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Post by Melissa Foxworthy on Nov 17, 2007 13:46:37 GMT -5
Sasquatch, Fact or Myth? Cliff Kopas A creature that has dwelt for centuries in the misty lands of fantasy may soon merge from its status as a myth and in stark realism become a monster or even newly discovered type of man. It is the Sasquatch of British Columbia, Canadian near relative of the Abominable Snowman of the Himalayas and first cousin of Mr. Bigfoot of California.
Before white man's coming, the Sasquatch was the subject of Indian mythology and verbal history from Alaska to California. White man's calloused disregard of Indian lore drove many of their mythical creatures into he unknown, to become completely forgotten. The Sasquatch, or to use its Indian name, Boqs, only retreated. Today it is staging a strong comeback, not as a myth, but as a real flesh-and-blood creature.
Observers describe it as a very muscular, man-shaped creature, large-chested, with arms that hang to its knees, about seven feet in height and of tremendous strength. Hunters who search for it refer to it as an ape. It is extraordinary, however, that stories told by natives, illiterate and living thousands of miles apart, give his creature not only the same name but also the same physical characteristics.
A generation ago the Sasquatch was derided, unwanted, refused recognition. To say that you had seen one was to brand yourself as a liar; to believe in them was to put yourself into the idiot class. Today, while skeptics are as voluble as ever, many people are willing to acknowledge the creature might exist. Ivan Sanderson, well known traveler and one of the world's foremost scientists, fiercely champions the thought of its existence. The Sasquatch's Himalayan cousin, the Abominable Snowman has at least risen to the level where fierce discussions on lecture platforms and even in the non-commercial National Geographic Magazine have centered on it. Organized hunts have taken place to establish his whereabouts as well as his very being.
An American oil king has offered virtually a million dollars in rewards and expenses to the man or group that brings in a genuine, indisputable Sasquatch. The search for Sasquatch has gone from California to Quebec, from Harrison Hot Springs to Kitimat and has centered recently into a triangle of British Columbia's rain forest marked out by Bella Coola, Bella Bella and Klemtu. This last area has a big and active Indian population and is as rich in Sasquatch stories as Fort Knox is in gold bricks. Bella Coola advertises as being the home of the Thunderbird, but it could as well be the Sasquatch center of North America. A lucky hunter could get his million-dollar quarry there.
Two years ago (in 1961), then California resident Bob Titmus, who dedicated much of his life to bringing in the Sasquatch out of the land of myths, took Bella Coola's ace Nuxalk grizzly bear guide, Clayton Mack into the forests of the outer islands of the Pacific Coast near Klemtu. Expert trackers both, and keen observers, they made interesting finds.
"The tips of young trees had been broken off about seven feet from the ground and the tender stems eaten," Clayton reported. "Bob Titmus says the same thing was found in Sasquatch country in California. They wrap the broken tip down around the stem as if attempting to hide their tracks. We found hair and tracks too. But no sasquatches. Otherwise we would have been millionaires by now."
He illustrated the one requirement needed to collect the reward for a Sasquatch, dead or alive, but undeniably a Sasquatch. Photos would not be accepted because photos can be faked. Incidentally, the British Columbia government has no regulations against taking sasquatches. Why legislate about something that has not yet been proven to exist?
Clayton Mack, whose workshop is heavily forested, mountainous fiord country of the mid-coast where humans are so scarce that these apes could go long undetected, has a fund of personal and related experiences concerning them.
I think I once saw one in Jacobsen Bay about 20 miles from Bella Coola" he stated. "I was gill netting in there when I saw this thing on the beach standing erect. I thought it was a bear and started my boat directly for it. It watched for a minute or two and then turned and ran into the woods, about ten yards away. It wasn't a bears, because bears will stand up like a man and take a few steps but always they drop and run on all four legs. Just like a rabbit will stand on its hind feet but always uses its four legs for running. It was pretty busy fishing season and I more or less forgot about it until George Olson, manager of Tallheo Fish Cannery said he saw what he first thought was a bear splash through the stream that runs into the same bay. He said the beast looked somewhat like a man with long arms and heavy chest and ran stooped over. He concluded it must be something else than a bear because it ran on its hind feet, not on all fours.
Olsen and Mack are alike in several respects. Both know the appearance and habits of bears and when they say something isn't a bear, it isn't! And neither have any desire to promote the Sasquatch idea. Neither have anything to gain by it.
How could a creature that didn't exist leave tracks for hundred of people to see?A few miles from Jacobsen Bay, George Tallheo shot a hairy monster that looked like a Sasquatch, but fear spiced with superstition cause him to leave without investigation. Two years ago, a boatload of basketball players anchored during a storm a few miles from Jacobsen Bay and heard the high pitched whinnying call attributed to Sasquatches. One of the original and best known haunts of Sasquatches is the Harrison Lake area, near Hope British Columbia and it was there in 1941 that a Sasquatch appeared at the home of an Indian family, the Chapmans, in the middle of the afternoon. The father, working on the railroad was absent. Mother and children fled. Enough people saw the tracks and other evidence left by the beast that there could be no doubt about its visit. How could a creature that didn't exist leave tracks for hundred of people to see?
Many sightings have occurred throughout the province, but one that carries with it the greatest clarity and continued observation was made at Tete Jaune Cache, five or six hundred miles distant from Harrison Lake by William Roe on an afternoon off from a road building job. He had this large powerful creature actually in his rifle sights but desisted from shooting because it was so human like. The creature approached to within twenty feet of him and in his statement, made under oath, he gives very detailed descriptions of the beast. He describes the way it plucked the vegetation it was eating, noted its even teeth and the look of surprise and dismay on its face when it discovered, him.
At Bella Bella, on the island fringe of the west of the continent, the tracks of a family of Sasquatches were seen on the muddy beach of the village's water supply lake, and every night tools used by pipe-line workers were tossed about by prowlers who left large tracks. In Gun-Boat Passage, one of the approaches to Bella Bella, a Sasquatch was intercepted on a beach and at Klemtu some more of the creatures have been met face to face while clam digging on the beaches. The Bella Coola Indians had a dance called the "Boqs dance" which portrayed the Sasquatch shielding his face from the squirting of the seawater from the clams.
At Bella Coola, in the early spring of 1962, a young Indian Mother went to retrieve her two children, 5 & 7 years old from the river bank on which is built the twin Indian and white Villages of Bella Coola. She saw her children watching something on a gravel bar very intently and following their gaze she saw a creature covered with yellowish brown hair, standing upright and holding a junior specimen by one hand (a young Sasquatch). For a moment the two groups looked at each other intently, then each mother gathered her young and fled, each running upright from each other.
Asked months later why she did not report this so that people might investigate, the human mother said, "People would say I was lying or had gone crazy."
Early in the fall of 1962 Harry Squiness was camped in a hay meadow, with his family at Anahim Lake, 90 miles east of Bella Coola. During a bright moonlit night, he heard a disturbance and taking up his shotgun, stepped out of his tent to investigate. He saw two big ape-like creatures and three small ones. Since he had but three shotgun shells, not very effective except at point blank range, he kept very quiet and watched the strange beats skulk away. Next morning, looking at the tracks, and seeing where the hand of one of the creatures had skinned a small poplar tree about 8 feet from the ground, Harry decided to move camp and never returned.
Forty or fifty miles down at Dean River, which flows out of Anahim Lake, Frank Sill, another hay-maker, picketed his horse a thousand pound animal in the closest meadow. In the morning he found it, not where he had left it staked, but hanging in a tree, so high that only the tip of one hind hoof touched the ground. Its neck was broken but there were no signs of torn flesh. It would seem possible that the horse, frightened, ran to the end of its picket rope, then fell on its head and broke its neck as the rope brought it up short. How it got trussed up in the tree at the edge of the meadow is anyone's guess, but it was a task taking great physical strength. Huge footprints were found near there. Like Squiness, Frank Still suddenly didn't like the scenery in that part of the country.
But there are no stories of Sasquatch savagery, except one from Kitimat, B. C., and that incident, in which a Kitimat Indian of two generations ago had shot one of the beasts. Others seemed to threaten to attack him while he was trying to drag the body out. When he fled to the beach and his canoe, they did not follow. Stories consistently pain them as shy, very strong, very keen of sight and of hearing and in some cases endowed with a sense of inquiry that leads them to move tools and other human products about. But never any shadow of savagery is related and all stories show the animal as vegetarian and an eater of shellfish.
Whatever else he might be revealed as, he is now the most challenging of quarries. For the scientists who find him in flesh and blood it would be the answer to a tremendous riddle and a door opening to another field of study. To the Indians (The First Nation Canadians), he is a supernatural creature returning in the flesh. But to someone who is smart enough, brave enough and lucky enough, he could be the way to gaining million of dollars.
British Columbia Digest, October 1963.
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