A Century Ago Bigfoot Appears to have Entered our Popular Culture

In yesterday's paper there was a profile on a new cheese shop.

In today's paper

The t-shirts the proprietors are wearing appear to show Bigfoot.

T-shirt detail

Bigfoot is having a mini-moment! Earlier this week the Oregonian mentioned Bigfoot.

Oregonian earlier this week

A century ago might be the very first mention in Salem papers, and it is almost certainly the first extended discussion in popular culture.

The Oregonian in fact had written about the episode in 2018, "How a 1924 Bigfoot battle on Mt. St. Helens helped launch a legend."

The afternoon paper here in 1924 picked up the story and gave it way more attention here than the morning paper. 

July 14th, 1924

But the afternoon paper was also very skeptical, calling it an instance of "the annual fake."

July 16th, 1924

July 17th, 1924

July 22nd, 1924

Without digging at all into discussions of the cultural context of the bigfoot myth, it is interesting this efflorescence in 1924 coincided with early 1920s nativism, as exemplified by anti-Japanese legislation and the KKK, and anxiety over evolution, as exemplified by the Scopes trial in 1925. The focus is not on any Indian legends, but is on "gorilla" and "ape."

The morning paper had been running a long, syndicated series that often touched on the debate between Modernists and Fundamentalists. (Again, it was not a very secular paper!)

Dec. 10th, 1922 and Nov. 18th, 1923

The afternoon paper was more critical, and they editorialized to support evolution.

Feb. 14th and Dec. 22nd, 1922

The culture in which the Bigfoot legend took root was not some blank canvas, but was fertilized with a series of live debates into which themes about Bigfoot could tap.

A closer reading would identify others, and maybe we'll come back to this. (But going down the Bigfoot rabbit hole is also not something we really want to do here...so maybe not.)