Time for some history on the Cryptid History blog! Anybody that knows me, knows I love Teddy Roosevelt. For an asthmatic, bespectacled child with few friends stories of a guy who was just like me as a child who grew up to be, well, Teddy Roosevelt, were very attractive. Theodore Roosevelt is a lot of things. Some of them good, many of them bad. A discussion on the intricacies of historical memory for Theodore Roosevelt is beyond the scope of this particular post. Today we will examine the story that Theodore Roosevelt published in his 1889 book “The Wilderness Hunter” where he describes a story that he heard from a mountain hunter, a story that in the modern day many Cryptozoologists and Bigfoot hunters have taken as proof of a “Bigfoot” report before people used the word “Bigfoot.”
The story, that Roosevelt calls a “Goblin Story” was relayed to him by a man named Bauman. Roosevelt had recently been describing in the text how “Frontiersmen are not, as a rule, apt to be very superstitious. They lead lives too hard and practical, and have too little imagination in things spiritual and supernatural. I have heard but few ghost stories while living on the frontier, and these few were of a perfectly commonplace and conventional type.” But he goes on to say that he’d recently heard a “Goblin” story that impressed him. Roosevelt wrote how this man had lived a rugged life on the frontier, and remarked how he must have believed what he was saying because “he could hardly repress a shudder at certain points of the tale.” Roosevelt went on to discredit his source citing “but he was of German ancestry, and in childhood had doubtless been saturated with all kinds of ghost and goblin lore, so that many fearsome superstitions were latent in his mind.” Roosevelt introduced the story, lent the story teller some credibility and immediately took most of it away citing that he was likely very superstitious because of his ancestry. He goes on to recount the tale of the two hunters who encountered strange happenings in the hinterlands of Montana. The story starts in the usual way, and is sort of a ‘slow burn’ as Teddy sets the stage and describes the locale. There is a small element of dread when Teddy describes the pass the trappers are visiting as having an “evil reputation” because years earlier a hunter had been found slain (supposedly by some ‘wild beast’) and the remains of the hunter were half eaten. I guess that’s just frontier life for you, because Bauman and the other trapper did not seem especially bothered by this at all. TR further describes how they arrived at their campsite and set up camp, including fashioning a shelter. After the trappers had been away from camp for a while they returned to find their campsite ransacked, presumably by a bear they believed, including footprints. They thought little of the incident, and set about making things right and preparing dinner. As Bauman prepared dinner his partner “began to examine the tracks more closely, and soon took a brand from the fire to follow them up, where the intruder had walked along a game trail after leaving the camp. When the brand flickered out, he returned and took another, repeating his inspection of the footprints very closely. Coming back to the fire, he stood by it a minute or two, peering out into the darkness, and suddenly remarked,''Bauman, that bear has been walking on two legs.”’ Bauman laughed it off, but his partner insisted, and they both inspected the tracks together, a debate ensued about whether they could be human, and the both decided that they could not be. This is a detail that is often left out of the narrative the footprint is not described. It’s not described as similar to a bear footprint or similar to a human, or even an extraordinary size. The only description we get of the prints is that they exist, and both men agree they are not human they are also interchangeably called footprints and paws in the text.
From then on the story gets spookier and more Bigfoot like. Bauman describes that they were “awakened by some noise, and sat up in his blankets. As he did so his nostrils were struck by a strong, wild-beast odor, and he caught the loom of a great body in the darkness at the mouth of the lean-to. Grasping his rifle, he fired at the vague, threatening shadow, but must have missed, for immediately afterwards he heard the smashing of the underwood as the thing, whatever it was, rushed off into the impenetrable blackness of the forest and the night” They claim to have heard nothing else that night, the next morning setting off to collect their traps. The men stayed together all day, and after returning to the camp finding it in shambles, with everything strewn about and in disarray. Tracks were also plain to see everywhere, and both man agreed they were tracks of a two legged creature, but again, no description of the size or shape of the tracks is present. At this the men were uneasy and somewhat distressed and gathered as much firewood as they could, working together to stay up through the night and keep the fire going all night. At “About midnight the thing came down through the forest opposite, across the brook, and stayed there on the hill-side for nearly an hour. They could hear the branches crackle as it moved about, and several times it uttered a harsh, grating, long-drawn moan, a peculiarly sinister sound. Yet it did not venture near the fire.” The next morning they decided to leave, and set out together to retrieve their traps and other accoutrements, but described a feeling of being trapped or stalked as they walked through the area. At around noon they returned to camp, with still three small traps nearby that needed to be collected, Bauman offered to go and retrieve them while his companion packed up the camp. This is of course the would be classic horror movie trope of don't split up, which until this point these two men had been doing a good job of staying together. When Bauman found his beaver traps they had trapped beaver, so he had to spend sometime retrieving the traps and preparing the beaver pelts. A few hours later he began to return to the campsite to retrieve his friend and exit the area. He remarked the strange stillness of the area and TR does a pretty good job of describing the general spookiness of the whole situation.
Bauman eventually returns to the campsite and recounted a grisly scene “Stepping forward he again shouted, and as he did so his eye fell on the body of his friend, stretched beside the trunk of a great fallen spruce. Rushing towards it the horrified trapper found that the body was still warm, but that the neck was broken, while there were four great fang marks in the throat. The footprints of the unknown beast-creature, printed deep in the soft soil, told the whole story.” The companion had evidently finished packing and sat to await his friend, and as Bauman continues “While thus waiting, his monstrous assailant, which must have been lurking nearby in the woods, waiting for a chance to catch one of the adventurers unprepared, came silently up from behind, walking with long, noiseless steps, and seemingly still on two legs. Evidently unheard, it reached the man, and broke his neck by wrenching his head back with its forepaws, while it buried its teeth in his throat. It had not eaten the body, but apparently had romped and gambolled round it in uncouth, ferocious glee, occasionally rolling over and over it ; and had then fled back into the soundless depths of the woods.” Bauman, understandably frightened out his wits, immediately vacated the area with all possible haste. Thus concludes TR’s spooky ‘Goblin story’ as he puts it. No matter what else I say here, this writing is one heck of spooky story, and has the makings for a great horror movie or short film.
So why do Bigfoot people glom onto this story in such a big way? It seems you hear about it in just about every podcast eventually and its a 50/50 chance if this story will show up in a cryptozoology themed tv show, episode or special about Bigfoot. This is because of who is relaying the story. Teddy Roosevelt has a certain amount of built in credibility with people, after all, he was PRESIDENT! He’s on Mount Rushmore for God’s sake!! We also know that he was an avid outdoorsman, so if he is intrigued by the story there must be something to it we say. The problem is, while some of the stuff in the story, the smell the bipedal walking, etc are all things that would fall into the “maybe its a Bigfoot” camp, there are vital elements missing from the story.
The thing that really sticks out to me is that there is no description of the creature’s footprints. The only description we get is that the beast walked on two legs, and that the footprints could not have been human according to the trappers. Supposed Bigfoot prints are supposed to be human shaped and very large, both characteristics that one imagines would have been noteworthy to the trappers, yet they make no mention of it. Why is it that so many Bigfoot researchers have latched onto this story as proof that Roosevelt knew about Bigfoot when it is missing something that is basically the defining element of Bigfoot, the BIG FEET! It seems to me that seasoned and experienced.trappers would have noticed something like that, especially when the rest of the story is so rich in detail. Of course they never see the creature, but only shoot at a vaguely threatening shadowy shape. It is also important to remember that Roosevelt himself seemed to think the story was hyped up from what it actually was because he immediately talked about how unlikely it was and attacked the credibility of Bauman before even retelling the story. Also, why doesn’t Bauman ever give the name of his companion? You would imagine that when your trapping partner is killed in the wilderness you would at least tell people his name when you tell the terrifying tale of his demise. Unfortunately, to my reading, this excerpt has all the tell tale signs of a spooky story told for entertainment, and few of a factual retelling of events.
Lastly, and probably most importantly, we need to keep in mind WHY people write things, and what their intended purpose is. Why was Roosevelt writing “The Wilderness Hunter”? I believe it was for entertainment and to tell hunting stories, not necessarily tell a completely truthful rendering of all the events that occurred to Roosevelt and everyone else he encountered. He wanted to weave a narrative that flipped pages and sold books. It is always important to approach these sorts of things with an open mind, and not just open to the possibility that “there might be a squatch in them woods” but also open to the possibility that people are just telling ghost/goblin stories or mistake or that Bigfoot researchers are seeing what they want to see in primary sources from the past. Keeping an open mind means keeping an open mind to all of those things, not just the things we prefer or would like to be true. I love this story, TR is one of my favorite historical figures, but I am not convinced this is an actual Bigfoot story.
All text that appeared in this post with quotation marks were citations from “The Wilderness Hunter” by Theodore Roosevelt. I am also going to do something I have not seen anyone else do in regards to this story, I am not just going to cherry-pick it and tell you the cool parts, I am going to provide a link to a freely available pdf of the entire 1889 book “The Wilderness Hunter.” This story is found in Chapter 20 “In Cowboy Land” and starts on page 441 and concludes on page 447. Read it for yourself and let me know what you think!
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