Where Does the Name Bigfoot Come From?

The stories behind the terms Bigfoot and Sasquatch.

Jerry Crew was the guy who discovered Bigfoot tracks back in late summer 1958 in Bluff Creek, California. He was a logger and tractor driver in the mountain wilderness. Jerry poured plaster in the prints to make casts.

In the fall of 1958 the logging foreman contacted the Humboldt Times newspaper in Eureka, CA. They published Crew's story about the giant footprints he had found.
Some of Jerry Crew's crew had referred to the unknown perpetrator as "Big Foot."
The newspaper article was the first place the term "Bigfoot" was used. The revelation of finding evidence of an unknown primate, quickly spread to news services across the country. The story was also carried in True Magazine, in 1959 in a article by Ivan Sanderson, a British Biologist.
Roger Patterson’s book; “Do Abominable Snow Men of America Really Exist?” from 1966 came out a year before Patterson filmed the famous Sasquatch footage also in Bluff Creek, Northern California. This was the same area that Jerry Crew had found footprints nearly a decade before.


The word “Sasquatch” was originally a Canadian term that came from Indigenous people of North America. It came about some eighteen years before the word Bigfoot was introduced in the United States.
J.W. Burns was working as a teacher on the Chehalis Native reserve in the 1920s.
He wrote a book called; ” The Harry Giants of British Columbia”, in 1940, in which he used his word “Sasquatch”. John Burns combined a few of the native names of the Salish language, for the large hairy creatures in the woods of western Canada.

The Salish People are a group of Native American tribes, from the Canadian Pacific coast and northwest United States. There are many similar names to Sasquatch from the different peoples of the region:
The Chehalis in British Columbia, their name is “Saskehavis”, which means “Wildman”.
The Colville of Washington State, call them “Skanicum”, or “Stick Indian”. They also speak the Salishan language.
The Spokane; also in the northwest, U.S., call them “Sc’wen’ey’ti”, meaning “Tall burnt hair”. They are another Salishan people.
The Salish of the coast, use the term; “Sasahevas and Sesquac”, or “Wild man” of the woods.
And “Sasq’ets”, also translates to “wild man”.
John Burns could have heard some of the names like these from different people in the area and came up with the name “Sasquatch”.



References:
Books; “Giants, Cannibals and Monsters”, by Kathy Moskowitz Strain.
“Do Abominable Snow Men of America Really Exist?”, by Roger Patterson.
Wikipedia.org; Bigfoot.
Bigfootencounters.com; J W Burns.