Before the name: wild men, 1811 to 1957

A track in the Athabasca defiles, January 1811

On January 7, 1811, David Thompson was moving eight sleds, two dogs to each, up the frozen Athabasca River in the defiles of the Rocky Mountains, in what is now western Alberta, on the crossing that would take him to the Columbia. What he recorded that afternoon is the oldest item routinely cited in Bigfoot literature. The passage is real and it reads as follows in J. B. Tyrrell's 1916 edition of the Narrative, page 445. DOCUMENTED

Continuing our journey in the afternoon we came on the track of a large animal, the snow about six inches deep on the ice; I measured it; four large toes each of four inches in length to each a short claw; the ball of the foot sunk three inches lower than the toes, the hinder part of the foot did not mark well, the length fourteen inches, by eight inches in breadth, walking from north to south, and having passed about six hours. We were in no humour to follow him:

That is the part everyone quotes. The next sentence is the part that is usually cut, and it is the whole point.

the Men and Indians would have it to be a young mammoth and I held it to be the track of a large old grizled Bear; yet the shortness of the nails, the ball of the foot, and it's great size was not that of a Bear, otherwise that of a very large old Bear, his claws worn away; this the Indians would not allow.

Nobody at the scene proposed a wild man. The two candidates on offer in 1811 were a living mammoth and an old bear with its claws worn down, and Thompson took the bear. He had reason to expect the mammoth answer. Two days earlier, on the same page of the same edition, he wrote that on entering these defiles, "strange to say, here is a strong belief that the haunt of the Mammoth, is about this defile," that he questioned several men, and that they conceded they "had never seen any marks of him, and therefore could show me none." Tyrrell's own chapter summary for Chapter VI calls the entry "Tracks of a large unknown animal," not a wild man. What is documented is a careful measurement with an identification the party could not agree on. CONTESTED

Two cautions. The text above is from the Narrative, the memoir Thompson compiled decades after the fact, not a field journal written on January 7. Shorter and slightly different wordings circulate in Bigfoot books.

Wild man was a newspaper genre before it was a creature

Joe Nickell, writing in Skeptical Inquirer in 2017, dates the earliest known newspaper account of this kind to 1818, in the Exeter, New Hampshire, Watchman, which referred to an animal "resembling the Wild Man of the Woods." Nickell's survey finds the same story recurring for a century with interchangeable parts: a "wild child" swimming in an Indiana lake in the late 1830s, a Nevada creature in the 1860s carrying a rabbit and a club, and a Kansas animal in 1869 with "a stooping gait" and "very long arms with immense hands or claws" that walked on its hind legs but sometimes on all fours. That the genre existed and repeated is documented. What it means is Nickell's argument, and readers should weigh it as one. DOCUMENTED

Readers at the time noticed the pattern too. Five days after the Mount St. Helens story broke in 1924, W. A. Maxwell wrote to the Morning Oregonian under the heading "Wild Man Stories Are Old," July 18, 1924.

The clearest case is Winsted, Connecticut, in August 1895, because a name is attached to it. By the traditional account, Lou Stone, a reporter for the Winsted Evening Citizen, invented a hairy wild man because he wanted to make $150 quickly and judged that the New York papers would not buy a story about anything that had actually happened in Winsted. More than a hundred armed men turned out. The quarry was a local farmer's stray jackass. HOAX

Jacko, 1884

On July 4, 1884, the Victoria Daily British Colonist ran a piece headed "What Is It? A Strange Creature Captured Above Yale. A British Columbia Gorilla." It carries the line "(Correspondence of The Colonist)" and a Yale dateline, which makes it an unsigned stringer's letter rather than staff reporting. The article exists, the page is scanned, and its text can be read today. That much is settled, and it is a fact about a newspaper. DOCUMENTED

The specifics read like a sideshow bill. The creature was said to be found near No. 4 tunnel, "situated some twenty miles above this village." The train crew involved were described as Mr. Onderdonk's employees, Andrew Onderdonk being the contractor then building the Canadian Pacific line through the Fraser Canyon. Engineer Ned Austin saw what he took for a man lying by the track; conductor R. J. Craig and express messenger Costerton gave chase and cornered it. The animal was "standing about four feet seven inches in height and weighing 127 pounds," in glossy hair about one inch long. It was placed with a keeper, George Tilbury. The article ends by asking whether the creature belonged to "a species hitherto unknown in this part of the continent, or is he really what the train men at first thought he was, a crazy Indian?" That last phrase is the 1884 paper's own. Note what the piece actually claims: a small gorilla, or a man. Not a sasquatch.

The rival papers took it apart inside a week. The New Westminster Mainland Guardian of July 9, 1884 is quoted as saying "that no such animal was caught, and how the Colonist was duped in such a manner, and by such a story, is strange." The British Columbian of July 11 reported that about two hundred people went to the jail to see Jacko and found only a man fielding questions about a creature that was not there. No fabrication was ever admitted, so this is a claim superseded by contemporaneous reporting rather than a confessed hoax. DEBUNKED

It reentered circulation by accident. In the 1950s the journalist Bruce McKelvie found the Colonist piece and passed it to John Green and René Dahinden, telling them that fire had destroyed the other area papers and this was the only surviving record. Ivan T. Sanderson printed it in Abominable Snowmen: Legend Come to Life in 1961, and it entered the Bigfoot books from there. Green kept looking, found the two rival reports, and wrote Jacko off as probable journalistic fiction in Pursuit in 1975, fourteen years later. Note the hedge in Green's own verdict. He said probable.

Roosevelt's goblin story is a story Roosevelt was told

The Bauman episode is in The Wilderness Hunter (1893), Chapter XX, "In Cowboy Land," which runs pages 412 to 447. The story occupies roughly pages 441 to 447. Roosevelt did not present it as his own experience, and he framed it with unusual care. DOCUMENTED

But I once listened to a goblin story which rather impressed me. It was told by a grisled, weather-beaten old mountain hunter, named Bauman, who was born and had passed all his life on the frontier. He must have believed what he said, for he could hardly repress a shudder at certain points of the tale; but he was of German ancestry, and in childhood had doubtless been saturated with all kinds of ghost and goblin lore, so that many fearsome superstitions were latent in his mind

Roosevelt then supplies the deflationary reading himself, suggesting Bauman "grew to attribute, both at the time and still more in remembrance, weird and elfin traits to what was merely some abnormally wicked and cunning wild beast; but whether this was so or not, no man can say." The setting is "among the mountains dividing the forks of the Salmon from the head of Wisdom River." The animal in the story is not built like the modern creature. It kills Bauman's partner by "wrenching his head back with its forepaws, while it buried its teeth in his throat," leaving "four great fang marks in the throat." ALLEGED

Popular retellings call this "Roosevelt's Bigfoot encounter." It is a story Roosevelt heard from one man, printed with the author's own suggestion that the thing was probably an unusually vicious animal. Roosevelt also attributes some of Bauman's imagery to stories he says Bauman heard from "Indian medicine men." That is Roosevelt's 1893 framing, he names no nation, and it is not evidence about one.

Ape Canyon, 1924: the reversal was contemporaneous

On July 13, 1924, the Portland Oregonian ran "Fight With Big Apes Reported By Miners. Fabled Beast Are Said To Have Bombarded Cabin," and the same day "Mr. Darwin, Here You Are. Kelso Offers Missing Link." Fred Beck, Marion Smith and their partners said they had shot at an ape-like animal near their claim on the southeast shoulder of Mount St. Helens, and that animals then bombarded their cabin with rocks through the night. The claim is one group of men's account of one night. ALLEGED

What the popular version leaves out is how fast the same papers turned around. Every headline below is indexed in Daniel Perez's bibliography of the 1924 coverage. DOCUMENTED

Nine days from front page to a headline using the word hoax. The rangers reported finding no support for the story, and the rocks were reported to be mine tailings from the claim itself. DEBUNKED Wikipedia names the two Forest Service investigators as J. H. Huffman and William Welch and reports that they demonstrated how fourteen-inch prints near the cabin could be faked, citing a 2018 Oregonian retrospective by Douglas Perry. That retrospective could not be opened for this entry, so the names and the demonstration are passed on at second hand and should be treated that way.

A different reading ran the same week. Jorg Totsgi argued that the animals were Seeahtik people, in "Big Hairy Indians Back Of Ape Tale" in the Morning Oregonian of July 16 and in "Apes Declared To Be Seeah-tik Indians" in The Real American at Hoquiam, Washington, on July 17. Those articles are indexed in Perez's bibliography. This site does not speak for any nation, and the Seeahtik material belongs in the Indigenous record rather than here.

Fred Beck published his own account decades later, as I Fought The Apemen Of Mt. St. Helens, privately published in Kelso, Washington, in 1967, forty-three years after the night in question. Roger Patterson had put the story into a book the year before. The fuller treatment of all this is in the Ape Canyon entry.

The two statements of 1957

Albert Ostman (1893 to 1975), a Swedish-born prospector in British Columbia, said that in 1924 near Toba Inlet a sasquatch carried him off in his sleeping bag, held him about six days with a group of two adults and two young, and that he escaped by feeding snuff to the adult male. He said nothing publicly for thirty-three years. The account reached print in The Province in 1957. ALLEGED John Napier wrote that the story "fails to convince me primarily on the grounds of the limited food resources available." Joe Nickell has written that it is "more likely the result of imagination than of recollection." The Ostman entry takes the account apart in detail.

William Roe swore a statement at Edmonton, Alberta, on August 26, 1957, describing an animal he said he watched on Mica Mountain in October 1955. In it he says, "I had been working on the highway near Tete Jaune Cache for about two years. In October, 1955, I decided to climb five miles up Mica Mountain to an old deserted mine, just for something to do." He gives the animal as roughly six feet tall, nearly three feet wide, around three hundred pounds, "covered from head to foot with dark brown silver-tipped hair." He says, "as it came closer I saw by its breasts that it was female," that its arms were "longer, reaching almost to its knees," that "when it walked it placed the heel of its foot down first," and that it "stripped the leaves with its teeth." He closes, "I hereby declare the above statement to be in every part true, to the best of my powers of observation and recollection." ALLEGED

A sworn statement is legally serious and evidentially narrow. It documents that a named man formally attested to something, which is a fact about the man and the document. It is not corroboration, and Roe has none. The text used here is a reproduction on an enthusiast site, not an archival scan, and the signing official's title appears there as assistant claims agent.

Where the name came from

John Walter Burns, an Irish expatriate, worked at the Chehalis Reserve in the Fraser Valley, among the people now known as the Sts'ailes Nation. Wikipedia describes him as Indian agent and teacher; the NiCHE Canada essay on the subject describes him as a teacher there in the 1920s and 1930s; one popular account dates his arrival to 1925. He published the accounts he collected in Maclean's in 1929 as "Introducing B.C.'s Hairy Giants: A collection of strange tales about British Columbia's wild men as told by those who say they have seen them." Secondary accounts date the issue to April 1, 1929. The Maclean's archive would not open for this entry, so that day and month are unconfirmed here. DOCUMENTED

The word itself is less settled than it is usually presented. Wikipedia gives "Sasquatch" as an anglicization of sasq'ets, roughly "hairy man," in Halq'eméylem. The NiCHE Canada essay gives it as an anglicization of se'sxac, "wild man," and attributes the word to the Salish language family rather than naming a single language. Popular accounts also differ on whether Burns coined the English word or simply wrote down a term his informants were already using, and at least one of them notes informants quoted using "Sasquatch" directly. CONTESTED

What can be said without overreaching is narrow. Burns published, in English, in a national magazine, accounts he gathered from one community, under one label. The sources available here do not agree on the underlying word or even the language it came from, and nothing in that record licenses anyone to describe distinct nations as sharing a single legend. That question is handled at length in the Indigenous record.

Twenty-nine years later the second name arrived from an unrelated event in northern California. Jerry Crew, a bulldozer operator, found large humanlike prints; a cast was made; and Crew appeared on the front page of the Humboldt Times on October 6, 1958, in a story by the reporter Andrew Genzoli that introduced the term. DOCUMENTED That is covered in 1958: how Bigfoot got its name.

The honest through-line

Read down the first column and there is no through-line. A disputed bear or mammoth track in the Rockies, a century of formula newspaper filler, a capture on the Fraser that two rival papers denied within a week, a trapper's ghost story printed by a future president who doubted it in the same breath, a mining camp panic that the Portland press reversed in nine days, and two statements made in 1957, one of them thirty-three years after the fact.

None of that settles what, if anything, is in the woods. It settles what the pre-1957 record can carry, which is less than it is usually asked to carry.

Sources

• David Thompson, David Thompson's Narrative of His Explorations in Western America, 1784-1812, ed. J. B. Tyrrell (Toronto: Champlain Society, 1916), Chapter VI, p. 445. The January 5 and January 7, 1811 entries were read in full in the scanned text. archive.org full text.
• "What Is It? A Strange Creature Captured Above Yale. A British Columbia Gorilla," Daily British Colonist (Victoria, B.C.), July 4, 1884. Read in the scanned OCR text. The dateline digits are damaged in the scan. archive.org.
• Theodore Roosevelt, The Wilderness Hunter (New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1893), Chapter XX, "In Cowboy Land," pp. 412-447, with the Bauman story at pp. 441-447. Read in full in the scanned text; the spelling "grisled" was confirmed against a second scanned copy. archive.org full text.
• "Jacko hoax," Wikipedia, collating the Mainland Guardian (July 9, 1884), the British Columbian (July 11, 1884), John Green's 1975 Pursuit article, and Loren Coleman on Bruce McKelvie. The two 1884 rival papers were not opened directly for this entry. en.wikipedia.org.
• Ivan T. Sanderson, Abominable Snowmen: Legend Come to Life (1961). Title and year confirmed against the Internet Archive catalogue record. archive.org.
• Daniel Perez, comp., "Bibliography on Ape Canyon Incident, 1924," November 27, 2019. Indexes the 1924 coverage by paper, date and page. Every 1924 headline and date in the table above was taken from this document, which was read in full. The individual 1924 newspapers were not opened. PDF.
• Joe Nickell, "Bigfoot as Big Myth: Seven Phases of Mythmaking," Skeptical Inquirer 41:5 (September/October 2017), for the 1818 Exeter Watchman account and the nineteenth century survey. skepticalinquirer.org.
• "The Winsted Wild Man (1895)," Museum of Hoaxes, for Lou Stone, the $150, the posse and the jackass. hoaxes.org.
• "William Roe's 1957 Sworn Affidavit," Alberta Sasquatch, reproducing the statement sworn at Edmonton on August 26, 1957. An enthusiast reproduction, not an archival scan. sasquatchalberta.com.
• "Albert Ostman," Wikipedia, for his dates, the 1957 publication in The Province, and the quoted assessments by John Napier and Joe Nickell. en.wikipedia.org.
• "Bigfoot," Wikipedia, for Burns as Indian agent and teacher, the sasq'ets rendering in Halq'eméylem, and Jerry Crew, Andrew Genzoli and the October 6, 1958 Humboldt Times front page. en.wikipedia.org.
• Hammerson Peters, "How the Sasquatch Got Its Name," Mysteries of Canada, July 12, 2018, for Burns's arrival in 1925, the April 1, 1929 Maclean's date, and the argument that Burns may have recorded rather than coined the word. mysteriesofcanada.com.
• Clare O'Reilly, "'A Bear, A Man, A Giant': On 'Sasquatch' as Cryptozoological Missing Link," NiCHE Canada, October 17, 2022, for Burns as a teacher at Chehalis in the 1920s and 1930s and the se'sxac rendering. niche-canada.org.
• "Ape Canyon," Wikipedia, for the gorge on the southeast shoulder of Mount St. Helens and for the Huffman and Welch investigation, citing Douglas Perry, "How a 1924 Bigfoot battle on Mt. St. Helens helped launch a legend," The Oregonian, January 26, 2018, which could not be opened for this entry. en.wikipedia.org.