did not walk with the foot in that position. It turned the foot outward so its toe-heel line paralleled the other one, which left heel and toes twisted inward and put the weight toward the outer edge, producing "the only case of an adult sasquatch footprint showing what might be called a raised arch."

Then the argument the case turns on, which has four steps and is usually reported with two of them missing.

1. Two lateral projections appear on the outer edge of the cast, with callus running around both. At first glance they look like the normal rear end of the fifth metatarsal and a projection on the cuboid, sitting much farther forward than a human foot would put them.
2. Krantz rejected that reading. "The two projections are quite symmetrical and equal in size. Yet the two underlying bones, whether in man or gorilla, are not symmetrical, nor are they the same size."
3. Measuring around the outside curve from the base of the little toe to the heel tip, the right foot is almost two inches longer than the left. Unless bones were enlarged, gaps must have opened, and only two gaps are available, in front of and behind the cuboid.
4. Those gaps would fill with cartilage or bone, the filler would grow outward, and callus would form over it. Filler-lumps would sit "just behind the bony processes that were first considered," meaning an even shorter fifth metatarsal and longer calcaneus than he had already inferred. Krantz's payoff line is that this "shows an excellent agreement with the short first metatarsal as was deduced from the double ball on the inside edge of the foot."

Two independent lines of inference landing in the same place is what impressed him.

Here is the part that gets misreported. Krantz did not diagnose a clubfoot. He wrote plainly, "The origin of this deformity is not clear." The clubfoot diagnosis was John Napier's. Napier, a British primatologist formerly at the Smithsonian, examined casts and photographs, identified talipes equinovarus, and attached a specific piece of reasoning: a true untreated congenital clubfoot usually produces a fixed flexion of the ankle so that only forefoot and toes bear weight, which would leave the heel impression absent or poorly defined, and the Bossburg heel impression is strongly defined. He concluded the cause was a crushing injury in early childhood. Then the sentence that made the case famous. Napier found it "very difficult to conceive of a hoaxer so subtle, so knowledgeable" and "so sick" as to "deliberately fake a footprint of this nature," and added, "I suppose it is possible, but it is so unlikely that I am prepared to discount it."

In the same passage Napier flagged that the apparent dislocation of the bones on the outer border "may be due to an imperfection in the casting technique." CONTESTED The feature Krantz built his strongest inference on is the one Napier said might be an artifact of plaster.

One more correction to the received version. Krantz's paper does not read as an argument from the Bossburg cast alone. His "our supposed hoaxer is an expert on human anatomy with a very inventive mind" is the last item on a list of general objections to hoaxing (obscure locations, stride length, imprint depth, independent toe movement), and he closes the paper by quoting Sherlock Holmes on eliminating the impossible and concluding that "even if none of the hundreds of sightings had ever occurred, we would still be forced to conclude that a giant bipedal primate does indeed inhabit the forests of the Pacific Northwest." That is an argument from elimination, and he says so.

Krantz's own signed statement of February 2, 2001 describes his role precisely: "In 1970 I studied a pair of casts of apparently crippled feet, 17 inches long, and deduced the major aspects of the foot anatomy to be consistent only with an 8-foot tall, powerfully built bipedal primate." He describes studying casts, not making them. Wikipedia says he also came to Bossburg and took photos and made casts; the Hunter and Dahinden passage it cites for that is not the passage carried in the widely reproduced excerpt of that chapter, so the claim is not confirmable here. ALLEGED

Four readers, five readings

Two things in that table are worth stating flatly, because both are usually smoothed over.

First, Krantz's 1999 addendum credits Jeff Meldrum with the answer and calls metatarsus adductus "a congenital condition." Meldrum's own text says the opposite about cause: "Its unilateral manifestation makes it more likely that the individual was suffering from a lesion on the spinal cord rather than a congenital deformity." Krantz relayed half of Meldrum's finding. CONTESTED

Second, Krantz and Meldrum do not agree about the two lumps, the single most-cited feature of the cast. Krantz explicitly rejected reading them as bony landmarks and built his model on gap-fillers sitting behind those landmarks. Meldrum reads them as "prominent bunnionettes on the lateral margin of the foot" that "mark the positions of the calcaneocuboid and cuboideometatarsal joints, which are positioned more distal than in a human foot." That is close to the interpretation Krantz considered and threw out. CONTESTED

This is the weak point in the pro-track case, and it is internal to that case rather than imported from outside. The claim is that the deformity is so anatomically specific that only a specialist could have invented it. If that were so, the specialists reading the cast should converge. They do not. Krantz, routinely cited as the authority for the clubfoot claim, refused to name the pathology in 1972 and by 1999 was endorsing a different diagnosis.

The rebuttal

David J. Daegling, a biological anthropologist at the University of Florida, published a short piece titled "Cripplefoot Hobbled" in Skeptical Inquirer 26(2), March/April 2002. The magazine's landing page confirms the title, author, volume, and issue. It does not show page numbers, and the text is behind a subscriber wall, so this entry does not quote it.

The Daegling argument usually attached to that title actually comes from his book Bigfoot Exposed (AltaMira, 2004). Joe Nickell, quoting it in Skeptical Inquirer in 2017, cites page 87: templates for feet, normal and deformed, were available in dozens of textbooks, and "all a hoaxer had to do was have the wherewithal to scale them up, and he or she did not need to know one iota of anatomy to do so." DOCUMENTED

That is a narrow claim, and it is the right narrow one. It does not require a hoaxer to reason from bone lever arms to a deformity. It requires a hoaxer to copy a shape. A pathological foot in a clinical illustration already contains the consequences of the pathology, because it came from a real pathological foot. Enlarging it carries those consequences along at no cost in anatomical knowledge.

There is a second problem, and it is Napier's own. In the same book he sorted Bigfoot prints into an "hourglass" type (Bluff Creek) and a "human" type (Bossburg), noted that the two walking patterns would imply two species, called that possibility beyond reason, and still argued for both. Hunter and Dahinden, who were sympathetic to him, called this a radical contradiction and left it unresolved. CONTESTED

Ivan Marx

Marx is not a footnote to Bossburg. He received the first report, the search camped on the property he occupied, he was driving on December 13, and he was the man who walked away from the car and came back with the news.

In October 1970 he telephoned Dahinden and said, "I've got a film of the cripple." The circumstances were written up by Denny Striker in the Colville Statesman-Examiner: a message left at the Marx home on the night of October 6 that either a car or a train had struck a large upright creature about seven miles north of Bossburg, a dog trailing it the next day, and 16mm footage shot with a Bolex and a 17mm lens. The paper put the filmed animal at about nine feet, working from a ten-foot stick it stepped on. Byrne's later account says Marx described the encounter to him as beginning with a call from a train driver, and the creature as at minimum eight feet. The two published versions of Marx's own story do not match. ALLEGED

Money arrived fast. Tom Page flew in with a check for $25,000 that Marx could have if he would confirm or deny the film's authenticity, and Marx declined it. John Green declared the film authentic, offered $800 for a copy, and wrote in the Bigfoot Bulletin that he was satisfied "that he could not have faked all he has to show, and that the film is genuine." Peter Byrne then put Marx on a retainer of $750 a month.

Byrne's 2003 account of what followed is specific. At a screening in late March 1971 at Don Byington's ranch, Byington's son Stephen, about eight, whispered that he recognized the place, and that it was not six miles off in the hills as Marx claimed but at the edge of his family's own ranch. The boy led them there next day and they matched the site from 8x10 enlargements by rocks, dead branches, frozen cow droppings, a piece of rusting tractor metal, and a small tree with a horizontal branch under which the film subject walks without stooping. The branch measured six feet from the ground, capping the subject at a maximum of five feet eleven. Norm Davis then noticed that the shadow angles differed between the movie frames and Marx's stills, so the two could not have been shot seconds apart as Marx had said. DEBUNKED

Marx left overnight before he could be questioned. Byrne's attorneys opened the sealed canister he had left as security and found about a hundred cut pieces of old black and white Mickey Mouse film. HOAX

The two published accounts of that canister differ on both particulars. Byrne says it went by registered mail to his attorneys in Washington, D.C., and held Disney footage. Hunter and Dahinden say it went into a bank safety-deposit box and held a roll of blank exposed celluloid. They also add two details Byrne does not: that Marx's camera carried a telephoto lens rather than the normal one he claimed, and that shortly before the filming he bought a quantity of fur pieces in Spokane. ALLEGED Byrne, for his part, records that the belongings Marx abandoned in his yard contained no fur suit. They also differ on the child: Byrne names one boy at one screening, while Hunter and Dahinden describe two Byington children who had been saying it since the film was first shown and were ignored.

In October 1972 Marx appeared on You Asked For It with a sealed can of unprocessed film of a white Bigfoot in a northern California snowstorm, developed on air under the producers' supervision. ALLEGED The primate expert the show consulted, who is not named in the account, said, "I think it's a man in a beast's suit," and Hunter and Dahinden, who watched, describe folds of a suit swinging like a blanket. Hunter and Dahinden also write that whether Marx was the perpetrator or the victim in that instance "will likely remain unanswered."

Marx appeared with his wife Peggy in the commercial documentary The Legend of Bigfoot (1976), directed by Harry Winer, and is credited with later Bigfoot documentaries whose dates and credits differ between sources. No published recantation by him has been found. This entry gives no date for his death: the only source offering one is a Bigfoot Encounters page that, in the same paragraph, says the 1,089 tracks were found by Joe Rhodes, which is wrong.

What the casts settle

The casts exist. The trackway was walked, measured, and photographed by more than one person before it melted, including sheriff’s deputies, Border Patrol officers, and a passing bus driver with a box camera. Nobody has ever demonstrated how it was made. All three are true, and the third is not a small point against the skeptics.

What the casts do not settle is an animal. The pro-track case rests on the proposition that no forger in 1969 could have produced a deformity with correct downstream consequences. That proposition does all the work, and it is undermined from two directions. The consequences come free with any copied clinical illustration. And the qualified people who accept the tracks cannot agree on which deformity it is, or even on what the two lumps are. Add that the man who received the first report and led searchers to the trackway is the same man later shown to have misrepresented where he filmed and to have handed over a substituted canister, and Bossburg becomes a question about how much weight an argument from incredulity can carry. CONTESTED

Dahinden was there, counted the prints, suspected Marx from the first afternoon, walked the line seven times, and never publicly recanted before his death on April 18, 2001. That is not evidence. It is worth knowing anyway.

Sources

• Virginia Story, "Sasquatch tracks are sighted in Bossburg in Stevens County on November 24, 1969," HistoryLink.org Essay 7938, October 31, 2006. Source for Bossburg's population, Joe Rhodes, the 1,089 figure, the fence height, and the Napier summary. historylink.org/File/7938
• Grover S. Krantz, "Anatomy of the Sasquatch Foot," Northwest Anthropological Research Notes 6(1), Spring 1972. Full text reprinted by the North American Wood Ape Conservancy, December 31, 2007. All Krantz quotations in the "What Krantz actually argued" section are from this reprint. The reprint gives no page range, so none is asserted here. woodape.org
• Don Hunter with René Dahinden, Sasquatch/Bigfoot: The Search for North America's Incredible Creature (1973; McClelland & Stewart, 1993). The Bossburg chapter is reproduced, with Dahinden's November 2000 permission, at Bigfoot Encounters, together with the John Napier excerpt (labeled pp. 123-124), Krantz's 1999 addendum from Bigfoot Sasquatch Evidence (pp. 298-299), and Krantz's signed statement of February 2, 2001. bigfootencounters.com/articles/bossburg.htm
• Peter Byrne, "The Hoaxed Ivan Marx Footage," September 2003, Bigfoot Encounters. bigfootencounters.com/hoaxes/marx_footage.htm
• Joe Nickell, "Bigfoot as Big Myth: Seven Phases of Mythmaking," Skeptical Inquirer 41(5), September/October 2017. Source for the Daegling quotation, which Nickell cites to Bigfoot Exposed (2004), page 87. skepticalinquirer.org
• David J. Daegling, "Cripplefoot Hobbled," Skeptical Inquirer 26(2), March/April 2002. Landing page consulted to confirm title, author, volume, and issue only. It shows no page numbers and the text is subscriber-only, so it is not quoted in this entry. skepticalinquirer.org/2002/03/cripplefoot-hobbled
• "Bossburg, Washington," Wikipedia. Source for the town's location and peak population, and quoted above where its account of Dahinden's arrival date and of Krantz's site visit goes beyond the citation it gives. Its bibliography (Napier 1973, Dutton, pp. 123-126; Daegling 2004, pp. 46-51 and 79-87; Krantz 1999, pp. 43-44 and 54-57; Meldrum 2006, pp. 237-240; Regal 2013) was used to check editions and page ranges. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bossburg,_Washington
• AJ, "'Recasting' the Infamous Cripplefoot Tracks of 1969," Bigfoot Base, May 24, 2016. Source for the block quotation from Jeff Meldrum, which it cites to Meldrum's "Evaluation of Alleged Sasquatch Footprints and Their Inferred Functional Morphology" (Idaho State University), and for David Howe's Lisfranc reading from MonsterQuest. Meldrum's paper was not reached directly. bigfootbase.com
• "MonsterQuest," Wikipedia episode list, used to check the episode: "Critical Evidence" is season 3, first aired July 8, 2009. Bigfoot Base numbers it season 3 episode 19; the episode list numbers it 11. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MonsterQuest
• "Marx Photos identified," Bigfoot Encounters, photographs credited to René Dahinden, 1998. Cited above only as the single source giving Ivan Marx a death year of 1999, and as the demonstration that the same page misstates who found the 1,089 tracks. bigfootencounters.com/films/marx-photos.htm
• "The Legend of Bigfoot," Wikipedia, for the 1976 film's year and director. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Legend_of_Bigfoot