North American Wildman: Fact or Folklore
“In the mountains live many giants … who look almost the same as humans,” Quinault tribal member Bob Pope, 1925.
An American wildman lore cycle took shape in the late nineteenth century. Of course, wildmen have been known across space and time, sometimes accepted as real, sometimes as fantasy, and usually troubling the line between humanity and animality.
-Joshua Blu Buhs.
Jeff Meldrum
Professor of Anatomy and Anthropology
Idaho State University
Jeff Meldrum is one of the leading bigfoot researchers today. He specializes in the study of bipedalism.
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During an interview with BYU-Idaho Radio, Meldrum explains how the prints he studies are “elegantly” adapted for a large primate walking on two legs. He says through studying these feet he considers it is more incredible to say sasquatch doesn’t exist then to at least acknowledge the possibility that there might be something out there.
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"These feet could not, he said, be formed just by making an enlarged print of a human foot, carving it into wood and then strapping it onto a hiking boot as many people have suggested".
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Mammologist Ivan Sanderson Believes:
"These elusive beings, he urges, evolved parallel to homo sapiens and retreated ages ago, not into the high alpine zones with their lunar ecology, but into the densely forested montane regions of Malaysia, Central Asia, Africa, North America, Central America, and South America, areas where they can subsist precariously and marginally and at the same time elude the bloody depredations of mankind".
The science?
The Folklore?
For thousands of years the wildman has had a story. His reign and popularity spanning over the entire globe. In North America, he is known by the indigenous populations as Sasquatch. Certain tribes share oral traditions of these illusive creatures stealing fish hanging out to dry, children and woman. Others know that certain part of the woods, where trees are put into the ground like fence posts, roots exposed, they do no go. For that is the territory of the wild man.
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First Nations people of differing clans and tribes across North America and Canada have co-existed for hundreds, if not, thousands of years with the Sasquatch’n and have revered them as a divine all-knowing creature (Munro, 2019).
North American Ancient Rock Art depicting Sasquatch
It was during the 1950's were the illusive creature termed the name Bigfoot, thanks to the PNW loggers who kept finding mysterious big foot prints within the woods they were cultivating.
