The Day It Began: Bluff Creek in Bigfoot History
Posted by: Loren Coleman on August 3rd, 2007
During this 40th anniversary of the filming of Bigfoot at Bluff Creek (October 20, 1967), I’ll drop in at various points to note some significant milestone dates on the calendar. For today, let’s look at the pivotal date of August 3rd.
The October 1958 tracks of the Bluff Creek’s Bigfoot became famous because Jerry Crew took a cast of one of them into Eureka to show the newspaper. But the 1958 Bigfoot events began in August.
Crew was a new hire that spring with the construction company. The men were getting serious about taking down trees and creating the new roadway into the woods. Crew, a man deeply involved with his family, church, and community activities, would drive home every weekend.
Ten more miles are cut into the forest. The route they are building is angling upward across a face of a mountain. On the 3rd of August 1958, Wilbur Wallace would tell investigators later in the month, that something threw a 700-pound spare tire to the bottom of a deep gully at the Bluff Creek worksite.
On August 22, at quitting time, Jerry Crew is the last to depart. He is a fourth of a mile deeper in the woods than anyone else. He then drives the two-and-a-half hours home to Salyer for the weekend.
When he returns to work on Wednesday, August 27th, Jerry Crew discovers giant manlike footprints around his bulldozer. He is so upset–even though his first thought is that they are someone putting a prank — that he finally decides to tell Wilbur Wallace, the foreman, and brother of the contractor, Ray Wallace.Bigfoot! The True Story of Apes in America, NY: Paraview Pocket – Simon and Schuster, 2003, page 69.
During most Augusts from 1958 throughout the end of the 1960s, routine Bigfoot activity was reported from the Bluff Creek area, the Hoopa Indian Reservation, and in Hoopa Valley, northwest of the little village of Willow Creek, California. What happened in August usually would indicate there would be more sightings in September and October; please see, Bigfoot Casebook Updated for individual sightings.
The entire modern era of Bigfoot allegedly began today in 1958 in a little corner of wilderness in California. The end results would be a new name spread widely by the media in October 1958, and a formidable piece of film in October 1967.
About Loren Coleman
Loren Coleman is one of the world’s leading cryptozoologists, some say “the” leading living cryptozoologist. Certainly, he is acknowledged as the current living American researcher and writer who has most popularized cryptozoology in the late 20th and early 21st centuries.
Starting his fieldwork and investigations in 1960, after traveling and trekking extensively in pursuit of cryptozoological mysteries, Coleman began writing to share his experiences in 1969. An honorary member of Ivan T. Sanderson’s Society for the Investigation of the Unexplained in the 1970s, Coleman has been bestowed with similar honorary memberships of the North Idaho College Cryptozoology Club in 1983, and in subsequent years, that of the British Columbia Scientific Cryptozoology Club, CryptoSafari International, and other international organizations. He was also a Life Member and Benefactor of the International Society of Cryptozoology (now-defunct).
Loren Coleman’s daily blog, as a member of the Cryptomundo Team, served as an ongoing avenue of communication for the ever-growing body of cryptozoo news from 2005 through 2013. He returned as an infrequent contributor beginning Halloween week of 2015.
Coleman is the founder in 2003, and current director of the International Cryptozoology Museum in Portland, Maine.
Weren’t their sightings way before 1958? How can it begin this day in 58 if their are reports years before then? Is what you mean by modern era 58 and after reports?
That sounds very much like the story my dad’s uncle told (which I already told here in a similar report) about how his logging crew took a day to go into town and celebrate the retirement of one of the men. Upon returning to the logging camp they found large footprints, trees pushed over, 50 gal. barrels of fuel thrown against trees (resulting in them breaking) and their brand new CAT tipped on its side. Everything that was “moved” happened to be in the way of the footprint’s direct path thru the campsite. This story is what got me into sasquatch. I knew this man. Though a story teller, this one he had trouble telling and there was no joking about it at all.
Before 1958, of course, there are hundreds of years of traditions and sightings.
In and after 1958, the use of the word “Bigfoot” was employed for the first time by the media, the researchers, and the eyewitnesses universally. This naming has served as an artificial boundary to indicate the “Modern Era” vs the “old one,” full of Sasquatch, Wildmen, Gorilla, Booger, Windigo, and other regionally named creatures that would infrequently appear in journal and articles.
Yes giant footprints would have got my attention too!
Exactly…so now if someone would point out when the ‘blobsquatch’ era began. What a nice ‘coffee table book’ that would make…”Blobsquatch:20 Years Captured in Images”. Amazon.com will be overwhelmed by the response.
Yes, Loren is right. It was the name Bigfoot that changed everything. For the first time, these animals were given a dramatic and media fiendly name.
Same with The Abominable Snowman name in the Himalayas. A catchy name works wonders and automatically gives it more attention than it would have had previously.
Question:
Are there any documented Bigfoot tracks (photos or plaster castings) prior to 1958?
Question: “Are there any documented Bigfoot tracks (photos or plaster castings) prior to 1958?”
Answer: Yes. But they were filed away as “Sasquatch tracks,” of course.
Thanks Loren for the reply.
Could you tell us, in your estimation, what is the best Sasquatch track documented before 1958 by photo or plaster cast?
John Green has a great photo in one of his books of a track from 1947, between Eureka and Cottonwwod, northern California. Looks about 15 inches long.
Thanks Lyndon. Which book does this photo appear in?
While the burden of proof rests with Bigfoot advocates, skeptics recognize that there is a phenomena that is in need of explanation. The best we can do towards this endeavor is construct a plausible chain of events that leads from regional lore (sasquatch) to continental myth (Bigfoot).
I suggest (and can only suggest) that the seminal and founding events (of the Bigfoot story) in the 1950’s were due to the confluence and conflation of the memory of the Ape Canyon incident, Indian lore of the sasquatch, and the stories of the Abominable Snowman from Nepal and other far regions.
You say that a track exists prior to the events of the late 1950’s. This is important because there has been suggestions of hoaxing concerning the Crew events (and any tracks found elsewhere and earlier would aid the advocate’s cause.) However, the date and location of the track you cite (near Eureka, in 1947) does not preclude the possibility of a hoaxed track, given the fact that we do know of hoaxers in that region who said they had been hoaxing tracks for years (prior to the Crew incident). What the skeptic would like is documentation of unmistakable Bigfoot tracks years and years before Crew and in places far away and NOW said to harbor Bigfoot.
I know that Green uses the Chapman track sketch as evidence for Bigfoot prints long before the Crew story, but I’ll leave it to you as to whether this sketch really looks like later Bigfoot prints. (I suppose Green is the pioneer in linking sasquatch lore to “America”s Abominable Snowman” and Bigfoot, although most sasquatch accounts, standing alone, can only be imaginative linked to “America’s Ape”, Bigfoot).
I used to be a “believer” in Bigfoot after reading Sanderson’s accounts. But even then I had a nagging suspicion concerning the tracks. Why an over sized HUMAN print? If this thing was ape-like, like the Yeti, wouldn’t it have, at the least, ape-like feet (similar to Shipton’s “snowman” print)? Or were hoaxers at play, creating “wild man” tracks?
I also suggest that advocates review the history of this mystery themselves to see if it really holds up their belief in a flesh and blood animal. Recently I casually ran across two items of interest that should raise concerns. First, I linked up with an advocate’s site that was touting the idea of Bigfoot in Texas. I’ve lived in Texas all my life and have found this idea rather ridiculous. The site touted the historical event known as the “Wild Woman of the Navidad” as early evidence of Bigfoot in Texas.
Coincidentally, the Dallas Morning News newspaper ran a story last week on the same story (sans Bigfoot) for a “Texas lore” piece. It seems that back in the mid 1830s to the mid 1840s, people living near the Navidad river in Texas reported seeing bare human tracks around farms and ranches. This went on for years, with food stuffs and small farm animals disappearing, apparently in conjunction with finding of bare tracks. No one then thought their neighborhood harbored a giant ape or other inexplicable being. Instead, they sensibly considered the tracks as from orphans or others left homeless from the recent revolution (for Texas independence).
The end result: a naked fellow was finally treed whose feet matched the prints. He was an escaped African slave who had lived in the wild on his own for years.
There was nothing in this story that would compel one to link it to Bigfoot. The tracks were so small, people thought a woman had made them. I grant this: one legendary account had a horseman chase the “wildwoman” and he described her as having body hair. Bigfoot? Not really. He also described her as fully human and with long head hair that reached almost to the ground. (The story may be entirely apocryphal, anyway).
My point: advocates and skeptics alike need to look more closely to pre-1958 Bigfoot events. What can we really find that supports one position or the other. It is an interesting mystery, no matter which side you view it from.