Taku-He and Cows in South Dakota

On this date, September 7th, in 1974, a calf was found mutilated in Pierce County, Nebraska. The blood had been drained from the animal and the sexual organs removed.

The day before, on September 6, 1974, near Jefferson, South Dakota, Jim Douglas saw a very tall, sandy Bigfoot dragging a red furry object through an alfalfa field. The Bigfoot stood and watched Douglas.

Three years later, during mid-September 1977, near Little Eagle, South Dakota, Chris Howiatow and others said a “big ape” watched them from a hillside as they checked cattle. The Bigfoot then ran into the brush as the men approached.

This Little Eagle encounter was near the beginning of three full months of Taku-He (the local name for Sasquatch) sightings, at least 25 in total, in that area of South Dakota, and elsewhere on the Standing Rock Reservation.

Little Eagle, in Corson County, South Dakota, was a community of about 300 people in 1977, with 99% of the population being Native Americans. The entire county lies within the Standing Rock Indian Reservation, which is the home of Dakota and Lakota people.

The Taku-He sightings were typically lowkey, such as the two by Phoebe Little Dog who saw a Bigfoot in a cattle pasture on October 6th and then again in the same one on October 13th, 1977, north of Little Eagle. The Taku-He encounters were reported by many locals, including several by police officers Verdell Veo, Bobby Gates, Selvin Arlen and others. The Bigfoot events at Little Eagle continued until the 5th of December 1977.

The Little Eagle “flap” was covered extensively in the media, with articles about the incidents appearing in the national news magazines, Time and Newsweek, for example. This year is the 30th anniversary of these events.

Meanwhile, in North Dakota, in mid-September 1977, near Cannonball River, Paul Monzelowsky and his son chased a 8-9-ft Bigfoot, using their pickup truck. The Bigfoot ran “as fast as a horse” and leapt across a creek.

Sources: Richard Hall, Zetetic Scholar, p. 49, case 6. Janet and Colin Bord, “Chronological List of Bigfoot Sightings (1818-1980)” in The Bigfoot Casebook Updated. Mark A. Hall, “Contemporary Stories of ‘Taku-He’ or ‘Bigfoot ‘ in South Dakota as Drawn from Newspaper Accounts,” The Minnesota Archaeologist 37(2): 63-78 (May 1978).

Loren Coleman 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.

Email • Facebook • Twitter •