I love history, and periodically I run across amazing things while digging through the old books I’ve accumulated over the years. This one may be new to you, but, on the off chance it jogs your memory, do you remember that time Teddy Roosevelt met Bigfoot?
There are lots of legends about Teddy Roosevelt and Bigfoot…and one piece of art to rule them all. I’d like to focus on the most well-documented case, though: his recounting of the Bauman Story.
TR is famous to this day as an outdoorsman, and presumably he learned how to smell a tall tale from a mile off in his time around cowboy campfires. He presents the Bauman Story differently, though, as something he thinks could be fact.
In TR’s recounting of Bauman’s tale, he describes how Bauman (as young man, long before TR had heard of the story) and a partner had gone trapping in the remote mountains. After checking their traps all day, they returned to their campsite to find it smashed to pieces and reeking to high heaven. They initially assumed they’d been the victims of an inquisitive bear, but an evaluation of the enormous tracks it left behind in their camp pointed to a bipedal vandal. That night, what appeared to be an enormous creature stalked their camp, howling and throwing things.
The next day and night brought the same tribulations, and the two men decided to call it quits. They split up to recover their traps more rapidly, and Bauman’s companion made it back to camp first. That’s where Bauman found him later, neck bitten and broken, but his body otherwise intact. He hadn’t been eaten so much as murdered.
Anyone familiar with modern Bigfoot stories will recognize many of the elements of this story: the night-time behavior reminiscent of territorial chimpanzees, the damaged camp, the stench, and even the neck-snapping (though modern stories usually refer to that in the context of deer). What’s most interesting, though, is that TR uses this story as an introduction to his own nighttime encounter that he found comparable to the nighttime encounters described by Bauman.
We will almost certainly never know if the great hunter, Teddy Roosevelt, was once himself hunted by another hominid. His presentation of his acquaintance Bauman’s old story, though, makes it clear that the possibility had crossed his mind…and possibly his nightmares.