First Encounter: …This is hard to pinpoint. A version Bigfoot exists in most ancient cultures of America, as well as across the globe. It is known by many names, and I have listed a few in the Folklore section.
Description: A large, bipedal, muscular, ape-like creature, as tall as 9 feet, with dark brown, or dark red hair.
Theories: Gigantophithecus (prehistoric bipedal ape of tremendous height); Surviving caveman (the missing link); giant ground sloth; alien
Folklore:
Sasquatch:
This excerpt comes from a history book titled Spuzzum: Fraser Canyon Histories 1808-1939 by Andrea Laforet and Annie York.
“Chief Pelek was the chief as far as Five Mile Creek, and he ruled the band. When the CPR was laying its track through this area, there was a construction camp up at the long tunnel above Spuzzum. The contractors who lived in the camp used to miss a lot of their stuff from the outside of the meathouse. Two cowboys had an idea about what to do. They took some long rope, the two of them, and they stayed up all night to watch the meathouse
Along came a sasquatch to the meathouse to take the food away. ‘So there,’ the cowboys thought to themselves, ‘that’s the chance for us to capture this monster that’s been taking our food away.’ So they lassoed him, and of course when they lassoed him they had the string around his neck. Then he jumped, and he snapped his neck and died.
One of the Indians above the tunnel there, from the reservation, came along and saw these whites looking at this monster laying on his back. The man came all the way down from there to Spuzzum to the chief and told the chief what had happened to the monster, which the Indians call ‘sasquatch.’ So the chief called together his retainers, his warriors. He put his robe on — his robe is made of weasel, and his banners were made of buckskin with beautiful pictures on them. He took these things and went with his warriors to the construction camp. When he got there the interpreter asked what they had done with the sasquatch. “Oh well,’ said one of the men, ‘we’ll do something about it. We’ll bury it.’
The chief insisted he would claim the body because the Indians have always reverenced these sasquatches. The Indians claim the sasquatch is a human being, and they always claim the body, and they bury it or put it on a scaffold, if they have that kind of system. So finally these men gave up, and they gave him the body. He took the body all they way from the tunnel right down to Spuzzum. He gave it his blessing and buried it as a human being.
The Indians claim that sasquatches are human beings because they are the people who practiced to be medicine men when they were young. When the boys or girls are young and want to be medicine men, their father or grandfather takes them up to the mountains and leaves them with very little to eat. They had to sleep and pray and stay alone, and some of them never returned. They got wild in the woods and never came home again. The Indians claim that that is where the sasquatch came from.”
(Picture of Fraser Canyon: Nancy Anderson)
I could not, for the life of me, find any stories that mention bigfoot by these names. However, every source that mentions these names have the same sort of description.
Stiyaha: “a nocturnal race that children were told not to say the names of lest the monsters hear and come to carry off a person…”
Skoocooms: “a race of cannibalistic wild men living on the peak of Mount St. Helens Volcano.” They are also regarded on the supernatural level and not the natural level. I can only conjecture what that means.
Sources:
While doing the meagre research that I do for these, I stumbled upon this gem, and I really wanted to include it. It has some great laughs in it.
11 Crazy Bigfoot Conspiracy Theories
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