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Overview
With Bigfoot, Joshua Blu Buhs traces the wild and wooly story of America’s favorite homegrown monster. He begins with nineteenth-century accounts of wildmen roaming the forests of America, treks to the Himalayas to reckon with the Abominable Snowman, then takes us to northern California in 1958, when reports of a hairy hominid loping through remote woodlands marked Bigfoot’s emergence as a modern marvel. Buhs delves deeply into the trove of lore and misinformation that has sprung up around Bigfoot in the ensuing half century. We meet charlatans, pseudo-scientists, and dedicated hunters of the beast—and with Buhs as our guide, the focus is always less on evaluating their claims than on understanding why Bigfoot has inspired all this drama and devotion in the first place. What does our fascination with this monster say about our modern relationship to wilderness, individuality, class, consumerism, and the media?
Writing with a scientist’s skepticism but an enthusiast’s deep engagement, Buhs invests the story of Bigfoot with the detail and power of a novel, offering the definitive take on this elusive beast.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780226079790 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Chicago Press |
| Publication date: | 05/15/2009 |
| Pages: | 296 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.30(w) x 9.10(h) x 1.10(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Bigfoot
The Life and Times of a LegendBy Joshua Blu Buhs
University of Chicago Press
Copyright © 2009 Joshua Blu BuhsAll right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-226-07979-0
Chapter One
WildmenRobert Hatfield heard the dogs howling. At least that's what he claimed later. Hatfield was a logger, down from Crescent City, in the far northwestern corner of California, visiting his sister and brother-in-law at Fort Bragg, along the coast. It was Wednesday night, February 7, 1962. Hatfield went outside to see what was bothering the dogs. He saw a huge creature, a beast, Hatfield said, "much bigger than a bear, covered with fur, with a flat, hairless face and perfectly round eyes." It stood "chest and shoulders above a six-foot-high fence." Hatfield went back into the house and woke Bud Jenkins, his brother-in-law, telling him to come out and see the largest bear he'd ever see.
When Jenkins and Hatfield returned to the yard, the beast was no longer there. Jenkins went back inside to get his gun; Hatfield started scouting. He rounded the corner of the house-and bumped into the beast. It knocked him down so hard that his arm and shoulders were "sore for the next three days." Hatfield scrambled back inside, yelling a warning to Jenkins: there was a "half-man, half-beast" monster after them! Once Hatfield was in the house, he and Bud tried to slam the door shut, but the beast caught it and pushed back. "Let it in andI'll get it!" Jenkins shouted, holding his shotgun. The two men let go, but before Jenkins could fire off a round, the beast turned and left. Good thing-it turned out the gun wasn't loaded.
The sheriff's department came out to investigate the disturbance. There were few clues. A bad odor wafted heavily in the air. There was also a muddy handprint on the door, eleven-and-a-half inches long with stubby fingers. Journalists for the local Santa Rosa Press-Democrat did some probing into the matter, too. And six Fort Bragg men formed a hunting party. For the past several years, newspapers had been reporting on a monstrous, manlike beast said to range from British Columbia down into northern California. It was called Bigfoot. Four of the men in the hunting party were convinced that Hatfield and the Jenkinses had seen Bigfoot. As evidence, they pointed to broken branches along a path about a mile from the Jenkinses' property, some tracks, and some dung. The two other members of the party were skeptics. The branches proved nothing, they said; deer could have broken them. Bears could have made the tracks. The dung was horse manure-indeed, the whole matter seemed to be not much more than manure. Maybe that accounted for the lingering odor.
The newspaper reports caught the eye of Hector Lee at nearby Sonoma State College. Lee was an important folklorist, having done seminal work on Mormon folktales, and was building an archive of California folklore. Apparently he had not paid any attention to Bigfoot prior to the creature being sighted in Mendocino County. But now he started gathering information about the beast. It was part of a small spurt of interest in Bigfoot among folklorists and those interested in folklore. Unlike the sheriffs, journalists, or hunters, the folklorists were not interested in whether Hatfield actually saw a half-man, half-beast monster. Most likely, Hatfield saw no such thing, but that didn't mean his stories, and other tales about the creature, weren't important, or didn't reveal something about the human condition.
That is the main contention of this book. Maybe there is no Bigfoot walking the forests of the American Pacific Northwest, but the creature is still real-it is part of the American cultural landscape, something about which people can, and do, talk, something that most everyone recognizes and knows. Understanding the monster helps to explain some of twentieth-century America. Tracing the creature's fortunes as it passed through America in the second half of the twentieth century sheds light on how knowledge moves through society, on the intersection of class, technology, science, and belief. It is a worthy reason to write a biography of a legend, a way of showing that what seems trivial and ridiculous is not.
Wildmen through History
As the folklorist Bacil Kirtley pointed out a few years after Hatfield's night of terror, Bigfoot is a contemporary example of a well-known folkloric character, the wildman-a hairy, sometimes giant, humanlike beast that lives on the outskirts of civilization. If wildmen are not a universal myth, then they are close. Peoples as diverse as the Maya, English, Chinese, and Melanesians have stories about them. The Epic of Gilgamesh, one of the first written documents-it dates to almost two thousand years before the birth of Christ-features Enkidu, a wildman with "hair that sprouted like grain." Enkidu ate with the gazelles, drank at a watering hole with other animals, and protected beasts from hunters. Genesis 6:4 says, "The giants were on the earth in those days-and also afterward-when the sons of God went to the daughters of men and had children by them. They were the heroes of old, men of renown." Esau, Jacob's brother, was a hairy hunter. The ancient Greeks' fervid imaginations populated the earth with all sorts of wildmen and wildwomen: Amazons and centaurs and cyclopes and fauns and giants and mænads and satyrs and sileni and titans. For modern readers the most famous wildman-although long since domesticated-is Santa Claus: hairy and strange, often depicted garlanded in holly and other vegetation, he visits civilization only around the winter solstice, bringing punishment, reward, and the promise that the days will lengthen again.
Throughout history, stories about wildmen have provided a way of thinking about what it means to be human: the contradictions, difficulties, limits, and the glorious wonder of it all. Sometimes, wildmen were stand-ins for other, distant-strange and frightening-peoples. In his Natural History, the Roman writer Pliny the Elder claimed that a number of monstrous races wandered across the world. He wrote about tribes of people with hairy tails, with dog heads, with horse hooves. Bestiaries after Pliny's Natural History continued to include wildmen, all the way through the works of Carl von Linné, who wrote what are considered to be the first scientific taxonomies. Wildmen could be disgusting, cannibals or man-eaters, the things that the civilized defined themselves against. They were, at times, interpreted as signs of God's wrath: their horrible disfigurement was a warning of what would happen should God withdraw His blessing. They were also proof of God's magnificence or nature's munificence: that the world was filled with every possible form of life, every gap between different kinds of creatures filled by some beast. Some wildmen were thought to have special faculties, abilities lost to civilized humans: the power to command animals, to call up winds and storms, to survive without society. In some myths, the wizard Merlin was a wildman.
For many centuries, learned Europeans took reports of such creatures seriously. As explorers extended the boundaries of the known, tramping through terra incognita, they found bizarre creatures-the platypus with its crazy-quilt patchwork of bird, reptile, and mammalian parts was probably the most notorious-and among these wonders were wildmen. Orangutans were discovered in Southeast Asia-the name literally means "man of the forest"-and chimpanzees in Africa. Other peoples were sometimes classified as wildmen-Native Americans, for instance, forcing the Pope to decree that they were, indeed, full-fledged humans, children of God. During the Renaissance, savants were drawn to the cases of feral children, boys and girls raised by animals or who otherwise grew up in isolation and so were wild.
Over time, belief in wildmen fell into disfavor. The ones that had been found were less than advertised; upon inspection, they could be classified as either human or animal, not something in between. And the great majority of the monstrous races that had been cataloged in old bestiaries did not exist. One thirteenth-century European visitor to the Tartars, for example, remarked, "I asked about the monsters, or monstrous men, about which Pliny and Solinus wrote. They told me they had never seen such creatures, which led me to wonder greatly if it were true." There were no dog-headed men, no humans with eyes in their chests, none with hooves.
By the nineteenth century, the category of wildmen had been carved up by various scientific disciplines and explained away. After Linné, bestiaries no longer included wildmen; taxonomists asserted that the globe housed no more wildmen than those apes already cataloged. Physiologists demonstrated that it was impossible for a race of giant humans ever to have existed and offered naturalistic explanations for oddities such as people who were covered entirely with hair. Geologists and evolutionists pushed wildmen into the past, making them into humanity's ancestors, rather than neighbors: they once had existed, but no longer did. Sigmund Freud built on this evolutionary idea and also twisted it, so that wildmen still existed, but only inside the human psyche. The wildman was the residue of our evolutionary past, the animalistic, untamed, uncivilized part of us. "In modern times," wrote the scholar Hayden White, "the notion of a 'wild man' has become almost exclusively a psychological category rather than an anthropological one." Continued reports of wildmen were dismissed as superstitions of the ignorant or as mid-identifications.
What-Is-It
Just because science banished wildmen from nature did not mean that interest in the monsters ended. In the United States and elsewhere, fascination with wildmen continued throughout the nineteenth century-maybe in part because of the hardening opinion among scientists that such creatures did not exist: official denunciations made the creatures seem rare and wonderful and uncanny. Literature was rife with wildmen, from Sir Walter Scott's Wandering Willie to Tarzan the Ape Man. Newspapers, too, were filled with reports of wildmen haunting the darkness beyond the edge of town. At circuses, audiences paid their pennies to gawk at geeks, wildmen so savage that they ate live animals. The actor Hervey Leech made something of a career playing apes and baboons in theatrical performances. P. T. Barnum brought a wildman to London in 1846; it was supposed to have been captured in the "wilds of California," where it had been living with a tribe of Indians. The wildman growled and, like any good geek, ate disgusting things-in this case, raw meat.
In 1869 came a report that the petrified body of a giant had been found in Cardiff, New York, proof that the Bible was right, physiologists wrong: that there had indeed been giants in those days. A journalist reporting on the stream of visitors to the Cardiff giant "noticed on the faces of all a momentary spasm of awe, a short involuntary holding of breath, as their gaze fell upon what they firmly believed to be the stony remains of an American Goliath." That same year Mark Twain published a mock-interview with a wildman for the Buffalo Express. "There has been so much talk about the mysterious 'wild man' out there in the West for some time, that I finally felt it was my duty to go out and interview him," he wrote. "I felt that the story of his life must be a sad one-a story of suffering, disappointment, and exile-a story of man's inhumanity to man in some shape or other-and I longed to persuade the secret from him." Barnum re-created his wildman exhibit in the 1860s, claiming this time that the creature had been captured in Africa, and again in the 1870s. In the mid-1880s he also began displaying Krao the Human Monkey and Jo-Jo the Dog-Faced Boy, a man with a rare condition known as hypertrichosis but who was rumored to be the offspring of a Russian woman and a bear-a real, live wildman.
Although these wildmen were associated with leisure-time entertainments, they provoked serious questions about what it meant to be human, to be civilized. These were questions much on the mind of Americans during the middle of the nineteenth century-after the publication of Charles Darwin's Origin of Species blurred the line between humans and beasts and as America first teetered on the brink of civil war, and then fell into it, in large part because of questions about the humanity of blacks. "What-Is-It," Barnum titled his second wildman exhibit, daring his audience to grapple with the thorny scientific and political issues of the day. Some whispered that the wildman was "an advanced chimpanzee," others that it resulted from a "cross between a nigger and a baboon." Deciding exactly what was on the stage, where the line was drawn between human and animal, between white and black, was important, desperately so, to understanding how the social order should be built, the morality that should be instilled.
Others who came out to see Barnum's What-Is-It were convinced that the series of so-called wildmen were just actors in costume. Of course, they were correct. Barnum's first What-Is-It display lasted less than half an hour, ending when a competitor recognized the wildman as Hervey Leech dressed in a hair shirt, his skin stained. According to one report, the rival entered the cage, stripped the shirt from Leech, and offered to buy him a cooked steak, enough of that raw meat. And what was true of Barnum's exhibits applied to all the wildmen of the day. The Cardiff giant was the invention of George Hull, a tobacconist who wanted to expose the gullibility of Christians and so bought Montana rock, employed Chicago sculptors to carve a giant from it, weathered the statue himself with water and sand, then secretly shipped the humbug to an in-law's property. Louis T. Stone, a journalist, fabricated the adventures of a wildman for his newspaper in Connecticut; H. L. Mencken did, too, when he was city editor of the Baltimore Herald, inventing new reports every Sunday for a month, piquing the curiosity of his readers and giving himself something to write about on slow nights. Twain admitted at the end of his article that the wildman was only a "sensation"-something to stir up interest and sell papers, not something real.
Fakery, though, did not detract from the displays and news stories-quite the opposite. Barnum noted, "The public appears disposed to be amused even when they are conscious of being deceived." He shrugged off his exposure in London, going on to become the most famous man in nineteenth-century America (his biography was likely the second-most-read book, behind only the Bible). Twain and Mencken also went on to fame and fortune. The possibility-the near certainty-that the wildmen were frauds was one of the reasons that they were so popular. Humbuggery raised a whole other set of pressing questions, as serious and important in their way as the questions about the morality of slavery and the limits of human nature.
In the second third of the nineteenth century, the American middle class became acutely concerned with fraud and authenticity. The country was growing, its economy switching from agrarian to industrial. Everyday transactions were increasingly conducted between strangers-raising the specter of fraud since personal reputations no longer warrantied goods-and new technologies made possible the creation of fake things: furniture that looked as though it were from the colonial period, pictures that seemed to reproduce moments otherwise lost to time. For the American middle class, these anxieties were exacerbated by their own rise to respectability. Nineteenth-century America valorized self-made men, Horatio Algers who lifted themselves up by their own bootstraps. The problem with self-made men, though, was that they lacked the traditional measures of refinement-learned manners, old money, reputable family names-and so the line between a respectable man and a con man was vanishingly thin. Nineteenth-century wildmen, the geeks, What-Is-Its, and petrified giants played on these anxieties. It was a time when the very notion of reality seemed to warp and become unmoored, when determining truth was difficult, if not impossible, when superstition could become science and science come to seem nothing more than the barking of a carnie: What is it? What is it? What is it?
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Bigfoot by Joshua Blu Buhs Copyright © 2009 by Joshua Blu Buhs. Excerpted by permission.
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Table of Contents
PrefaceDramatis Personae
1 Wildmen
Wildmen through History
What-Is-It
The Abominable Snowman
The Life and Times of Bigfoot
2 Yeti: 1951–1959
Sensation
The Yeti, Science, and Zadig’s Method
Britain Hunts the Yeti
America Hunts the Yeti
What the Evidence Told
3 Sasquatch: 1929–1958
The Great Sasquatch Hunt
The Kidnapping of Albert Ostman
“Occam’s Razor Cuts on the Side of the Sasquatch”
Slick Eyes the Sasquatch
4 Big Foot: 1958
The Folkloric Origins of Bigfoot
Big Foot Makes the Papers
The Confirmed and Converted Confront Bigfoot
Humbug!
“Maybe Bigfoot is Lost Relative of Old ‘Sasquatch’”
5 ABSMery: 1959–1961
The (Weird, Wacky) Wonderful World of Ivan T. Sanderson
ABSMery
The Pacific Northwest Expedition
Enter Peter Byrne
The Wipe: Or True’s Trouble with Truth, and Ivan Sanderson’s
6 Melting the Snowman: 1961–1967
Melting the Snowman
Sanderson’s Failed Debunking of the Debunking
The Quiet Years
Big Foot Daze
7 The Return of Bigfoot: 1967–1980
Bigfoot Filmed!
Making Sense of the Movie
The Return of Bigfoot
Bozo, the Minnesota Iceman
Bigfoot on Tour
The Secret of Sasquatch
8 A Contest for Dignity: 1969–1977
The Bigfoot Community
Cripplefoot
The Center that Wasn’t
Hoaxing, the Unconquerable Problem
The Laugher Curtain
9 Cryptozoology: 1978–1990
Grover Krantz, Sasquatch Scientist
Anthropology of the Unknown
Cryptozoology
Science Police
“Definitive Proof”
Arrested by the Science Police
10 The Death of Bigfoot? 1980–2002
The Green Man
The Death of Bigfoot
“The Most Abominable Hoaxer”
Bigfoot is Dead! Long Live Bigfoot!
Not The End, but An End
Curse of the Sasquatch
Bibliography
Archival Collections
Select Bibliography
Index