The County in Washington Where It’s Illegal to Kill Bigfoot

When officials in Skamania County, Washington, passed Ordinance No. 69-01 on April 1, 1969, they took pains to assure the public that the new law was no joke—even if what it outlawed was the killing of Bigfoot.

“The absence of specific laws covering the taking of specimens encourages laxity in the use of firearms … and poses a clear and present threat to the safety and well-being of persons living or traveling clear within the boundaries of Skamania County as well as to the creatures themselves,” the ordinance read. It declared that “any premeditated, wil[l]ful and wanton slaying of any such creature shall be deemed a felony punishable by a fine not to exceed Ten Thousand Dollars … and/or imprisonment in the county jail for a period not to exceed five years” [PDF].

“There is reason to believe such an animal [as Bigfoot] exists,” Board Chairman Conrad Lundy, Jr., told the press, “and there is even more reason to make its hunting unlawful in order to prevent accidents caused by the use of lethal weapons.”

1. Sasquatch in Skamania
2. Protecting Bigfoot
3. To Kill or Not to Kill

Sasquatch in Skamania

If there’s any place where the passing of such an ordinance made sense, it’s Skamania County: The area has a long history of reported sasquatch sightings. 

According to one story from 1847, the native Multnomah people refused to guide a French-Canadian artist attempting to paint Mount St. Helens to the headwaters of the Lewis River because “a race of giant, hairy cannibals” lived nearby [PDF].

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More than a century later, in 1950, a 7-year-old girl said a creature with “kind eyes” had observed her and her friends playing near the edge of a forest. Investigation of this encounter led researchers to rabbit pens opened with a level of dexterity unknown by the animals in the area, and stories of guard dogs begging to be let inside with their tails between their legs.

Five years later, YMCA counselors claimed to have spotted an extra rare albino sasquatch throwing logs around in 1955.

And only a month before the ordinance passed, a man named Don Cox reported seeing an ape-like creature just before 4 a.m. on Highway 14.

What he thought at first was just a fallen tree in the road was in fact moving—alive, huge, and hairy. The creature was humanoid, 8 to 10 feet tall, and had the face of an ape; it ran across the road before jumping up a steep, 14-foot-tall ledge with ease, disappearing into the woods. Police investigation yielded a smeared track going up the slope measuring about 8 inches long and pressed more than 3 inches into the dirt.

The next year, there were three more separate sightings of ape-like creatures in Beacon Rock State Park—and the list goes on and on.

Protecting Bigfoot

Somewhat shockingly, Skamania County isn’t the only place in the U.S. that has laws in place to protect Bigfoot.

Whitehall, in upstate New York, boasts a marker naming it a “Bigfoot Sanctuary” (it’s also known as “the Bigfoot Capital of the Northeast”). In 2004, the town passed a law that made the hunting of its official mascot illegal. Local researcher Paul Bartholemew suggested the ordinance, he said, as a way to “embrace the phenomenon.”

Like Skamania county, Whitehall has a storied record of sightings, ranging from a string of sasquatch encounters by residents and policemen alike in the 1970s to anecdotal evidence by the Native people of the area going back hundreds of years. The town even hosts an annual Sasquatch Festival and Calling Contest, featuring local speakers, live music, and food vendors peddling sasquatch-themed fare. 

But as we well know, all the sightings in the world don’t seem to necessitate these kinds of laws in most locations. So why were they passed at all?

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To Kill or Not to Kill

As it turns out, the debate over killing or protecting cryptids is a hotly contested one. Dr. Grover Krantz, considered by many to be the founding father of serious Bigfoot research, had a controversial take on the subject: He advocated for the hunting and killing of sasquatch … to an extent.

“[Fifty] years from now, somebody by the rare chance might just stumble across the skeleton of a Sasquatch, and then the government … establishes definitely, they were there, but they’re extinct," he posited in 1996. “Everybody will be standing around wringing their hands saying: ‘If only we knew they were real, we could have saved them.’ Well, they could have been saved if only we would blow one away now. The first one who bags one should get a big, big prize. The second one should be hanged.”

Krantz thought that passing laws to protect Bigfoot was particularly foolish, comparing it to legally protecting unicorns. So why bother?

Many others in the Bigfoot community find the thought of killing one of the creatures unconscionable, and potentially with good reason. While Krantz’s philosophy leans towards striking before the species becomes extinct, it neglects to account for the idea that Bigfoot is hardly seen because it’s an already critically endangered species. If this were the case, killing one might do serious damage to the health of the population as a whole—all in the name of science. Skamania County furthered this line of thinking when, in 1984, Ordinance No. 69-01 was amended to classify bigfoot as an endangered species and create a “Sasquatch Refuge” in the area.

There’s also a more practical reason why we might want to discourage the killing of Bigfoot, which was discussed when an Oklahoma state representative filed a measure that would set an annual hunting season to coincide with a Bigfoot festival in the district: Hunters could inadvertently be shooting at one another hoping to be the first in the world to kill the fabled beast.

“It’s a whackadoodle idea,” Joe Nickell, a senior research fellow at the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry, told the New York Post. “I don’t know why we would want people unleashing guns out in the forest to hunt Bigfoot … they may shoot Littlefoot—themselves.” He also pointed out that it’s “an absolute invitation to needlessly kill wildlife, especially bears because they resemble Bigfoot.”

Lastly, there’s the most obvious reason for this kind of legislation: a gimmick for the press, to boost tourism, or—less cynically—just for fun.