For approximately fifteen years I have been reading the Bigfoot Field Research Organization Website, BFRO for short.  The BFRO maintains a data base of sightings, searchable by county and state.  The BFRO will accept witness reports, interview the witnesses, gather additional details, and visit the location if possible.  If the report appears to be legitimate, the report gets added to their data base.

To take just a minute to explain some things to people who do not know much about Bigfoot.  Ever since the settling of North America, there have been Bigfoot sightings.  Yes, Bigfoots have been captured, both dead and alive.  There are hundreds of newspaper reports of Bigfoots being seen and being shot back in the 1800s and early 1900s.  Someone had collected about one hundred of these old newspaper articles on their website titled “Lawn flowers, Jerky, and Bigfoot.”  Myself, and many others read these newspaper articles, but this site is only referenced now, it appears to be gone now.

The person who created the website “Lawn flowers, Jerky, and Bigfoot”, that contained about one hundred articles from old newspapers, appeared to be a biologist or naturalist, probably employed by a state agency.  All the State and Federal employees, such as naturalists, biologists, environmentalists, geologists, park rangers, fish & game, Bureau of Land Management, etcetera, are all told to not talk about the Bigfoot subject.  It may be wisdom, or it may be something else, that made the U.S. Government decide a long time ago, that they were going to deny, cover up, and not acknowledge the existence of Bigfoot.

There have not been many Bigfoot sightings reported in North Dakota, compared to states like California, Oregon, and Washington state.  This seems understandable, since North Dakota is not heavily forested, North Dakota is comprised mostly of grassland and badlands.  However, there have been a great deal of Bigfoot sightings on the Fort Berthold Native American Reservation.

I knew a little about Native American history, culture, values, and life from reading, and from meeting and working with Native Americans.  For the sake of simplicity, you can start out by realizing that Native Americans were taken advantage of, and that to this day they have some mistrust, resentment, and hostility when dealing with non-Native Americans.

During the past four weeks I have had to work in the oil field on the Native American Reservation of Fort Berthold.  In the late 1940s, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers was conducting a study on where to dam the Missouri River in North Dakota, to create a reservoir.  The area that was decided upon, was the Native American Reservation at Fort Berthold.  Can you imagine that?  The Native Americans in the Dakotas had been forced off the plains and grasslands onto a reservation in the late 1800s, not something they wanted to happen in the first place, and now, less than 100 years later, the U.S. Government is going to flood their villages.  Eight villages were flooded, and a new town was created above the reservoir Lake Sakakawea, called New Town.

In the summer, Lake Sakakawea is beautiful.  The dark blue water of the lake washes right up onto the various colors of green grassland and farm fields.  The land is Native American owned, sparsely occupied, and hardly developed at all.  In many areas, there are several thousand acres per single family home.  There are very few roads, most of them are not paved, and not marked with signs.

Remember, this is a Native American Reservation, and I am only allowed to travel on the reservation because I am working on the oil wells.  Each oil field vehicle has a large sticker on the door, called a “Taro Card”, that is issued by the reservation at a fee of $2,500 per sticker.   The Native American police patrol all the roads, and if you do not have a big “Taro Card” sticker on your door, and you are not a member of the tribe, the fine is $1,000.

For those of you living outside of North Dakota, try to realize that the population of the entire state is less than 1 million people.  Western North Dakota is very sparsely populated.  The Fort Berthold Reservation is even more unpopulated and undeveloped.  Many times each day when I am working, I can see for five miles in every direction, and there are no people.  About every other location that I am working on, a tanker truck will arrive to load oil.  If it weren’t for the oil field traffic, there would not be any vehicles.

This past week, I got my co-worker/supervisor to look up on the internet the Bigfoot sightings for Fort Berthold.  My co-worker/supervisor has been working in this area for about five years, and he knows the area very well.  He was surprised to see that many of the sighting reports were right where we were working.

During my second week of working on the reservation, my co-worker/supervisor was trying to give me a warning to never, ever work until dark on a location, to make sure to get back to town before dark.  He said that he had been way out at a location, not far from where we had been earlier, and an oil field tanker truck driver had started a conversation with him, delaying him in the work that he was doing.  The tanker truck driver left, and he was alone at the site.  He needed to complete the work, and not have to come back in the morning.

He said that he began to feel that he was being watched, like someone was watching him.  The hair on the back of his neck was standing up, and he tried to work, but he couldn’t.  He had to leave without completing the work.  He talked to some of the other workers the following day, and they said that other workers said the same thing about that location.  He will not go to that location when it is getting close to dark.

The Fort Berthold Reservation is sparsely populated and undeveloped.  Everywhere, it seems like there is a heavily treed ravine with a creek bed.  The criss crossing and ever present heavily treed ravines make it possible for Bigfoots to stay concealed during the day, with water and things to eat.  At night, they can travel across the fields and hills without much risk of being seen, there are so few people.

The Native Americans in their culture and heritage do not feel the need to deny the existence of Bigfoot, any more than they would try to deny the existence of a wolf or buffalo.  The Native Americans, although they may be astonished at the sight of a Bigfoot, and afraid, they don’t feel that something must be done about it, they just continue on doing what they normally do.