Forbidden Archeology: The Hidden History of the Human Race

The satyr is a stylized and very recognizable figure, part human and part animal, occurring mainly on Greek vases. Typically, satyrs have horselike tails and are shown engaged in some kind of sporting or licentious behavior, perhaps connected with the cult of Dionysus. The hairy humanlike figure depicted on the Etruscan silver bowl, however, is shown not with revelers but in the midst of a hunting party of well-armed humans mounted on horses. The creature has no satyr’s tail and appears to be carrying a crude club in one hand and a large stone, raised threateningly above his head, in the other.

During the Middle Ages, wildmen continued to be depicted in European art and architecture. A page from Queen Mary’s Psalter, composed in the fourteenth century, shows a very realistically depicted hairy wildman being attacked by a pack of dogs (Shackley 1983, p. 25). Wildmen were thought to live in caves and forests, where they subsisted on berries and roots. They were not considered ordinary humans. Instead, they were said to be members of the animal kingdom, unable to speak or comprehend the existence of God.

10.4 Northwestern North America

For centuries, the Indians of the northwestern United States and western Canada have believed in the reality of wildmen, known by various names, the most familiar of these being Sasquatch. In 1792, the Spanish botanist-naturalist José Mariano Moziño, in describing the Indians of Nootka Sound on Vancouver Island, Canada, stated (1970, pp. 27–28): “I do not know what to say about Matlox, inhabitant of the mountainous district, of whom all have an unbelievable terror. They imagine his body as very monstrous, all covered with stiff black bristles; a head similar to a human one, but with much greater, sharper and stronger fangs than those of the bear; extremely long arms; and toes and fingers armed with long curved claws. His shouts alone (they say) force those who hear them to the ground, and any unfortunate body he slaps is broken into a thousand pieces.”

In 1784, the London Times printed a report that Indians at Lake of the Woods, Manitoba, had captured a “huge, manlike, hair-covered” creature (Shackley 1983, p. 35).

Describing the Spokane Indians of the Pacific Northwest, Elkanah Walker, a missionary who lived among them for 9 years, wrote in 1840: “They believe in the existence of a race of giants which inhabit a certain mountain, off to the west of us. This mountain is covered with perpetual snow. They inhabit its top. . . . They hunt and do all their work in the night. They are men stealers. They come to people’s lodges in the night, when the people are asleep and take them and put them under their skins and take them to their place of abode without their even awakening. . . . They say their track is about a foot and a half long. . . . They frequently come in the night and steal their salmon from their nets and eat them raw. If the people are awake they always know when they are coming very near by the smell which is most intolerable” (Drury 1976, pp. 122–123).

Indians from the Columbia River region of the northwestern United States produced rock carvings that resembled the heads of apes. Anthropologist Grover Krantz (1982, p. 97) showed photographs of the heads to a number of scientists and noted: “Zoologists who did not know their source unanimously declared them to be representative of nonhuman, higher primates; those who knew the source insisted they must be something else!” Whatever the carvings may actually represent, Krantz’s findings are significant. Preconceptions seem to determine what scientists are prepared to see, and one thing most scientists are definitely not prepared to see is apelike creatures in the American Northwest.

U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt included an intriguing wildman report in his book The Wilderness Hunter (1906, pp. 255 –261). The incident took place in the Bitterroot Mountains, between Idaho and Montana. Wildman reports still come out of this region.

In the early to middle 1800s, a trapper named Bauman and his partner were exploring a particularly wild and lonely pass, through which ran a stream said to have many beaver. The two trappers set up camp late one afternoon and went out to explore for a couple of hours. Returning at dusk, they found that something had scattered their belongings around and had in “sheer wantonness” destroyed their lean-to. They rebuilt their lean-to, made supper, and then studied the footprints left by the beast. They noticed, quite to their surprise, that the malicious intruder had apparently walked off on two feet (bears usually go on all fours). This was a bit unsettling, but at last they managed to fall asleep under the lean-to.