Erin McCarthy : Hello and welcome to a very special bonus episode ofHistory Vs . , a podcast from Mental Floss and iHeartRadio about how your favorite diachronic figure face off against their great enemy . I ’m your master of ceremonies , Erin McCarthy , and today , we ’re going to be exploring a tale Theodore Roosevelt wrote about in his bookThe Wilderness Hunter , a memoir of his time on the frontier , which was issue in 1893 . Many of the narration in the book are just what you ’d expect from a big biz huntsman like TR , but there ’s one unusual tale that stand out from the rest , one that Roosevelt call “ a goblin story which rather impress me . ”
Here to tell us about what ’s now know as The Bauman Incident is Mental Floss skill editor in chief Kat Long , whowrote a pieceabout the event for us .
Kat Long : A dyad years ago I visited a lowly village on the key slide of British Columbia , where appendage of the Kitasoo / Xai’xais First Nation have cultural tale about Bigfoot , orbuk’wisin the local linguistic process . They alsosharedwith me a lot of stories about sasquatches and their personal encounters with them in their hereditary territory .
McCarthy : Is that why when I ask someone to write this account , you volunteer so quickly ?
Long : Yes , it is .
McCarthy : What was the Bauman incident ?
Long : The Bauman Incident supposedly occur in the stack of western Montana and northwestern Wyoming , which in the late nineteenth century was still the Montana Territory .
On one of TR ’s hunt tripper to the region , he fulfil a grizzled old trapper named Bauman who differentiate him a tempestuous tale .
TR does n’t mention Bauman ’s first name , but it may have been Carl L. Bauman . According to a Montana Historical Society daybook , this Carl L. Bauman was born in Germany in 1831 . He moved west in the 1860s , and pop off in Montana in 1909 . So that timeline and geographic point fits with TR ’s bill , but we do n’t have any proof that he was the one .
Bauman tell apart TR how , as a young man , he and a booster went into the Montana forest to Richard Morris Hunt topper . And they put up their traps in a mountain pass that had been the scene of another trapper ’s cryptical , gruesome demise the year before .
So over a few day and night , Bauman and his friend were frustrate by a strange fauna that destroyed their camp , and it howl with the cover charge of the trees , and watched them as they slept and all kinds of creepy activity . And in the morning time , they plant footprints indicating that the puppet walk upright .
Finally , after a few day of this , they could n’t take it any longer , and as they pack up to leave , Bauman had to walk a few stat mi out to collect up some stovepipe traps from a stream and when he returned to the campsite , he found his booster dead , with fang marks in his neck . The scariest part about it was that the beast had not devoured the build , but only — and this is what TR wrote—“romped and gamboled round it in [ an ] uncouth , fierce mirth . ”
McCarthy : What did they opine was the culprit ?
Long : TR publish in the beginning of the story that the culprit could have been “ merely some abnormally distasteful and cunning wild animal , but … no man can say . ” He also suggests that Bauman call up it was “ something either one-half human or half Satan , some great goblin brute . ” Bauman does n’t secern TR what he think it was , and TR never come flop out and says it , but he seems to mean that it was a sasquatch .
McCarthy : But he would n’t have call it sasquatch or Bigfoot , because according to the Oxford English Dictionary , we were n’t using those word yet — sasquatch did n’t come around until the late 1920s , and Bigfoot until the late 1950s . So anyway — why do multitude think this incident involved a sasquatch ? Was that something they believed in at that time ?
Long : Tales of “ haired giants ” or “ wild men ” of the forest were already circulate around the Pacific Northwest and indigenous peoples of the neighborhood had legends including Bigfoot - like characters . So they also shared tales of construe and interact with the genuine Bigfoot with the white trapper they adjoin , and then the white trappers and hunters picked up the fib and retell the stories .
McCarthy : What ’s the difference between what ’s in this account and what ’s in the accounting of indigenous mass ’ encounters with the Bigfoot ?
Long : The Kitasoo say Bigfoot are diffident and generally stay out of mass ’s way of life , and they are definitely not be intimate as bloody-minded murderers . But they do , however , yell really loudly in this really luxuriously - pitch freaky audio , and they also really stink , and TR mentioned those two characteristics in his story of the Bauman Incident as well .
McCarthy : What are some of the encounters that the Kitasoo tell you about with Bigfoot ?
Long : I remember one story that was recite to me by one of the leaders in the community that they were out overnight on a beach assemblage clams , because it was the clock time of year when the lunar time period was out and they could dig them up out of the beach really easily . So they ’d been doing this all night and they were sort of gathered around the beach . Some of the members of the group heard this crazy scream come out of the woods . They look over to the elder of the group and the elder was n’t doing anything , he did n’t seem alarmed at all , so they were like “ OK , we ’ll just go forward doing our affair , ” but they kept hearing this scream just out of the woods . And it isveryquiet up there , I signify , it would have been shocking . And so [ they ] kind of gathered closer and closer to the boat they had all come in on . The elderberry bush tell “ Why are n’t you out gathering clam ? What ’s going on ? ” and all of a sudden , this piercing , super gaudy scream just came out of the forest , and he of a sudden looked incredibly shocked and set out banging the mainstay on the sauceboat trying to dash whatever it was off , and everybody jumped on the boat and motored aside as tight as they could .
So in that account , we see the Bigfoot screaming . They did n’t see him — it really stay put out of ken — but it was kind of like , the sasquatch might have been a little curious about what they were doing and was trying to get their attending , but then they just got the hell out of there .
McCarthy : They were like “ we do n’t see you , and establish on that disturbance , we do n’t need to see you . ”
Long : Yeah .
McCarthy : How often are they having encounters like this ? I signify , are they common ?
Long : A caboodle of people in the village have had them , but they do n’t find every Clarence Day or anything like that . They may happen , to each individual , mayhap a few metre in their life .
McCarthy : And what do they say to westerly science ’s belief that sasquatch is n’t tangible ?
Long : They translate that a lot of hoi polloi do n’t think that they ’re material , or they do n’t believe them when they say they ’ve see them with their own middle , and their answer to that is “ well , you know , we do n’t need some Western scientist telling me whether they exist or not . I ’ve discover them , ” or , “ elderberry bush in our community have run across them and I conceive what they say , ” or , “ Our account over generations and generations all talk about them , so how can they not exist ? ”
McCarthy : And one thing that I think was really interesting about your piece is that I think you go back to one of the elders , and you asked him , right , and he said , “ Just because we have n’t find a skeletal system or bones or anything does n’t think of anything — I’ve never found a bear skeleton in the woodwind either . ”
Long : on the dot .
McCarthy : Which is a pretty good peak .
Long : Yeah . Yeah . It really stool you remember . We have sex a fate about what ’s out in the forest , but there ’s a lot that we do n’t know , and so … we ’ll just kind of have to leave that where it is .
McCarthy : So TR was a pretty practical dude , and he was not really give to flights of illusion . So how did he explain what happened here ?
Long : TR wrote that Bauman was of German ancestry , and must have try “ all sort of ghost and hob lore , so that many fearsome superstitious notion were latent in his mind . ”
He also say that Bauman had heard tales from the Native American practice of medicine men of “ snow - walker … spectres , and the formless evil beings that haunt the forest depths . ”
TR says that Bauman “ must have believed what he say , for he could hardly repress a tremor at sure points of the tarradiddle . ”
McCarthy : Have any scientists thought about what the fauna really was ?
Long : I do n’t think any real scientist have look into this because from a scientific investigation point of sight , there are n’t many specific clue to go on , and no physical evidence that could be tested for , like , sasquatch DNA or they do n’t have any stuff to essay for stable isotopes , which can show where an animate being has been or what it ’s eaten , or that sort of thing .
McCarthy : Besides the walking on two foot thing , it almost sound like it could be a mountain lion — people say that a catamount screech sounds like “ a woman screaming for her life . ” TR himself once suppose that “ No human being could well listen to a stranger and wilder sound . ”
Long : What I was thinking is that maybe a cougar was attacking a bear that was walk erect , which would cover all the bases .
McCarthy : Yes , that was decidedly it . That was decidedly , definitely it . Well , I guess this is just one of those closed book that we are never proceed to figure out .
Thanks to Kat Long for joining us , and thanks for take heed to this special bonus installment ofHistory Vs . We ’ll be back with another incentive episode in a few hebdomad .
Credits
History Vs.is hosted by me , Erin McCarthy . The executive producers are Erin McCarthy , Julie Douglas , and Tyler Klang . The show is edited by Dylan Fagan and Lowell Brillante .
History Vs.is a production of iHeartRadio and Mental Floss .
