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| Daniel Boone By Chester Harding - http://npg.si.edu/object/npg_NPG.2015.102, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=66327138 |
Before his death in 1820, famous explorer and pioneer Daniel Boone spoke of once killing a giant 10-foot hairy creature. It is unclear where this occurred but likely it was in Kentucky, where he lived with his family from 1775, or Missouri where he settled in 1799. Boone had been previously silent about the matter, only sharing the story with a few people, but during the year prior to his death he told several people about the encounter, possibly in an attempt to get the tale out before he passed on.
The most notable written account is from the book DANIEL BOONE: THE LIFE AND LEGEND OF AN AMERICAN PIONEER
by John Mack Faragher:
“After the meal one of the men asks Boone for a story, and he begins a tale but is interrupted by a man who claims that his story is ‘impossible.’ With this remark Boone shuts up and despite urgings that he continue, he refuses to speak further. Later that evening, when he has retired to the room he shares with the son of the tavern keeper, the boy asks him about his silence. ‘I dislike to be in a crowd’ Boone explains, and ‘would not have opened my lips had that man remained.’ Well, we are alone now, says the boy, and he presses the old man to tell the story. ‘You shall have it, honey’ says Boone, who has taken a fancy to him, and proceeds to tell of killing a ten foot, hairy giant he called a ‘Yahoo.’
Boone's favorite book was Gulliver's Travels written in 1726 by Jonathan Swift. In the book the giant hairy humanoids were called Yahoos, so it seems fitting that Boone would give the creature he saw that name. Swift describes the Yahoos thus:
"My horror and astonishment are not to be described, when I observed
in this abominable animal, a perfect human figure: the face of it indeed
was flat and broad, the nose depressed, the lips large, and the mouth
wide; but these differences are common to all savage nations, where the
lineaments of the countenance are distorted, by the natives suffering
their infants to lie grovelling on the earth, or by carrying them on
their backs, nuzzling with their face against the mothers’ shoulders.
The fore-feet of the Yahoo differed from my hands in nothing else but
the length of the nails, the coarseness and brownness of the palms, and
the hairiness on the backs. There was the same resemblance between our
feet, with the same differences; which I knew very well, though the
horses did not, because of my shoes and stockings; the same in every
part of our bodies except as to hairiness and colour, which I have
already described."
The real question is - where did author Jonathan Swift get the idea for Yahoos? Did Swift encounter a Sasquatch himself?
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Margie Kay is an author and researcher. She owns UnX Media Publishing and the KUNX Digital Broadcasting Network.
