Bigfoot is often described as a large, muscular, bipedal ape-like creature covered in dark brown, black, or dark reddish hair. Reports of its height range from 1.8–2.7 metres (6–9 ft) to as tall as 3.0–4.6 metres (10–15 ft). Some eyewitness accounts describe the creature as having a human-like face. In 1971, multiple people in The Dalles, Oregon, filed a police report describing an overgrown ape, with one of the men claiming to have seen the creature in the scope of his rifle, but could not bring himself to shoot it because it looked more human than animal.
Common descriptions of Bigfoot include broad shoulders, no visible neck, and long arms, which skeptics suggest could be misidentifications of a bear standing upright. Some nighttime sightings have reported the creature's eyes glowing yellow or red, though eyeshine is not present in humans or any other known apes. Possible explanations for observable eyeshine off the ground in the forest include owls, raccoons, or opossums perched in foliage.
Michael Rugg, owner of the Bigfoot Discovery Museum in Northern California, claims to have smelled the creature, describing it as "imagine a skunk that had rolled around in dead animals and had hung around the garbage pits."
The creature is famously known for its enormous footprints, which are said to be as large as 610 millimetres (24 in) long and 200 millimetres (8 in) wide. Some footprint casts have also contained claw marks, suggesting they could have come from known animals such as bears, which have five toes and claws.
Many of the Indigenous cultures across the North American continent have long-standing legends of mysterious, hair-covered creatures living in the forests. According to anthropologist David Daegling, these tales predate contemporary reports of Bigfoot. These stories varied in their details, both regionally and between families in the same community.
On the Tule River Indian Reservation in Central California, petroglyphs created by a tribe of Yokuts at a site called Painted Rock are believed by some to depict a group of Bigfoot known as the Family. The local tribespeople refer to the largest of the glyphs as Hairy Man, and they are estimated to be between 500 and 1000 years old. In the 16th century, Spanish explorers and Mexican settlers in California told tales of the los Vigilantes Oscuros, or Dark Watchers, large creatures said to stalk their camps at night. Similarly, a French Jesuit priest living with the Natchez in 1721 reported stories of hairy creatures in the forest that were known to scream loudly and steal livestock.
Ecologist Robert Pyle has argued that many cultures have accounts of human-like giants in their folk history, which may reflect a need for a larger-than-life creature. Each language has its own name for the creature featured in the local version of such legends, often meaning something along the lines of wild man or hairy man. Other names describe common actions that it was said to perform, such as eating clams or shaking trees. For example, Chief Mischelle of the Nlakapamux at Lytton, British Columbia told such a story to Charles Hill-Tout in 1898. Similarly, the Stsailes people tell stories about sasqets, a shapeshifting creature that protects the forest. The name Sasquatch is the anglicized version of sasqets (sas-kets), roughly translating to "hairy man" in the Halqemeylem language. This suggests that the idea of a giant, shapeshifting creature is deeply embedded in the folklore of many cultures.
Members of the Lummi Nation tell tales of creatures known as Tsemekwes. While the general descriptions of these creatures remain consistent, details differ between family accounts, including their diet and activities. Some versions of the stories describe more menacing creatures, such as the Stiyaha or Kwi-Kwiyai, which were said to be a nocturnal race that children were warned against mentioning for fear of being carried off and killed. The Iroquois tell of an aggressive, hair-covered giant with rock-hard skin known as the Ot ne yar heh or Stone Giant, more commonly referred to as the Genoskwa. In 1847, Paul Kane reported stories of the Skoocooms, a race of cannibalistic wild men living on the peak of Mount St. Helens in southern Washington state. An alleged incident in 1924 involving a violent encounter between a group of gold prospectors and a group of ape-men was reported in the July 16, 1924 issue of The Oregonian, and has since become a popular piece of Bigfoot lore, with the area now being referred to as Ape Canyon. U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt, in his 1893 book The Wilderness Hunter, writes of a story he was told by an elderly mountain man named Bauman. According to Bauman, a foul-smelling, bipedal creature had ransacked his beaver trapping camp, stalked him, and later became hostile, fatally breaking his companion's neck in the wilderness near the Idaho-Montana border. Roosevelt noted that Bauman appeared fearful while telling the story, but attributed the trapper's folkloric German ancestry as a potential influence.
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