History Vs. Podcast Bonus Episode: Theodore Roosevelt vs. Bigfoot

Erin McCarthy: Hello and welcome to a very special bonus episode of History Vs., a podcast from Mental Floss and iHeartRadio about how your favorite historical figures faced off against their greatest foes. I’m your host, Erin McCarthy, and today, we’re going to be exploring a tale Theodore Roosevelt wrote about in his book The Wilderness Hunter, a memoir of his time on the frontier, which was published in 1893. Many of the stories in the book are just what you’d expect from a big game hunter like TR, but there’s one unusual tale that stands out from the rest, one that Roosevelt called “a goblin story which rather impressed me.”

Here to tell us about what’s now known as The Bauman Incident is Mental Floss science editor Kat Long, who wrote a piece about the event for us.

Kat Long: A couple years ago I visited a small village on the central coast of British Columbia, where members of the Kitasoo/Xai’xais First Nation have cultural stories about sasquatches, or buk’wis in the local language. They also shared with me a lot of stories about sasquatches and their personal encounters with them in their ancestral territory.

McCarthy: Is that why when I asked someone to write this story, you volunteered so quickly?

Long: Yes, it is.

McCarthy: What was the Bauman incident?

Long: The Bauman Incident supposedly occurred in the mountains of western Montana and northwestern Wyoming, which in the late 19th century was still the Montana Territory.

On one of TR’s hunting trips to the region, he met a grizzled old trapper named Bauman who told him a wild tale.

TR doesn’t mention Bauman’s first name, but it may have been Carl L. Bauman. According to a Montana Historical Society journal, this Carl L. Bauman was born in Germany in 1831. He moved west in the 1860s, and died in Montana in 1909. So that timeline and geographical detail fits with TR’s account, but we don’t have any proof that he was the one.

Bauman told TR how, as a young man, he and a friend went into the Montana forest to hunt beaver. And they set up their traps in a mountain pass that had been the scene of another trapper’s mysterious, gruesome death the year before.

So over a few days and nights, Bauman and his friend were tormented by a strange animal that destroyed their camp, and it howled with the cover of the trees, and watched them as they slept and all kinds of creepy activities. And in the morning, they found footprints indicating that the creature walked upright.

Finally, after a few days of this, they couldn’t take it anymore, and as they packed up to leave, Bauman had to walk a few miles away to gather up some beaver traps from a stream and when he returned to the campsite, he found his friend dead, with fang marks in his neck. The scariest part about it was that the beast had not devoured the flesh, but merely—and this is what TR wrote—“romped and gamboled round it in uncouth, ferocious glee.”

McCarthy: What did they think was the culprit?

Long: TR writes in the beginning of the story that the culprit could have been “merely some abnormally wicked and cunning wild beast, but … no man can say.” He also suggests that Bauman thought it was “something either half human or half devil, some great goblin beast.” Bauman doesn’t tell TR what he thought it was, and TR never comes right out and says it, but he seems to imply that it was a sasquatch.

McCarthy: But he wouldn’t have called it sasquatch or Bigfoot, because according to the Oxford English Dictionary, we weren’t using those words yet—sasquatch didn’t come around until the late 1920s, and Bigfoot until the late 1950s. So anyway—why do people think this incident involved a sasquatch? Was that something they believed in at that time?

Long: Tales of “hairy giants” or “wild men” of the forest were already circulating around the Pacific Northwest and indigenous peoples of the region had legends including sasquatch-like characters. So they also shared tales of seeing and interacting with the actual sasquatches with the white trappers they met, and then the white trappers and hunters picked up the tale and retold the stories.

McCarthy: What’s the differences between what’s in this account and what’s in the account of indigenous peoples’ encounters with the sasquatch?

Long: The Kitasoo say sasquatches are shy and generally stay out of people’s way, and they are definitely not known as bloodthirsty murderers. But they do, however, scream really loudly in this really high-pitched freaky sound, and they also really stink, and TR mentioned those two characteristics in his account of the Bauman Incident as well.

McCarthy: What are some of the encounters that the Kitasoo told you about with sasquatch?

Long: I remember one story that was told to me by one of the leaders in the community that they were out overnight on a beach gathering clams, because it was the time of year when the tide was out and they could dig them up out of the beach really easily. So they’d been doing this all night and they were sort of gathered around the beach. Some of the members of the group heard this crazy scream coming out of the woods. They looked over to the elder of the group and the elder wasn’t doing anything, he didn’t seem alarmed at all, so they were like “OK, we’ll just continue doing our thing,” but they kept hearing this scream just out of the woods. And it is very quiet up there, I mean, it would have been shocking. And so kind of gathered closer and closer to the boat they had all come in on. The elder said “Why aren’t you out gathering clams? What’s going on?” and all of a sudden, this piercing, super loud scream just came out of the woods, and he suddenly looked incredibly shocked and started banging the anchor on the boat trying to scare whatever it was away, and everybody jumped on the boat and motored away as fast as they could.

So in that story, we see the sasquatch screaming. They didn’t see him—it really stayed out of sight—but it was kind of like, the sasquatch might have been a little curious about what they were doing and was trying to get their attention, but then they just got the hell out of there.

McCarthy: They were like “we don’t see you, and based on that noise, we don’t want to see you.”

Long: Yeah.

McCarthy: How often are they having encounters like this? I mean, are they common?

Long: A lot of people in the village have had them, but they don’t happen every day or anything like that. They may happen, to each person, maybe a few times in their life.

McCarthy: And what do they say to Western science’s belief that sasquatch isn’t real?

Long: They understand that a lot of people don’t think that they’re real, or they don’t believe them when they say they’ve seen them with their own eyes, and their response to that is “well, you know, we don’t need some Western scientist telling me whether they exist or not. I’ve seen them,” or, “Elders in our community have seen them and I believe what they say,” or, “Our stories over generations and generations all talk about them, so how can they not exist?”

McCarthy: And one thing that I thought was really interesting about your piece is that I think you went back to one of the elders, and you asked him, right, and he said, “Just because we haven’t found a skeleton or bones or anything doesn’t mean anything—I’ve never found a bear skeleton in the woods either.”

Long: Exactly.

McCarthy: Which is a pretty good point.

Long: Yeah. Yeah. It really makes you think. We know a lot about what’s out in the forest, but there’s a lot that we don’t know, and so … we’ll just kind of have to leave that where it is.

McCarthy: So TR was a pretty practical dude, and he was not really given to flights of fancy. So how did he explain what happened here?

Long: TR wrote that Bauman was of German ancestry, and must have heard “all kinds of ghost and goblin lore, so that many fearsome superstitions were latent in his mind.”

He also said that Bauman had heard tales from the Native American medicine men of “snow-walkers … spectres, and the formless evil beings that haunt the forest depths.”

TR says that Bauman “must have believed what he said, for he could hardly repress a shudder at certain points of the tale.”

McCarthy: Have any scientists thought about what the animal actually was?

Long: I don’t think any real scientists have looked into this because from a scientific investigation point of view, there aren’t many specific clues to go on, and no physical evidence that could be tested for, like, sasquatch DNA or they don’t have any material to test for stable isotopes, which can show where an animal has been or what it’s eaten, or that kind of thing.

McCarthy: Besides the walking on two feet thing, it almost sounds like it could be a mountain lion—people say that a cougar screaming sounds like “a woman screaming for her life.” TR himself once said that “No man could well listen to a stranger and wilder sound.”

Long: What I was thinking is that maybe a cougar was attacking a bear that was walking upright, which would cover all the bases.

McCarthy: Yes, that was definitely it. That was definitely, definitely it. Well, I guess this is just one of those mysteries that we are never going to solve.

Thanks to Kat Long for joining us, and thanks for listening to this special bonus episode of History Vs. We’ll be back with another bonus episode in a few weeks.

Credits

History Vs. is hosted by me, Erin McCarthy. The executive producers are Erin McCarthy, Julie Douglas, and Tyler Klang. The show is edited by Dylan Fagan and Lowell Brillante.

History Vs. is a production of iHeartRadio and Mental Floss.

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