Dr Matthew Bowman is the chair of Mormon Studies at Claremont Graduate University. He’s probably best known for his writings about Mormon Bigfoot. We’ll discuss that, as well as his latest book on UFO’s. How does that related to spirituality? Check out our conversation…
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Meet Matt Bowman
Interview
GT 00:04 Welcome to Gospel Tangents. I’m excited to have one of the premier Mormon historians on the show. Could you go ahead and tell us who you are?
Matthew 00:57 That is generous of you, Rick. I’m Matthew Bowman. I’m the Howard W. Hunter Chair of Mormon studies at Claremont Graduate University. I’m an associate professor of history and religion there.
GT 01:10 It’s been way too long that we haven’t had Matt Bowman on. You just– let’s see, can we say retired? Is that the right word, as the chair of the Mormon History Association?
Matthew 01:21 Well, I wouldn’t say retired, I’d say rotated out. I served as president of the Mormon History Association until the last meeting in Rochester, New York, and then a new president took over at that meeting.
GT 01:34 That was kind of funny, because there was some turmoil before you got in there. You got thrown to the wolves over there.
Matthew 01:39 There was, yeah. We had a couple of presidents, prior to myself, who were supposed to be the president for that meeting. Presidents serve for a year until the annual meeting that they preside over. And then at the end of that annual meeting, they hand it off to the next president. The two presidents who–well, there was one president who was elected to serve. He had to step down for family reasons. And the next, the same issue. He ran into some health problems. And so I did take over (kind of) at the very last moment. But honestly, it was easier than you might think, because those two presidents did a lot of the groundwork. This Rochester conference was supposed to happen in 2020. It was the 200th anniversary of the First Vision. And so, the executive directors, well, Christine Blythe, who served as the executive director for me, but Barbara Jones Brown, as well, who was the executive director who planned that initial 2020 conference, they had done so much of the groundwork that it was actually not terribly hard.
GT 02:42 Thank you, COVID. That was terrible. I got lucky, because the John Whitmer Historical Association was the fall before 2020, [in] 2019, and so we got to go. And the idea was MHA was going to follow right up and then COVID hit. It took, what, four years to come back?
Matthew 03:03 Yeah, I guess, three. It was it was jerry-rigged for a little while there. But I’m glad to say, I think MHA came through the whole thing really well. The Rochester conference had far more registration than we thought it would. It was, maybe people were just hungry to come back. And I’m glad they did.
GT 03:22 It was kind of nice to have a four-year break, after all, but it was fun. I don’t know. Like you, I’m a history nerd. So it was a blast.
Matthew 03:33 MHA is always great. It’s a good time.
GT 03:35 Can you tell us a little bit about next year? Who’s going to be the president and where is it?
Matthew 03:39 The person who took over for me is David Howlett. He is a Ph.D. in religious studies, author of a really, really great book on the history of the Kirtland Temple and the uses of the Kirtland Temple.[1] Appropriately, he’s going to be presiding over a conference in Kirtland, Ohio.
GT 03:59 Yeah, yeah. Cleveland/Kirtland.
Matthew 04:03 The real hope for it is that we could find a venue close enough to Kirtland proper and to the temple, that there can be some conference events there. That’s proving a bit difficult, but I do think MHA will be at Kirtland proper for at least part of the conference. There will be some events there.
GT 04:19 Okay. So, most people will probably fly into Cleveland, though. That’s a half hour away, I think.
Matthew 04:25 Yeah, roughly.
GT 04:27 And David’s a member of the Community of Christ.
Matthew 04:29 Yes.
GT 04:30 He’s another person that I really need to get on my podcast. So David, if you’re listening…
Matthew 04:35 You can buttonhole him at that conference. {both chuckling}
GT 04:39 Well, I didn’t get you, because I was afraid you were too busy. Isn’t the president usually too busy to do that?
Matthew 04:44 The president is running all over the place. That is absolutely true. But you know, as soon as that last plenary session happens and the one president hands it off to the other, the responsibilities are out of your hands.
GT 04:55 All right.
Matthew 04:55 So try to get him right at the tail end.
GT 04:57 Okay. I’ll talk to you. We’ll see you David. All right. I always like to get people’s educational background and you’re a Utah man. Is that right?
Matthew 05:08 Correct? Yes.
GT 05:09 Where did you get your bachelor’s, Master’s, Ph.D?
Matthew 05:11 I went to the University of Utah for my bachelor’s degree. I went to Georgetown University in Washington, D.C. for my Ph.D.
GT 05:17 Oh, the Hoyas, Oh, wow.
Matthew 05:19 Yeah, it’s a Ph.D. in American history, 19th-20th century American history with an emphasis on religion.
GT 05:26 Okay. Was Paul Reeve there when you were a student?
Matthew 05:30 No, Paul and I overlapped just a little bit. He graduated with his Ph.D., right about the time I started.
GT 05:40 At Georgetown?
Matthew 05:41 Oh no. At University of Utah, I was an undergraduate. Then he returned to the University of Utah to join the faculty right about the time I left to go to Washington.
GT 05:50 I was getting scared there, because I was like, did Paul go to Georgetown and I didn’t know that? {both laughing} Well, that’s cool. Paul’s been on the show twice. I love Paul.
Matthew 05:58 Yeah, Paul’s great!
GT 05:59 All right. So you’re in town, because I think there was a meeting of all the Mormon History chairs. Is that right?
Matthew 06:09 There was, yes.
GT 06:10 Can you tell us anything more about that?
Matthew 06:11 Yes, it was a really good idea, actually. Keith Erickson at the Church History Library proposed this to the chairs. There are four of us: myself, Paul at the University of Utah, Patrick Mason at Utah State University, and, of course, Kathleen Flake at the University of Virginia. Keith Erickson, who was at the Church History Library, contacted all of us and suggested this. We had never actually done this sort of thing before.
GT 06:39 Yeah. So is this like correlation, or something?
Matthew 06:41 No, no. It was really, I think, just getting us all in the same room and talking a little bit about our different programs and what we do, trying to find some ways we might collaborate in the future, and particularly, I think, how the Church History Department might support us. They were really great there. For instance, I teach primarily graduate students, masters and Ph.D. students who are beginning to dip their toes into doing primary source research, who are trying to produce original scholarship. And the Church History Department is really working hard, I think, to digitize a lot of their materials to make more stuff readily available and trying to find ways in which my students, who are in Southern California, can get access to stuff in Salt Lake City. It was a really fruitful conversation. So I think there will be some visits that they will make, either digitally or in-person, down to my program. And we’ll find ways to put my students more directly in touch. When I was a graduate student, and I think this is still true for my students, as well, staring down an archive, and you might wonder, where do I even start? I’m interested in, I don’t know, I have maybe a student who’s interested in researching the history of the Young Women’s program, right? You just go to the catalog and type any Young Women’s and then you get 40,000 hits, and how do you kind of narrow this down? But that’s what archivists are for. Right? You’re supposed to be able to go to an archivist to say, I am interested in the history of the Young Women’s, say, I don’t know, like the Young Women’s mutual activities. And they will say, “Well, here’s this collection and this collection and this collection,” and they really give you a jumpstart on your research.
GT 08:23 Okay.
Matthew 08:24 Hopefully, we’ll be able to do some of that.
GT 08:26 Well now. I know I just was talking to Rick Turley and Barbara Jones Brown. I was surprised to hear that the John D. Lee collection/diaries were at the Huntington Library. Is that close to you at Claremont?
Matthew 08:38 Yeah, the Huntington Library is about 30 miles down the road. They have a very, very strong 19th century Mormon collection, which does surprise a lot of people. But the Huntington Library specializes in the history of the American West, the history of the Pacific, and so they’ve been gathering a lot of this for quite a while. That is actually where, as you may have discussed, Juanita Brooks did a lot of her work on the Mountain Meadows Massacre. at Huntington.
GT 09:03 Right.
Matthew 09:03 They’ve got the Oliver Cowdery letter books there, as well, [and] as you say, the John D. Lee stuff, so a lot of really valuable material.
GT 09:11 I know Todd Compton spent an internship at the Huntington Library, and that’s where he got his book on polygamy. Why can’t I remember the name?
Matthew 09:22 In Sacred Loneliness.
GT 09:22 There you go.
Matthew 09:24 Yeah, yeah. Precisely. Many of my students, I think, perhaps, because myself and Patrick Mason are primarily historians in the later period, post-Civil War, so I don’t have as many students doing 19th century history, as I might like, but you would think the Huntington would attract some of them.
GT 09:45 Well, very good. And it seems, oh, I was talking to you last week, I think it was, and there’s some Third Convention stuff that Claremont has. Is that right? Can you talk about that?
Matthew 09:56 Absolutely. So, there is a really wonderful little museum in Provo, Utah called the Museum of Mormon Mexican History, which is founded and operated by Fernando and Enriqueta Gomez. Fernando, he’s an emeritus general authority. He’s a former temple president. And these two have devoted their retirement to gathering materials about the history of various branches of Mormonism, for this museum. Over the past 20 years, they’ve gotten such an incredible collection. We’ve recently partnered with them both to bolster their profile and help them do their work. But they’ve been very generous, as well, in contributing to the Claremont Mormon Studies program. They donated about 80 linear feet of material. That’s how archivists measure material. You just line it up, and however long all these pieces of paper are, that’s how you call it. So, it’s about 80 linear feet worth of material, a lot of photographs, and a lot of documents, and just an incredible collection [donated] to our Mormon Studies program. And I’ve had a number of students who have been working to catalog this. Much of it has been digitized. It’s up on our websites now. But there’s so much more. This museum still exists. They’ve had a lot of really incredible artifacts. And the museum really tries to tell the history of the Church in Mexico. We’ve got some students who’ve done internship work with the museum and we’re really tying our relationship closer and closer together.
GT 11:32 Yes, Stephanie Griswold is one of those. I’m trying to get her on, but she lives down in Short Creek.
Matthew 11:38 She does.
GT 11:39 I always like to do these in person and I’m going to have to just make a special trip to Short Creek, I guess.
Matthew 11:42 Yeah, that might be fun for you. She can show you around. She’s doing some, I think, a really fascinating work. She’s collected a lot of materials, done a lot of oral histories on the community down there.
GT 11:55 Okay.
Matthew 11:56 Yeah, I think whatever she ends up producing from it, will be really great.
GT 12:01 And she spoke with Fernando [Gomez.] I didn’t realize he’s a former general authority. He was at Sunstone. Is that okay to go to Sunstone?
Matthew 12:03 I mean, according to who? {both laughing}
GT 12:09 It seems like the Church really was like, if you’re a BYU employee, don’t go to Sunstone.
Matthew 12:18 Of course.
GT 12:18 If you are a Church employee…
Matthew 12:19 There’s problems there.
GT 12:20 I’ve seen some there. But usually they’re like, “Don’t say I’m here.”
Matthew 12:25 Yeah, when you’re emeritus, I suppose like he is…
GT 12:29 you can do what you want. {both laughing}
Mormon Bigfoot
Interview
GT 12:32 Well, fantastic. So I’d like to segue a little bit. You wrote a chapter in a book called Dimensions of Faith. Can you show it to the camera and then talk a little bit about your chapter and talk a little bit about the book. It’s a fantastic book.
Matthew 12:47 Yeah. So this is an edited collection, done by Steve Taysom, who just recently published a really wonderful biography of Joseph F. Smith, that he has been working on for years and years and years.
GT 13:00 I’ve got too many books to read. But that’s on my list.
Matthew 13:02 I know we all have too many books to read. Prior to that, I think he was best known for two or three other pieces of work. One is his dissertation, which he turned into a really excellent monograph. It’s a comparison of 19th century Shakers, and Mormons and thinking about how these two small religious movements developed a sense of their boundaries, their relationships with the culture around them and how they became essentially–well, the book uses that word boundaries in the title.[2] But he also wrote two really excellent articles, one about the shifting memory of polygamy in the LDS Church over the course of the late 19th, early 20th century and how ideas about polygamy changed. The other one, I’m not going to remember the title, because it’s quite long. But the other one is an article about exorcism in in LDS history, and that was published in Religion and American Culture, which is a very prestigious academic journal on American religion. But you can see from these, the eclectic nature of Taysom’s interests, certainly. In Dimensions of Faith, I think, this reader that he did, is a gathering of a lot of different articles that have already been published in other places, many of them. My article was published in the Journal of Mormon History. But what he’s trying to do with this book, I think, is introduce readers to not only a variety of topics in Mormon history, but also different ways of studying religion. And so, if you look at the table of contents, there are sub-sections on memory, on media, on theory, on biography, on lived experience, all these different ways that you get at looking at what Mormonism is. My article is about Mormon Bigfoot folklore.
GT 14:55 {Rick laughing} We’ve got to talk about that.
Matthew 14:57 Yeah. And this was, actually, an article I wrote in graduate school.
GT 15:01 Okay.
Matthew 15:02 It’s my first real academic publication ever.
GT 15:06 Okay.
Matthew 15:07 I say sometimes this might still be the thing I’m best known for. At least, it’s the thing I get the most email about. I do still get emails.
GT 15:15 I know when they were publishing the book, Bigfoot got a big play, and I remember…
Matthew 15:21 Oh, I’m sure!
GT 15:22 …Tom Kimball was like, “Oh, we don’t want to only talk about Bigfoot.” {both laughing}. But it’s such a great story. I think. I don’t know, maybe it’s people of a certain age, my age, remember that Cain was Bigfoot. You can talk about that more. But I think it’s losing its memory. And so, I’m glad you wrote about it. It’s a fantastic topic.
Matthew 15:45 Yeah, it’s something, I mean, and this is something I still work on. I just finished a book on UFO’s. it’s going to be published in a couple of weeks. And I think these sorts of stories, this folklore, this supernatural folklore that people find fascinating and interesting and all of that, we find it fascinating and interesting, because it appeals to us, because it tells us something about who we are. Really, there’s a sense of being edgy when you think about Bigfoot, when you think about UFOs. But these things catch on, and they catch on for reasons because they resonate with something that we want to think about ourselves. And that’s the argument of the article. You say, the notion that Bigfoot is Cain, or vice versa, Cain is Bigfoot. I argue in the article that this is an association that really emerges in the 1980s…
GT 16:09 Right.
Matthew 16:16 …in the Mormon corridor, Idaho, down through Arizona.
GT 16:44 And that’s why I remember hearing about it because I’m an ‘80s child.
Matthew 16:48 Yeah, absolutely. Right. And you have that moment, this intersection, an interweaving of two strands of folklore. There had been in the Church, a long history of Cain. Cain was a figure in the history of the Church going back to 1835 when David W. Patten, who was then president of the Quorum of Twelve Apostles…
GT 17:13 Captain Fear Not!
Matthew 17:15 Exactly. He was killed in the Missouri conflicts. He claims to have seen Cain. Now, what I think is really interesting about this story, is that most members of the Church hear this story much later, or at least it is written down much later. It is first put in print in a biography of Patten, written in the 1890s by a guy named Lycurgus Wilson. However, what Wilson does is, he reprints the letters. And these are letters to and from Joseph F. Smith, who apparently writes to a man named Abraham Smoot.
GT 17:59 Okay.
Matthew 18:00 The Smoots, and Abraham Smoot, of course, is a significant figure in his own right. He was mayor of Salt Lake for a while.
GT 18:07 Also a slaveholder.
Matthew 18:08 Right, as we know. Smoot writes to Joseph F Smith and says, here’s the story. And this is 50 years after the fact. And so, Smoot’s letter is reprinted in this biography of David W. Patten. It’s then later reprinted in part, in Spencer Kimball’s book The Miracle of Forgiveness, which is where it gains a lot of traction, because that’s a really big book in the ‘70s and 80s. Now Smoot says when he was a little boy, Patten was staying with his family while he’s serving the mission in Tennessee. Patten came home one day, white as a sheet, and says essentially, that he had seen Cain. He was riding his horse through the forest and Cain came out of the woods. Patten says, “He was nearly as tall as I was, when I was sitting on the back of my horse. He was covered with dark hair.”
GT 19:02 So if you’re sitting on a horse, this guy is like nine feet tall. Right?
Matthew 19:05 Precisely, and Patten says, “Who are you?” He says, “I am Cain, who slew my brother, Abel.” And Patten learns that Cain is cursed to wander the earth and he’s trying to destroy the souls of men. That’s the quotation. And then Patten says, “I cast him out by the authority of the priesthood.”
GT 19:22 Wow.
Matthew 19:22 So that’s a story. And there are, I think, hints that this story was circulating in the Church in the 19th century. Eliza R Snow writes a poem in which she mentions this story before the publication of that biography. So, it’s a matter of tracking down these little snippets and trying to piece together if this story was known, if it was told. It appears that it was. There is another account in the Church History Library, which is filed under the title Encounters With Cain, no date and it is an account of E. Wesley Smith, who was a son of Joseph F. Smith, who claims to have encountered Cain while he was serving in the Hawaiian Mission in the 1920s. And he says it’s the night before the dedication of the Laie, Hawaii Temple. And Cain came into his office. And he casts Cain out, again, with the authority of the priesthood. And again, he describes Cain as being nine feet tall. He says he has to duck his head to get through the doorway, covered with dark hair. And Smith commands him to depart by the authority of the priesthood.
GT 19:22 So when was the Hawaii Temple dedicated? Was that in the 50’s?
Matthew 20:36 It was in the early 1920s?
GT 20:38 Oh, 1920s, it’s that old, okay.
Matthew 20:41 Yeah. And so, these stories are circulating. So, there’s this folkloric tradition of encounters with Cain. And Cain is depicted in the history of the Church in a couple of ways. The first is he’s a representative of Satan. And he is an example of the real, tangible nature of spiritual evil. That evil is not simply doing bad things. Right? There are supernatural forces out there trying to stop the Church, trying to destroy the Church. That’s why Cain appears when he appears. At the dedication of temples he appears to apostles. Right? He’s an adversary. But, and increasingly so, I think, as this folklore progresses through the 19th century, Cain is, also, of course, the progenitor of African people. Now, this is not simply in the church. There’s a long history going back to the Puritans, if not before, of depicting Satan, Cain, these demonic figures as black, as the ancestors of the black race. And this becomes increasingly pronounced, I think, in the late 19th early 20th century, as the Church is beginning to proselyte in the Southern States Mission, as missionaries are encountering more and more black people. There are stories in the BYU folklore archives, in the early 20th, or mid-20th century of missionaries encountering Cain in the south, of Cain being black skinned, which is something that becomes more and more pronounced in the folklore. As you move into the 20th century, the fact that he has black skin becomes increasingly important.
GT 22:29 Because that was the mark. Right?
Matthew 22:32 Precisely, precisely right. This is part of the version.
GT 22:35 God cursed him with black skin.
Matthew 22:36 Yeah. Now, although Genesis does not say that. Genesis simply says that a mark was placed upon Cain. It becomes part of the folklore that that mark is black skin.
GT 22:48 Right.
Matthew 22:50 There is a lot of early modern racial theorizing that Europeans are doing, dividing up the “races,” and saying, that the Asian people are descendants of this person. Semitic people are the descendants of this people, Africans are the descendants of this people. It often goes back to the children of Noah.
GT 23:10 Right.
Matthew 23:10 The three children of Noah, and then Cain through that. And of course…
GT 23:14 Ham, Shem and Japheth. Right?
Matthew 23:15 Precisely. And of course, the Pearl of Great Price notes the marriage, and links these children of Noah back to Cain, particularly. So, this becomes a justification…
GT 23:30 So Ham was a descendant of Cain, essentially. They’re the black race. Right?
Matthew 23:34 Ham’s wife, well in the Pearl of Great Price.
GT 23:37 Oh, it’s his wife.
Matthew 23:37 His wife is Egyptus.
GT 23:38 Okay, because there’s the curse of Ham and the curse of Cain. Is that because Ham married a black woman. Is that what you’re saying?
Matthew 23:46 It’s not clear in the Book of Genesis. And so, what we’re dealing with here is a lot of extrapolations from the Book of Genesis, as early modern Christians, European Christians are trying to explain different races. So, you have the curse of Cain, which is a mark. And it’s unclear what it is, but a mark was placed on Cain in Genesis, and many people…
GT 24:08 It’s extrapolated to be black skin.
Matthew 24:09 Black skin, yes. But then you have Ham, the son of Noah, who is the son who mocks his father while his father is drunk, while his other sons care for their father. And then Ham is cursed to be a servant. And of course, Europeans…
GT 24:28 So that explains slavery.
Matthew 24:29 Precisely. Europeans will say, “Well, this explains slavery. Ham must, therefore, be the ancestor of African peoples.” And it’s backward reasoning there. And so, the presumption is Ham must have had black skin, too, because of this.
GT 24:47 Or according to the Pearl of Great Price, he married someone with black skin, which is what brought black people from Cain, I guess.
Matthew 24:55 Yeah. Now it’s actually not. Even The Pearl of Great Price is not that clear with black skin. It doesn’t assert that. But it does say, it doesn’t use those words, but that connection is made. And so, you can extrapolate from it, if you want to.
GT 25:11 Well, and I don’t want to get too far away, but there’s Egyptus, too.
Matthew 25:14 And that’s the daughter of Pharaoh.
GT 25:16 Right.
Matthew 25:17 Exactly. And, of course, the extrapolation is, these people, because she’s the daughter of Pharaoh, Africans are black, therefore, even though, whether or not ancient Egyptians were black is–likely they were not.
GT 25:33 Right.
Matthew 25:33 But, of course, that’s under dispute. So all of this is to say, there’s this long folklore lineage discussion of Cain in LDS folklore, and he becomes, then, Cain becomes a figure in which this racialization, the white people are doing their racial theorizing, and this idea of supernatural, tangible evil become interwoven with each other.
GT 26:03 So, Shem, you said he was the father of Semitic people, so Middle Eastern people?
Matthew 26:08 Japheth.
GT 26:09 Oh, it’s Japheth.
Matthew 26:10 Yeah.
GT 26:12 Okay, so Japheth and then who is?
Matthew 26:15 There’s three sons, Ham, Shem and Japheth, three primary races: Africans, Semites, Asians.
GT 26:23 Okay.
Matthew 26:24 Now, yeah.
GT 26:25 So Asians are descendants of Japheth?
Matthew 26:30 Or Shem. It’s never terribly clear, because you’ll have different associations. Sometimes it will be Shem is the ancestor of Semitics, Japheth is the ancestor of Asians, sometimes it’ll be the other way around.
GT 26:39 Yeah, that’s what I thought!
Matthew 26:40 Where Caucasians come in is another question. And all of this is to say, what’s happening in the early modern world is this attempt to map these very simple biblical stories onto a very complicated reality and trying to link these different races to different biblical figures. And depending on which theorists you read, whichever lineage you read, it will work in different ways.
GT 27:11 All right.
Matthew 27:13 Oh, but yes, Bigfoot. So the other major strand to folklore here is Bigfoot, Bigfoot folklore, which, it goes back pretty far, too. You will find stories of “wild men,” in folklore of all different sorts of people around the world, people who are uncivilized who live in the forest, who we encounter sometimes. I mean, if you want to take it all the way back, you can go to the Epic of Gilgamesh, and see the figure Enkidu, who is sent to Gilgamesh and who is a wild creature who lives in the forest. And oftentimes, this wild man folklore is a story of civilization. You have this wild creature who lives out in the woods, who eventually encounters civilization and becomes civilized. And this creature is frightening, often because it is a creature that resists civilization, that lurks at the edges of our societies and threatens to tear it down. Now, Native Americans speak about peoples like this. Europeans do, as well. And by the 19th century, you get stories, well, I mean, one of the most famous accounts is in a book by Theodore Roosevelt, the future president, in which he wrote a book about hunting and living in the wilderness, and he describes a man who encountered a great wild ape-like creature in the forests of North America. So, the story is really circulating. And by the 20th Century, there are two emerging, two primary strands in Bigfoot folklore. One is the scientific strand. And these are researchers and scholars of Bigfoot. And the most prominent of whom I discussed yesterday is a man named John Green. And then, as well, a couple of actual anthropologists: Grover Krantz is a famous one and Jeffrey Meldrum is actually a member of the LDS Church, who teaches in a university up in Idaho. These people argue that Bigfoot is simply an animal. It’s a creature, it’s an ape, that human beings are related to, the same way human beings are related to chimpanzees and gorillas. And we just haven’t found it yet. But it’s just an animal.
GT 29:35 The missing link maybe?
Matthew 29:36 Who knows?
Matthew 29:38 The other strand are Supernaturalists. They would argue that Bigfoot is not just an animal. That Bigfoot is an alien creature, an interdimensional creature, a supernatural creature of one type
GT 29:53 Which is why we can’t catch him?
Matthew 29:54 Precisely. And those people might say that there’s actually only one out there. It’s not a species. It’s a special supernatural creature. So, this debate is raging among scholars of Bigfoot in the mid -20th century.
GT 30:10 Can you put those two words together, scholars and Bigfoot? {both laughing}
Matthew 30:14 Hopefully. That’s what I am. {Both laughing} But then in the 1980’s, all of this comes together in Utah, because there’s a rash of Bigfoot sightings in Utah.
GT 30:26 Okay.
Matthew 30:27 Particularly up in northern Utah, around Ogden, North Davis County. There’s a famous sighting there.
GT 30:34 I grew up in Ogden, so that explains a lot.
Matthew 30:36 There you go. You may have heard of it. Yeah. And it gets in the newspapers, right. It’s in the Salt Lake Tribune. It’s in the Deseret News, these people. There’s two or three sightings over the course of a month or two. And I think really critically, that happens at almost exactly the same time as a couple of other developments in the Church. The first is the revocation of the priesthood and temple ban in 1978, which begins to make the sort of overt racialization, the purposes that Cain was serving, prior to that, more uncomfortable for some white members of the Church. Cain is no longer serving that function anymore. The other thing that happens, of course, is the publication of Spencer Kimball’s book, The Miracle Of Forgiveness, which contains the David Patten story in it.
GT 31:29 Wow.
Matthew 31:30 So all three of these things happen at about the same time. And you start to see, and I would see this as I’m going through the folklore archives at Utah State University and at BYU, there are faculty members and students at both of those universities who often collect folklore from the students. The faculty who teach folklore classes will send their students out, and say,” go gather folk stories. Talk to your friends. Talk to your peers. Ask them for folktales.” And they’ll get them and then they’ll archive them. And so, you can trace, in some ways, the evolution of folklore over time, what stories students are telling. That appears in these archives. And I saw, beginning in the mid-1980s, increasingly, this conflation happening: students saying “Bigfoot is actually Cain. Cain is actually Bigfoot.” And thus, that is a way, I think, for students, especially younger students, who are increasingly uncomfortable with the earlier function of Cain saying that he’s the archetypical cursed black man. They’re pushing out in a different direction. What they’re saying now is Cain is Bigfoot and Bigfoot is a monster.
GT 32:45 So this is to avoid the racism of calling Cain a black man?
Matthew 32:49 I think, to some extent. Right? It may not be overt. It’s hard to track why these people are doing it. What I do know is that the racialization of Cain starts to drop out from stories of Bigfoot told in the 80s and 90s. Instead, they’re telling stories about Cain being Bigfoot. But Cain acts like Bigfoot, in some of this earlier folklore, like when Cain meets David W. Patten, when he meets Wesley Smith in these folk tales, he’s intelligent. He talks. He tells them who he is. He says, “I’ve come to destroy the work of the Church.” By the stories I’m seeing in the 80s and 90s, about Bigfoot, identifying him as Cain, he acts like a big gorilla. He doesn’t speak anymore. He roars. He chases you through the woods.
GT 33:37 He’s not here to destroy the Church.
Matthew 33:39 His skin color is mentioned less and less. It’s still there, sometimes. But often he’s described not as being black or dark skinned, he’s described as being big and hairy, like a gorilla, like an ape. Now, certainly some of that residue, like the animalization of black people is still there, but it’s not as overt anymore. Instead, that conflation, I think, happens as a way to try to push the folklore in a different direction.
GT 34:04 Very interesting. I never thought of it as a way to get rid of the racism of the previous things there. And it’s fun to see the conflation of Mormon doctrine with Bigfoot. {Rick chuckling}
Matthew 34:18 Yeah, absolutely. And this is actually something that scholars of folklore have noted for a long time, that folklore is one vector, by which these small cultural communities, these fairly insulated cultural communities, become intertwined with broader American culture.
(End of Part 1}
[1] The book is titled “Kirtland Temple: The Biography of a Shared Mormon Sacred Space” and can be purchased at https://amzn.to/3YdZ7rR
[2] The book is titled “Shakers, Mormons, and Religious Worlds: Conflicting Visions, Contested Boundaries (Religion in North America).” It can be purchased at https://amzn.to/3XVrGJh.
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