Where the word actually comes from
"Sasquatch" is an anglicized version of sásq'ets, a word from Halkomelem, the language of several Coast Salish peoples in British Columbia, including the Sts'ailes First Nation. It's been translated as "wild man" or "hairy man," and the Sts'ailes themselves have described it closer to "big hairy man-like creature." The term entered English mainly through J.W. Burns, a Vancouver Province reporter who spent the 1920s collecting and publishing Indigenous oral histories about the creature, well before "Bigfoot" existed as a word.
The felony that's still, technically, on the books
On April 1, 1969, Skamania County, Washington, about an hour from where we're half-planted, passed Ordinance No. 1969-01, making the "premeditated, wilful and wanton slaying" of Sasquatch a felony: up to five years in prison and a $10,000 fine. In 1984 the county revisited it and softened the penalty to a gross misdemeanor, one year and up to $1,000, or a simple misdemeanor if it wasn't premeditated. It's still, as far as we can tell, an active county ordinance.
The footage everyone's actually arguing about
The Patterson-Gimlin film, shot October 20, 1967, along Bluff Creek in California's Six Rivers National Forest, is the piece of evidence basically everything else gets compared to: 59.5 seconds at 16 frames per second, showing a large upright figure crossing a creek bed before it looks back at the camera. A man named Bob Heironimus claimed in 1999 that he was the one in a suit; Patterson and Gimlin maintained until their deaths that it was real. The Bigfoot Field Researchers Organization, founded in 1995, still keeps a public, searchable database of reported sightings by state, and Washington has more entries than anywhere else in the country.
Where we actually land on it
Officially, unsourced: Andrew's personal read is that Sasquatch isn't a missed species so much as an interdimensional being that steps in and out of our reality when it feels like it, which would explain the total absence of a body in 50-plus years of trying. We're not the only ones who won't fully rule it out, either: primatologist Jane Goodall told NPR's Science Friday in 2002, on the record, "you will be amazed when I tell you that I'm sure that they exist." We build sourced local pages for a living, not cryptozoology ones, so take this section as the one place on the whole site where we're just a couple of guys with an opinion.