Bigfoot The life and times of a legend

Joshua Blu Buhs

Book - 2009

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Subjects
Published
Chicago : University of Chicago Press 2009.
Language
English
Main Author
Joshua Blu Buhs (-)
Physical Description
xv, 279 p. : ill. ; 24 cm
Bibliography
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN
9780226079790
  • Preface Dramatis Personae
  • 1. Wildmen
  • Wildmen through History
  • What-Is-It
  • The Abominable Snowman
  • The Life and Times of Bigfoot
  • 2. Yeti: 1951-1959
  • Sensation
  • The Yeti, Science, and Zadig's Method
  • Britain Hunts the Yeti
  • America Hunts the Yeti
  • What the Evidence Told
  • 3. Sasquatch: 1929-1958
  • The Great Sasquatch Hunt
  • The Kidnapping of Albert Ostman
  • "Occam's Razor Cuts on the Side of the Sasquatch"
  • Slick Eyes the Sasquatch
  • 4. Big Foot: 1958
  • The Folkloric Origins of Bigfoot
  • Big Foot Makes the Papers
  • The Confirmed and Converted Confront Bigfoot
  • Humbug!
  • "Maybe Bigfoot is Lost Relative of Old 'Sasquatch'"
  • 5. ABSMery: 1959-1961
  • The (Weird, Wacky) Wonderful World of
  • ABSMery
  • The Pacific Northwest Expedition
  • Enter
  • The Wipe: OrTrue's Trouble with Truth, and Ivan Sanderson's
  • 6. Melting the Snowman: 1961-1967
  • Melting the Snowman
  • Sanderson's Failed Debunking of the Debunking
  • The Quiet Years
  • Big Foot Daze
  • 7. The Return of Bigfoot: 1967-1980
  • Bigfoot Filmed!
  • Making Sense of the Movie
  • The Return of Bigfoot
  • Bozo, the Minnesota Iceman
  • Bigfoot on Tour
  • The Secret of Sasquatch
  • 8. A Contest for Dignity: 1969-1977
  • The Bigfoot Community
  • Cripplefoot
  • The Center that Wasn't
Review by Choice Review

In this adroitly researched and well-documented work, independent scholar Buhs (The Fire Ant Wars, CH, Apr'05, 42-4652) argues that Bigfoot's popularity can be traced mostly to the North American working class, primarily white males, and their disaffection with increasing societal focus on mass media and consumerism. Buhs outlines how the stories of supposed undiscovered bipedal creatures evolved from being the stuff of regional popular culture, as in 19th-century stories of "wild men" and Sasquatch in North America and the yeti of the Himalayas, to 20th-century mass media incarnations, as in the film Harry and the Hendersons. He also focuses on prominent figures and happenings such as P. T. Barnum and his "What Is It" wildman exhibits, explorer Eric Shipton's discovery of yeti tracks, naturalist Ivan Sanderson's writings in men's adventure magazines, Roger Patterson's infamous Bigfoot film, and anthropologist Grover Krantz's studies of Bigfoot, along with herpetologist George Zug's establishment of the International Society of Cryptozoology. This work is much more focused and thorough than G. Reece's Weird Science and Bizarre Beliefs (CH, Jan'09, 46-5566) and a very suitable cultural history complement to the anthropological focus of C. Daegling's Bigfoot Exposed (CH, Jun'05, 42-5947). Summing Up: Highly recommended. All levels/libraries; popular studies collections. K. D. Winward Central College

Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
Review by New York Times Review

BECAUSE I watched TV in the 1970s, I have an image of Bigfoot stamped on my brain like a paw print. He resembles Chewbacca (minus the bandolier) walking through a grainy forest, scowling over his shoulder at the camera. But your Bigfoot image might be different, because for a while the hairy hominid was everywhere, in B movies and liquor advertisements and docu- and mocumentaries. He also starred in some "real" footage taken in 1967. That one was actually a she, complete with pendulous breasts. Why did this ginormous, nonexistent ape capture our collective imaginations for five decades, and what does our infatuation say about us? Joshua Blu Buhs, the author of a previous book, about fire ants, takes up these questions in "Bigfoot: The Life and Times of a Legend." Devotees of Sasquatchiana won't be disappointed. Buhs takes us on a long and windy tour of the early sightings, footprints, fur tufts, droppings and even abductions (at various times, Bigfoot was said to have kidnapped many women and children and at least one man). As amusing as these accounts are, Buhs's more serious interest lies not in the ape but in the white working-class men who were the beast's advocates, hoaxers, hunters and most ardent consumers. His main characters are drifters, loggers and a small-town newspaper reporter in the Pacific Northwest. He is condescending to them at times, but also compassionate. These were the true believers even in the face of scads of evidence of faked footprints and wigs. Buhs argues compellingly that Bigfoot's heyday in the 1960s and '70s was a difficult time for white, rural men in America. They were threatened by women's rights, civil rights and service-oriented, materialist culture that didn't value working with one's hands or backwoods know-how. Believing in Bigfoot was a way to snub effete, skeptical scientists. Hunting him re-engaged their imperiled backcountry survival skills. And the hoaxers? Well, they were having a laugh while manipulating a hostile consumer culture. Sometimes, Buhs writes, they dressed as Bigfoot "to touch their essential selves." Bigfoot, even in its fakery, was "representative of the really real, the world beyond the facade, a world of life and death and vital things." Viewing predator-fantasy through a class lens is fresh and interesting, but Buhs overdoes it. Everybody loves a good monster tale. To the extent that Bigfoot transcended race, gender and geography, we have the human brain to thank. We evolved with predators, and there's something in our primitive core that cannot forget the fear of the hunted. Where predators don't exist, we invent them, and we always have, from Grendel to Godzilla. We've overcome our natural predators, and so most of our monsters now are de-fanged. They eat cookies and sing to small children and channel Mike Myers in Hollywood blockbusters. We've imbued them with romance. In his waning years, as more claims were exposed as hoaxes, Bigfoot came to symbolize "the green man," Buhs notes, bearer of the dying ways and mysteries of the wilderness. That, and he was great at selling beer. Believing in Bigfoot, Buhs says, was a way to snub effete, skeptical scientists. Florence Williams is a contributing editor at Outside Magazine.

Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [October 27, 2009]
Review by Booklist Review

Thoroughly discredited hoaxes regarding seeing or shooting an actual bigfoot notwithstanding, media interest in whether giant wild humanoids exist is readily re-ignitable. In 1962, Robert Hatfield struck the match when a 'half-man, half-beast' monster chased him into a cabin but ran off before Hatfield trained a gun on it. Good for Hatfield, maybe, since the gun wasn't loaded, but fortuitous, anyway, for keeping the Bigfoot legend going, since once again there was no physical evidence of the fabled creature. Buhs undertakes the telling of how the modern myth of Bigfoot emerged and uses the terms Bigfoot, Yeti, Abominable Snowman, and Sasquatch more or less interchangeably throughout, since all refer to not-quite-human creatures living in the wild that are preternaturally elusive. Proceeding era by era and place by place, Buhs evaluates the stories of encounters with the giant creatures, deconstructs hoaxes, and evaluates genuine studies in service of tracking down the truth. His conclusions seem well founded but are highly unlikely to end debate.--Tribby, Mike Copyright 2009 Booklist

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

This sprightly, if sometimes overblown, study finds the elusive hairy wildman of the Pacific Northwest lurking everywhere. Independent scholar Buhs (The Fire Ant Wars) skeptically but affectionately surveys the evidentiary traces of bigfoot and his yeti and Sasquatch kin in sightings, tracks, sideshow exhibits and film, but his focus is on the megapod as cultural signifier. To the white working-class men who are his biggest fans, Buhs contends, bigfoot is an icon of untamed masculinity, a populist rebel against scientific elites, the last champion of authentic reality against a plastic, image-driven, effeminate consumer society. (Ironically, Buhs notes, bigfoot's career as advertising mascot and tabloid teaser also makes him a touchstone of consumerism.) Buhs's rote application of race-class-gender theory-"By imagining themselves into the body of Sasquatch, white working-class men could imagine themselves as black, as women, could come in contact with... repressed and forbidden desires"-yields more academic cant than insight; his oft-invoked white proles feel almost as legendary and stereotyped as the creature itself. Buhs is at his amused best when following the exploits of bigfoot's human handlers-the colorful band of true believers, hoaxers and pseudo-documentarists who constructed this greatest of all shaggy-hominid stories. 35 b&w photos. (May) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review

Although Buhs (The Fire Ant Wars) makes his personal stance clear in the preface, this book does not try to convince the reader that Bigfoot does or does not exist or argue for or against the legend. Instead, Buhs has written the story of Bigfoot, focusing on social and cultural contexts, and lets the reader come to his or her own conclusions. The legend of Bigfoot is not distinctly American: Buhs covers early incarnations of the myth such as the views associated with "wild" men who often lived on the fringes of societies. Stories of these wild men date back hundreds of years and are prevalent on all inhabited continents. The American Bigfoot legend has its roots in the myth of the Yeti, or Abominable Snowman, originating in the Himalayas of the 19th century. Buhs's very well researched book regards the reasons why the legend has flourished and survived, arguing that Bigfoot "reveals something about the human condition" and that even though Bigfoot may not be real, it still is part of the cultural fabric of contemporary society: when Bigfoot is brought up in conversation in the United States today, most people know its meaning. This cultural history, complete with footnotes and a comprehensive bibliography, is recommended for academic and public libraries, especially those that specialize in mythology/folklore.-Jeremy Spencer, Mabie Law Lib., Univ. of California, Davis (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.