Sasquatch Lives On In Sculpture

[From “Oregon Public Broadcasting”. 2006-05-11.]

By: Tom Banse

I'm driving a lonely highway toward Grand Coulee Dam, minding my own business. Here we are cresting Disautel Pass. When: No! It can't be. It's a Bigfoot, coming out of the trees right above the highway. Against my better judgement here, I'm going to pull over. It's about 12-feet tall.

(Sound of turn signal clicking.)

Oh, false alarm. It's a sculpture. Turns out the artist is Smoker Marchand of Omak, Washington.

Smoker Marchand: "At evening time, when you're driving up there and you have a little bit of light in the background, it just really sticks out. Some of the parents have utilized it to scare their kids. By now, everybody is pretty much aware of it. But we did it without telling anybody."

Virgil "Smoker" Marchand says the idea came while brainstorming with fellow members of the Colville Tribal Planning Department. They were casting about for enhancements to the Coulee Corridor scenic byway. The sheet metal cutout has not caused any car wrecks since it appeared late last fall. But as the artist intended, it has provoked discussion of legends and sightings that area families tended to keep quiet.

Smoker Marchand: "I'll read you something real quick here. This is a lady -- from her grandmother. She says, 'The legends of Sasquatch have been with us for many, many years. Yet people have laughed at each of us for repeating any experiences with the creature.'"

Marchand and a non-Indian anthropologist, Ed Fusch, are collecting family stories. The sightings reported to them range from the distant past to the present day. Fusch says earlier generations of Spokane and Colville Indians considered Bigfoot's presence when they set up their annual fishing camps.

Ed Fusch: "The drying racks were so tall, that the Indian women would have to stand on stools to reach the top racks. All of their fish, they would put on the lower racks. Up on top, the heads and the parts they didn't want, they would put up there for the Sasquatch. Sasquatch would come through at night and take stuff off the top they put for him and not harm the camp or harm anything else then."

The Colville and Spokane elders he interviewed considered them wild "cousins."

Ed Fusch: "They knew better than to ever harm them."

Fusch says nearly all of the tribes of the Pacific Northwest have legends about a tall, hairy, humanoid creature. Those legends are rich fodder in the ongoing debate over whether Sasquatch exists. No one's ever found a body.

Artist Virgil Marchand hopes to synthesize the best stories for an interpretive sign at the planned Sasquatch highway crossing.

Smoker Marchand: "We're already working with DOT to do some footprints going across the road. Right there at that site, I'd like to do a really nice story based on someone local."

By the way, the sculptor is only getting started in adding to the highway scenery. He recently finished a grouping of six women harvesting roots. The larger-than-life root diggers will be placed further down State Highway 155 toward the village of Elmer City.

WCSRO, 2006.