photo collage of boone & bigfoot
Appalachian celebrities / Folklore / Kentucky

Yeahoh, Yahoo or Bigfoot?

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Estimated reading time: 5 minutes

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.

Jonathan Swift“[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.

A print of the watercolor of Daniel Boone, by David Wright.
A print of the watercolor of Daniel Boone, by David Wright.

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.

Sources: Curious Legend of the Kentucky Mountains, by Leonard Roberts, Western Folklore, Vol. 16, No. 1 (Jan., 1957), pp. 48-51
The Element Encyclopedia of Magical Creatures by John Matthews, Caitlin Matthews, 2006, Sterling Publishing Company, Inc.
www.nationalcenter.org/BoonebyRoosevelt.html
Daniel Boone: The Life and Legend of an American Pioneer, by JM Faragher, 1992, New York: Henry Holt & Company
Did fiction give birth to Bigfoot?, by HH Trotti, 1994, SKEPTICAL INQUIRER 18(5): 541-2.

More articles on Daniel Boone:

New documentary ‘Daniel Boone and the Opening of the American West’ releases(Opens in a new browser tab)

Did Daniel Boone’s Ghostwriter Let Us See the Real Boone?(Opens in a new browser tab)

‘Daniel Boone’ opens at the Palace(Opens in a new browser tab)

Book Review: ‘Blood and Treasure–Daniel Boone and the Fight for America’s First Frontier'(Opens in a new browser tab)

21 comments

  1. According to Faragher, Neely did not kill two Shawnee, but two buffalo at a salt lick. Brobdignags were a race of giants, hence the connection to buffalo. There was no Shawnee village in the area of Lulbegrud creek.

  2. Years ago, I read of royal european families who took their hairy over large born due to incestial relations to Montana USA and left them to live in the wild.

  3. Some people have suggested the bigfoot are what’s left of Neanderthals. I believe this could be true. The evidence suggests they had bigger brain cavities than humans do. This would explain their ability to hide so efficiently.

    And it has been speculated that that is the reason we have tales of intermarrying; they are a type of human.
    And as far as their hiding, we all know how men love to kill what they don’t understand and take what they want.
    Look at the reward — 1 million dead or alive. I’m surprised some big hairy mountain man has not been shot and submitted as a bigfoot!

  4. People have shot at big foot and wood boogers.. Yes Yes It is a fact they exist. We have much evidence of this rare and fearful hominid.

  6. I really don’t think they are real. After all these years and reports of them being shot. There is no hard evidence meaning remains of the Bigfoot any where. You would think that if it were true we would have proof not just word of mouth. Some thing to back up what people say. Yet we have none.

  7. They are absolutely real. Thousands of encounter reports dating back hundreds of years. Folks living in rural areas or farms have long known of their existence; many are reluctant to even talk of the subject because of ridicule, etc.

    There have been many bodies over the years, aggressive encounters, hit by cars etc. The Gov’t would collect any body, and threaten witnesses not to talk of the matter. Other stories indicate Sasquatch collect their fallen family members and run off. The info is out there for anyone who wants to learn. It is a collection, or body of evidence, not a single smoking gun that proves its existence.

    You must take the time and research it yourself, listen to the witness encounters, read reports, watch videos, read etc. and you will come to the same conclusion, they are real, and there is big money at stake to not prove their existence!

  8. Hi. We have picture proof of footprints and Nathan Sanders (e.t.b.h.) I’ve heard the midnight whistlers do this. This is hunter Sharry–I’m a sheriff in Atlanta, TX and I’ve seen the yahoo.

  9. THIS IS ETBH AND WE HAVE EYE WITNESSES THAT THERE IS A REAL BIG FOOT THIS BIG FOOT FROM WHAT WE ONDERSTAND IS ETHER THE MIDNIGHT WHISLER OR THE YAHOO IF YALL HAVE ENY INFO ON ANY THING EMAIL ME AT HUNTERSHARRY04@gmail.com

  10. If you don’t think Bigfoot exist, try staying a few nights in the southern part of Jefferson National Forest on the Virginia/Kentucky border. You will get visited. The people of Bristol, Va. have known about them for centuries. They’re known as woodboogers. They’ll rip you to pieces.

  12. I was up in north carolina and we was stopped in traffic. when i looked to my left and mind u we was surrounded by forests so yeah. anyone when i looked to my left i said to y girlfriend i says do u see that to? she said yes. we was seein this huge hairy apelike creature with reddish brown hair standing at the edge of the road. when it saw us lookin at it it took off in the woods. and then a few minutes later we still havent moved in traffic we heard this aweful gutteral howl. just thinking about that howl to this day it gives me goosebumps. the thing was 9 to 10 feet tall.

  13. so thousands of people seeing these things over thousands of years and they are all just mistaken? 90% of the human population do not wish to discuss this because …..like religion and politics you ”think” you have it figured out! and you don’t! the 90% would rather be lied to …….it’s too much to deal with! thanks!

  14. My understanding they are distant relatives who have always lived on Earth. They are inter dimensional beings who can create portals at will. They live our planet the most- far away from humans as possible. They don’t trust us and say we are very dangerous and are fiercely protective of their children. I don’t believe they are all dangerous, but I do think some react based on what WE DO! Read the books written by people with long term frequent contact! Good stuff!

  15. One night after a long day of wood cutting and sleeping out in the woods near Prospect, Oregon, something woke me. I woke staring in the face of a bigfoot about a hundred feet from me. We stared in disbelief. I glanced away to wake Bill, and it vanished. It probably ducked behind brush and it was probably not magical but timed perfectly. This was prior to 1980.

    Does the Forest Service know about them? Probably. If they became as potent as the Spotted Owls then what? USA forest get shut down? Are they magical? Probably not but simply intelligent and well adapted to our forest. Who wants to hunt them during pitch black nights when they are active to make a point? This is a good way to wind up as Squatch food served on a platter in a high mountain cave. No thanks…….. leave them alone and hike with armed partners. grm Oregon Pioneer Family 4th generation.

  16. Are you people all on drugs? Just more evidence of our lack of education problem in this country.

  17. Meaning what? That Bigfoot doesn’t exist? If that’s the case you have to ignore thousands of reports over hundreds of years …I guess it’s all been a joke? Or you like 90% of all humans are afraid to admit there are things we don’t know exist out there!

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