The Naming of Bigfoot — Humboldt County, California (1958)

The modern legend of Bigfoot was born in the fall of 1958 in Humboldt County, California, when enormous humanoid footprints were repeatedly found around a road construction site in the remote Bluff Creek drainage. Workers on Jerry Crew's bulldozer team had been finding the tracks for weeks, and strange events — equipment moved overnight, fuel drums displaced — accompanied the prints. When Crew made plaster casts of a particularly clear set of prints and delivered them to Andrew Genzoli at the Humboldt Times, the resulting article on October 5, 1958 introduced the name 'Big Foot' to the American lexicon. The story was picked up by wire services and spread nationally, launching a phenomenon that would become one of the most enduring legends of the twentieth century. The Bluff Creek area, deep in the Klamath Mountains near the California-Oregon border, was an extraordinarily remote and heavily forested landscape accessible only by logging roads. The construction crew was building a road into virgin timber stands for the Wallace Construction Company. The area would gain further fame nine years later when Roger Patterson and Bob Gimlin filmed their famous footage just upstream from the construction site. The convergence of these events at Bluff Creek cemented the region's status as the birthplace of the modern Bigfoot phenomenon.