The Bossburg "Cripple Foot" Sasquatch Trackway

Bossburg is a ghost town in Stevens County, Washington. It stands on the east bank of the Columbia River just south of the Canadian border.

November 24, 1969. Joe Rhodes of Colville spotted very large, human-like footprints at the community garbage dump, including a left print 17.5 inches long, 6.5 inches across the ball and 5.5 inches across the heel. The right print was slightly smaller, with two lumps on the outer edge. Its third toe was badly twisted or missing, and its little toe stuck out at a sharp angle. Locals called the track-maker the "Bossburg Cripple."

Sasquatch hunters converged on the town. René Dahinden arrived on November 27 to find most of the prints already trampled by sightseers, and photographed and cast the best one left. Ivan Marx, a Bossburg resident, joined the hunt, along with Bob Titmus. Roger Patterson came intermittently, while his assistant Dennis Jenson stayed full time. Grover Krantz of Washington State University came later to take photos and make casts.

December 13, 1969. Marx and Dahinden were driving near a railway crossing. They passed a Jeep parked by the roadside. Marx got out to check a small meat cache, then came back shouting. "Bigfoot tracks!"

There were 1,089 of them in the snow. They ran from near the Columbia River, across the railroad and main highway, over a 43-inch-high wire fence, across flatland, and halfway up a hill. Along the way lay an apparent rest area, and even a spot where the creature had relieved itself in the snow. Then the footprints retraced their path and disappeared into the river. Five days later, a U.S. Border Patrol officer reported similar tracks across the Canadian border.

John Napier, a primatologist formerly at the Smithsonian, studied the casts and photographs and diagnosed a clubfoot, talipes equinovarus, probably from an early childhood injury. Deliberate hoaxing seemed so unlikely that Napier was "prepared to discount it." Krantz reconstructed the bones of the foot from the casts and concluded they could not have been faked. "If somebody faked that and put all of the subtle hints of the anatomy design in that, he had to be a real genius, an expert at anatomy, and very inventive and original in thinking." Later, Jeff Meldrum of Idaho State University re-read the deformity as metatarsus adductus, or skewfoot.

Dahinden accepted the tracks but stayed suspicious. When they returned with cameras, the Jeep was gone. Later accounts say Dahinden strongly suspected Marx of the hoax, while Krantz refused to accept that the tracks were not real.

In October 1970, Marx phoned Dahinden: "I've got a film of the cripple." Most viewers were convinced at first, and a bidding war began. Peter Byrne then checked the filming site. It did not fit Marx's account, and shifting shadows showed far more time had passed between shots than claimed. Belief in the film evaporated.

Sceptical writers, from Skeptical Inquirer to Sapiens in 2023, treat Marx as the likely author of the tracks. They point to the Jeep, the trackway near Marx's own meat lure, the faked film and the wooden feet behind the 1958 Bluff Creek tracks. Supporters reply that the deformity is too anatomically consistent for a 1969 hoaxer to have known. Krantz's cast copies went on show at the Phoebe A. Hearst Museum of Anthropology for Darwin Day 2008. Nobody ever saw the Bossburg Cripple. Only its footprints remain.