Shortly after my interest in Bigfoot became known, I received a letter in a childish script from Toledo, Washington, a logging town in the Cascade foothills. It was from Wallace, a Toledo patriarch and, in all senses, a character. He enclosed a couple of snapshots of someone in a gorilla suit, in one photo sitting on a log and in the other tugging at an elk carcass by a stream. He claimed to have encountered Bigfeet often and to have many still photos and motion pictures of them performing various activities. “Let me know what you are interested in and maybe I can help you out, as I have built roads where these giant sized people have roamed for over three hundred years and the only people sees B.F.s are people like me that’s running these big yellow Caterpillars as that’s what the B.F.s are interested in as they will follow a cat around all day and watch us build roads.”
I was surprised to learn that a roadside zoo I remembered along old U.S. Highway 99 (before Interstate 5 was completed)—white deer, bison hunching in the rain—had been “Ray Wallace’s Free Zoo,” a landmark for a generation. That was one of the first things I found out when I went to visit Wallace. The door of his Toledo home was open, and Ray, a big, craggy man in high-waisted dungarees, red Loggers World suspenders, and flannel shirt, with mussed white hair and stubbly jowls, was at ease in a tilted-back La-Z-Boy. I took up a place beside him, and for the next four hours he told me stories.
Wallace was born in Missouri in 1917, and in 1919 his family came west; he was raised on the Cowlitz River, where Indians camped and taught him to track when he played hooky. Ever since, he has plied the trades of the woods up and down the West Coast. His specialty was building roads into the wilderness, but he also speculated in gold, platinum, oil, beefalo, and Bigfoot.
I had a hard time keeping him on the topic at first. He seemed more interested in telling about UFOs, which he claimed to have seen regularly all around the St. Helens country. One of the first he saw was “back when the Russians put them Spudnicks up . . . it was afoolin’ around a star. At Thelma Sorenson’s place up Salmon Creek, she ’n’ her husband got a divorce and she wanted to sell that flatbed truck . . . We went out there and saw three flying saucers come by, and boy, you talk about moving!” Since then “them dawg-gone flyin’ saucers is all over the place.” Everybody else around there has seen them too, he maintained.
As president of the Yellow Creek Logging Company, Ray held Forest Service contracts in northern California in the fifties and sixties. It was reports of disturbances to his road-building crews that first drew attention to the Willow Creek area, which has since become “Bigfoot Town, USA.” Huge tracks and equipment vandalism, found by worker Jerald Crew and Ray’s brother Wilbur, led to extensive newspaper coverage nationwide and attracted the noted cryptozoologist Ivan Sanderson to investigate. Sanderson told the story in detail in his book Abominable Snowmen: Legend Come to Life. He described Wallace, who was righteously upset about the meddling monsters’ interference with his contracts, as “hard-boiled and pragmatic . . . a professional skeptic”—hardly my impression.
Later Ray became involved with Tom Slick’s Pacific Northwest Bigfoot Expedition of 1960, bringing in a couple of trackers with dogs. Always on the lookout for opportunities, whether in timber, minerals, or monsters, he and his partners offered Slick’s operatives a look at a captive Bigfoot for cash up front. When they asked to see the animal first, Wallace claimed it had sickened and been released.
Ray’s hearing has been damaged by constant bulldozer work, and he tends to speak loudly. Much of what he bellowed to me, punctuated by dawg-gone’s, had to do with saucers and giants. He played a record he had helped to produce, an LP of ballads by a Johnny Cash–type country singer named Don Jones. Cut in Nashville, the disk included a Bigfoot song mixed with Bigfoot screams that Ray had taped by lowering a microphone into a hole he’d dynamited out around a trapped Sasquatch. The high-pitched shrieks could have been anything, but Ray maintained that a “government counter-intelligence machine . . . declared these screams to be no sound of any known animal in the world today.”
The LP jacket photo, taken by Ray and clearly staged, showed a Bigfoot and a mountain lion placidly sitting together after sharing a deer kill. The Bigfoot was saying “Zuki, zuki” to the puma, which is what you’re supposed to say to pacify giants. Bigfoot runs with cougars and bears, Ray said. He once told Bob Titmus, a noted Bigfoot tracker and taxidermist, who was tanning cougar hides, “You shouldn’t kill Bigfoot’s pets.”
As hokey as Ray’s pictures were, he called the Patterson-Gimlin film a fake: “I know exactly which Yakama Indian was in that monkey suit,” he said. He also claimed Patterson, “a cagey guy,” stole his screams. The record played on: “Scientists call him the missing link, some people think he is extinct.” Ray said the single “got down to number ten on the scale of things . . . ten more points and we’d ’a’ got a gold record.” It used to be for sale in a shop called Cowlitz Landing, where Ray’s writings could also be had in a tabloid of the same name. “You could hear it there too,” he said. “But that dawg-gone nickelodeon durn near wore it out.”
Elna Wallace came in to turn down the record and asked me to stay for dinner. She did not seem amused that yet another Bigfoot buff was egging her husband on. Then Ray told me about a diary he’d bought written by early California gold miners, red-hot with Bigfoot stories. He was sure a movie would be made of the book, once it was written. If I’d write it, he offered, I could have a half interest. I steered the topic back to Bigfoot. “I’ve fergot more about Bigfoot than most people ever knew,” he said. “I worked where they lived. You don’t move fast around ’em when they’re standin’ there with a dawg-gone rock in each hand.”
Ray doesn’t claim to have been attacked by a Bigfoot, but he has been hurt in the woods. He broke his back when a whistle punk (signal man) screwed up, then wore a body cast while he set chokers for four months. In a bad crummy (crew bus) wreck, he broke his hip, “three lombards,” five ribs, and a knee. But he was cured by an Assembly of God preacher overnight. He also puts stock in “choirpractors,” raw garlic, and lemon juice, which cured his arthritis in two weeks.
Before I left, Ray told me that he actually believed that the Bigfeet were aborigines wearing bearskins. This didn’t square with his pictures or the reputed dimensions, but consistency did not seem to be a major roadblock for Ray. According to folks I talked with on the Hoopa Reservation who remembered him, it never has been. There are those, in fact, who believe that Ray began the entire series of modern northern California episodes himself. He appeared on the scene immediately after the tracks were found near Willow Creek. And he says he knows who was in the “monkey suit” at Bluff Creek when the Patterson-Gimlin film was made.
Perhaps Ray has seen something, perhaps he hasn’t. But of course he is without credibility in the Bigfoot world. The serious searchers will be surprised that I have spent so much space on him. Yet by himself Ray Wallace embodies the diversity of traits found throughout the guild: intelligence, cleverness, cupidity, guile, wit, judgmentalism, hyperbole, and genuine curiosity. It is clear that he once had the latter, even if it has since been bulldozed under his own mountains of bullshit. He was a significant figure in the early-sixties stories out of California, and he has popped up in Bigfoot lore ever since.
Driving out of town, I was stopped by a policeman for having a taillight out. He turned out to be a former student of mine, and I asked him about Wallace. Ray had donated the land for the town high school, the young officer said; he was “a pillar of the community.”
On my way out, Ray had kindly handed me the concretion. He hadn’t a clue where they came from, but he knew they were “Bigfoot’s bullets.” And then he gave me one thing more. With the winning, confiding smile that Sanderson had noted, this bulldozer of a man winked at me and said, “Don’t waste your time looking for Bigfoot.”
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Who are the “major players,” the serious Bigfoot searchers I
referred to? Six names come chiefly to mind: Ivan Sanderson, Bernard Heuvelmans, John Green, René Dahinden, Peter Byrne, and Grover Krantz. Bob Titmus could be added to the list, but he has not been recently active. One cannot take a close look at the North American hairy giant without taking each of these men into account. The late Sanderson was a prolific author of natural history and long the world’s leading student and raconteur of animal mysteries. Heuvelmans, a much-respected Belgian zoologist and “the father of cryptozoology,” wrote the encyclopedic On the Track of Unknown Animals. Green, Dahinden, and Byrne are the leading trackers in North America. Green and Dahinden will have nothing to do with Byrne, and they have not spoken to each other for fifteen years; Byrne advocates a more collegial approach.
It was Byrne whom I had met at his Bigfoot Information Center in 1975 and had subsequently brought to Yale for the seminar that turned several academic heads. Byrne, born in Ireland, became a tea planter in India, then a tiger hunter and safari guide. Most of his kills, he told me, were to finish off wounded animals left by his drunken and idiot clients. Later, convinced of the need to protect the wildlife he had formerly tracked to shoot, he helped found the International Wildlife Conservation Society and originated Nepal’s first tiger preserve. He recently assisted with a water project there.
As early as 1948 Byrne found a possible Yeti track in Sikkim and began searching for the maker. Ten years later he was recruited to the Himalayan Yeti expedition supported by the charismatic and much-loved Texas oil heir Tom Slick, who was influenced by Heuvelmans’s book to pursue the elusive snowman. Byrne proved instrumental in having part of a possible Yeti hand shipped from Nepal to England in the lingerie case belonging to the wife of the willing (and amused) actor Jimmy Stewart, who had been visiting a maharaja. It proved to be human. Later Byrne was summoned by Slick to California to head up the Pacific Northwest Expedition, on the heels of the Willow Creek footprint findings.
It was in this period that much of the current animosity originated. Byrne, Dahinden, Green, Titmus, and Wallace were all involved in the expedition, at Slick’s expense. The friction of egos and the resentments spawned then have never quite healed. Canadians Dahinden and Green (still speaking at that time) couldn’t tolerate having the young Irish-Brit in charge. They hied themselves back to British Columbia to carry out a satellite investigation for Slick. And then, on October 6, 1962, Slick was killed in the crash of a light aircraft. All the expeditions he had supported came to an abrupt halt, and the Sasquatch search’s one strong bonding influence evaporated. Byrne returned to Nepal and led river expeditions out of Katmandu, among other activities, for the next few years. He recalled that his first American period was bracketed by a pair of eerily connected events: hearing Marilyn Monroe sing “Happy Birthday” to Jack Kennedy at Madison Square Garden when he first arrived; then, back in the Nepalese bush, hearing of JFK’s death from a village big man, who told him, “Your Big Man has died.”
In 1971 Byrne, back in the States, founded the Bigfoot Information Center in The Dalles. He and Dede Killeen edited The Bigfoot News, a mother lode of information. In 1975 he published the best campfire read of all the Bigfoot books, The Search for Bigfoot: Monster, Myth, or Man (foreword by Jimmy Stewart). In 1979 Byrne and Killeen suspended the project and returned to Nepal and India to work on Asian elephant conservation. In 1991 Byrne’s Tula Hatti: The Last Great Elephant was published. Back in Oregon, Peter’s interest in Bigfoot was rekindled, and he founded the Bigfoot Research Project in 1992.
Well funded by the Academy of Applied Science of Boston, the Project is described as “a benign, scientific investigation designed to prove the existence of a large, bipedal, hair-covered hominid believed to be living in the forested mountain ranges of the Pacific Northwest.” With a staff of three, equipped with four-wheel-drive Blazers and Bell Jet Ranger helicopters; sophisticated computers and software designed for tracking serial killers; digital global positioning equipment; motion, sound, and heat sensors; radios, cellular phones, and night-vision scopes; and a widely known contact line (1-800-BIGFOOT), Byrne feels he is finally poised to find the animal if it exists. But rather than raking the countryside, as he did in his youth, he is concentrating on computer analysis of his database to construct what he calls “geo-time patterns”—integrative models that will predict where and when Sasquatch is most likely to occur. Then, he believes, the team can go forth into the field with a much greater likelihood of success. The full-time team includes Tod Deery, director of field activities, and office manager Deborah Wolman, who copes with the many serious, flaky, and obscene calls on the 800 line.
Byrne is the object of resentment by the other big names for several reasons. His suave and handsome appearance, enhanced by his Oxbridge accent, pressed khakis, sweat-stained safari hat, and silk cravat they see as a pose to further oil his considerable charm. That a young foreigner would have a position of leadership in Tom Slick’s California operation never sat well with the others. His unorthodox conclusions—that Bigfoot is shorter than often stated, quite intelligent, and entirely unthreatening—contradict their own. His insistence on a peaceful approach to the creature, eschewing guns and attempting contact and communication, strike the other searchers as unrealistic, sanctimonious, and troublesome for their own methods. He further makes them look bad by (at least in public) rising above the disputes, taking the high road, and pleading for cooperation, while they kvetch and point fingers.
Under the title “Carpe Diem” in a recent Track Record, Byrne wrote that “Bigfooters, especially those who tend to spend time in the rascally and useless trade of chastising their competitors, would do well to keep the time factor of their trade in mind.” He goes on to state that “we are literally no further forward than we were when Tom Slick and his merry men . . . were scrambling up and down the pineclad slopes of the Six Rivers National Forest, the rugged mountains of the Trinity Alps and the dark ravines of the Marble Mountain Wilderness.” In other words, let’s get with it, chaps!
The greatest source of resentment against Byrne and his undertakings, however, must be his substantial financial support. Not since Tom Slick, who was devoted to Byrne and vice versa, has there been a financial angel for Bigfoot research like the current Academy of Applied Sciences commitment. Sasquatch hunters have been notoriously poor, always scratching for money for gas and plaster. Bob Titmus worked as a taxi-driving taxidermist in Kitimat. Roger Patterson promoted his film through public appearances, multiple rights sales, and any other way he could (Robert Gimlin is said to have never profited from it). The entire field has scrambled for cash, so it is understandable that Byrne’s success (again) at gaining sponsorship would rankle. Then there are charges of dishonesty and double-dealing—but in this poison-pen fraternity I look at all personal attacks with as much skepticism as I apply to sightings of hairy monsters.
In spite of the calumny I have heard, I like Peter, as do most people who are not his rivals. And I don’t think I’m just charmed by the khaki and the accent. I’ve known plenty of two-bit expatriates, has-been white hunters in tropical tuxedos, left behind by the Raj or its equivalents in some steamy outpost, living on image and foreign aid. Peter isn’t one of them. I take him for a committed conservationist, a fine writer, and a genuine gentleman explorer, a species as rare today as any Yeti. He may take some shortcuts on the way to knowledge, but he has a better chance of getting there than most, and not just because of his bankroll.
I have yet to share a campfire with him, but we have sat around fireplaces in both our homes, sharing good ale, chenin blanc, or single-malt whisky, trading tales from Nepal or New Guinea, comparing signatures of Tenzing Norgay—his from personal correspondence, mine an autograph garnered in my grandmother’s postwar rambles. Our conversation tends to focus on the possible phylogeny of wild men and on how they might be contacted and how conserved. I’ve seldom heard Byrne utter an unkind word about his colleagues. He respects Krantz, though he disagrees with him about k
illing a specimen. Once Ray Wallace’s name came up, and Peter called him a nice and good fellow. “But he’s a joker,” he said, recalling certain incidents from the Slick era involving an alleged trapped animal and a demand for more money for Frosted Flakes to feed it. “Don’t waste your time with guys like Ray.” How oddly this echoed Ray Wallace’s own words to me, “Don’t waste your time looking for Bigfoot.”
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In May of 1994 I attended Sasquatch Daze at Harrison Hot Springs, a mountain resort town in British Columbia’s Fraser River Valley. This annual event capitalizes on the area’s long history of Bigfoot associations, which were first written about by J. W. Burns, a teacher on the Chehalis Indian Reserve in the twenties and thirties. His articles popularized the name “Sasquatch” and brought notoriety to the region, leading to the first Sasquatch festivals. In 1959, for British Columbia’s centennial, a “Sasquatch Hunt” was mooted, then dropped. As John Green wrote, “Perhaps never before has a tourist resort achieved such publicity without actually doing anything.”
The modern Sasquatch Daze, including art exhibits, Bigfoot races, and a series of forums, is an attempt to build on the town’s old reputation to enhance tourism while throwing light on the Sasquatch mystery. Steve Harvey, the beleaguered organizer, was troubled by the weather, which had turned cool and rainy after a banner weekend for Canada’s Memorial Day. The town was nearly deserted when I arrived, the usually thronged promenade wet and lonely, the lake undisturbed except by wind. Inside the massive old Harrison Hot Springs Hotel, however, the forum was well attended. Mostly by males—the only women present were wives and friends of Bigfooters, a trio of Bigfoot promoters from Elma, Washington, and a couple of tanned and scented blown dandelions on vacation who had just dropped in: “We’re into the supernatural, Bigfoot, all of it,” said Shirley.
Where Bigfoot Walks Page 23
