Where Bigfoot Walks

by Robert Michael Pyle

  The Forest Plan says “the supply of berry fields is endless,” yet admits there is likely to be increasing competition. And while it is true that “huckleberries grow well in disturbed and burned areas,” not all forms of disturbance promote their fruiting. Herbicides, for example, used in many forestry operations, do not help. Recalling that Northwest timber interests once referred to the forests themselves as “endless,” I would regard that term with circumspection if I were a Yakama. But then, if I were a Yakama, I would take everything the whites say with plenty of salt and keep my potential interfaces to a minimum.

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  Six months before Kamaiakun signed his treaty, Sealth had done the same for the Duwamish. Kamaiakun got five hundred dollars a year, a comfortable house, and ten plowed acres to be the go-between for his confederated bands and the government. Sealth (Seattle) got a city, a statue, and a famous eco-speech that he might or might not have uttered in some form or other. Eventually Seattle became a metropolis where American Indians make up the poorest minority. The Yakamas, though deprived of their salmon by dams and jailed when they tried to carry out the terms of the treaty, at least retain a substantial land base, berries and all. Also it is difficult to find a Duwamish Indian with any direct knowledge of Bigfoot, while the Yakamas, though reluctant to talk with prying whites, retain a rich Bigfoot tradition.

  Marlene Simla is the great-granddaughter of Chief Spencer of the Klickitats. Now a Yakama child welfare specialist who works for a tribal agency called Nak-Nu-We-Sha (“we care”), she shared with me the story of Bigfoot as child-minder on Potato Hill’s berry fields. Marlene knew two old stories of abduction. In the first a long-strided giant put pitch over a girl’s eyes to take her away. Another time a baby on a cradleboard was said to have been taken at Potato Hill while her mother gathered berries. This tale has long been used to keep children from straying. The time came when Marlene told the story to her own children while berrying at Potato Hill. (Chief Lelooska says that these days the threat of Bigfoot is used to mediate squabbles over the TV.)

  A friend of Marlene’s, Mary Schlick, is a student of basketry who has her own Potato Hill story. When her husband worked for the BIA, she lived on reservations, and her enthusiasm for basketry began with dogbane-fiber hats made by the Warm Springs weavers. Then she discovered cornhusk bags made with dogbane and hop strings (but not cornhusks). One fall at Toppenish in the Yakama Nation, having missed the berry season, Mary “traded” dollars for a gallon of huckleberries. They had been picked on Potato Hill by Gracie Ambrose, and they came not in the usual ice cream container but in a beautiful coiled, step-design berry basket made of cedar bark and beargrass. Gracie told her to save the leaves and take them back to the berry fields so the harvest would be good the next year.

  The First People respected many such traditions in their use of olallie. When the berries ripened, no family was to eat them until one designated house held the “first feast”—a ceremony with counterparts in the salmon harvest and other foods. Many names have to do with berries. According to Seattle anthropologist Eugene Hunn, writing in A Columbia River Reader, Indian Heaven was once known as ayan-as, or lovage place, for a medicinal root that could be gathered there. The Klickitats camped at pswawas-waakul (sawlike), now the Sawtooth Berry Fields. “All gathered,” Hunn wrote, “to socialize, trade, and race horses at Kalamat, ‘yellow pond-lily,’” a broad meadow astride the Klickitat Trail. These organic names evoke the folds and patterns in the blanket of the land. It is good to know that our own language can do better than “potentially interface with National Forest management.” In fact it was on a national-forest nature trail in Vermont where I found Robert Frost’s description of wild blueberries whose “blue’s but a mist from the breath of the wind.”

  As I dropped off the bushy heights toward Cultus Creek, I thought of the importance these high ghost-moth heaths have had in the lives of the native peoples. And I thought of how the “city Indians,” as my friends from the Saddle called themselves, even if they come back for berries, have lost touch with the giant hairy Indians. Later, when I read Jorg Totsgi’s account of the Seeahtlk of Ape Canyon, I was struck by the name’s similarity to Seattle, or Sealth, also spelled See-alt, See-ualt, See-yat, and Se-at-tlh. Is it possible, I wondered, that the Emerald City, through its native namesake, actually honors Sasquatch?

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  The berry-field campgrounds I’d thought of using were all designated for Indians, and my English-Scots/Irish-German genes vastly outweigh my little scrap of Algonkian, so I went on to the Forest Service’s big Cultus Creek Campground, which was empty. I took a pleasant site in a fir grove beside rustling Cultus Creek. When night came, it was all stars; there was no need for my tent. I fell asleep quickly but had only a light night’s rest, with small animals mothing frequently about my head and a nightmare in which I was carried away by Bigfoot. The sound of the stream was in it, the only such dream I’ve ever had. I cried out, waking myself up. As I lay stretching my stiff legs, with deer mice dancing on my bag, I ran through the various stories I’d read of Bigfoot abductions. With a few notable exceptions, the victims have been females, which accords with the Indians’ stories of Seeahtlks occasionally making off with their women. In that case I had little to worry about.

  But the stars had shifted, and as I watched them and waited for either sleep or dawn, I couldn’t help but think about the stories. How rich the Native American storehouse of Seeahtlk traditions! Few of them are found in books, since their owners are seldom willing to share the tales with Bigfoot investigators, after generations of exploitation by ethnologists, as they see it. I recalled my good fortune in hearing a dramatic and heretofore unpublished story of an encounter with Bigfoot.

  The previous spring I had led staff and board members of the Portland-based Ecotrust, an organization devoted to conservation of the temperate rain forest, on an outing into an old-growth cedar reservation. After days of meetings, words, documents, and figures, the conservationists were eager to get out of doors to see something of the resource they were laboring to protect. I guided them up a closed logging road, then into the deep duff of the cedar wood, where giant candelabras of western red cedars punctured the forest roof and moss padded the floor. For a while we dispersed among fluted trunks as big around as redwoods, losing ourselves among their quiet mass.

  On the way back out I found myself walking with Gerald Amos, a former chief of the Haisla Nation of coastal British Columbia. The Kitimaat Haisla were working with Ecotrust to protect the watershed of the Kitlope River, which they call Husduwachsdu. Kitlope, Tsimshian for “people of the rocks,” embraces the greatest remaining Canadian rain forest. When the subject of Bigfoot came up, Gerald told me a remarkable story from his village. Later Alan Hall, grandson of the original teller, Billy Hall, recounted the story in more detail. I have his permission to share it here in his words, just as he told it by a campfire in the Kitlope forest.

  Welcome to our campfire. Tonight I am going to tell you a story about my grandfather, the late Billy Hall, how he encountered those hairy monsters we call Sasquatch. This is a true story. There is nothing mythical about what I am going to tell you, because it is a true story based on the experience that he had with these monsters. These monsters that we are talking about are real, as real as you and I who are sitting here.

  My grandfather was preparing for hunting bears, when there was a good market for bear pelts. When my forefathers prepared to go hunting for anything, they went through a ritual of purification. They purified themselves by bathing regularly with devil’s club, or whatever was at hand to use. My grandfather and his first cousin, Robert Nelson—these two guys were never separated. He and Robert were like brothers, really. They went through all this purification during the wintertime to get ready to go hunting bears during the months of April and May.

  My grandfather owned a place just across from Kemano, a little bit further down the channel we called Mu
skook, a sandy beach there. And up above Muskook are three valleys. One is the Muskook Valley, another one is where sweetgrass grew and it was called Sweetgrass Valley. They ventured out to go and hunt there. My grandfather had an uncle named Kwabellish, who looked after the canoe down at the beach while they went hunting. So they went up, and Robert Nelson and my grandfather parted. Robert went up one valley and my grandfather went up to the Sweetgrass Valley. They broke a little sapling, and whoever came back first was to plant the sapling in the ground to let the other guy know that he had come down ahead of him to the ford.

  My grandfather reached his destination. Where he went, at that place there was a great big rock. He had his oolichan that he used for broth, and he was eating it and walking around this rock, wondering if there was any significance to it. Then he went and sat down to finish his meal and looked across the river and saw what he thought were bears. They were black, and there was nothing unusual about them; he was going to go there and shoot them and skin them for their pelts. But as he went there and tried to sneak up on them, he had a hard time crossing the river. He wasn’t sure which way he was going to shoot these bears.

  It wasn’t until he aimed and shot, at the instant of impact, that he heard these human beings howling. He knew it was a human being [that he shot]. Then he saw them start to run—and they were running upright. And he knew they weren’t bears. But the one that he shot, he lived for a while and then he died. My grandfather started pushing the panic button, for he saw that these were not bears, and he saw one that never had any hair on the body at all, and it was a female. He saw that it had breasts just like a human female and he knew that he had done something wrong.

  So he took another look again before he went into shock and he saw this band of Sasquatches and watched them pick up the dead one, and they were crying like human beings. Then he went into shock. He didn’t remember how he came out of it and crossed the river—he remembered that he had a hard time crossing. He came out of the shock momentarily and he was up on top of the great big rock—he didn’t know how he got up there! And through all the process, with the instinct of survival, he took stock of his situation. He felt something poking on the inside of his leg and he looked at it, felt it. He found out that his hunting knife was lodged there. He knew he had put that there for a purpose. Then he heard and felt the presence of some other beings close by him. He looked down and there were two of these big male Sasquatches. They were trying to get onto the rock with him, but they couldn’t. He knew they were trying to communicate with him, but they couldn’t. He told them, in our own language, that he had made a mistake. He apologized to them in our language, that what harm he had done was not done intentionally. The big Sasquatches seemed to understand him, and both turned and started walking away from him.

  Since it was getting close to darkness, my grandfather told himself, “I’m going to make a run for it.” So he climbed down from the rock and ran. He ran down toward the canoe on the beach. He ran tirelessly until he suddenly found out he had run past the place where he was supposed to set the peg, the sapling. So he ran back, got the sapling, put it in the ground so that Robert would know that he was down on the beach already.

  He made it down to the beach, and before he reached it, he hollered to his uncle to launch the canoe, “I am in trouble!” By the time he reached the beach, Kwabellish had the canoe down the beach. When he got there, he told Kwabellish to get into the canoe. He looked back and saw the two monsters running down the beach after him. My grandfather told Kwabellish what had happened to him. So the old man started talking to these big beasts the way my grandfather had talked to them on top of the rock, telling them in our language that it was all a mistake. So the beasts turned around and went away.

  Then my grandfather and the old man had to wait in the area until about noon the next day, when Robert came down. By then my grandfather had lapsed into a coma. He started to throw up, and what he threw up was saturated with the smell of those animals, and that smell saturated the canoe. They were able to go back to Kemano, but he didn’t come out of the coma for four days.

  My grandfather, when he came around, was able to do all kinds of things he hadn’t been able to do before. He was able to communicate with other creatures. In those times they were waiting for the oolichan to come up the Kitlope River and it was during that time that he was sitting on the beach and he started communicating with all these creatures out in the sea. The oolichan told him that they were going to be there the next day, so the old man told his people to start off for Kitlope from Kemano. The oolichan, sure enough, came up the next day. He believed the spirit of a medicine man named Kolalli entered his body when he was in a coma. So he was able to perform the feats that the medicine man before him could do . . . These are the things that happened during his lifetime.

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  When Alan Hall tells this family tradition, his campfire guests shiver. But they see that the stunning encounter, as terrifying as it was for Billy Hall, also brought him power. So it often is in the heartfelt tales of Indians meeting with giants. And the power continued into the next generation: when a giant logging company determined to log the Kitlope, the Haisla resisted with stronger determination. In cooperation with Ecotrust, they peacefully wrested an accommodation from the company.

  In the summer of 1994, a year after Alan told his grandfather’s story, the British Columbian premier announced that eight hundred thousand acres of the Kitlope would be preserved without any logging whatever. The West Fraser Timber Company both received and gave praise for the unusually cooperative result. As the Kitimaat Haisla celebrate this amazing victory around their campfires with their Ecotrust friends, Billy Hall’s story will be told again, along with a new story: how the greatest temperate rain forest has been saved for the people and all its creatures. In this battle of the Titans, Bigfoot wins and everyone else wins too.

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  As I lay awake beside Cultus Creek, the story of the Kitlope Sasquatch came back to me. Although unique, in many particulars the story conformed with the others I had heard. One of the most distinctive features of the Indians’ Sasquatch is that they are always represented as either devils or an outcast tribe possessed by demons—wild people. Rather than a different kind of animal, as we tend to conceive of it, Bigfoot appears to the natives of its territory as either supernatural or human—but beyond the pale of convention and acceptability. Some call them simply demons. Many place names in the Pacific Northwest that include the word “Devil” or “Devil’s” have been connected with Indian myths of Bigfoot or other monsters: ten lakes in Washington alone, as well as a Devil’s Slide, Devil’s Washbasin, several Devil’s Peaks, and Diablo Reservoir.

  We shouldn’t be surprised when Native Americans define the hairy creatures as something close to themselves, for every report confirms Bigfoot’s hominoid traits. On the other hand, its enormous strength, night vision, and other unusual attributes could easily suggest a supernatural being. Nor should we be surprised that the obvious third option—a related species of primate, neither human nor spectral—does not suggest itself to Indians. This, I surmise, is because native North Americans are one of the few groups of aboriginal humans who have had no contact with primates other than themselves (and perhaps Bigfoot).

  South American Indians have New World monkeys as neighbors. African and Indo-Asian tribes are well acquainted with Old World monkeys, baboons, apes, and orangs. North Americans, with no construct equivalent to “primate,” would consider their own form unique in nature. A large, apelike animal would naturally seem a kind of giant hairy Indian; or, if it was too weird and perverse to be of the People, then a devil. Where there are no apes, all apes are humans or spirits.

  I read a similar interpretation in Roger L. Welsch’s article “Omaha Dance Lessons” in Natural History, concerning Native American humor. Asked by a stranded traveler if he had a monkey wrench, an old Omaha man regarded his gamboling g
randchildren and laughed, “Monkey ranch? No, these are my grandkids.” We can appreciate the joke since our kids are monkeys too. But among the Omahas this goes deeper: monkey is the trickster figure, Icktinike, and tricksters share their powers and vulnerability with children. “I have heard again and again from Omahas the story about the first time an Omaha saw a monkey in a nineteenth-century traveling carnival,” Welsch wrote. “The immediate response of the Omahas was Icktinike! Having never seen a monkey, having never seen Icktinike, they all agreed: the monkey is Icktinike; Icktinike is a monkey.”

  Certain artifacts suggest that some Amerindians were acquainted with something having the visage of an ape. A number of carved stone heads found in the Columbia River basin and masks from the Tsimshian and other north coastal tribes possess strong primate features. The resemblance was noted as long ago as 1877 by pioneer paleontologist Othniel Marsh, who reported to the American Association for the Advancement of Science, “Among the many stone carvings [from the Columbia] were a number of heads, which so strongly resemble those of apes that the likeness at once suggests itself.”

  These ancient effigies include prognathous, chinless faces with heavy brow ridges and in at least one case a sagittal crest. Their age is unknown, but they are considered prehistoric. Scientists who don’t know where they are from usually call them anthropoid; those who do know say such a conclusion is preposterous. Such reactions reinforce the view of scientists held by many Bigfooters: that they refuse to see evidence that challenges their assumptions. As writer Rick Wiggin put it, “Preferring the comfort of existing dogma to the intellectual embarrassment of gross scientific error”—the error of having overlooked a large primate on their doorsteps. The relics do not prove that Bigfoot exists nor that Indians had contact with apes, but they do raise uncomfortable questions.

  In the cosmology that many Indian beliefs describe, the border between the “natural” and “spiritual” worlds is a permeable membrane indeed. When I asked Lelooska whether Indians of his acquaintance considered Sasquatch real, I learned that it might be the wrong question altogether. First, he explained, even the Kwakiutl differ among themselves on many points of tradition. Second, reality for them varies and shifts in meaning. An elder told him that there are many ways of existence that whites know nothing at all about. To many coastal Indians, Dzonoqua might be as real as a bear. But a bear might change its nature as easily as Bigfoot.