The First Bigfoot Sighting Was a Set of Footprints

On the morning of 27 August 1958, a bulldozer operator named Jerry Crew arrived at a logging road under construction near Bluff Creek, in the mountains of northern California, and found footprints in the mud around his machine.

They were sixteen inches long. They were pressed deep. They walked upright through the site and away into the trees.

Crew was not a man with a story to sell. Photographs taken that autumn show a broad-chested logger in heavy glasses, holding a plaster cast beside his face for scale, looking faintly embarrassed to be holding it at all. That is most of the reason the story travelled.

The word arrives

Crew's colleagues had been finding similar tracks around Wallace Brothers worksites for weeks. Tools went missing. A heavy steel cable was dragged uphill and abandoned. The men started calling whatever was responsible Big Foot — two words, a job-site nickname, nothing more.

Crew asked a friend to help him cast one of the prints, and took the cast to the offices of the Humboldt Times in Eureka. A columnist there, Andrew Genzoli, had already mentioned the tracks once in September, half-joking that the county might have a relative of the Abominable Snowman. In early October he ran the photograph of Crew and his cast, and closed the loggers' two words into one.

The Associated Press picked it up. Within days the story was in papers across the country, and a word that had been shop-floor slang in one Californian county became the name of a creature.

Genzoli said afterwards he had simply thought it made a good Sunday morning story.

The postscript, forty-four years later

Ray Wallace, co-owner of the logging company and brother of Crew's foreman, was a locally famous prankster. When the tracks appeared, plenty of people in Humboldt County assumed he was behind them. He denied it for the rest of his life.

He died in 2002. His family then produced a pair of carved wooden feet, sixteen inches long, and said he had used them to make the prints around Jerry Crew's bulldozer. The trick was not even original — Wallace had taken it from a Washington hoaxer of the 1930s.

Crew himself appears to have been straightforwardly taken in, which is its own small tragedy. The most famous photograph in the history of the subject is a sincere man holding a cast of his employer's joke.

What the name was put on top of

None of that makes the idea new. It makes the word new.

Accounts of large, upright, hair-covered figures in the forests of the Pacific Northwest long predate 1958, and many of them are not American folklore at all. The word Sasquatch is an anglicisation of Sasq'ets, from the Halkomelem language of the Sts'ailes people of British Columbia — a specific being in a specific nation's tradition, borrowed into English in the 1920s and gradually flattened into a synonym.

That flattening is worth resisting. The Sts'ailes Sasq'ets, the Salish accounts, and a mid-century logging camp's nickname for a prankster with wooden feet are not the same thing, and treating them as one story does a disservice to the oldest part of it.

What happened in 1958 was that America found a word it liked. Everything since — the searches, the museums, the film shot nine years later a few miles from the same creek — has been hung on that word.

Going there

Bluff Creek is remote, on unpaved forest roads, and there is nothing at the site to see. The town that made itself the front door to all of this is Willow Creek, forty miles south, where the Bigfoot Daze festival still runs every September.