Foreword
Copyright 2007 Gian J. Quasar
Hype and Hyperbole
From the Yukon to the bluffs of northern California’s Klamath Mountains and High Sierras the continent from high above would appear as a tempestuous green sea of furry pines. Like gigantic swells they follow the contours of the land, rolling over hills and dipping down into valleys, concealing below as does the sea a world seldom seen. This vast area, this Dark Continent, has been mapped only from these dizzying altitudes. Here rivers are silver veins of liquid mercury in the bright sunlight, and those mountain peaks that rise above the forest-line are dangerous, craggy islands swaddled by gusting winds. Intimidating rock precipices are streaked with mold and appear to weep mournfully over the dank valleys.
This is as close as most have ever come, and many a seasoned mountain man has never come back. Although we may only guess what happened to them, clues are omnipresent even on a short walk along the fringes of this great unknown. Broken tree stubs form crowns of deadly spikes. Snakes are abundant and lurk in the thickets, and mountain lions have no fear of coming into your camp. There is death everywhere.
For the most part the dangers seem far from our daily habits. Mankind keeps within the safe pockets of coastal cities. Then his habitation trickles into outlying small towns. Then it is dabbled into little villages, hamlets, and isolated cabins and logging camps. His knowledge of the wilderness, even today, is only of its fringes. He follows its life-giving arteries of rushing rivers so far as it is necessary or convenient to hunt and fish, and where they narrow into the veins and capillaries of still creeks and foggy bogs and dells he seldom reaches.
The forest serves economy only as far as the hunters can go or the logging camp roads can reach. The ground is a soft, deep chocolate in color, and when wet from the heavy rains and morning dew it is a squishy, sloppy walk or bumpy hazardous drive.
The mystery of the Pacific Northwest is therefore a mystery not of the unexplained but of the unknown. What lies deep within beyond the fringes of the forest lies within the depths of an abyssal sea, one that is harder to access than any ocean, impossible to sound or even consistently to dredge. There are hundreds of lakes where man cannot even reach without a float plane; dozens of creeks and still streams he will not venture beyond. Even the topography beyond the river banks is a mystery, blanketed under the dank silence of the thick understory, choked with brambles, thickets and lush bracken and old fallen trees. Ghostly effigies of standing dead trees are our only guideposts. Looming like brittle crucified old scarecrows, they guard or warn one of the paths that lay beyond.
There are always distant echoes: a log rolls, bark cracks, twigs and branches snap; crunches are made by the loping of deer; squirrels scratch their way up and down bark; and there is the chatter of birds and chipmunks, the skipping of the stream, and the hoot of sentinel owls. But there are never blunt sounds. Most everything skulks or is careful in the forest. There is the distant sound of the banjo, the honky-tonk, the logger’s buzz saw, the crackle of splitting wood and a swoosh as a tree falls. Man mixes only indistinctly with the quiet sound of the deep forest glades.
This is the Dark Continent. Whether viewing it from northern California, Oregon, Washington State, Alberta, British Columbia, Yukon and Alaska, it remains the same as it has for thousands of years; it is a quiet, brooding place: foreboding, uninviting and yet alluring.
This is the terra incognita, the great unknown; and many have sought to profit by that unknown by selling speculation and potential. The unknown allows us to imagine all sorts of facts and realities behind it. That is the great advantage of mystery— its reality may be anything we wish.
Within this terra incognita there is said to exist a horrible giant “manbeast,” some unexplained “animal-human” or “wild man” that is said to be hairy like an ape, to howl like a wolf, but to strike one as a human. Encounters with it have been so rare and horrifying that not much more than that can be sketched in our imaginations except the most surprising feature: ‘it’ walks on its hind legs like a man and leaves behind a strange long gigantic footprint.
‘It’ also walks where mystery must walk. Mystery does not dwell where man dwells. It exists far out at sea beyond man’s scrutiny. It exists high up in the mountains where he can seldom tread. It exists deep in the forests where he cannot see. It exists beyond the clouds where he cannot reach; or it extends far back into prehistory where he cannot remember.
It is not surprising therefore that the manbeast’s haunt is one of these regions. He treads one of the last misty abodes of a modern Olympus from which there briefly emerged and then retreated again the great pantheon of the 20th century’s unexplained phenomena. They became the modern equivalent to the Seven Wonders of the World; not great wonders of engineering as were the ancient Seven Wonders of the World, but unusual and unexplained phenomena to satiate our appetite for the unknown: the sea cloaked the Bermuda Triangle; UFOs are mysteries from the heavens; the subject of this book, once again, is a mystery of the dark forests and high mountains; Nessie is another denizen hidden by the mantel of the deep; Noah’s Ark is shielded from accessible feet far up dangerous Ararat; Atlantis was long ago; so were ancient astronauts and the origins of mankind.
One can wink a cynical eye and dismiss them as the folklore of mankind because such areas are outside the scrutiny of our daily endeavor, but such a blade of cynicism is two-edged. Because these areas are largely unexplored by mankind, is it not possible, even logical, that the unexplained and as-yet-undiscovered should dwell there?
Should “So be it, and fall on!” be our attitude?—even as Robert Louis Stevenson invited his ‘hesitant purchaser’ into his world of pirate stories. Unfortunately, the world of the unexplained is not comprised of adventurous pirate stories. It is a venal pursuit to achieve notoriety in a world where, naturally undefined, expert status is easily attained and cynicism can pass as wisdom and agendas as theories.
Such a world as the unexplained offers is also not subject to our eyes and to our reason. Rather, it is subject to our imaginations. . .and to this is subject, unfortunately again, our mass markets. Snippets of facts and circumstantial evidence are with time pasted together into a scrapbook which is little better than the literal meaning of its name.
Into this world of scrap and fancy we have tread for 50 years, finding no “manbeast” or “animal human” or even a crazed wild man. “So be it, and fall on!” has made us but the followers of a few opportunist woodsmen and their “desire for glory and cash prizes,” to use the words of René Dahinden, one of the foremost of what is still venerated today as “Old” or “Original Bigfooters.” We should have stopped first and considered the evidence before we tread in their footsteps. But we didn’t. Happily, innocently— less generous perhaps, gullibly— we followed a market.
The bulwark defending the “animal human” in particular therefore is not the forest or the high mountains, though be they ever so formidable. It is the hype and hyperbole that has created the angle by which we view or instinctively reject such a topic. Preconceived ideas are now so set, even innocently by such handles as Bigfoot or Sasquatch, that we’re no longer able to see the evidence that like a maniac on a switchback leapt so forcefully into the public conscious in the 20th century.
How can one— I, in this case— erase 40 to 50 years of the hype and hyperbole from the popular conceptions to reveal again the actual reality? That has been my chief aim ever since beginning to investigate the “world of the unexplained.”
That exciting group of topics ignited the 20th century mind, tantalizing a world with rational mysteries, like the Loch Ness Monster or Bigfoot; even UFOs were a very insulated and, initially, respectable phenomenon to tangibly approach and investigate. What was absurd about a giant eel or “sea serpent” existing, about an unexplained hairy primate in the forest or even heavier than air ships visiting the planet? In themselves— nothing. Virgin they were and virgin they excited the most interest.
But it was for only a short time that they existed in this state before being colored by the many fantasists for whom mystery is the canvas upon which they splatter their graffiti of falsehood. How do I get the mainstream back to day 1, when these reports first went over the newswires? How to rekindle the original excitement before it was redirected by so much theorizing and opportunism?
It takes more than restarting with a blank piece of paper. Popular hearsay survives upon the gasses we breathe. We cannot avoid taking it in, and, unfortunately, unlike the gospeline teaching, it is not harmlessly dispelled in the draught.
For “Bigfoot” the ether is thick with hype and hyperbole. But like volatile gasses there is no foundation to anything. Theories may abound, campfire gossip may be paraded as anecdotal evidence, but 50 years has provided nothing tangible. No carcass, no live specimen, no incontestable film. Thirty or forty years of regurgitation, adding new chapters, stoking new angles still amounts to nada. “Nada” is a scientific term meaning “nothing absolutely positively sarcastically.” With amoeba-like dexterity the topic has changed shape but never grew anything new.
It is the purpose of the book to finally uncover the actual facts regarding the existence or no of a giant “animal human” in the Pacific Northwest of North America; if real, to determine what it is, and that which is fatuous to clearly expose as such so that an undeniable base of facts can be secured. The actual facts command attention, and the logical conclusions that can be drawn from them are more alarming than the endless hype and hyperbole of their public marketing.
Before the garish world of popular hype there was complete consistency in the reports of an unexplained “What is it?” haunting the forests of the Pacific Northwest of America. It was not that it was unidentified. It was that nobody could explain what it was. It was animal, but it was also so human it could only be called a “human monster.” The only tangible piece of evidence was its strange footprint. It was wide at the ball of the foot tapering to a “curiously elongated heel.” There was nothing human in the footprint, but it was human-like. It wasn’t ape-like either. There was no offset toe like a thumb.
I am not being naïve or hopelessly uninformed by refusing to call ‘it’ Bigfoot. Such a moniker conjures up much more than can be verified, and most of it contradictory to what reports from 1792 to 1955 consistently describe of the “animal human.”
It was not until October 1958 that we even first hear of “Bigfoot.” He emerged at Bluff Creek (near Willow Creek), California, in the form of big enlarged human footprints. Found deeply embedded in the logging camp roads the footprints were a constant source of consternation each morning as workers arrived to man their logging equipment. Finally, one of the men, Jerry Crew, made a plaster cast and was soon dazzled in the photographer’s flashing bulbs at the headquarters of the Humboldt Times in Eureka. What he held was a 16 inch cast of a flat enlarged human foot.
There were many old legends in the area upon which this foot and the subsequent hype and hyperbole rode piggyback. But a garish circus performer and the strange feats he performs upon horseback can cause even multitudes to be blind to the horse he rides. In like manner we looked at Bigfoot as the first tracker/researchers— “Old Bigfooters”— cracked the whip and barked the astounding glories, like any big top ringmaster, to hide a very mundane performance. The horse which is always far more graceful and consistent we failed to notice.
Up until now that has been Bigfootery, and its modern contingent have proven themselves worthy understudies. While Modern Bigfootery may heap thereon, it does not go beyond pontificating in the sanctity of a legend that is primarily the product of this seminal group of woodsmen. Each of the “Old Bigfooters” emerged first from the hinterlands like big game hunters greedy to shoot a Bigfoot, each also recycling the most fantastic and contradictory notions of what Bigfoot must be in order to juice the glory of attaining their quarry.
From the dossier of Bigfootery there leapt a host of apes, subhumans, missing links, and hermaphrodite gigantopitheci. The amoeba may have changed shape in their hands, but it remains the creation of these woodsmen whose single line of thought was money and glory, a compound that can mix with the popular gasses but not create an atmosphere conducive to objective and rewarding study.
If a less venal popular image of “Old Bigfooters” still pervades the media, it has not escaped it. Behind-the-scenes the media often winked an eye at the whole business of “Bigfootery” and largely ignored the Bigfooters’ less-than-rosy reputations in order to promote salable angles. The last thing the media wishes to do is kill cash cows. They want to come back and milk these when needed; and presenting all those involved as money-seeking bastards is not going to aid in the longevity of any topic.
The Old Bigfooter René Dahinden once said at the end of a newspaper interview: “We’re an exclusive group of Sasquatch hunters, largely because no one wants to join us.” I have found that to be true. . .and to be a good word of caution on how to proceed with my own research.
Old Bigfootery was indeed an unusual amalgam. René Dahinden was a milkman who quit in order to take a menial job at the Vancouver Gun Club, where his duties consisted of picking up the spent lead, so that he could devote all his time to “thinking about Sasquatch.” John Green was a small town newspaper editor. Ivan Marx was an itinerant woodsman who left a trail of Playboys throughout the woods of his wandering. Bob Titmus was a taxidermist. Roger Patterson was a rodeo rider, and Peter Byrne was a big game hunter in Asia turned Bigfoot tracker in America in the one place Bigfoot was never reported until he arrived.
Mutual incompatibility was the sum of the parts. Dahinden considered Roger Patterson to be a “crook.” Many Bigfooters thought John Green to be a “backstabber.” Most everybody thought Ivan Marx was a “huckster.” Peter Byrne recalled he was but a “mediocre woodsman.” Dahinden has been called a “vulture” due to the fact he sued to get the best-end-of-neck on the Patterson Film. Bob Titmus was regarded as an inept “storyteller.” Grover Krantz must have thought himself diplomatic when he regarded John Green to be only a “chronicler of Bigfoot,” avoiding direct mention that Green promoted many contradictory stories and made no analysis of them.
Mutual illogic was also the sum of their analysis. What in fact did Old Bigfootery believe? That is hard to say. There was neither method to their madness nor consistency to their method. All appeared to dogmatically believe that Roger Patterson filmed a “Bigfoot” at Bluff Creek, California, on October 20, 1967. The film is incredibly famous and even openly touted by each one as authentic. That being the case Bigfooters had proof not only of Bigfoot’s existence but of its existence at Bluff Creek. Yet none staked the area out. No camps keeping a constant vigil were erected. No scopes scanning the glades and creeks from mountain shoulders. No trailers housing round-the-clock observers and hunters ready to sortie out.
The hunt for Nessie at Loch Ness inspired just such scientific endeavors, yielding as their result some interesting film and a number of sightings. But the Bigfooters forsook Bluff Creek for the whole of the Pacific Northwest, taking strange depositions of even stranger hairy manbeasts, subhumans, apes, and aroused wolf men, making plaster casts of radically different, often cartoon feet in the process. Two of the most famous, René Dahinden and John Green, obtained rights to Patterson’s film and peddled this on a lecture circuit as far from Bluff Creek as possible in Canadian towns.
Money and cash prizes were so foremost in the minds of Old Bigfooters that Jack W. Ondrack had to warn fellow anthropologists, sociologists and zoologists that the mutual goal of the Bigfooters “is mutual only in the sense that each man wants to find a Sasquatch, and not in the sense that each man wants somebody to find a Sasquatch.”
Ondrack’s summary, concurrent at the moment of Bigfootery’s greatest black eye (the Bossburg fiasco), is despite its informed insights still sheathed with white gloves. Bigfootery was a venal, undisciplined amateurish pursuit that, after Bossburg (1970), it graduated from the forests to become an almost exclusively media presentation.
Despite the popular 1987 movie Harry and the Hendersons which portrayed two Bigfoot hunters created in the image of John Green and René Dahinden (David Suchet played the French-Swiss Dahinden part as a man named Jacques LaFleur), it had probably been 17 years since either of the two Bigfooters had packed a rifle and gone looking for Bigfoot. Dahinden was even later acknowledged to be a man “who investigated men who investigated Bigfoot rather than being an actual Bigfoot investigator.”
To be a gossip of a popular culture icon is not to be a crypto-zoologist. To be a gadfly of the unexplained is not to be an investigator. Longevity is also not a plus, for the obvious reason that its mixture with failure is a terrible assignation. It is not surprising therefore that the Old Bigfooters found nothing. It is merely hype and hyperbole, that dreaded hype and hyperbole, that has created the false media image that Bigfoot has seriously been tracked.
Bigfootery has fed popular hype and has subsequently nursed on it to such an extent it fooled itself. When lumber contractor Ray Wallace, Jerry Crew’s boss, recently passed away in November 2002, his family reported in his obituary that he was the man who made the footprints around Bluff Creek in 1958 to hoax some of his lumbermen. They confessed that everybody in their family had known what their father had been up to, and now that he was dead they announced that “Bigfoot is dead.” Ray’s nephew, Dale Wallace, showed the wooden feet to the world. The very seed that grew the Bigfoot tree upon which so many nested was found to be false.
René Dahinden was already dead. So was Grover Krantz, whose Frankenstein needlework sewed together a completely fantasized creature based on Bluff Creek’s strange interlude. Peter Byrne had always distanced himself from Bluff Creek, and many other Old Bigfooters were dead or had faded into a deserved obscurity for their past crimes in Bigfootery, like Ivan Marx.
But their classic methodology was preserved in the surviving and most seminal of all Old Bigfootery’s members, John Green. He came out and vociferously denounced how ludicrous the claim was to begin with, seeing how different the Wallace fake foot is in comparison to the Crew Print. Green so much as lamented, in what could be said to be a tone of frustration, that “. . .not one newspaper would so much as have a reporter talk to someone, namely me, who told them he had investigated the original incidents back in 1958, and had ample proof that Ray Wallace and the wooden feet could not have been responsible.”
Modern Bigfooters continue to adamantly maintain this implacable stance, following John Green as the “First Man of Bigfoot Letters.” Bigfoot Research Organization venomously denounced Wallace in scathing terms on their website in an article entitled “Wallace Hoax Behind Bigfoot?” The media and everybody who bought into the story 
of Ray Wallace have been caustically denounced, and the usual insults to the media have been bandied about.
Most of this furor is a red herring that once again sullies the reputation of old and new Bigfooters alike, demonstrating plainly what little lucid analysis (or even attention in this matter) they also applied to the entire Bigfoot question.
Two types of prints appeared simultaneously at Bluff Creek in August of 1958. Modern Bigfooters seem completely unaware, and Old Bigfooters bark our attention to look elsewhere— but it is nevertheless true that when the story broke in 1958, Ed Chambers, the Humboldt Times reporter, was shown 2 different pairs of tracks. A December 6, 1965, San Francisco Chronicle article confirms this: “Bill Chambers, at that time a reporter for the Humboldt Times, inspected the prints found by Crew and another set of giant prints found in the Bluff Creek area by contractor Ray Wallace.”
This other print was a queer hourglass shape, with five stiff neatly symmetrical toes and a pointless groove in the middle of the ball of the foot. The Wallace fake foot is clearly not the Jerry Crew Print, true. . . but it is obviously this common “hourglass” print. This print vexed the area of Bluff Creek for some 10 years, becoming equated with Bigfoot in roadside posters, restaurants and lumber signs, and even in the popular media.
Regardless of John Green’s claim, it is plain to see in pictures of tracks in his own old books that the Wallace foot is the creator of all the tracks he ever saw at Bluff Creek. In his 1968 On the Track of the Sasquatch Green even declares: “An 
unusual feature discernable in most tracks, in varying degrees, is a division right in the middle of what appears to be the ball of the foot” — an excellent description, once again, of the Wallace fake foot, a rather fatal declaration for Bluff Creek.
It is impossible to distance the Wallace Hourglass Print from the Crew Print. The Wallace family admitted that Ray’s brother Wilbur helped him with another pair of feet, both pairs which had been made by an expert woodcarver, Rant Mullins. By only showing the hourglass pair of wooden feet to the world, Dale Lee Wallace (Ray’s nephew) lanced the Bigfooters’ usual obtuse analytical skills. They confused this with Dale Wallace claiming these were the makers of the Crew Print. However, Wallace’s shenanigans involved more than one pair of feet and more than 1 brother.
The Brothers Wallace formed a legend, fun and silly, but a legend that dates no older than 1958. Sasquatch-men, the ancient legend of a degenerate species of men, was its victim when it should have been its destroyer.
But when the rider falls from his horse in mid crotch spread and the barker exchanges praise for four letter words we fail to see the horse run off on its own. All eyes are trained on the carnage and the sound of the hooves is covered by gasps.
Bigfoot’s death was a blessing. But hype and hyperbole prefer four letter words. Upon the carnage it has remained and upon the barkers cursing some poor member of the audience for the fall. The legend of “susquatch-men,” the ancient legend of British Columbian Indians, has disappeared and is also believed to have been pure chicanery. Those of us seeking the truth behind the legend find few interested when the commotion seems far more interesting.
But now the dust has settled. Five years since the fall and the four letter words. Several years since this book was first finished. It is now time to find the legend of the “animal humans.” It is now possible to tell people that Bigfoot and Sasquatch are not the same. We can drag the crotch spread performer off the sawdust and bring in the horse.
To do so we must bury the “old school” of Bigfootery once and for all and the comic dossier it accumulated. The reality behind the phenomenon called Bigfoot or Sasquatch is so obscured that free of Old Bigfootery the pursuit to discover the truth actually becomes an exciting adventure. It is possible to recapture the excitement of the hunt so long ago and view this volume as a new endeavor completely and thankfully divorced from the carnival of the last 50 years.
While you may think this a bold, even brash statement, evidence for a very unusual creature can be found on 3 continents and found to extend back over 200 years. Following the trail, before hoaxers lied in wooden feet and Bigfooters swore to it, uncovers something neither hoaxers could imitate nor Bigfooters imagine.
This volume is the result of discovering Bigfoot’s true footprint. It was clearly described in obscure old newspaper accounts dating back as far as 1818 and physically traced long before Bigfootery by an investigating and intuitive police officer in 1941. It was lost in the hail of Bigfootery’s absurdities and many comic enlarged fake human feet. But even in this twister a burp of truth was found by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police in 1988. Found far in the boondocks of Manitoba, these footprints matched and confirmed descriptions of a “giant human monster” reported over 100 years ago.
Hopefully by recasting its footprint we can recast Bigfoot to such an extent that we can not only recast the creature but recast the entire phenomenon and set it on a new and more plausible course. Something unheard of for 50 years needs rediscovering. There is nothing human about the Sasquatch foot. And this type of footprint alone is the only kind that has ever has been found spread over thousands of miles and over 200 years. The many fake feet with cute toes vary from location to location, each the locus ad quo of 100 varieties of the species hoaxeris snipus leading the gullible Bigfooters who needed new stories to keep themselves profiled in the popular ether. This became Bigfoot, the human footed, discrete penis—those voluptuous breasts so many rednecks dwelt upon in the Patterson Film— our berry-eating, caveman buddy. The reality is not so pleasant (or erogenous). It is not a gentle giant ape, nor a placid herbivore waiting to have its dollops examined to reveal its diet “one with nature.”
Names and legends for a hairy manbeast throughout Indian history belie this. A collation of native peoples’ legends reveals that the Indians of British Columbia have the legend of the Dsonoqua, the cannibal woman who was a hairy creature; other Indians referred to the Sasquatch as ‘cannibal people.’ Various and sundry tribes all had some similar legends: the fierce bukwas dreaded by the Kwakiutl Indians. The scoocums of Mount St. Helens were considered “another species of men;” hideous cannibals which the Clallam Indians declared to be offshoots of the Klikitats. They were hairy, tall and violent, possessing an abominable stench.
Accounts of native peoples may cause some to muse, the hypocritical deception of those who feel they are superior to simpler cultures and that simpler means dishonest. Widespread legends, however, can be found even in Eurasia describing a hairy “animal human.” They exists over similar mountainous and forested isolation, from the Steppes of Russia, near the forests of the Caspian Gate, to the Pamirs and with this the Himalayas, the place where the whole concept of a living giant man-beast (the Yeti) excited Western curiosity in the early 20th century when we first heard of the Metch Kangmi—“Abominable Snowman.”
Newspapers cause the skeptics to cringe—and this is rightfully so. Reporters often go the wrong way to work. In the words of the venerable reporter nudged out by the crowd: “I don’t need to see it; I’m a writer.”
But newspapers, reports, and journals spanning 200 years, 3 continents and thousands of miles do collectively speak, even if alone we prefer them to remain mute. After hype and hyperbole became their incentive we can take them with a grain of salt and consider the reporter fondled his gin. But an obscure 1792 report and an obscure 1934 report that describe something similar can merit our respect.
Quite a few of the “old buffs” of Bigfoot may recognize some of the early reports that will be used. They should not fear that they are about to delve into just some collection of odd stories. This is not a compilation of interviews, a recycling of overused vignettes passed on uncritically, or a dossier of claims. This is a work of analysis, discovery and prediction. The purpose of this book is to weed out fact from fiction and then retrace the steps and follow the true tracks of Sasquatch, not the garish, fake and make-believe. First we must start at the beginning of the evidence. Then we will do the weeding and then we can follow the track of something that even today has only one truly undeniable and tangible characteristic: a big footprint.
Recasting Bigfoot
A clear picture of the famous 1967 tracks on Blue Creek Mountain overlooking Bluff Creek.. In his early On the Track of the Sasquatch, 1968, Green writes: “They were familiar to me— the same 15-inch print with a split in the ball of the foot that I had first seen 9 years before. . .”
On the Trail of the Sasquatch
Exposing the truth about Bigfoot
