Daniel Boone Once Had a ‘Yahoo’ Encounter With No Computer in Sight

I am an indirect descendant of Daniel Boone, one of Kentucky's most well-known historical figures. (I'd go ahead and give him the title if Abraham Lincoln had been born in, say, Nebraska.) Mom used to refer to him as "Uncle Daniel" because we were DIRECT descendants of his brother Squire Boone and, specifically, Squire's youngest daughter Hannah.

Daniel Boone

Because of this, I should probably kick myself for never having visited Fort Boonesborough or Harrodsburg or any of the other locations in central Kentucky where Boone explored. Since I have the whole summer ahead of me, I've created a reminder for myself to correct this oversight.

I should also look more closely into Boone's journals to discover other contextually pertinent locations besides the two obvious ones above. But geography isn't the only goal here. Daniel Boone's writings reveal something that could lead many people (including me) to believe that he may have been the originator of perhaps the most popular focal point of American folklore.

Daniel Boone's 'Yahoo' Encounter

You see, folklore has it that Boone encountered and killed what he described as a "a ten-foot, hairy giant" that he called a "Yahoo." Now, where in the world did he GET that term? Well, he and his fellow journeymen were fans of Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels in which Gulliver has an encounter with "quadrupeds" he called Yahoos. Here are a few more details.

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But Boone's description sounds strikingly similar to how we might describe Bigfoot. So you have to wonder? Did Daniel Boone encounter such a creature? Did he have one too many and just THINK he encountered something like that when it might have been something more explicable like a bear?

We may never know, but it sure is fun to think that HE might be the reason we have the whole Bigfoot myth to begin with.