Just 100 years ago Theodore Roosevelt was the country’s chief executive and favorite son. His personality was larger than life. His exploits captured people’s imaginations worldwide. After the death of his first wife in 1884, Roosevelt spent two years as a rancher and hunter on his ranch in the Badlands of Dakota Territory. He climbed down from the saddle long enough to pen three books during this period. In 1893, he published a lengthy and most entertaining narrative entitled T
he Wilderness Hunter: An Account of the Big Game of the United States and Its Chase with Horse, Hound, and Rifle, a memoir of sorts of his days in the territories. Among the stories recorded here is what seems to have been a 19th-century Bigfoot encounter.
Read on...
Actually, and technically, Roosevelt was not a Sasquatch witness, but he did write about a Sasquatch encounter. The Sasquatch in question had evidently murdered a mountain man but "It did not eat the dead body, but apparently had romped and gambolled round it, occasionally rolling over and over it, and then had fled back into the soundless depths of the woods"
ReplyDeleteHowever, Roosevelt was told this at second hand at the campfire as a ghost story by the deceased man's former partner, a man named Bauman, who also never saw the creature, only its tracks. If it is true it was presumably not a full-grown Sasquatch but more likely a rowdy youth since Sasquatches generally do not go about murdering people and carrying on about it so.
I read about this as a teenager in a juvenile book, The Maybe Monsters, a classic of the genre.