Skip to main content

Crackpots and Eggheads

  • Chapter
Searching for Sasquatch

Abstract

On a cold November in 1969 a gentle snow fell on the town of Bossburg, Washington, enveloping the area in forest quiet. Rumors had been rolling around the local populace during the Thanksgiving holiday about strange goings-on involving big, hairy shapes in the woods. Following up on the talk, local wilderness guide, trapper, and cougar breeder Ivan Marx came to Bossburg one evening to investigate and found Sasquatch tracks near the municipal dump. He had been alerted by butcher Joe Rhodes to keep an eye out for the tracks. Hikers, construction workers, trappers, and hunters had been finding such tracks all over the western United States and Canada, causing a stir in the local media. Rhodes also told Marx about a woman who stumbled across a creature lurking in the area the previous spring. Some sheriff’s deputies arrived to look into the woman’s story. They nosed about unenthusiastically accomplishing little more than exchanging snide remarks.

A monster is a thing deformed against kind both of man or of beast.

Mandeville’s Travels (1356)1

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this chapter

Chapter
USD 29.95
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
eBook
USD 99.00
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as EPUB and PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
Softcover Book
USD 129.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Compact, lightweight edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info
Hardcover Book
USD 129.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Durable hardcover edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info

Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout

Purchases are for personal use only

Institutional subscriptions

Preview

Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.

Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.

Notes

  1. See Al Stump. “The Man Who Hunts Bigfoot,” True 56:456, May, 1975:28–31, 74–77. The quote is from Grover Sanders Krantz to Robert Gottlieb, 6/2 4/1975, folder 0334, box 3, Grover Krantz Papers Collection, National Anthropological Archive, Smithsonian Institution, hereafter NAA. Also from here Grover Sanders Krantz will be abbreviated as GSK.

    Google Scholar 

  2. Peter Byrne, The Search for Bigfoot: Monster, Myth or Man? (Washington, D.C.: Acropolis Books Ltd., 1975).

    Google Scholar 

  3. Vladimir Markotic and Grover Krantz, eds. The Sasquatch and Other Unknown Hominoids (Calgary: Western Publishers, 1984): 147.

    Google Scholar 

  4. A poll conducted in the early 1980s found the majority of professional anthropologists in North America felt no acceptable evidence existed of Sasquatch and little justification for any funded research into it. Richard Greenwell and James E. King, “Attitudes of Physical Anthropologists towards Reports of Bigfoot and Nessie,” Current Anthropology 22:1 (Feb., 1981):79–80.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  5. Jim Endersby. Imperial Nature: Joseph Hooker and the Practices of Victorian Science (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008). The word scientist, first coined in the 1830s by the British philosopher William Wheuwell, did not see wide application until the later part of the nineteenth century and has been problematic ever since.

    Google Scholar 

  6. See Harriet Ritvo. The Platypus and the Mermaid and other Figments of the Classifying Imagination (Harvard University Press: Cambridge, MA, 1997),

    Google Scholar 

  7. and Lorraine Daston and Katherine Park. Wonders and the Order of Nature 1150–1750 (New York: Zone Books, 1998).

    Google Scholar 

  8. George Gaylord Simpson. “The Beginnings of Vertebrate Paleontology in North America,” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 86 (1943): 130–88.

    Google Scholar 

  9. Robert Silverberg, Mound Builders of Ancient America: The Archaeology of a Myth (Greenwich, CT: New York Graphic Society, 1968)

    Google Scholar 

  10. and Gordon R. Willey and Jeremy A. Sabloff, A History of American Archaeology (San Francisco: WH Freeman & Co., 1974).

    Google Scholar 

  11. A. Hunter Dupree. Science in the Federal Government: A History of Policies and Activities to 1940 (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1957).

    Google Scholar 

  12. See, John C. Greene. American Science in the Age of Jefferson (Ames: Iowa State University Press, 1984);

    Google Scholar 

  13. Brooke Hindle. The Pursuit of Science in Revolutionary America, 1735–1789 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1956);

    Google Scholar 

  14. and Dirk Jan Struit. Yankee Science in the Making: Science and Engineering in New England from Colonial Times to the Civil War (New York: Dover Publications, 1991).

    Google Scholar 

  15. Mark V. Barrow, Jr. A Passion for Birds: American Ornithology after Audubon (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998).

    Google Scholar 

  16. Jeremy Vetter. “Cowboys, Scientists, and Fossils: The Field Site and Local Collaboration in the American West,” Isis 99:2 (June 2008):273–303.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  17. Brian Regal. Henry Fairfield Osborn: Race and the Search for the Origins of Man (London: Ashgate, 2002);

    Google Scholar 

  18. and Ronald Rainger, An Agenda for Antiquity (Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama Press, 1991).

    Google Scholar 

  19. Robert E. Kohler. All Creatures: Naturalists, Collectors, and Biodiversity, 1850–1950 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006).

    Google Scholar 

  20. Nathan O. Hatch, ed. The Professions in American History (Notre Dame, IN.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1988).

    Google Scholar 

  21. Nathan Reingold. Science, American Style (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers Univ. Press, 1991).

    Google Scholar 

  22. Adrian Desmond. “Redefining the X Axis: “Professionals,” “Amateurs” and the Making of Mid-Victorian Biology—A Progress Report,” Journal of the History of Biology 34 (2001): 3–50.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  23. Paul Lucier. “The Professional and the Scientist in Nineteenth-Century America,” Isis 100:4 (December 2009): 699–732.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  24. See Alixe Bovey. Monsters and Grotesques in Medieval Manuscripts (London: The British Library, 2002),

    Google Scholar 

  25. and John Block Friedman. The Monstrous Races in Medieval Art and Thought (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981).

    Google Scholar 

  26. Zakiya Hanafi. Monster in the Machine: Magic, Medicine, and the Marvelous in the Time of the Scientific Revolution (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000).

    Book  Google Scholar 

  27. Thomas R. Williams. Getting Organized: A history of amateur astronomy in the United States (Doctoral Thesis, Rice University, 2000).

    Google Scholar 

  28. Peter Bowler. Science for All: the Popularization of Science in Early Twentieth-Century Britain (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009).

    Book  Google Scholar 

  29. Lucien Blancou. Géographie Cynégétique du Monde (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1959).

    Google Scholar 

  30. Bernard Heuvelmans. “The Birth and Early History of Cryptozoology,” Cryptozoology 3 (1984): 1–30.

    Google Scholar 

  31. Bernard Heuvelmans. “What is Cryptozoology?” Cryptozoology 1 (Winter 1982):1–12.

    Google Scholar 

  32. Pierre Assouline. Hergé: the Man Who Created Tin Tin (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009): 170–172.

    Google Scholar 

  33. For the life of Huxley see, Adrian Desmond, Huxley: From Devil’s Disciple to Evolution’s High Priest (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1997).

    Google Scholar 

  34. For the professionalization of science in England see Jim Endersby, Imperial Nature: Joseph Hooker and the Practices of Victorian Science (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008).

    Google Scholar 

  35. H. Brink-Roby. “Siren canora: the Mermaid and the Mythical in Late Nineteenth-Century Science,” Archives of Natural History 35:1 (2008): 1–14.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  36. Ivan Sanderson. “The Wudewása or Hairy Primitives on Ancient Europe,” Genus XVIII: 1–4(1962):109–127.

    Google Scholar 

  37. Ivan Sanderson. “Some Preliminary Notes on Traditions of Submen in Arctic and Subarctic North America,” Genus XIX:1–4 (1963):145–162.

    Google Scholar 

  38. Ivan Sanderson. Abominable Snowmen: Legend Come to Life (Philadelphia: Chilton Co., 1961): 20.

    Google Scholar 

  39. Ivan Sanderson. “More about the Abominable Snowman,” Fantastic Universe 2:6 (October 1959):58–64.

    Google Scholar 

  40. Willy Ley. Salamanders and Other Wonders (New York: Viking Press, 1955): 107.

    Google Scholar 

  41. Willy Ley. Willy Ley’s Exotic Zoology (New York: Viking Press, 1959):

    Google Scholar 

Download references

Authors

Copyright information

© 2011 Brian Regal

About this chapter

Cite this chapter

Regal, B. (2011). Crackpots and Eggheads. In: Searching for Sasquatch. Palgrave Studies in the History of Science and Technology. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230118294_2

Download citation

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230118294_2

  • Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, New York

  • Print ISBN: 978-1-349-29378-0

  • Online ISBN: 978-0-230-11829-4

  • eBook Packages: Palgrave History CollectionHistory (R0)

Publish with us

Policies and ethics