Hoopa Bigfoot Footprint Photograph

Hoopa sits in the Hoopa Valley on the lower Trinity River, in Humboldt County, California. The valley is encompassed by the Hoopa Valley Indian Reservation. Among the Hupa, a creature of the forest has long been called Oh-mah. The name is glossed as "Boss of the Woods."

In 1958 the region gave a modern legend its name. Jerry Crew found tracks at Bluff Creek, above Weitchpec. Andrew Genzoli and Betty Allen covered them in the Humboldt Times, and "Bigfoot" reached the front page on 6 October 1958. Fan chronologies record tracks found by Bob Titmus near Hoopa in 1960. On 13 July 1960 the paper published a San Jose doctor's print photographs near Weitchpec.

4 September 1962. The Eureka Humboldt Times ran a photograph of an alleged Bigfoot footprint. The headline read "Bigfoot Leaves Prints While Touring." It suggests a line of prints left by something on the move. The article's text has never been transcribed.

Wikipedia's caption places the photograph in Hoopa, taken in September 1962. The exact day is not known. Neither is the spot where the print was found. No one is recorded as having seen the animal. There is no description of its size, its build or its colour. Only the trace.

The record is thin. The photographer is unknown. So is the finder, and so is the reporter. No source gives the size of the print. There are no casts, no hair, no film. No police, Forest Service, tribal or government inquiry is known. Betty Allen, the paper's Willow Creek correspondent, had covered Bigfoot tracks in the area since 1958. She is an obvious lead. Nothing ties her to this item.

No one has claimed this particular print was faked. But the question already hung over the valley. On 31 October 1958, Betty Allen reported an offer of $1,000 for "the fund for the badly needed hospital project of the Community Health Association at Hoopa." It would be paid if the "wooden feet" behind the tracks were found and shown to be wearable.

Ray Wallace, the road contractor at Bluff Creek in 1958, died in 2002. His family then said he owned "large, poorly crafted, obviously fake wooden feet." They said his brother Wilbur Wallace and nephew Mack McKinley used them to "stamp imprints around northern California as a prank." Ed Schillinger, the only living witness from the Bluff Creek job, disputes their story. No source connects the Wallace feet to Hoopa or to 1962.

The scan was uploaded to Wikimedia Commons in April 2017, in the public domain because its United States copyright was never renewed. Today it illustrates the English Wikipedia article on Bigfoot. It also appears on the Wikidata entry for Anthropoidipes, recorded as a nomen dubium ichnogenus. The footprint has travelled far. The story behind it has not.

The valley's reputation endures. As one Survivorman episode put it, "the town of Hoopa is swimming in Sasquatch stories."