Taku-He

In the fall of 1977 the small community of Little Eagle, on the Grand River in Corson County, South Dakota, became briefly famous for a wave of reports of a large, hairy creature. Little Eagle lies entirely within the Standing Rock Reservation, home to Dakota and Lakota people, and it had around three hundred residents at the time. Residents called the creature Taku-He, and the name has stuck as the local label for South Dakota’s Bigfoot-type reports.

The reports began, according to cryptozoology accounts, in mid-September 1977, when Chris Howiatow and others checking cattle said a “big ape” watched them from a hillside and then ran into the brush. Over the next three months, between two and three dozen sightings were counted in and around Little Eagle, with a few more on the neighboring Cheyenne River Reservation and one reportedly near Spearfish. Phoebe Little Dog reported seeing the creature in the same cattle pasture on October 6 and again on October 13. On October 29, three police officers – Verdell Veo, Selvin Arlen and Bobby Gates – saw it in the middle of the night and chased it, but stopped, they said, when they realized they had no way to deal with it if they caught up.

As word spread, outsiders arrived. Hunting parties gathered at night around fires with rifles, and tribal police and local authorities also searched for the creature, which was reported near the Elkhorn Buttes northeast of town. One local resident later recalled suspecting that the hunters wanted to kill or capture it to prove it existed. According to writers on the case, the scare drew coverage in Time and Newsweek. The final Little Eagle sighting was reported on December 5, 1977, and researcher Mark Hall collected the newspaper accounts for a 1978 article in The Minnesota Archaeologist.

A few things are worth noting. 1977 was the height of America’s Bigfoot craze, fueled by television documentaries, so the reports landed in a society primed to notice them. And the story is a Native community’s story: the memories and family accounts belong to the people of Standing Rock, which is why modern retellings, including a 2017 horror film that borrowed the name, are best read against local recollections.

A tall, hairy, ape-like creature, described by witnesses as a “big ape” on two legs, with a large footprint reported on the Grand River bank and repeated visits to cattle pastures. Some accounts mention green eyes.

Pastures, river bottoms and brush along the Grand River near Little Eagle and the Elkhorn Buttes on the Standing Rock Reservation, in the fall of 1977.

Taku-He is South Dakota’s best-known Bigfoot story and a staple of regional paranormal writing and local-history features. A 2017 horror film took its name, though it was filmed in Tennessee, and sources on the actual 1977 events are mostly newspapers and the recollections of Standing Rock residents. Readers should treat the Native community’s own memories as the authority on what the events meant.