New? This goes all the way back to one of the earliest "accounts" which is a misconstruing of an early Mormon writing about how he met Cain. Mormons until a decade ago officially held that black people are descended from Cain, and part of that ties into this early story about one of their founders meeting Cain who is effectively a Bigfoot.

Great paper on this that I read a few years ago https://www.jstor.org/stable/23289895?read-now=1&seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents it is actually a really interesting part of how sasquatch lore interweaves with other aspects of american myth-making and of course racism

The conflation of these two legends is a study in the transformation of Mormon culture as reflected in its folklore. Its simplest lesson is that skepticism about the veracity of such tales can be interpreted as declining belief in physical manifestations of supernatural evil. However, the content of Cain stories reflects more subtle changes. The reidentification of Cain as Bigfoot demonstrates how Cain has come to be identified with the mainstream legendary figure; in the process, he is stripped of his spiritual status as an intelligent, malevolent agent of supernatural evil, a presence accepted, and even expected, in nineteenth-century Mormon life. Further, this dehumanization of Cain reflects the weakening grip of the "curse of Cain" folk doctrine that associated him with the stigmatized African race. In these ways the uncoupling of Cain and the demonic is indicative of a larger process of cultural assimilation and transformation