Before Bigfoot: J. W. Burns and the Sasquatch Name

Before Bigfoot had a name in American newspapers, Sasquatch already had older roots.

The strange part is not that J. W. Burns invented the whole thing. The strange part is that he may have helped translate something older, deeper, and more culturally specific into a form the outside world could consume.

What Happened

In 1929, J. W. Burns published an article in Maclean’s magazine titled “Introducing B.C.’s Hairy Giants.” Burns was a schoolteacher and Indian Agent who had worked around the Chehalis, now Sts’ailes, community in British Columbia. His article presented stories of large, hairy, human-like beings said to live in the mountains and forests.

The word he helped popularize was “Sasquatch.”

That word is commonly connected to Sasq’ets, from the Halq’emeylem language spoken by First Nations peoples in southwestern British Columbia. In Burns’s article, Sasquatch was described less like a gorilla and more like a wild human or hairy mountain person. That is an important difference.

Modern Bigfoot is usually treated like a hidden animal: footprints, trail cameras, plaster casts, hair samples, sightings, hoaxes, and arguments over evidence. But older Sasq’ets traditions can be much broader. Depending on the community and telling, the figure may be tied to land, warning, spiritual presence, forest guardianship, ancestry, or a relationship with places humans do not fully control.

That means Burns sits at a strange doorway.

On one side are Indigenous stories with their own cultural meaning. On the other side is the English-language monster market: magazines, newspapers, curiosity, entertainment, and eventually Bigfoot.

Why It Matters

This case matters because the modern Bigfoot story did not grow in clean soil.

The 1958 Bluff Creek footprints helped popularize the name “Bigfoot,” and those tracks are now strongly tied to hoax claims involving Ray Wallace. But that does not erase the older stories that were already present before the logging-camp footprint craze.

A hoax can fake a footprint. It cannot retroactively invent generations of stories.

At the same time, older stories should not be treated as simple “proof” of the modern cryptid either. That would flatten them into something they may never have been. Sasq’ets was not just waiting around to become a roadside attraction or a blurry photo subject.

That is where J. W. Burns becomes interesting. He may have preserved stories that non-Indigenous audiences might not have heard otherwise. But he also may have reshaped them by putting them into a sensational magazine format: “hairy giants,” wild men, strange encounters, mountain mysteries.

The act of recording a story can save it. It can also change it.

T Funk Take

J. W. Burns did a great service by preserving the stories he could get. That is what I want this archive to be. That is why there is a “Submit Your Story” section. I feel the need to keep strange stories alive, especially the ones that are not well known to everyone.

Even if a story turns out to be a hoax, there is still value in knowing what people tried to make others believe. A hoax is still part of the record. It tells us what people feared, what they wanted to believe, what they thought others would believe, and how legends grow.

That does not mean every story deserves to be treated as fact. It means every story deserves to be placed in the right drawer.

Some belong under evidence. Some belong under folklore. Some belong under hoax. Some belong under “we still do not know.”

That is what makes the Sasquatch story interesting. The wooden feet may explain a famous footprint, but they do not explain every older story. They do not explain why the idea was already waiting in the woods before the newspapers arrived.

Until the wooden feet explain the older stories, Sasquatch stays in the archive.