If you go back far enough, pretty much everybody is descended from somebody famous, or better yet, infamous (except for people who aren’t, and just decide to lie about it anyway; so if you ever meet someone claiming to be descended from George Washington or Uncle Fester be aware they’re just trying to beef ya).  Most people’s ancestors seem to have lived lives full of romance and adventure, and doing all sorts of other things that would be kind of impressive if not for the fact that it’s just kind of expected that most people’s ancestors did things like invent the ham sandwich or invent the first monkey-fez.  As you might have suspected, my own forefathers came not from so common a mold, rather, as family legend goes, most of them spent their time looking craggy and running away from Indians (Like, a whole bunch of Indians, mind you, not just a few.  More Indians than there are in Cleveland even.  Yeah, that many.).  Also, one of them jumped off a cliff in Pittsburgh while indulging in this great family tradition.  In fact, if you go back far enough, pretty much everybody I’m related to has some connection to either running away from Indians or Pittsburgh, which is kinda weird, come to think of it.  Also, according to family legend, I am the proud descendent of the only family ever to go out West on the Oregon Trail, live in Oregon for a couple of years, and then get so bored with things there that they came back (though at least the traffic on the Eastbound lanes must have been a lot lighter).  I guess what I’m trying to say is, my family is weird, and they always have been.  So let’s just pretend that that was a terribly witty segue instead of a rambling, nonsensical paragraph full of goofiness, and get on to telling the story of one of America’s greatest and most poorly documented folk heroes, Bigfoot Wallace.  Now, being as how there’s that whole poorly documented thing, a lot of this is going to be written in accordance with the fine historical tradition that we professionals like to call “making up stuff and hoping that nobody ever calls you on it”.  That said, here we go.

            Born in Virginia in 1817, Bigfoot Wallace (who, according to my sources was not, scientifically speaking, a Sasquatch, Yeti, or Abominable Anything of any sort whatsoever) probably had your regular old American folk hero upbringing.  He spent his days wandering through the woods, wrestling trees and chopping bears into firewood.  He was most certainly not killed in a bar when he was only three, but statistically speaking, it’s almost certain that somewhere along the line he found a large blue animal freezing in a blizzard somewhere and adopted it, after which point it inexplicably grew to an enormous size and followed him in all his travels thereafter, like some kind of blue wookie or something.  I’m really temped to go with the giant blue squirrel route, but since recent evidence suggests that Bob Dole already has one of those, I’m gonna be a bit more original and say it was an enormous stoat of some kind, and it was probably named after some great American baseball player or another.  Also, in case any among you doubt the veracity of my tale, just check out the nose on old Bigfoot there.  That, my friends, is the same nose that every single man in my family (and a good share of the women) has had ever since my great, great, great, grandfather, Og Strohm first evolved away his tail (big mistake, Grampa Og) and ran away from the first big group of Cave-Indians somewhere around what would someday become Pittsburgh.  Also, he kind of looks like Zephram Cochrane, which if you’re a dork (and if you’re reading this, you probably are) opens up all sorts of temporal paradoxes and stuff.

            Anyways, in 1836, Bigfoot Wallace learned that his older brother had been killed in the Texan War for Independence.  So he put a colander on his head, grabbed a sack of yams, and headed West with his faithful giganamous blue stoat, Willie Stargell.  Unfortunately, Bigfoot Wallace also had the family sense of punctuality and by the time he got to Texas, the war was already over.  Happily enough though, there were already a number of good hardware stores in the area, so he just decided to stay and become a Texas Ranger (This, might I add, would have made an infinitely more awesome show than anything about Chuck Norris.  Unless Chuck Norris had like, a flying battleship and a giant blue Gila monster named Roberto Clemente). 

            Anyhow, Bigfoot Wallace went on to fight in the Mexican War and probably spent the rest of his time doing all that obligatory folk hero stuff like rasslin tornados and carving Mount Rushmore with nothing but a pocket knife and a bag of moldy yams.  Most say that he died in 1899 and has remained dead since.  I suspect that he probably just went back to the 21^st century so he could finish his warp ship and bring the first Vulcans to Earth.  Either way, if you’re reading this, Bigfoot, send me a comment or something, and maybe a giant blue gibbon called Dizzy Dean.  That would be totally cool.