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The Sasquatch in Minnesota: Early Minnesota Bigfoot Sightings in The Land of 10,000 Lakes
The Sasquatch in Minnesota: Early Minnesota Bigfoot Sightings in The Land of 10,000 Lakes
The Sasquatch in Minnesota: Early Minnesota Bigfoot Sightings in The Land of 10,000 Lakes
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The Sasquatch in Minnesota: Early Minnesota Bigfoot Sightings in The Land of 10,000 Lakes

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This book tells the story of my own investigations in my home state of Minnesota. Every report that I am personally aware of at this time for Minnesota and the Dakotas is included here. Many are of a more-or-less conventional nature (man sees sasquatch, sasquatch runs away) while others are downright bizarre, but all are true to the best of my knowledge, and I believe they prove the existence of the beast I saw along that forest highway all those years ago.

LanguageEnglish
Release dateNov 19, 2021
ISBN9781955471077
The Sasquatch in Minnesota: Early Minnesota Bigfoot Sightings in The Land of 10,000 Lakes

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    The Sasquatch in Minnesota - Mike Quast

    INTRODUCTION - 10 YEARS SEEKING SASQUATCH

    Why am I writing this book?

    I could just as easily ask- What is it that makes a perfectly sane human being dedicate a large part of his life to pursuing something so elusive that most people do not even believe it exists?

    What causes someone to spend enormous amounts of time and money (which could probably be better spent) in an endeavor that is both physically and mentally demanding and exposes him to great ridicule, all the while having only the very tiniest chance of success?

    I have been doing it for a decade now, and I still don't know.

    In 1990, I published The Sasquatch in Minnesota, following it in 1991 with Creatures of the North: The New Minnesota Sasquatch Encounters. In one way, these were just two more additions to the large collection of books dealing with the subject of giant, hairy manlike/apelike creatures that reportedly exist in our wilderness areas. But in another, more personal way, they told an important piece of my life story.

    On a warm, sunny summer day in 1976, I was with my family on a leisurely drive through the area of Strawberry Lake, located near the Indian community of White Earth in western Minnesota. I was just eight years old and was enjoying the view as we drove through the forested countryside, hoping to catch sight of a deer or other animal.

    Suddenly I did see something. Standing between 75 and 100 yards ahead of the car, on the left side of the road, was a dark black object about 6 1/2 or seven feet tall. At first, I thought it was a burned, blackened tree trunk, but that notion quickly went out the window when it stepped away from the road and walked on two legs into the woods, disappearing from view. No one else in the car had seen it, so I alone was left to wonder- what was it?

    A man? Not likely, owing to its color and large size.

    A bear? Even less likely, since although bears can stand and even take a few clumsy steps on their hind legs, they always drop down to all fours to go anywhere.

    There was really only one other option I could think of. I believed then, as I do now, that I'd seen a sasquatch, or Bigfoot, one of those legendary giant man-apes said to roam the wild places of North America. From that moment on, I have been determined to learn more about these creatures, and the more one learns, the more curious one becomes.

    It was in 1987 that I began to seriously investigate this phenomenon, and I learned quickly that for some reason, it is a subject that stirs great emotion in people. The sasquatch is regarded by many as a big joke, a silly piece of folklore that somehow became popular, not as a real animal at all. Therefore, are those of us who have actually seen one in the flesh included in the joke? If so, we are not laughing.

    Most of the general public is still completely unaware of the scope of this phenomenon and of the number of investigators in the United States and Canada who pursue it. And what is my role?

    Through what feels to me to have been a minimal effort on my part, I have somehow become the chief investigator for the state of Minnesota.

    Of course, this is just a fancy way of saying that I'm about the only person who's really gotten out there and done the work on a large scale.

    So, I ask again - why am I writing this third book?

    Two reasons, one of which is the very work I've been doing for the past decade. I've made a lot of observations and formed many opinions in that time, and in this my ten-year anniversary, it seemed fitting to share some of them. The other reason is the state of Minnesota, my home. Look up this state in other books on Bigfoot, and you will probably find less than a dozen reports listed for all of recorded history. This was discouraging at first, but as I did not have the resources to go to the more popular Pacific Northwest or some other hot spot for any length of time to conduct research, and since after all, I had seen a sasquatch myself in Minnesota, it was here that I established myself. And as I soon discovered, the other books are quite incomplete.

    A good number of reports have come to my attention since the publication of my last book. My Minnesota file now contains over 130 of them, a fact I am quite proud of. Some of these have been published in newspapers but never widely circulated, while others were completely unknown until I came across them. A small percentage are my own personal experiences (my 1976 sighting, various footprint discoveries, etc.), but most are not, and I take credit for assembling them into the collection you'll see here.

    But isn't this kind of book dreadfully monotonous? We've seen it over and over - books that simply tell story after story, sighting after sighting, footprint after footprint. It was a new idea once, but we've gotten very used to it. So why do it one more time? Because I am very serious about getting this information out there, establishing Minnesota as what I feel it is- one of the best-suited states east of the Rockies to shelter these giant creatures (and I do like to fancy myself a fairly decent writer, so hopefully my telling of the tale will keep you entertained).

    MINNESOTA- The Gopher State. Land of 10,000 Lakes. It is a state with many vastly different features. It contains the Twin Cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul (a major metropolitan area by anyone's standards). It is an industry leader in agriculture, shipping, yard iron ore production. Yet, it also has thousands of square miles of unspoiled wilderness throughout its wide expanse. An analysis of the land reveals the following statistics:

    Crops: 44%

    Forest: 34%

    Pasture: 11%

    Water: 6%

    Wetlands: 3%

    Mines: 0.1%

    This leaves only 1.9% for cities.

    With all of its lakes, actually numbering close to 15,000, Minnesota has more shoreline than Hawaii, California, and Florida combined, and these lakes are filled with many kinds of fish from the huge muskie to the tiny shiner minnow. In the woods, one may find such animals as white-tailed deer, moose, black bear, timber wolf, lynx, and bobcat. Even the elusive mountain lion still prowls here, though it's hard to convince the experts of that. Bird watchers love it here as well, enjoying glimpses of the rare bald eagle and listening to the crazy call of the loon, our state bird.

    The Norway Pine is Minnesota's state tree, but overall, the forests here are mostly mixed growth, with both deciduous and coniferous trees. A perfect habitat for the sasquatch.

    A spokesman for the state DNR (Department of Natural Resources) stated to me in a letter that ...most bigfoot-type observations occur in the Pacific Northwest. If such a creature really exists, it is not unreasonable to expect that one could stray into Minnesota. However, such authorities have put forth very little effort to study the situation. In fact, hardly anyone has. But there are a few people besides myself who have worked at it to some degree in Minnesota.

    During the late 1970s and early 1980s, a Mr. Donald Peterson of Litchfield was active in investigations, allied with an Iowa sasquatch tracker named Cliff Labreque.

    Also, at that time, two teenagers, Ted Steiner and David Warner were publishing a small newsletter called Minnesota Bigfoot News and operated a Bigfoot Center in the basement of Warner's home in Edina.

    A Richard Johnson of St. Paul searched for the creatures in northern Minnesota in 1978-79 and claimed a sighting (details in chapter three).

    Although I've attempted to contact these people, I have been unsuccessful. I have been in touch, however, with Mark A. Hall and Tim Olson.

    Hall is a Fortean researcher (interested in all manner of strange phenomena) in Bloomington, a suburb of the Twin Cities. A colleague of popular writer Loren Coleman, he has an extensive library and has written a number of books and articles of his own. Mark is probably best known as the foremost authority on thunderbirds, giant birds of prey that are said to inhabit North America, but his interest in manlike beasts also runs very deep. He has been outspoken in his belief in what he calls the true giants, creatures that may exceed 15 feet in height, not a popular belief by any means but one he treats with true scholarly wisdom. However, he is employed by the federal government, and most of his time is spent making a living (a problem for all of us in this field- there is no money whatsoever in sasquatch chasing); thus, he rarely gets out into the field. He is a virtual human storehouse of information, however, and has helped me a lot.

    Tim Olson is younger and more active on the physical end of things. He has been my partner on and off for several years since Mark Hall first introduced us (they were neighbors), but though he is a Minnesota native, he now lives in northern California, where the name Bigfoot first arose. He has been allied at various times with such well-known investigators as Rich Grumley of the now-defunct California Bigfoot Organization and Warren Thompson and Arch Buckley of the Bay Area Group.

    When I met Tim, I had recently begun publishing a monthly newsletter, The Sasquatch Report. He soon became my associate editor.

    Since then, the project has gone in various directions, but all in all, I'd say we've done a pretty good job. I have a lot of respect for Tim; he has to live with a medical condition that denies him many things most people take for granted, but he has a very strong religious faith, and it's gotten him through a lot of hard times.

    And since late 1990, there has been Ed Trimble. Old Ed has been extremely valuable to me as an investigator since his own first discovery of strange tracks on his property, and many of the reports in this book were first uncovered by him. Much more on him later.

    It is through the work of people like these, as well as myself that the true picture of the sasquatch's role as a member of Minnesota's fauna has emerged. And as I said, in a decade of investigating that role as well as being involved in the sasquatch field on a wider scale, I've formed my own unique set of views about the whole thing. I'd like to share some of those with you now and tell you a bit more of my story.

    THE SASQUATCH REPORT AND PETER BYRNE

    My newsletter, The Sasquatch Report (SR), is one of several such publications within the field right now. However, as far as I know, only the Bigfoot Co-Op out of Whittier, California, surpasses it in its longevity. What's more, it is monthly, whereas the Co-Op is bimonthly and has sometimes disappeared for months at a time, the SR no matter what else can be said about it, it does seem to have staying power. And here is how it came about:

    In October of 1989, I traveled by Greyhound to Hood River, Oregon, to meet with famed Bigfoot hunter Peter Byrne. I had been corresponding with him for some time, choosing him mainly because of an information packet he'd sent me when I was a child. That had been back in the 1970s when his Bigfoot Information Center was operating, and he'd been publishing the monthly newsletter, Bigfoot News. There were other investigators I could have contacted, but having him fresh in my memory made me choose him.

    I stayed with Peter, his wife Celia, and their five-year-old daughter Rara overnight, finding their home along the Hood River to be comfortable and gracious. (Incidentally, I found it impressive that a man could have his first child at the age of 58.)

    Rara was a little bundle of energy. Celia (Dede to her friends) seemed even more into conservation than her famous husband and had been live-trapping mice in the house to release them outside.

    Peter said he had retired from the Bigfoot business in 1979 because he had simply had enough. After a lifetime of thrilling adventures- big game hunting in Nepal, yeti expeditions in the high Himalayas, white water rafting excursions, then on the conservation movement and the founding of a tiger preserve, along with the Bigfoot quest- he seemed content now to take it easy in his picturesque mountain surroundings. Beautiful Mount Hood loomed on the horizon from the end of his driveway.

    During the day, we visited Fermin Osborne, a retired logger who had had a famous creature sighting along with two other men in 1974.

    I looked over and saw this big old monster, he said matter-of-factly as he told the story.

    Then at night, Peter and I sat by his fireplace listening to opera, sipping hot rum, and talking about the sasquatch. The surroundings, plus his suave Irish accent, seemed to lend a distinct air of class to the whole business.

    Before I had to catch the bus home the next morning, Peter showed me one of the few remaining complete sets of Bigfoot News, 57 issues dated Oct. '74-June '79. I had talked about how I had been thinking of starting a newsletter, and in a surprising act of generosity, he gave me the complete set, said I could use anything from it that I wished, and suggested I even use the Bigfoot News title and logo.

    It was a few months before I got everything organized. In spreading the word about my intentions, I learned that Don Keating of Newcomerstown, Ohio already had a newsletter called Bigfoot News and wasn't about to let me use that name, so I changed it to The Sasquatch Report, which began in April 1990 and endures to this day without a single month missed and never late by more than a few days.

    I did use one major thing from Peter's publication- its four-page format. This made it easy to print on one single 11 x 17 sheet of paper. Only a few times has an extra page been inserted.

    Things change, of course. That's part of what defines life. Events involving Peter Byrne since then are now a matter of record, fully documented elsewhere, and I won't rehash things too much.

    Peter's retirement did not last forever. Shortly after my visit, he was off to Nepal again to work on an elephant study project, resulting in the book and t.v. special Tula Hatti, the Last Great Elephant. And not long after that, his 1970s benefactor, Boston's Academy of Applied Science (best known for their Loch Ness Monster research), decided to fund him for a new 5-year sasquatch hunt. And thus was born the Bigfoot Research Project. It was a big operation, with computers and motion sensors and all manner of other high-tech gear. Peter's critics asserted that it was primarily a giant publicity gimmick, as they had said of his earlier efforts. At this point, I honestly don't know the truth about Peter Byrne, nor do I really care as it does not affect my own work in Minnesota in any way. The Bigfoot Research Project did provide funding for my newsletter for a time, as they did for others around the country, but that too is open to interpretation as to motive by Peter's critics.

    But my publishing endeavors suddenly put me in the midst of a scandal that became known as the Great Footprint Caper. To make a long story short, it involved a photo of a sasquatch track circulated by Peter and an assertion that it was that of the creature in the famous 1967 Patterson film from Bluff Creek, California, found seven years prior to the filming. Others, however, including investigator John Green in British Columbia (who had considerable experience with tracks from Bluff Creek), were quick to point out that it was most definitely not the same, and that in fact, Peter had published the exact same photo years before with a completely different story as to date, location, and track dimensions.

    Byrne and Green debated angrily back and forth in the pages of The Sasquatch Report for four months until I finally gave up on the whole issue and said, Enough. After all, how could this possibly serve to help find a live sasquatch now, a quarter-century after the fact, no matter where the track came from?

    It seems to have been this issue and other disagreements between him and Green that estranged me from Peter Byrne, who was very angry that I wouldn't take his side exclusively. Of course, I didn't take anyone else's either, but so be it. People are funny.

    MORE SASQUATCH SCANDAL

    We sasquatch investigators are a curious lot. We are not scientists unless you consider cryptozoology (the study of hidden animals) to be an amateur science. Rather, we are pretty much all private working citizens who pursue our quarry in our spare time on shoestring budgets. We like to make little corners of our homes into offices, put maps on the wall with multiple-colored pins sticking in them, and try to appear as official as possible. Many of us also like to form organizations or information centers and have business cards and stationery printed. (I myself once tried to form a group, the short-lived Minnesota Bigfoot/Sasquatch Organization.)

    As stated before, a fair number of publications resulted from all this as well.

    It's all very impressive, to be sure, and maybe someday it'll all be worth it.

    I would like to call all of these people a real functioning network of investigators. I really would. Unfortunately, that is just not the case. In this field, everyone is well-meaning, and almost everyone believes the sasquatch is real, but somehow no one agrees on anything else. Just believing is not enough. You must believe for the right reasons, and your motives must be like everyone else's. If not, no matter how nice a guy you might be, you automatically make enemies. As I said, this subject is highly emotional.

    I have ended up in more than my fair share of arguments with some of these people in the past decade. Without naming names, the state of Ohio seems to be a hotbed of disagreement in sasquatch-related matters of all sorts. Newcomers to the field, especially, are often looked down upon, especially if they happen to come up with impressive evidence with a minimum of effort (which is only due to extreme luck in most cases). And if you happen to operate a newsletter and make it an open forum for people to speak their minds, watch out.

    I have tried to make The Sasquatch Report impartial. Most issues do contain an editorial, but all contain a disclaimer that reads, Opinions expressed by others in this newsletter are not necessarily shared or supported by the editors. But that's not enough, it seems. Over and over, people submitting their views to SR have insisted that I support them and that I refuse to print viewpoints opposing them. Usually, the cases in question are ones that I have very little or no personal opinion on anyway.

    I like to use the following analogy: If some fascist dictator gives a speech and angrily insults the United States, does our media condone his views simply by reporting what he said? Of course not!

    But the fact that he said it is news, like it or not. Why people refuse to let me and SR approach the sasquatch field from this standpoint is completely beyond me.

    It has always been my contention that the only way the sasquatch is going to be proven real is by long, hard hours spent out in the wilderness physically searching for it, not through anything that takes place on the printed page or in a lecture hall. Spreading the word is important, surely, but in the end, it will only serve as support for more physical activity. Arguing for years over whether or not the Blue Mountains dermal ridge tracks are real or fake, or whether this film or that film shows a real sasquatch or a man in a costume, is completely pointless. (Films, especially, are pointless to debate unless they are of good enough quality to serve as final proof. If they're not, it doesn't matter if they're real or fake!)

    I suppose it was inevitable, though, that big egos and basic human nature would cause this sad state of affairs. Yet somehow, things do occasionally get accomplished in this field. While the various cliques argue back and forth, investigations are launched. Discoveries are made. And some day, one of us is going to prove to the world once and for all that the sasquatch really exists and vindicate us all, friends and enemies alike.

    And so, this book tells the story of my own investigations in my home state of Minnesota. I do not claim to be absolutely correct about everything you will read here, for I am only human and therefore imperfect and fallible, but I hope the weight of the evidence here will make at least somewhat of an impression.

    This book is essentially an updated combination of my first two, with many updates, corrections, and much new information. I have also included a section this time on the neighboring states of North and South Dakota, where the sasquatch has also roamed.

    A note about witnesses: In cases where the witnesses' names have not been previously published, only initials will be used unless permission has been given to use the full name.

    And a note on the word Bigfoot. It is actually a local northern California name for the creatures that simply caught on in the rest of the country through media coverage in the late 1950s, and I have always thought it sounded much too cartoon-like for a real animal; thus, I prefer to use the term sasquatch.

    Every report that I am personally aware of at this time for Minnesota and the Dakotas is included here. Many are of a more-or-less conventional nature (man sees sasquatch, sasquatch runs away) while others are downright bizarre, but all are true to the best of my knowledge, and I believe they prove the existence of the beast I saw along that forest highway all those years ago.

    Author's view of Strawberry Lake sasquatch, summer 1976.

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