Bigfoot FOUND

Ecologist Robert Michael Pyle argues that most cultures have human-like giants in their folk history: "We have this need for some larger-than-life creature."[9] The indigenous population of the Pacific Northwest had many stories about wild men from the woods that would often come to terrorize the population. The stories differed both regionally and between families in the same community.

Most members of the Lummi would be able to tell a tale about Ts’emekwes, the local version of Bigfoot. The stories were similar to each other in terms of the general descriptions of Ts’emekwes, but details about the creature’s diet and activities differed between the stories of different families.

Some versions contained more devious creatures. The stiyaha or kwi-kwiyai were names for a nocturnal race that children were told not to say lest they hear and come to carry off a person—sometimes to kill him or her. In 1847, Paul Kane reported stories by the native people about skoocooms: a race of cannibalistic wild men living on the peak of Mount St. Helens.

Less menacing versions such as the one recorded by Reverend Elkanah Walker exist. In 1840, Walker, a Protestant missionary, recorded stories of giants among the Native Americans living in Spokane, Washington. The Indians claimed that these giants lived on the peaks of nearby mountains and stole salmon from the fishermen’s nets.

Not all of these creatures were viewed as animals. The skoocooms appear to have been regarded as supernatural, rather than natural.

The local legends were combined together by J. W. Burns in a series of Canadian newspaper articles in the 1920s. Each language had its own name for the local version. Many names meant something along the lines of "wild man" or "hairy man" although other names described common actions it was said to perform (e.g. eating clams). Burns coined the term Sasquatch, which is from the Halkomelem sésquac meaning "wild man", and used it in his articles to describe a hypothetical single type of creature reflected in these various stories. Burns’s articles popularized both the legend and its new name, making it well known in western Canada before it gained popularity in the United States.

Sightings of Bigfoot-like creatures by Europeans begin in the 1830s. However, it was not until the Twentieth Century that Bigfoot became more widely known. In 1929, Burns published an article in Maclean’s, a Canadian magazine. Bigfoot’s popularity continued to climb until major events in the 1950s.

In 1951, Eric Shipton published what he described as a Yeti footprint. Bigfoot’s increasing notoriety through the decade culminated in 1958 when large footprints were found in Humboldt County, California by bulldozer operator Jerry Crew. The story was published in the Humboldt Times along with a photo of Crew holding a cast of one of the footprints. The article’s author, Andrew Genzoli, titled the piece "Bigfoot", after the 16 inches (41 cm) casts. Sasquatch received a new name and gained international attention when the story was picked up by the Associated Press. Ray Wallace was later attributed with making the name-sake footprints by Wallace’s family shortly after his death.