BIGFOOT: MAN, MYTH OR MISSING LINK?
Bigfoot, Sasquatch, Yeti, the Fouke Monster, the Abominable Snowman, Gigantopithecus, or Cain — there are many names given for one of the most enduring stories of a giant, hairy, wild man wandering the woods the world over. I grew up hearing stories of Bigfoot, and many camping trips included searches for this magical woodland giant.
Is this creature real, or is he a story of enduring myth? Let’s take a look at some of these stories.
The first story is that of Gigantopithecus. A very real great ape that lived in Asia during the Miocene and is believed to have gone extinct within the last 500,000 years (Larsen). Some sources state Gigantopithecus went extinct no longer than 150,000 years ago. Gigantopithecus was named by Ralph von Koenigswald (1902–1982), a Dutch-German paleontologist, who had wandered into a Chinese pharmacy in 1935 and asked to look at a giant tooth that had been labeled as a “dragon’s tooth.” Chinese herbalists long used ancient fossils in their medicines, and upon viewing the tooth, Koenigswald realized he was looking at the molar of a large primate. Follow up research led to the discovery of a strictly herbivorous extinct great ape that had stood close to 10 feet tall and weighed up to 1,212 pounds.
The problem with guessing our hairy wild man is Gigantopithecus is due to the fact that no fossils have been found in the Americas. Gigantopithecus inhabited Southeast China and Vietnam.
This doesn’t dissuade noted Anthropologist and Crytozoologist Grover Krantz from believing that Gigantopithecus is our man Bigfoot and that he is not extinct, but rather walked across the Bering Strait land bridge and has played the greatest game of hide and seek in history (Eliot). Professor Krantz was the foremost expert on Gigantopithecus and taught anthropology at Washington State University up until his death in 2002. Krantz wrote more than 10 books on the subject, spoke at length and gave numerous interviews. No one has done more to support the scientific possibilities that Gigantopithecus is not extinct than Krantz. That said, he never found fossil evidence or unquestionable current physical evidence that Gigantopithecus still walks this planet.
Bolstering Krantz’s belief is the fact that Mountain Gorillas, who were once described as giant, hairy beasts, were considered mythological stories rather than very real primates who still survive today. We now know how very real they are and how endangered, in part, due to the extensive work of renowned primatologist Dian Fosse.
Perhaps our giant hairy wild man is the biblical Cain, cursed by God and doomed to walk the planet till the end of days. Our Cain even has a North American witness to his dark past. Our good Brother David Wyman Patten, early Latter Day Saint (aka Mormon) leader, testified to meeting “Cain, who murdered his brother, Abel,” along a lonely stretch of Tennessee road one night in September of 1835. Good Brother Patten shared the following story with the family Smoot before dying a few years thereafter, a martyr at the Battle of Crooked River:
“As I was riding along the road on my mule I suddenly noticed a strange personage walking beside me. He walked along beside me for about two miles. His head was about even with my shoulders as I sat in my saddle. He wore no clothing, but was covered with hair. His skin was very dark. I asked him where he dwelt and he replied that he had no home, that he was a wanderer in the earth and traveled to and fro. He said he was a very miserable creature, that he had earnestly sought death during his sojourn upon the earth, but that he could not die, and his mission was to destroy the souls of men. About the time he expressed himself thus, I rebuked him in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and by virtue of the Holy Priesthood, and commanded him to go hence, and he immediately departed out of my sight. When he left me, I found myself near your house (Wilson).”
An avid reader with a curious mind from early childhood, Professor Krantz quite likely knew the story of Brother Patten and his twilight walk with Cain, especially considering Krantz was raised in Brother Patten’s religion and surely read the Martyr’s story.
Perhaps Krantz also heard the giant, hairy, wild man stories of Native American lore. These are known as the legends of Sasquatch or “Indians without fire.” We get the name Sasquatch, which is an anglicized version of “Sasq’ets,” from the Halq’emeylem language of the First Nations peoples of British Columbia (Walls).
I’ll tell you truly, there were Native Americans that topped 7 feet 6 inches tall occupying these lands long before European settlement. In fact, the bodies of eleven people were recovered from an Adena burial mound on one of my own family’s ancestral property in Charleston, West Virginia. The mound is known as the Creel/Criel Mound, so named for the family. My family had donated land to the City of Charleston and upon the land was an old Creel cemetery. Beneath the graves of my ancestors was a deeper burial chamber, long forgotten. Between the years 1884 and 1885, Cyrus Thomas, archaeologist for the US Bureau of American Ethnography and ethnographer for the Smithsonian, excavated this mound and took detailed notes of the remains which he dated starting at 250 BC to 1650 AD (Izzo). The remains are currently housed at the Smithsonian.
So, do I believe Native American legends of giant men? Yes. I do. They existed. Were they hairy? No evidence exists that they were hairy. In fact, evidence states to the contrary.
Perhaps it was the Fouke Monster of Arkansas that first ignited Krantz’s imagination. The foul-smelling Fouke Monster, also called the Swamp Thing, had been spotted since the 1940s by the residents of the town of Fouke in a haze-covered Arkansas bog. After terrorizing the people of Fouke for years, in 1972 an intrepid advertising salesman by the name of Charles B. Pierce, undertook the task of interviewing witnesses and accompanying hunters with their dogs through the swamps filming the furtive signs of this shrieking creature. (Wikipedia 2) Releasing his independently created film as The Legend of Boggy Creek, Pierce’s film has grossed over $20 Million.
Having watched the film as a pre-teen and camped out in the woods of Texarkana as a teenager, I can tell you that I sat huddled in a tent with my friends waiting for a hairy arm to rend our tent to pieces. Here’s a picture of me running through those woods.
In the United States, we also refer to Sasquatch as Bigfoot. Bigfoot has left a big trail across the country, but has yet not been caught, alive or dead. We do have stories. These are a few of the stories.
Bigfoot sprang into nationwide public consciousness one day in 1958, when human-like footprints were discovered by a road construction crew in Bluff Creek, a tributary of the Klamath River, which is located in Humboldt County, California. These footprints were 18 inches long and 7 inches wide with a 50 inch stride. Jerry Crew, the man who made a plaster cast of this discovery, was photographed holding up the cast, and the story spread out like wildfire to a national audience, eager for unsolved mysteries (Buhs).
Then, in the Summer of 1967, Bigfoot first appeared in all his hairy glory on screen in The Patterson-Gimlin Film. Two friends, Roger Patterson and Bob Gimlin, were filming where Bigfoot’s footprint had first been cast alongside Bluff Creek in Northern California, and caught an amazing clip of film. A giant, bipedal, fur covered creature strolled by, and they captured it on film and stunned the world (Wikipedia 1). The world stared at Bigfoot and Bigfoot stared back at us.
Tourism around the story and sightings of Bigfoot sprang up all over Northern California and there wasn’t a bear left in the woods that wasn’t identified first as Bigfoot in those rose-hued days of the 1970s California campgrounds.
By 1987, a scary Bigfoot morphed into the friendly, but misunderstood anthropomorphic hominid of Harry and The Hendersons. We wanted to release Bigfoot back into the wild and wish him well.
Throughout the years, Bigfoot tourism and media has grown nationwide. Television shows and radio programs are dedicated to the search for Bigfoot. You can even visit my giant cousin in Alabama and he and his boys will take you out on a search for a Bigfoot roaming his woods and mutilating his cattle just as he’s done for TJ Biscardi and the Searching for Bigfoot Team (Biscardi).
If you’d like, you can even book a helicopter ride right here in Bend and soar through the air hunting him down, or book a tent trip that will take you to his last known haunts (Douglas). Why? Because Bigfoot is big business. He’s an enduring myth because there’s a possibility he exists. As long as we have that possibility, we’ll keep looking.
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WORKS CITED
Biscardi, TJ, “Finding Bigfoot, Alabama Followup,” Searching for Bigfoot; Searching for Bigfoot Sightings and Encounters, 20 January 2008, searchingforbigfoot.com/ALABAMA_FOLLOWUP_01–08/
Buhs, Joshua Blu, Bigfoot: The Life and Times of a Legend, excerpt from p. 66–75, University of Chicago Press, 2009, www.press.uchicago.edu/Misc/Chicago/079790.html
Douglas, Patric, “Sasquatch and Bigfoot Tent Trailer Tours Oregon 2019,” Big Mountain Adventures, 5 December 2018, bigmountainadv.com/sasquatch-and-bigfoot-tent-trailer-tours-oregon-2019/
Eliot, Krissy, “The Man, The Myth, and The Legend of Grover Krantz,” California Magazine: Summer 2018 Our Town, 2019 Cal Alumni Association, UC Berkeley, alumni.berkeley.edu/california-magazine/summer-2018-our-town/man-myth-and-legend-grover-krantz
Izzo, Will, “Criel Burial Mound,” The Clio, 27 November 2013, theclio.com/web/entry?id=260
Larsen, Clark Spencer, Our origins: discovering physical anthropology, Clark Spencer Larsen, The Ohio State University p. 228, New York, W.W. Norton & Company, [2017].
Walls, Robert, “Bigfoot (Sasquatch) Legend,” The Oregon Encyclopedia, Portland State University and the Oregon Historical Society, 17 March, 2018, oregonencyclopedia.org/articles/bigfoot_sasquatch_legend/#.XG36Irh7nIU
Wikipedia Contributors1, “Patterson Gimlin Film,” Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, 15 February 2019, en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Patterson%E2%80%93Gimlin_film&oldid=883395242
Wikipedia Contributors2, “The Legend of Boggy Creek,” Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, 3 February 2019, en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=The_Legend_of_Boggy_Creek&oldid=881583013
Wilson, Lycurgus A., Life of David W. Patten, the first Apostolic martyr, p. 46, The Deseret News, Salt Lake City, Utah, 1904