Bossburg

A dead mining town remembered for a set of 1969 footprints in the snow

Bossburg is a ghost town on the east bank of the Columbia River in Stevens County, Washington, about 20 miles north of Colville and just south of the Canadian line. Silver turned up in the hills above the river in 1888, and the Young America mine drew miners and their families; the camp that grew around it took the mine's name. It was platted as Millington in 1893 and later renamed for Chester S. Boss, its first postmaster and storekeeper. At its peak, in 1892, it held about 800 people.

For a few years it was a gateway. No railroad yet reached British Columbia's Boundary country, so prospectors rode the train from Spokane to Bossburg, crossed the Columbia on a cable ferry called the Young America Landing, and went on by stage into Canada. Stages left Grand Forks at four in the morning to meet the 11 a.m. train. One of the old Bossburg coaches survives, restored, in the Boundary Museum at Grand Forks. When the lead and silver mines slowed, the town tried a ferry service and a sawmill to stay alive, and the Bossburg Journal kept printing until 1910. None of it lasted. The cemetery is still in use, tended by local families, with several graves unmarked.

Bossburg's second life began on 24 November 1969, when large human-like footprints, the right foot oddly twisted, were found near the town dump. Locals called the track maker the Bossburg Cripple; Bigfoot hunters call it Cripplefoot. René Dahinden arrived three days later to find the prints mostly trampled by sightseers, and cast the best one left. On 13 December he and Ivan Marx, a Bossburg resident, found 1,089 giant tracks in the snow near Lake Roosevelt, and the anthropologist Grover Krantz came to photograph and cast them. The primatologist John Napier and the anthropologist Jeff Meldrum later studied the casts and photographs and were convinced they were genuine. Dahinden was impressed too, though he never forgot that Marx had wandered off alone just before announcing the find, near an empty Jeep that was gone when they came back.

Then came the hi-jinks. In January 1970 a prospector, Joe Metlow, claimed to have a Bigfoot trapped in a mine shaft, and the searchers bid up to $55,000 without ever seeing it; then he offered a Sasquatch foot from his freezer. In October Marx produced a film of the cripple himself, which convinced nearly everyone until Peter Byrne, following a tip from local children, found the filming site and it did not match Marx's story.