In 1903, Green Giant was founded in Le Sueur, Minnesota, as the Minnesota Valley Canning Company. In 1925, a pale, giant, boy-like figure with a leafy bit of clothing was introduced to market the company’s new line of giant, sweet, early green peas. The name Green Giant for this marketing image soon followed, with the giant figure’s skin then turning green. Eventually the Green Giant came to symbolize not only the peas, but the company as well. In 1950, Minnesota Valley Canning Company disappeared completely behind the trademark it had created and became officially the Green Giant Company. Today, the Jolly Green Giant is the name of the giant figure, having evolved from the youthful figure of 1925.
In our search for the origins of the California Giant in the tales of the California Bigfoot, should we be disturbed that Jolly Green Giants are not running around Minnesota? Perhaps. Perhaps not. First and foremost, the tradition of the Green Giant appears to have a direct link, in terms of artistic imagery, with the folklore and widespread art of the European Green Man.
Green Giants to Bigfoot
From ancient times, the archetypal figure shown as the Green Giant is commonly referred to as the Green Man, or leafy man, and has been discussed throughout European texts, especially in England, and as well as in France, where it is called Le Feuillou, and in Germany, where it is known as Blattqesicht. Authors have written extensively on the pagan and Celtic traditions of these Green Men, and books and Web sites about them are abundant.
Scholars, furthermore, see a direct link between the European traditions of the Green Man and the old tales and encounters with real Wild Men. “The wildman (who may be the same as the ‘green man’),” Myra Shackley notes in her book Still Living? Yeti, Sasquatch and the Neanderthal Enigma, “also takes on the role of the spirit of the woods, a kind of pagan nature god…. Over two hundred European families have wildmen as heraldic emblems, and many more as supporters. Any nude figure in heraldry is called a ‘savage’, ‘wildman,’ or ‘woodman,’ and the terms are interchangeable. There is little variation in the way they are portrayed, leafy decorations and a club being the rule…. Wildmen (or green men) also appear carved in wood and as architectural adornments in the Middle Ages…. Green men are frequently shown as a face with foliage emerging from the mouth, and fifty or more of these are known from England alone. The green man is also found carved in stone, as a gargoyle…. In the Elizabethan period wildmen, or green men, were often employed to clear the way for processions, wielding sticks.”
Clearly the Green Man comes from the tradition and evolution of the art form of the burly wildmen, the woodsmen, and thus the man of the woods and greenery. Shackley notes, “Wildmen are important figures in medieval paintings and illuminated manuscripts. They may be called ‘wodewoses’ or ‘woodhouses,’ and are frequently shown covered with long hair or fur. An additional class of picture shows actors in plays, masques, and dramas who are depicted in wildman costumes…. The name wodewose is derived from the Anglo-Saxon Wudewasa and thence from Wudu (late Old English for ‘wood’; Wudewasa seems to mean ‘man-of-the-wood.’”
The “wildmen” are an active topic in hominology, and some researchers feel the Wildmen and Green Men are a remembrance of Neandertal. As Shackley, Ivan T. Sanderson, and others have noted, we must view the interrelationship between the hairy wildfolk lurking in the remote woodlands of the Middle Ages and the European wildmen, regardless of whether they were called wodewose or green men.
So the graphic transmutation of the survival of late Neandertals in Europe to Wild Men and Green Men, with an artistic connection to the Green Giant and the Jolly Green Giant, is worth serious consideration. There appears to be a link between that label on a can of peas in your kitchen and the possible existence of relict hairy hominids, even if uncomfortably so.
Just as the encounters of European wildmen survive in medieval carvings and other graphic representations, so too is the early-twentieth-century California Bigfoot evident in an artistic form. Depressionera painters appear to have captured the giant, hairy hominid on at least one fruit crate label. The containers for lettuce, carrots, and, yes, green peas may have much to teach us in Bigfoot studies, beyond our wildest imaginations.
Ruby Creek Incident
Although Bigfoot would not break into public consciousness until 1958, the modern history of this creature is widely thought to have begun with a 1941 encounter labeled by John Green as the Ruby Creek Incident because it happened a half mile east of that little settlement in British Columbia. Although only the Chapman family was involved in this encounter, others in the Ruby Creek area also saw the footprints.
Ivan Sanderson wrote up the Chapmans’ story soon after he interviewed them and then published his account in True magazine in 1960. I will let Sanderson retell the story in his own words, directly from his firsthand interview, in order to do full justice to the Chapmans’ account:
“The modern history of the Sasquatch really dates from September, 1941, when one of these creatures paid a visit—in broad daylight—to an Indian family named Chapman. While the Amerindian stories have usually been dismissed as legend, or laughed off because Indians are not supposed to be reliable, too much physical evidence to be ignored accompanied this experience. The Chapman family consisted of George and Jeannie Chapman and children numbering, at my visit, four. Mr. Chapman worked on the railroad, and was living at that time in a small place called Ruby Creek, thirty miles up the Fraser River from Agassiz, British Columbia, in Canada’s great western province.
“It was about three in the afternoon of a sunny, cloudless day when Jeannie Chapman’s eldest son, then aged nine, came running to the house saying that there was a cow coming down out of the woods at the foot of the nearby mountain. The other kids, a boy aged seven and a little girl of five, were still playing in afield behind the house bordering on the rail track. Mrs. Chapman went out tolook, sincethe boy seemed oddly disturbed, and they saw what at first she thought was a very big bear moving about among the bushes bordering the field beyond the railway tracks. She called the two children, who came running immediately. Then the creature moved onto the tracks and she saw to her horror that it was a gigantic man covered with hair, not fur. The hair seemed to be about four inches long all over, and of a pale yellow-brown color. To pin down this color Mrs. Chapman pointed out to me a sheet of lightly varnished plywood in the room where we were sitting. This was of a brown-ochre color. This creature advanced directly toward the house and Mrs. Chapman had, as she put it, ‘much too much time to look at it’ because she stood her ground outside while the eldest boy—on her instructions—got a blanket from the house and rounded up the other children. The kids were in a near panic, she told us, and it took two or three minutes to get the blanket, during which time the creature had reached the near corner of the field only about one hundred feet away from her. Mrs. Chapman then spread the blanket and, holding it aloft so that the kids could not see the creature or it them, she backed off at the double to the old field and down onto the river beach out of sight, and then ran with the kids downstream to the village.
“I asked her a leading question about the blanket. Had her purpose in using it been to prevent her kids seeing the creature, in accord with an alleged Amerindian belief that to do so brings bad luck and often death? Her reply was both prompt and surprising. She said that, although she had heard white men tell of that belief, she had not heard it from her parents or any other of her people, whose advice regarding the so-called Sasquatch had been simply not to go further than certain points up certain valleys, to run if she saw one, but not to struggle if one caught her as it might squeeze her to death by mistake. ‘No,’ she said, ‘I used the blanket because I thought it was after one of the kids and so might go into the house to look for them instead of following me.’ This seems to have been sound logic as the creature did go into the house and also rummaged through an old outhouse pretty thoroughly, hauling from it a fifty-five-gallon barrel of salt fish, breaking this open, and scattering its contents about outside
. (The irony of it is that all those three children did die within three years; the two boys by drowning, and the little girl on a sickbed. And just after I interviewed the Chapmans they also were drowned in the Fraser River when a rowboat cap-sized.) Mrs. Chapman told me that the creature was about seven and a half feet tall. She could estimate its height by the various fence and line posts standing about the field. It had a rather small head and a very short, thick neck; in fact really no neck at all, a point that was emphasized by William Roe and by all others who claim to have seen one of these creatures. Its body was entirely human in shape except that it was immensely thick through its chest and its arms were exceptionally long. She did not see the feet, which were in the grass. Its shoulders were very wide and it had no breasts, from which Mrs. Chapman assumed it was a male, though she also did not see any male genitalia due to the long hair covering its groin. She was most definite on one point: the naked parts of its face and its hands were much darker than its hair, and appeared to be almost black.
“George Chapman returned home from his work on the railroad that day shortly before six in the evening and by a route that bypassed the village so that he saw no one to tell him what had happened. When he reached his house he immediately saw the wood-shed door battered in, and spotted enormous humanoid footprints all over the place. Greatly alarmed—for he, like all of his people, had heard since childhood about the ‘big wild men of the mountains,’ though he did not hear the word Sasquatch till after this incident—he called for his family and then dashed through the house. Then he spotted the foot-tracks of his wife and kids going off toward the river. He followed these until he picked them up on the sand beside the river and saw them going off downstream without any giant ones following.
“Somewhat relieved, he was retracing his steps when he stumbled across the giant’s foot-tracks on the riverbank farther upstream. These had come down out of the potato patch, which lay between the house and the river, had milled about by the river, and then gone back through the old field toward the foot of the mountains where they disappeared in the heavy growth.
“Returning to the house relieved to know that the tracks of all four of his family had gone off downstream to the village, George Chapman went to examine the woodshed. In our interview, after eighteen years, he still expressed voluble astonishment that any living thing, even a seven-foot-six-inch man with a barrel chest, could lift a fifty-five-gallon tub of fish and break it open without using a tool. He confirmed the creature’s height after finding a number of long brown hairs stuck in the slabwood lintel of the doorway, above the level of his head.
“George Chapman then went off to the village to look for his family, and found them in a state of calm collapse. He gathered them up and invited his father-in-law and two others to return with him, for protection of his family when he was away at work. The foot-tracks returned every night for a week and on two occasions the dogs that the Chapmans had taken with them set up the most awful racket at exactly two o’clock in the morning. The Sasquatch did not, however, molest them or, apparently, touch either the house or the wood-shed. But the whole business was too unnerving and the family finally moved out. They never went back. After a long chat about this and other matters, Mrs. Chapman suddenly told us something very significant just as we were leaving. She said: ‘It made an awful funny noise.’ I asked her if she could imitate this noise for me but it was her husband who did so, saying that he had heard it at night twice during the week after the first incident. He then proceeded to utter exactly the same strange, gurgling whistle that the men in California, who said they had heard a Bigfoot call, had given us. This is a sound I cannot reproduce in print, but I can assure you that it is unlike anything I have ever heard given by man or beast anywhere in the world. To me, this information is of the greatest significance. That an Amerindian couple in British Columbia should give out with exactly the same strange sound in connection with a Sasquatch that two highly educated white men did, over six hundred miles south in connection with California’s Bigfoot, is incredible. If this is all hoax or a publicity stunt, or masshallucination, as some people have claimed, how does it happen that this noise—which defies description—always sounds the same no matter who has tried to reproduce it for me? These were probably the last words on the Sasquatch that the Chapmans uttered and I absolutely refuse to listen to anybody who might say they were lying. Admittedly, honest men are such a rarity as possibly to be nonexistent, but I have met a few who could qualify and I put the Chapmans near the head of the list.”
Before 1958, Sasquatch was merely a regional monster, a hairy forest tribe of the Indians. The California fruit-crate hirsute beast was little known outside of the lettuce- and orange-growing regions. Stories of “wildmen” and “gorillas” had faded from news reporters’ memories. Over in the Himalayas, the Abominable Snowmen were getting some notice, but it had little bearing on America. Something big was about to happen, though. And that something was Bigfoot!
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8 Frozen Man
A film is one thing. A body is quite another. The year 1967 also brought to light what appears to a specimen of a kind of Bigfoot. It began with a mysterious millionaire who was debating what to do with a frozen hairy hominoid that had fallen into his hands. The owner of the Minnesota Iceman, as it would soon be called, wanted to display this frozen Bigfoot-like beast to see what people’s reaction to the “missing link” would be. As the story would develop, the true owner did not wish to be “the one” to undercut the truth of biblical creation. How could this be accomplished without “scientists” getting the specimen? A plan was hatched. The body would be shown around Middle America, from one rural town’s stock shows to the next, off the beaten track, and out of the limelight. No one would notice and the mystery owner could gauge public reaction. But then a series of events began to unravel the plot.
During the autumn of 1967, college zoology major Terry Cullen spotted an extraordinary exhibit in Milwaukee—a fresh, apparently authentic corpse of a hairy, manlike animal. For twenty-five cents people could see the “man left over from the Ice Age” that exhibitor Frank Hansen kept frozen in a block of ice inside a refrigerated glass coffin.
After trying unsuccessfully during 1967 and 1968 to interest mainstream academic anthropologists, Cullen alerted Ivan T. Sanderson, a naturalist and author of the successful book Abominable Snowmen. Sanderson’s houseguest in New Jersey at the time was none other that the Belgian cryptozoologist Bernard Heuvelmans, author of On the Track of Unknown Animals.
What everyone wanted to know was, why hadn’t anyone noticed this thing before? After all, the body had been on public exhibit for almost two years in Minnesota, Illinois, Wisconsin, Texas, Oklahoma, and other states. Why hadn’t anyone spotted it before Cullen? Sanderson answered such questions this way: “Just how many people with proper training in any of the biological sciences (including medical practitioners and students) go to such shows? If any do, how many are trained physical anthropologists or primatologists? How many have ever heard of the ABSM [abominable snowman] search? The answer is: practically nobody who attended the exhibit.”
After hearing from Cullen on December 12, 1968, however, Sanderson invited Heuvelmans, and the two immediately traveled to see firsthand what Hansen was showing at fairs and shopping centers across the American Midwest. For three days, from December 16 through 18, 1968, Sanderson and Heuvelmans examined the creature in Hansen’s cramped trailer. The specimen was an adult male with large hands and feet. Its skin was covered with dark brown hair three to four inches long. The creature had apparently been shot through one eye, which dangled on its face, but it also had a gaping wound and open fracture on its left arm. Smelling putrefaction where some of the flesh had been exposed from the melting ice, the two concluded that the creature was authentic. They could hardly believe what they saw.
Heuvelmans described it this way in the Bulletin of the Royal Institute of Natural
Sciences of Belgium:
The specimen at first looks like a man, or, if you prefer, an adult human being of the male sex, of rather normal height (six feet) and proportions but excessively hairy. It is entirely covered with very dark brown hair three to four inches long. Its skin appears waxlike, similar in color to the cadavers of white men not tanned by the sun…. The specimen is lying on its back … the left arm is twisted behind the head with the palm of the hand upward. The arm makes a strange curve, as if it were that of a sawdust doll, but this curvature is due to an open fracture midway between the wrist and the elbow where one can distinguish the broken ulna in a gaping wound. The right arm is twisted and held tightly against the flank, with the hand spread palm down over the right side of the abdomen. Between the right finger and the medius the penis is visible, lying obliquely on the groin. The testicles are vaguely distinguishable at the juncture of the thighs.
Sanderson and Heuvelmans nicknamed the creature Bozo. Later Sanderson would write about it in the May 1969 issue of Argosy:
Bozo’s face is his most startling feature, both to anthropologists and anyone else—and for several reasons. Unfortunately, both eyeballs have been “blown out” of their sockets. One appears to be missing, but the other seems (to some, at least) to be just visible under the ice. This gives Bozo a gruesome appearance, which is enhanced by a considerable amount of blood diffused from the sockets through the ice. The most arresting feature of the face is the nose. This is large but only fairly wide, and is distinctly “pugged,” rather like that of a Pekinese dog—but not like that of a gorilla, which actually doesn’t have a nose, per se. The nostrils are large, circular and point straight forward, which is very odd. The mouth is only fairly wide and there is no eversion of the lips; in fact, the average person would say he had no lips at all. His “muzzle” is no more bulging, prominent, or pushed forward than is our own; not at all prognathous like that of a chimp. One side of the mouth is slightly agape and two small teeth can be seen. These should be the right upper canine and the first premolar. The canine or eye-tooth is very small and in no way exaggerated into a tusk, or similar to that of a gorilla or a chimp. But—to me, at least—the most interesting features of all are some folds and wrinkle lines around the mouth just below the cheeks. These are absolutely human, and are like those seen in a heavy-jowled, older white man.
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