Mark A. Hall passage on the connection between the 1958 Jerry Crew Cast, the Laird Meadow Road Cast of 1963 and the Patterson/Gimlin Movie Cast

This brings us back to the record of events in 1958 and thereafter. Loren Coleman has recently brought to my attention the existence of a footprint cast made by Roger Patterson in 1964. Tracks were found by Pat Graves on Laird Meadow Road in Del Norte County of California. (Laird Meadow itself is located at 41d 22m 59s N, 123d 44m 12s W.) Patterson made two casts.

The record of the Laird Meadow cast (the shape appears in Fig. 2) is helpful to our understanding of what was happening back then. It appears to show the same foot as that of the creature identified as “Patty” in the Patterson-Gimlin film of 1967. The imprint shows that this female was around three years earlier at the same level of maturity. If she was in the same area six years earlier, her tracks could have been found by Kerr and Breazele at that time. Such a cast could then have served as the prototype for the alder-wood Wallace foot-forms.

The presence of two tracks makers in the same area of Northern California in the 1950s and 1960s has been indicated by Charles Edson’s observations of tracks in those years [4] and by the casts that have made showing those same two sizes, one male (such as cast in 1958 and 1964) and one female (as cast in 1964 and 1967). The measurements, casts, and photographs are indicating finds of tracks for the same individuals (”Patty” and her mate).

Edson and others were likely to be seeing imprints made by “Patty” during the years that fakes were done. But casts of her genuine prints seem to be rare for the early years, while the Wallace fakes have been illustrated again and again. The 1964 Laird Meadow cast is simply the earliest for “Patty” where there is a clear record. Now let us find the explanation for why the female tracks sometimes show a sort of bulge behind the toes on the inside of the foot. This kind of indentation shows in the tracks left by “Patty” in 1967 and in the female tracks found in South Dakota in 1977 (the Grand River cast). [5]

(Blogger's note: The actual date for the finding and casting of the Laird Meadow Road track was October 20-21, 1963, not '64. According to information found by author David Murphy in which he found the original Laird Meadow Road cast at the Patterson household, the cast has etched on the back of it the date of discovery of the track, which was October 20, 1963, and it was cast on the 21st, the next day.)