Biography: Bob Titmus

The Incomparable Bob Titmus
From the book "Meet The Sasquatch" by Chris Murphy
Used with permission

Bob Titmus, the greatest of the 20th century "Sasquatch Hunters" is generally thought of as an American, but he spent two thirds of his adult life in British Columbia-on the northern coast, in the Hazelton area and at Harrison Hot Springs. He died a Canadian citizen. Not well-known to the public, because he never sought publicity or wrote a book, he devoted more time to actually hunting for Sasquatch creatures and had more to show for his efforts, than anyone else. He was a taxidermist a Anderson, California, when large humanlike tracks started showing up on a road under construction in the Bluff Creek valley during the summer of 1958. He showed his old friend Jerry Crew how to make the plaster cast that introduced "Bigfoot" to the world. That cast, and susequent examination of the tracks themselves, convinced Bob that a real creature had to be out there; something he spent the rest of his life trying to prove. Bob's greatest success came within a few weeks of the Jerry Crew incident. Bob and a friend found slightly smaller tracks of a distinctly different shape on a sandbar beside Bluff Creek, proving that a species of animal was involved, not a freak individual. Bob made casts of these tracks and subsequently found those same tracks again at more than one location. He made more casts of the familiar tracks and went on to cast other tracks he later found in California, Oregon and on islands off the central coast of British Columbia (B.C.) All casts he made are among the best ever made anywhere. Bob was also called in to examine and cast tracks found by other people. Although most of his B.C. material was lost when his boat burned, his collection was by far the largest collection of original casts made by any individual. In 1959, Bob, along with John Green and Rene Dahinden, persuaded Texas millionaire Tom Slick to finance a full-time Bigfoot hunt in northern California. However, the hunt produced only some more footprints so in 1961 Bob shifted his efforts to what seemed at the time to be a more promising area-that centering on Klemtu, B.C. This venture also petered out, but Bob found life in northern B.C. to his liking and he stayed on, settling at Kitimat and later Hazelton, B.C. In 1977 he investigated tracks found by children near the Skeena River and made the best set (left and right foot) of casts ever obtained. Bob told of two personal Sasquatch sightings on the northern coast, one during World War II from a ship in Alaskan waters (he said he refused to credit his senses at the time); and one of three dark bipeds scaling a cliff a long way off near Kitimat. This sighting occurred while he was searching with his own boat in the 1960s. Like most witnesses he had no proof of these experiences. Nevertheless, he did find and cast footprints corroborating reports by others, including a remarkable set of casts of the prints left by the creature in the Patterson/Gimlin film. One of these casts showed that the creature's foot could bend in the middle in a way not possible for a human foot. By the time Bob moved to Harrison Hot Springs in 1978, his field work was restricted by health problems, including increasing pain from a back injury he had suffered keeping his boat from going on the rocks in a storm. However, he continued to investigate reports in the nearby Fraser Valley and also to hunt for more evindence at Bluff Creek. On one of his trips there, he collected brown hairs from branches where there was evidence that a Sasquatch had passed. These hairs were later proven to be from a higher primate but defied specific identification. On another trip he drained a large pond in order to make a cast of a Sasquatch hand print. Bob Titmus died at Chilliwack, B.C. in 1997 and his ashes were scattered on a Harrison Lake mountainside. His American material is now displayed in a wing of the Willow Creek-China Flat Museum in California that was built especially to house it.