Bobbie,
    I met Dalton around 1988 in Wasilla up here in Matanukska-Susitna Borough in the Anchorage Metro area. He was up from Colorado visiting his daughter. He called re: my book “ Alaska Bear Tales” and wanted to talk bears. I drove out there and virtually listened to him for about 3 hours, talking about his experience with bears on the Yakima Indian Reservation. At the end, figuring he'd been in bigfoot country and was a reliable reporter (former lawman involved in 28 shootouts), I asked, "So what's your experience with Bigfoot?" He nearly fell from his chair. "I didn't want to say anything about that because I thought you'd think I was a fool," he responded. Then he told me three stories. I later wrote him and asked him to repeat the ones I'd told nearly verbatim to others. He later sent a letter including all I'm attaching. They are for your use only. .... Larry Kaniut, Anchorage, AK 2005

The first time occurred when Eddie Gunnyon, an Indian policeman and I were hunting elk on the east side of Mt. Adams, Washington.  I had been checking the trails carefully for any fresh elk tracks.  I stopped by a little stream that crossed the trail and started to get a drink of water.  As I bent down to get the drink I saw the most amazing thing that you could imagine! A huge bare foot print. 

The first thing that hit my head, "This can't be real!" It was an imprint of a man's left foot, unshod.  It was such a marvelous track that I stayed there and guarded it while I sent Eddie clear back to the reservation office to get some plaster so I could make a cast of the footprint.  Eddie said he would be glad to go back and get the stuff for me, but it wasn't anything to really get excited about because it was simply a Sasquatch track!  I asked if he had seen them before and he said it was the third or forth time that he had seen one of these things, but this is the biggest he had ever seen.

The cast made, I got out my tape measure and measured the track, 17 inches in length and 9 and 3/4" wide.  I took the cast down to Paul DePlane, a geologist and archeologist who lived in Toppenish, WA., and asked him what kind of track it was.  He said it was a big humanoid class of beast definitely not an ape and looked very much human to him.  I stepped in the sand at the scene just to the left of the track and made an impression of my foot in the sand.  I asked Paul if he had ever seen a man that big and he said he hadn't and asked me where I made up the track cast. 

I told him I hadn't made up the track, that it was the real McCoy.  He turned kind of pale and said, "My God!  That's a big fellow!"  I asked him how big he thought it would be comparing the depth of the impression with the depth of my impression in the sand.  He said figuring as near as he could from the size of the foot and the depth of the impression that it stood at least 9 feet tall and weighed in the 320 to 340 pound class. 

I put the cast of the foot in evidence and wrote up a report on it and let the incident pass.  I am sure however, that it was not a fake because nobody would try such an elaborate ruse 4 and a half miles back in the woods on a trail that no man would follow more than once or twice a year.  When I say backcountry, I mean BACKcountry, as only the northwestern woods can be. 

The second incident occurred in 1963 when Eddie Mesplie and I had taken our 4 wheel drives up to his place in the mountains, one to help pull the other out in case one got stuck.  We were trying to reach his summer home in the high country. Because of an early snow blocking the road to the cabin, Mrs. Mesplie was stranded there all alone without any transportation out. 

We stopped our 4 wheel drives when the snow got so deep that we were pushing it with our bumpers.  We took our snowmobiles out of our trucks, fired them up, and took off for his cabin a mile and a half farther up the road.  When we arrived, every light was on in the place.  I guess his wife heard the motors, opened the door to welcome us.
 
She was sitting right in the middle of the living room with Eddie's 284 Savage lying across her lap.  She said, "I thought you guys would never get here!  I have been visited by a Sasquatch!  He has been messing around out there for about 3 hours."  Since it was about 10 P.M. we figured that he had come in about an hour after dark.  Still not believing what we were hearing, Eddie and I went out and checked.  At the window where he had peeked in, there were huge tracks in the snow.

We could see where he had stepped to the window and see the marks where he had placed his hands against the glass to look inside.  He had made one trip around the house checking all the windows, and then came back around to the first window where he had started observing Mrs. Mesplie in the house. 

She described him as being very tall and appeared as though he had had to stoop over to see in the window.  His face was covered with white hair except on his cheeks, mouth, nose and forehead.  The white hair tapered off into his hairline.  His face was black, but not Negroid in appearance.  His hands where he had pressed them on the window pane showed long tapered fingers and very broad hand.  She said it had very nearly scared her to death, but the thing had never made an attempt to enter the house.  She said he had stood there for a long time as though he were curious.  He left the window when he heard the motors of the machines coming. 

The tracks, of course, were starting to fill in by falling snow, but you could see that they were easily 22 to 23 inches long and 9 or l0 inches wide.  When he had left, he wandered westward toward the eastern slopes of Mt. Adams. 

We closed the house for the winter and took Mrs. Mesplie down the mountain.  Eddie and his wife seemed not surprised in the least and said they had known the existence of the Sasquatch since their childhood, but this was the first time either had seen one in person.
 
The third incident was when I was on a bear hunt on the lower slopes of Mr. Adams.  I was at the end of a road right of way that was being cut through the timber.  The road crew hadn't started working yet and 2 lumberjacks were just cutting the trees in preparation for the builders to come in and start their work.  These 2 lumberjacks happened to be friends of mine.  In Alaskan words, I guess you could call them real sour doughs.  When it came to logging they had done about all there was to do.  They were my good friends Burl Thomas and Vernon Beaks. 

I had gone to their camp at the end of the trail and told them I was going to look for a grizzly that had been seen in that area.  They told me that the snow line was pretty far up but I better take my hip boots, as the snow was still 2 and 3 feet deep in places. 

Walking up was pretty easy early in the morning.  I got above the timberline and it wasn't long before I reached the ice cap.  I was walking along the edge of the ice when I looked over toward the north where I could see a cloud coming that I didn't like the looks of.  It looked like a gully washer.  I wanted to get off the mountain before the storm hit.  The stream that I had walked up by was about a foot and a half deep and 8 or 9 feet wide.

I had just entered the ferns along the bank that were so thick that you couldn't see the ground through them.  They were about as high as my head.  I began to smell an odor that I had never smelled before; a pungent odor that smelled a lot like bear cages in a zoo. 

The farther I walked in the ferns, the more nervous I grew.  I didn't like the smell at all!  I thought it might be the grizzly trailing me instead of me trailing him!  But I had never smelled a bear that smelled as bad as this one!  I had that terrible gnawing fear that I was being followed, and I at once left the trail on the bank and stepped into the creek.  I put my rifle in the high ready position and slipped the safety off that last mile and half to Burl's camp. 

It was pure torture!  I expected to be jumped any minute from the trail in the ferns.  A very large grizzly could have stood on all fours in the ferns and never been seen.  Don't forget the creek was running ice water off of the glacier just above. My feet were frozen inside my hip boots and I was beginning to feel a little bit f hypothermia coming on.  I stumbled into camp, threw the shell out of the chamber, picked up the cartridge and put it in my pocket and sat down on a log bench beside the fire. 

Burl had just prepared supper and expected me about that time and had set my place and said, "Come on over and sit by us and have your supper."  I was so tired not because of physical exertion but the terrible weighing down fear of the unknown that was so heavy on me I was exhausted. 

Vernon looked at me, then took a second look and said, "Why, boy, you look white as a ghost!  What happened up on that mountain?"  I told them about the details of my trip, both grinned broadly, and said, "So you've had a run in with the Sasquatch, have you?" 

I went to sleep that night and was haunted all night by dreams of Sasquatch.  I never felt the same about spending the night out in the wilds again.
 
Next incident was when Eddie Gunnyon and I got called out at 8 P.M. in the winter of 1964. 

A party of 2 doctors and wives had been driving over Satus Pass from Yakima to Portland,  when they saw by the road what appeared to be a man standing beside the road.  In the glare of the light through the falling snow, they couldn't see what kind of man it was and said that they were only traveling only 20 or 30 miles an hour through snow and slush.  He was crowding the roadside and turned to face them.  They said he was like a man except for his very large size, and that his face and chest were black with a thin cover of silver hair on his belly and chest with the hair turning to long silver hair on his arms, legs, and back.  He also had mans genitalia, which gave him a very humanoid appearance.  They estimated his height to be 8 or 9 feet tall and probably 400 or more lbs of body weight.  The ladies had been so upset by the incident that the doctors gave them both tranquilizer shots. 

As soon as they reached Bend, Oregon, they got to a telephone and called the Washington State Patrol in Yakima.  Since Satus Pass was in the Indian jurisdiction, the State Patrol called us out to investigate the scene.  They told us that the point where it occurred was about 40 minutes from us.  When we got to the place, I got out and walked along the road looking for the place the fellow might have stood.  I walked along by the front right fender looking in the light at the edge of the road for about a mile and half.  Suddenly I came upon a stomped out area about 4 or 5 feet in diameter with big tracks now filling with snow coming from the north and crossing to the south.  He had stopped and stood and walked around in a circle in that place for 10 or 12 minutes, and it was well patted down. 

We did a report and it was added to many reports that were already there.  This was just another eyewitness account of many that have been reported through the years. Capt. Wilson LaMere of the Yakima Indian Police told us not to file that report. Some newspaperman will get hold of it and laugh us out of the area!  So we put it in the pile of reports labeled "Not for the News media". 

The most interesting incident occurred when C. E. Barnett, a government hunter and I found what we called a Sasquatch's nest.  It was about 8 feet across, 3 feet deep, made in the order of a cup.  It was grass piled neatly to form the bowl. The mat was about 7 inches deep.  There were some mats that were crudely woven from grass stems that looked as though they were used for pillows.  The nest was covered with silver hair an inch and a half black at the roots tapering off into a silver color in the last 6 inches of the strands. There were several good handfuls that I took as a souvenir and we found some cracked nuts where they had eaten some acorns and other nuts I was not familiar with.  We also found where they had been eating tubers and mushrooms.  The nest was very clean and looked like it wasn't a permanent dwelling but a resting place along their way. 

I took the hair samples and sent one sample to the Smithsonian Institute, one to the Denver Museum of Natural history, and one to a British Museum of Natural history.  The note that I received from the Smithsonian was very noncommittal and said "This is hair and not to be confused with a plastic imitation."  That was all! They admitted it was hair but didn't say what! The Denver Museum asked me a lot of questions, but never answered me about what the hair was off of.  The British Museum of Natural History was very blunt and said, "This hair is of no known earthly origin."  This was probably the only honest comment of the day!
 
I was told by another man in whom I had great confidence that he and his 11-year-old daughter were separated in the mountains near their campsite.  He reported her missing after 2 days because she knew her way around in the woods and not to worry ‘til the 2nd day if she didn't come back.  When the second day cleared he started to look for her before any of the other searchers had arrived.  He left them a note telling them that he had gone to look for her and to make themselves at home and he would return within a couple of hours.  He said that he found her about 400 yards from the camp curled up in a grass-like nest and that she was asleep and covered up with her jacket.  She had about half a gallon of huckleberries piled beside her head.  When she awoke she told her father that she had fallen and hit her head on a rock and when she came to there was a big pile of berries there and a wooden vessel holding some water.  She drank the water and ate some berries and hadn't wakened again until her father woke her.  It was apparent somebody or something had cared for the girl as she was safely ensconced in the warm nest. 

Snowman, is he real?  Who knows?  But I for one believe with all my heart that this animal exists and I believe that he is not a member of the great ape or polar bear families, and that doesn't leave very many choices, does it?  I know that nobody faked the tracks that I saw or the nest that was built or Mrs. Mesplie seeing things, and they were all confirmed by the tracks of some very large animal. 

That is about all I can remember.  If I remember anything else, I will let you know. 

Dalton

Back to Stories?
Back to Bigfoot Encounters Main page
Back to Newspaper & Magazine Articles
Back to Bigfoot Encounters "What's New" page

Portions of this website are reprinted and sometimes edited to fit the standards of this website
under the Fair Use Doctrine of International Copyright Law
as educational material without benefit of financial gain.
http://www4.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.html
This proviso is applicable throughout the entire Bigfoot Encounters Website.