The Bauman story as related by "Rough Rider" Teddy Roosevelt is a familiar one to seasoned Bigfooters. The St.Petersburg Times allows us to revisit it.
The article is framed as a Q&A format:
Q:Is it true that President Teddy Roosevelt once claimed to have seen a Bigfoot-type creature?
A:It doesn't appear that Teddy Roosevelt ever saw a Bigfoot, but he wrote about another hunter having an encounter with one in his book, The Wilderness Hunter, which was published in 1893.
Roosevelt related a story told to him by a "grizzled, weather-beaten old mountain hunter, named Bauman" that occurred near the Salmon River between Montana and Idaho. According to the story, Bauman and another man were hunting and trapping beaver when they learned they were being stalked by a creature they thought to be a bear.
Roosevelt writes the creature ransacked their camp while they were gone, and the next day, while Bauman was away, it broke his companion's neck.
"Bauman, utterly unnerved and believing that the creature with which he had to deal was something either half human or half devil, some great goblin-beast, abandoned everything but his rifle and struck off at speed down the pass . . . until beyond reach of pursuit," Roosevelt wrote.
The creature did more than broke his companions neck, as Roosevelt describes in detail in his book...
...The unfortunate man, having finished his packing, had sat down on the spruce log with his face to the fire, and his back to the dense woods, to wait for his companion. While thus waiting, his monstrous assailant, which must have been lurking in the woods, waiting for a chance to catch one of the adventurers unprepared, came silently up from behind, walking with long noiseless steps and seemingly still on two legs. Evidently unheard, it reached the man, and broke his neck by wrenching his head back with its fore paws, while it buried its teeth in his throat...
You want more? You can't beat Bobbie Short's article on the classic at Bigfoot Encounters
RELATED LINKS
St.Petersburg Times Article
The Classic Story at Bigfoot Encounters
