Daniel Boone’s Yahoo = Bigfoot?
Posted by: Craig Woolheater on June 17th, 2011
Source: Appalachian History: Stories, quotes and anecdotes.
Dave Tabler
Long before it became the brand of a search engine, the creature whose uttered cry gave it a name haunted Kentuckians. Daniel Boone told tales of “killing a ten-foot, hairy giant he called a Yahoo,” says John Mack Faragher in a 1992 biography of Boone. The Yahoos are hairy man-like creatures in Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, one of Boone’s favorite books. Boone and his explorer companions, it should be noted right from the get-go, threw around many of the terms used in that book rather liberally.
“[Boone] was encamped with five other men on Red River,” Theodore Roosevelt relates in his Daniel Boone’s Move to Kentucky (1897), “and they had with them for their amusement ‘the history of Samuel Gulliver’s travels, wherein he gave an account of his young master, Glumdelick, careing [sic] him on a market day for a show to a town called Lulbegrud.’
“In the party who, amid such strange surroundings, read and listened to Swift’s writings was a young man named Alexander Neely. One night he came into camp with two Indian scalps, taken from a Shawnee village he had found on a creek running into the river; and he announced to the circle of grim wilderness veterans that ‘he had been that day to Lulbegrud, and had killed two Brobdignags in their capital.’ To this day the creek by which the two luckless Shawnees lost their lives is known as Lulbegrud Creek.”
Folktale scholar Hugh H. Trotti suggests that Boone’s tall tales may be the origin of some of the Bigfoot tales in North America. Could the term “Yeahoh” used for such a creature in the following story simply be a corruption of Swift’s “Yahoos”?
Once upon a time they’s a man layin’ out, and he went to a cave. And he was layin’ out in there and the Yeahoh come and throwed a deer in to him — something would come every day and throw a deer into him, and leave out. On time that Yeahoh come and got down in there wuth him and not long after that she had a kid. Then one time he took a notion to leave her and he would go to leave and she wouldn’t let him go. She’d make him come back. A-finally he got out and he got on a ship going to cross the waters. And he got started and rode off and left her. And she stood there and hollered and screamed after him. And when she seen he’d got away from her and she couldn’t go, why she tore the baby in two and throwed one half in after him.
—Told by Nancy McDaniel of Big Leatherfoot Creek, Perry County, KY to folktale collector Leonard Roberts, who published it under the title “The Origin of Man” in South From Hell-fer-Sartin (1955).
So okay, if Kentuckians heard it passed down from Boone, who got it from Swift, how did Swift learn of Yahoo tales? Or did he simply spin them from his imagination? One possible clue: though Nancy McDaniel’s tale is told in the hills, it mentions ships and “crossing the waters” as the escape route for the captive human.
Tales of women shipwrecked or marooned on an island populated by monkeys or apes, fed and housed by a dominant monkey and forced to cohabit and bear it offspring, before escaping and seeing their hybrid children murdered by the irate simian parent, may have arisen in early 16th century Portugal, and also exist in similar forms in the Americas and across Asia. The idea of a “semi-human” was also floating through scientific circles in the first half of the 18th century: in 1758 Carolus Linnaeus theorized that a form between man and ape existed, which he named Homo troglodytes.
Daniel BooneLinguist Richard Stoney carefully states that Swift, a lover of wordplay, drew from many language sources, each of which refer to various personality facets of the Yahoos. But he also turns up the following morsel published in Australian Aboriginal Words in English (1835): “The natives are greatly terrified by the sight of a person in a mask calling him ‘devil’ or Yah-hoo, which signifies evil spirit.”
And from the 1844 edition: “They have an evil spirit, which causes them great terror, whom they call ‘Yahoo’ or ‘Devil-Devil’: he lives in the tops of the steepest and rockiest mountains, which are totally inaccessible to all human beings, and comes down at night to seize and run away with men, women or children, whom he eats up, children being his favourite food…The name… of Yahoo being used to express a bad spirit, or ‘Bugaboo’, was common also with the aborigines of Van Diem[e]n’s Land [Tasmania]…”
The tribes mentioned here are located in the region around Botany Bay (near Sydney and slightly westward), site of the first British settlement in Australia in 1788. Gulliver’s Travels was written in 1726. Did the aborigines, like early Kentuckians, absorb Swift’s tale from the new colonists and make it local, or did Swift, to create his characters, draw on much older aboriginal folktales, possibly passed along to him by seafarers pre-dating Cook? The debate continues.
Co-founder of Cryptomundo in 2005.
I have appeared in or contributed to the following TV programs, documentaries and films:
OLN's Mysterious Encounters: "Caddo Critter", Southern Fried Bigfoot, Travel Channel's Weird Travels: "Bigfoot", History Channel's MonsterQuest: "Swamp Stalker", The Wild Man of the Navidad, Destination America's Monsters and Mysteries in America: Texas Terror - Lake Worth Monster, Animal Planet's Finding Bigfoot: Return to Boggy Creek and Beast of the Bayou.
These tales could date back much further than Swift. With DNA evidence showing that early humans bred with Neanderthals, it seems possible that oral history around primitive man’s campfires may have included tales of the barrel chested big uglies coming into dwellings and carrying off their females.
Very interesting. Seems this has become so ingrained in the public zetigiest the story goes where ever its needed.
“Daniel Boone was a Bigfoot-killer,
‘Yes, a Bigfoot-Killer!!!”
Sorry, I just had to do that.
Interesting that he said he encountered these creatures, even shot them. The extreme height sounds like Mark Hall’s and Loren Coleman’s True Giants. Neat too that Alexander Neely said that he killed two Brobdignags…Possibly Sasquatch or very large Indians. Karankawa Indians of Texas averaged over 6 feet high.
IIRC, Swift’s Yahoos were simply human beings who lived like animals where the horses lived like people. Gulliver’s Travels is a social satire, and he used various exaggerations of humans to make points. Swift’s yahoos are not bigfoot, nor the highly advanced, non-hair-covered neandertalers.
“The tribes mentioned here are located in the region around Botany Bay (near Sydney and slightly westward), site of the first British settlement in Australia in 1788…”
Botany Bay is actually part of Sydney and to the south of Port Jackson, site of the first settlement (i.e. not Botany Bay itself, although that was first considered and found wanting). If it were westward it would be dry land. Sydney’s international airport is located at Botany Bay.
All the best,
Dave from North-West Sydney.
I would like to know how far back the reports of “Red glowing eyes” goes and how common it was to see them. When was the first report or the first occurrence of this type of sighting?
Purportedly in Sasquatch language “Nermateta” means “People Eaters”, Bigfoot that eat people.
sschaper:
It’s been a while since I read Gulliver’s Travels, but I do remember them being hairy all over their bodies. Nevertheless they were human, albeit with physical abilities above civilized man (I remember that they were quite agile, and perhaps also very strong).
Having said this, I have lost my copy of Gulliver’s Travels and cannot look it up quickly to confirm. I will have to order it at a Library or look at a copy in some bookstore. Maybe there is somewhere online I can read a passage from the book about them.
sschaper:
They were hairy, but not over their whole bodies. However their finger and to nails were long claws and their physical prowess was awesome.
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