5. In 1869, Bigfoot and his wife played with fire
Bigfoot-hunters (or ‘Squatchers’) aside, Bigfoot is most often encountered by outdoorsmen, such as more conventional hunters and forestry workers. Back in 1870, one such figure gave an intriguing account to the Antioch Ledger about some creatures he encountered at Orestimba Peak, Oregon. Noticing that his fire had been meddled with, he searched the surrounding brush, when he ‘struck the tracks of a man’s feet, as I supposed, bare and of immense size’. Hiding in the bushes to find out ‘what possessed him to be prowling about there with no shoes on’, the hunter suddenly heard ‘a shrill whistle’.
‘It was the image of a man, but could not have been human… The creature, whatever it was, stood fully 5 feet high, and disproportionately broad and square at the fore shoulders, with arms of great length. The legs were very short and the body long. The head was small compared with the rest of the creature, and appeared to be set upon the shoulders without a neck. The whole was covered with dark brown and cinnamon colored hair, quite long on some parts, that on the head standing in a shock and growing close down to the eyes’.
The creature then ‘grabbed a stick from the fire. This he swung round, until the fire at the end had gone out… having amused himself, apparently, as he desired, with my fire… and, having gone a short distance returned, was joined by another – a female, unmistakably’. Although the correspondent suggests the creatures were escaped gorillas, the account is one of the oldest historical accounts corresponding to the Bigfoot legend. To the fury of subsequent Bigfoot researchers, the hunter let the creature go unharmed: ‘I could easily have put a bullet through his head, but why should I kill him?’