On the Track of the Sasquatch (An Excerpt)

The late bigfoot researcher and author, John Green, wrote a must have book for your Bigfoot library. "On the Track of the Sasquatch" came out in 1973 and detailed footprints, evidence and stories of this hairy giant of the forest.

1 Meet the Sasquatch

Early on an evening in mid August of 1968 two men from Stewart, British Columbia were driving down an old mine access road. They had been hunting grouse, but were also on the lookout for bear.

Still above 4,000 feet when the daylight started to wane, they rounded a corner and jumped from the truck as what they thought was a bear started to move off into the bush above the road.

Guns in hand, they stopped short as they realized that their quarry was walking up the hill on its hind legs, then gaped in astonishment when the hairy beast swung to look back at them, twisting its wide shoulders around because it had no neck to twist.

They had a brief glimpse of a dark face with a wisp of beard, a flat nose and a "What the Hell are you doing here" expression. Then it turned again and quickly vanished among the trees.

It left behind an impression of great height and weight, and an overpowering stench.

One of the men later estimated its height at well over seven feet and its weight at over 300 pounds, it did not ' look fat, but its build was very heavy. It stood straight, yet its arms swung several inches lower than its knees. Once it grabbed a tree with its left hand as it went uphill, but its hands never touched the ground.

On the body the hair looked thin, but on the head it was quite long, hiding the ears.


* * *

What can you make of a story like that? Not much perhaps, because there's no way to prove it true or, false. But there's one thing you definitely can not make of it. It's not a legend. It's a matter of fact account of something two ordinary people claim to have seen just the other day.

Perhaps that's the only point there's any real hope of making in a book about the "legendary" hairy giants of the Pacific Coast, they are not a story out of the past. The evidence of their existence, whatever it may be worth, is concentrated overwhelmingly in the present. Right here, right now.

I call giants "Sasquatch" because that is what they are called by the Indians living near my home at Harrison Hot Springs. Up and down the coast they have other names, and most of those names are also of Indian origin. But that doesn't make the Sasquatch an Indian legend . . . the Indians had words for all the other animals too. The difference is that for the other animals the white man brought his own names with him. He has never named the Sasquatch because no matter how often he sees them he refuses to accept that they are there.

Among Indians there are other names with much wider distribution than "Sasquatch", which seems limited to the southwestern corner of British Columbia, and is an Anglicized word at that. But "Sasquatch" has gained wide acceptance in the white community—rivaled only by the "Bigfoot" of Northern California—because it was under that name that the creatures received their first press notices, back in the 1920's and '30's.

The man who did the writing was J. W. Burns, who was for many years a teacher at the Chehalis Indian Reserve, on the Harrison River near Harrison Hot Springs. His articles achieved wide circulation in newspapers and magazines in the United States and Canada, Like most native British Columbians, I read some  his stories as a child. Burns got his stories from his Indian friends, and some of them smacked heavily the supernatural. Thus Burns' deserves not only the credit for introducing the Sasquatch to the general public, but also the blame for affixing firmly to it the label of "Indian Legend."

When I bought a weekly newspaper at Agassiz, B.C. 14 years ago, I was aware that I was in the area occupied by Mr. Burns' Sasquatch; in fact I once wrote an "April Fool" story for my paper about one of the hairy monsters kidnapping a beautiful guest from the Harrison Hot Springs Hotel. Of course I never took the subject seriously. Mr. Burns had left the area some years before; the Sasquatch Days once held at Harrison Hot Springs were a thing of the past and about the only reminder of the old stories was the "Sasquatch Inn", a small hotel on the highway No. 7 near the Harrison River.

That situation continued for four years until René Dahinden, a Swiss immigrant in his mid 20's, turned up at my office with the announcement that he intended to go in to the mountains and look for the Sasquatch. I tried to persuade him that the whole thing was just a tall story and referred him to a couple of veteran woodsmen whom I knew would assure him that there was no such thing to be found. He declined to be discouraged, but another man he had brought with him from his home town of Lumby, B.C. backed out, and after a few days Rene went home.

The following year the subject came up again when the village council at Harrison Hot Springs was discussing what to do with about $600 available for a "permanent project" to mark British Columbia's hundredth birthday. Not much of a permanent nature can be built for $600, and one of the council members suggested using the money for a statue of the Sasquatch. Next suggestion was that the money be used for a "Sasquatch hunt". This was greeted with enthusiasm, but since it was not the type of thing authorized by the provincial government for a project, permission had to be sought from the B.C. Centennial Committee. It was, of course, a bid for publicity, and it was tremendously successful. Papers all over Canada played the story on the front page. There were numerous offers from would be Sasquatch hunters, even from young ladies prepared to act as "bait".

Perhaps never before has a tourist resort achieved such publicity without actually doing anything. René Dahinden came back to lead the search. Newspaper and radio reporters flocked around, and a tide of delighted stories rolled round the world touching Sweden, India, New Zealand and points between. No matter that the provincial Centennial Committee turned down the whole project and the "hunt" never took place. Public attention remained focused on the Sasquatch for months, with the news media doing their own digging to come up with fresh angles to keep the subject alive. In the process they dug up some stories that didn't fit the accepted pattern.

The Sasquatch with which Mr. Burns' readers were familiar were basically giant Indians. Although avoiding civilization, they had clothes, fire, weapons and the like, and lived in villages. They were called hairy giants it is true, but this was taken to mean that they had long hair on their heads, something along the lines of today's hippies.

William Roe, of Cloverdale, B.C., claimed to have seen something quite different. He described a six-foot female weighing somewhere near three hundred pounds and covered from head to foot with dark brown, silver-tipped hair less than an inch in length. This creature, which he had encountered in a mountain clearing in the Fall of 1955, made a meal of leaves which it stripped off a bush with its teeth. It wore no clothes.

Following its tracks, he could find no sign that it had any tools or weapons. It slept on the ground with-out shelter. He was left in doubt whether it was animal or human.

Publication of his story brought him a letter from Albert Ostman, of Fort Langley, who claimed to have been carried off by one of the creatures, and to have spent several days with four of them in an alpine valley, He described in detail a mature male and female, a young male and an adolescent female. All were clothed only in short hair and the big male was eight feet tall and very heavy. He thought that they were some sort of humans, but they lived on roots and leaves.

Certainly these were not the Sasquatch of the earlier newspaper and magazine stories. Nor were they characters from Indian legends. The men concerned were not Indians and they claimed to have been personally involved in the events they described. Mr. Roe's experience had taken place only two years before.


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