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''Sasquatch Is Real!'' Forest Love Slave Tells All! (Cont.)
Prospectors, fur trappers, hunters, and farmers continued to report sightings of hairy creatures throughout the Pacific Northwest for the next century. In July 1924, a group of miners reportedly waged a battle with a gang of enraged "mountain gorillas" while prospecting a claim near Mount St. Helens. One of the miners had shot a 'squatch earlier in the day (somehow the body disappeared, of course), and apparently his relatives came looking for payback.
The modern Bigfoot era debuted in October 1958, when Jerry Crew walked into the Eureka, California, office of The Humboldt Times carrying a giant plaster footprint. Crew, a bulldozer operator, had been clearing a road through a forest in the remote Bluff Creek Valley, a few miles north of the Klamath River. For weeks he and his coworkers had found 16-inch-long, seven-inch-wide prints every morning in the freshly graded dirt. The Associated Press picked up the story and sent it out on the national wire, noting that Crew's fellow construction crew members had coined a new nickname for Sasquatch: "Bigfoot." Up to this point Sasquatch had adhered to the accepted order of discovery: Native stories, explorers' tales—now a report of contemporary tracks. But then things began to go awry. In terms of scientific credibility, Jerry Crew wasn't exactly Louis Leakey. And his evidence, while compelling, wasn't physical—it was not a bone, a skull, or a body. When you came right down to it, all he held in his arms was an absence of dirt. It took a pair of cowboys to bring home the goods—and unwittingly destroy whatever shred of scientific probity still clung to the search. Roger Patterson and Bob Gimlin had met on the rodeo circuit. Both were fair-to-middling riders who scratched out a living around Yakima, Washington. Patterson's Bigfoot obsession grew out of his reading of noted cryptozoologist Ivan Sanderson's 1959 True magazine article "The Strange Story of America's Abominable Snowman." "He'd talk about it around the campfire," Gimlin recalled in a 1978 interview with Peter Byrne. "I didn't care, but after a time you find yourself looking for the doggone thing, too." Though Gimlin, then 36, remained a Type C skeptic, he gamely accompanied the 34-year-old Patterson on Sasquatch forays around southwestern Washington. In October 1967, Patterson heard that fresh tracks had been found near the site of Jerry Crew's original discovery at Bluff Creek. He and Gimlin loaded their horses into a truck and road-tripped to northern California. A week or so into their search they found what they were looking for. You know the clip. Tall gorilla. Long arms. Creekside lope. Stay-away-from-my-shit glare. Late-sixties Kodachrome color scheme. Eager to get scientific confirmation of the evidence, Patterson enlisted the help of John Green and screened the film for a number of experts—to no avail. The director of a primate research center in Oregon was troubled by the appearance of hair on the animal's breasts, and a naturalist at the British Columbia Provincial Museum thought the crested skull was all wrong. But the most crushing blow came from John Napier, a well-known author on early man and director of the Smithsonian Institution's primate biology program. Although he remained open to the possibility of Sasquatch's existence—"Too many people claim to have seen it or at least to have seen footprints to dismiss its reality out of hand," he wrote—Napier also found inconsistencies in the animal's anatomy and movement. "There is little doubt," he added, "that the scientific evidence taken collectively points to a hoax of some kind." In 1968, spurned by the scientific establishment, Patterson took his message to the masses. After padding his 59.5 seconds of footage with supporting "documentary evidence" (film shot at Bluff Creek before and after the encounter, plaster footprints cast at the site), Patterson embarked on a barnstorming tour of the American West, renting small theaters for one-night stands that combined the cheap thrill of a circus sideshow with the marketing instincts of ski-movie king Warren Miller. Patterson's crusade was cut short when he died, nearly broke, of Hodgkin's disease in 1972, but he bestowed upon his creature an eternal afterlife of controversy, feverish speculation, and kitsch, from hyperventilating episodes of In Search Of... to that classic of white-trash car accessories, the Bigfoot gas pedal. Even the Patterson skeptics have their own dubious lore. One of the most pervasive theories is that Patterson colluded with Planet of the Apes makeup artist John Chambers. Like most conspiracy theories, this one contains delicious bits of plausibility, such as the fact that production on the original film wrapped on August 10, 1967—ten weeks before Patterson's encounter—leaving Chambers with surplus ape suits and a window of opportunity. There are logical flaws, though: The Bigfoot in Patterson's film (subsequently dubbed "Patty") looks nothing like a simian Roddy McDowall, and one wonders why the makeup artist would hook up with a nickel-and-dime horse tender. Chambers periodically denied the story, but the tale lives on.
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