Jerry Crew's Bluff Creek Footprints and the Birth of "Bigfoot"

Summer 1958. About 30 workers were cutting Bluff Creek Road, a new timber access road through virgin stands of Douglas fir in the Six Rivers National Forest of far northern California. Wilbur "Shorty" Wallace was the foreman. His brother Ray L. Wallace co-owned the contracting company, and Jerry Crew ran a bulldozer. Crew was a catskinner from Salyer, earnest and serious, active in his church and community.

The morning of 27 August 1958, Crew came to his machine and found footprints. They were big and manlike, pressed deeply into the earth. They circled his rig and then led away. He reported them to Shorty Wallace, who linked them to a missing 450-pound diesel drum. Other stories followed: a 700-pound tire found in a gully, tools gone, and steel cables of 100 pounds dragged uphill.

Ray Wallace measured the stride himself: "fifty inches while at a stately pace, nearly ten feet while running." Hoopa workers on the crew had their own answer. They called the track-maker "a hairy forest giant." No one ever saw it.

More prints appeared in mid-September. On 21 September, Humboldt Times columnist Andrew Genzoli published a letter from Jess Bemis, the wife of a crew member. He had first called the report "good material for a good imaginative writer." Then another set arrived on 1 and 2 October. On 3 October, following instructions from taxidermist Bob Titmus, Crew made a plaster cast of one print, about 16 inches long, and took it to the paper in Eureka.

Sunday, 5 October 1958. The front page ran a photo of Crew holding the cast under the headline "Giant footprints puzzle residents along Trinity River," although some accounts give 6 October. Genzoli used the crew's nickname, "Big Foot," and it became one word: Bigfoot. Wire services carried it to the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times. Within a year the story drew more than 2,500 letters.

In 1958 Ray Wallace denied any role. He said the tracks were bear prints. Locally he was known as a prankster and a yarn-spinner. He later claimed he had captured a young Bigfoot and fed it Frosted Flakes.

He died on 26 November 2002, aged 84, in Centralia, Washington. His family then showed a pair of 16-inch carved wooden feet. His son Michael told the Seattle Times: "Ray L. Wallace was Bigfoot. The reality is, Bigfoot just died." Nephew Dale Lee Wallace said: "He did it just for the joke and then he was afraid to tell anybody because they'd be so mad at him." Logger John Auman suggested the prints were meant to scare off equipment thieves.

The confession did not settle it, and Titmus, skeptical at first, had come to accept the tracks as genuine. Jeff Meldrum of Idaho State University says the wooden feet do not match Crew's casts. Loren Coleman wrote that the surviving Crew cast "does not match the fakes revealed by the Ray Wallace family." Ed Schillinger, described as the only living witness from the Bluff Creek job, disputes the family's account. No official inquiry into the tracks is on record.

In December 1959 Ivan T. Sanderson told the Jerry Crew story in True magazine. Roger Patterson read it. In 1967, on the same creek, came the Patterson-Gimlin film. Loren Coleman called the case "a turning point in the pursuit of hairy wild hominoids in North America, and soon the world."