You’ve seen them on bumper stickers and postcards, in movies and TV series, video games, roadside attractions, museums, even in advertising for insurance commercials; an immensely tall, shaggy, slightly hunched, ape-like figure commonly known as Bigfoot or sasquatch.
What started off as a handful of local legends, grew to become a cultural phenomenon here in the Pacific Northwest. Many Bigfoot enthusiasts credit the notorious 1967 “Patterson-Gimlin Film,” for kickstarting this collective obsession, as the short documentary allegedly features the first captured footage of Bigfoot. But before they adorned the bumpers of cars or the logos of social distancing awareness campaigns, sasquatches were the subject of stories specifically tied to Indigenous peoples’ oral storytelling history and traditions. These trickled into the stories of parties involved in the western expansion; reports in Ohio and Pennsylvania newspapers of encountering seven-foot tall, wild, hairy men, according to Cliff Barackman, a Bigfoot field researcher, the host of Animal Planet’s “Finding Bigfoot” TV series and owner of the North American Bigfoot Center in Boring, Oregon.
“Many of these stories actually describe behaviors that weren’t even known in apes until Jane Goodall and Dian Fossey did their pioneering studies in the 1960s and 70s,” Barackman said. “But yet, here we are, in like 1843 and you have a giant, hairy man throwing rocks, and that continued to happen, so eventually they slapped some names on them.”
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