The Bauman Goblin-Beast: Theodore Roosevelt's Tale from The Wilderness Hunter

Around 1890, Theodore Roosevelt listened to a story from a "grisled, weather-beaten old mountain hunter, named Bauman." The man was of German ancestry, a lifelong frontiersman raised on ghost and goblin lore. He had heard Native medicine men tell of "snow-walkers." Roosevelt gives no first name and no year. The events belonged to Bauman's youth. In June 1893, with a preface signed at Sagamore Hill, Roosevelt put the story into The Wilderness Hunter.

The mountains dividing the forks of the Salmon from the head of the Wisdom River. Today it is the Big Hole River, on the border of Idaho and Montana. A wild and lonely pass. A small stream full of beaver. The pass had a bad name. The year before, mining prospectors had found the remains of a lone hunter there. The two trappers went in anyway. They left their ponies in a meadow at the foot of the pass and walked about four hours up to a glade. There they made camp.

They came back at dusk from scouting the stream. The lean-to was torn up. Their gear lay scattered. A bear, they thought. Then the partner studied the prints. "Bauman, that bear has been walking on two legs."

That night something circled the camp, out beyond the firelight. Branches cracked. It gave "a harsh, grating, long-drawn moan, a peculiarly sinister sound." Around midnight Bauman smelled a strong "wild-beast odour." In the opening of the lean-to, he saw a huge body. He fired. The shot probably missed, and the thing ran off. The next day the camp was torn apart again. At one point it "stayed there on the hill-side for nearly an hour."

The men decided to leave. The partner stayed to pack the camp while Bauman went to collect the traps. When Bauman returned, his partner lay dead. The body was still warm. "The neck was broken, and there were four great fang marks in the throat." The tracks showed that the killer "came silently up from behind, walking with long, noiseless steps, and seemingly still on two legs." It had not eaten the body. It "romped and gambolled round it in uncouth, ferocious glee," then went back into the forest.

Bauman left everything but his rifle. He rushed off at top speed down the valley, through the night, to the ponies. He would call the thing "half human or half devil, some great goblin-beast."

Roosevelt called it a "goblin story" that "rather impressed me." He was sure Bauman "must have believed what he said," for the old hunter could hardly hold back a shudder in the telling. Perhaps the killer was "merely some abnormally wicked and cunning wild beast." But "no man can say." Roosevelt also suspected that German folklore and the snow-walker stories had coloured Bauman's memory. Jason Colavito sees a secondhand tall tale. Two men frightened by a bear walking upright, and a story that grew with each retelling. In Mental Floss, Kat Long half-jokingly suggested a cougar. No official investigation and no contemporary news report of the death has been found.

Neither Roosevelt nor his era used the words Bigfoot or Sasquatch. Even so, the tale is now retold across Bigfoot websites, podcasts and videos. Some writers identify the teller as Carl L. Bauman, born in Germany in 1831, who died near Melrose, Montana, on 20 March 1909. Nobody has proved it. And the violence sets the story apart. Kitasoo/Xai'xais sasquatch traditions describe a shy creature that smells bad and screams, but does not kill.