Appalachian Folklore & Myths Series – The Yahoo of Kentucky: Daniel Boone, Gulliver’s Travels, and Appalachian Bigfoot Lore
Somewhere between the archive, the campfire, and the modern monster book, Daniel Boone acquired a creature.
The story is usually told in a simple way. Boone, the great Kentucky frontiersman, supposedly met and killed a ten foot hairy thing called a Yahoo. Because the name came from Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, and because the creature sounds to modern readers like a Bigfoot, the tale has become one of the strangest pieces of early Appalachian monster lore. It has appeared in cryptid books, Bigfoot articles, websites, and online retellings as if it were a frontier eyewitness report.
The problem is that the evidence is much thinner than the legend.
I did not find a Boone-authored primary source saying Daniel Boone killed a creature called a Yahoo or Bigfoot. The closest surviving source appears to be a group of 1875 and 1876 letters written by Buckner Payne to Lyman C. Draper, more than fifty years after Boone’s death. Payne was recalling a story Boone supposedly told at Limestone, Kentucky. That makes the account valuable, but it also means it is not Boone writing in his own hand, not a sworn frontier report, and not a contemporary record of an encounter.
Folklorist Carl Lindahl has made the most careful study of the story. His conclusion matters. According to Lindahl, the surviving Payne account describes a giant, not a creature Boone himself called a Yahoo. The “Yahoo” wording appears to have entered the story through John Mack Faragher’s later summary in his major Boone biography, and then spread through Bigfoot and cryptid writing.
That does not make the story worthless. It makes it more interesting. The Boone Yahoo tale is not strong evidence for Bigfoot in early Kentucky. It is better read as a case study in how Appalachian legends grow, how frontier tall tales become local history, and how one famous man’s name can carry a story farther than the evidence can support.
Boone, Swift, and the Kentucky Wilderness
The strongest part of the Boone and Yahoo connection is not the hairy giant story. It is Gulliver’s Travels.
In 1770, Daniel Boone and his companions were deep in Kentucky, camped near the waters that became known as Lulbegrud Creek. Boone later recalled that the party had a copy of Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels with them for amusement. That detail is important because Swift’s book was full of strange peoples, distorted worlds, giants, miniature kingdoms, and savage humanlike beings called Yahoos.
The Lulbegrud Creek tradition comes from this literary world. In Swift’s book, Lorbrulgrud is the capital city of Brobdingnag, the land of giants. In the Kentucky story, Alexander Neeley returned to camp and joked that he had been to “Lulbegrud” and killed “Brobdingnags.” The name stuck to the creek. The U.S. Forest Service history of the Daniel Boone National Forest repeats the tradition, explaining that the party had Gulliver’s Travels in camp and that the creek name came from the story read aloud there.
This is where the historical ground is firmer. Boone’s party really was linked to Swift’s book in early Kentucky memory. The words “Lulbegrud” and “Brobdingnag” had entered the landscape before the later monster story took shape. A piece of eighteenth century satire had crossed the mountains with hunters and found a home in Kentucky place names.
That matters because later writers could easily connect Boone’s frontier world to Swift’s fictional monsters. If Boone’s party was reading Gulliver’s Travels, and if Kentucky already had a place name born from Brobdingnag, then a hairy giant story could be pulled into the same imaginative family. The result was not a clean historical line. It was a tangle of literature, memory, humor, folklore, and frontier reputation.
Buckner Payne and the Hairy Giant
The key archival source behind the alleged Boone creature tale is Buckner Payne’s correspondence with Lyman C. Draper. Draper spent much of his life gathering frontier manuscripts, interviews, letters, and reminiscences connected to figures like Daniel Boone, George Rogers Clark, and other early western pioneers. His Boone materials are now part of the Draper Manuscripts, held by the State Historical Society of Wisconsin.
Payne’s letters, written in late 1875 and early 1876, recalled a story Boone supposedly told many years earlier. Lindahl identifies those letters as the source behind the later Boone Yahoo tradition.
In the story as summarized by Lindahl, Boone and his son encounter a huge humanlike being. It is pale and hairy, roughly ten and a half feet tall, with long yellowish hair, large hands and feet, and heavy bone under the chest. Boone kills it. The details are vivid, strange, and close enough to modern Bigfoot imagery that later readers understandably paid attention.
But the setting of the evidence matters. Payne was writing long after the alleged telling. Boone had died in 1820. Payne’s letters were written more than half a century later. The story itself was presented as something Boone had told in social company, not as a scientific report, official deposition, or Boone family manuscript. It belonged to the world of reminiscence.
Boone was also a legendary figure in his own lifetime. He was not only a hunter and settler. He was a storyteller. Men like Boone lived in a culture where hunting stories, danger stories, and exaggeration were part of frontier sociability. A tale of a giant killed in the wilderness could be heard as a joke, a marvel, a boast, a tall tale, or a legend depending on the teller, the listener, and the moment.
That is one reason Lindahl’s interpretation is useful. He treats the story not as simple evidence that Boone encountered a literal creature, but as a performance that later audiences reinterpreted. A tall tale can become a legend when the next listener forgets the wink.
How a Giant Became a Yahoo
The word “Yahoo” is the turning point.
In Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, the Yahoos are savage, degraded, humanlike beings in the land of the Houyhnhnms. They are not Bigfoot in the modern sense. They are part of Swift’s satire of human nature. The giant world in the book is Brobdingnag, while the Yahoos belong to another part of the story. In later monster writing, however, Swift’s imaginary beings became useful names for anything humanlike, hairy, strange, or frightening.
John Mack Faragher’s 1993 biography Daniel Boone: The Life and Legend of an American Pioneer helped popularize the Boone Yahoo wording. Faragher is a serious Boone biographer, and his book remains important for understanding Boone’s life and legend. But on this specific point, Lindahl argues that Faragher’s summary unintentionally transformed the Payne account. The manuscript source said giant. The later summary gave readers a Yahoo.
That small shift had a large effect.
Once the creature became a Yahoo, it could be tied directly to Swift. Once it was tied to Swift, it could be tied to Lulbegrud Creek. Once it was tied to Boone, Swift, Kentucky, and a hairy giant, modern Bigfoot writers had the perfect frontier origin story. It sounded old. It sounded literary. It sounded Appalachian. Most of all, it had Daniel Boone in it.
Boone’s name gave the story power. A nameless hunter saying he killed a giant might be dismissed. Daniel Boone saying it feels different. Boone’s reputation acts like a certificate of authenticity, even when the source does not actually prove what later retellings claim.
This is how folklore often works. The story did not need to be invented from nothing. It only needed to be nudged. A giant became a Yahoo. A Yahoo became a Bigfoot ancestor. A late reminiscence became a frontier encounter. The story moved from archive to biography to folklore scholarship to cryptid culture, changing slightly at each stop.
Kentucky Yeahohs and Mountain Folklore
The Boone tale is not the only Kentucky mountain story involving a strange humanlike creature. The best folklore source for this wider tradition is Leonard W. Roberts.
Roberts was one of Kentucky’s most important collectors of mountain folktales. His papers at Berea College include folklore narrative transcriptions, sound recordings, correspondence, photographs, and research materials documenting his work from the mid twentieth century. Berea notes that Roberts’s recordings from the late 1940s and 1950s are especially important because audio documentation of southeastern Kentucky folklore from that time is rare.
Roberts published “Curious Legend of the Kentucky Mountains” in Western Folklore in 1957. He also included related material in South from Hell-fer-Sartin: Kentucky Mountain Folk Tales, published by the University Press of Kentucky in 1955. These sources preserve the “Yeahoh” tradition, a rare Kentucky mountain tale about a humanlike creature.
One version, told by Nancy McDaniel and discussed by Lindahl, has a man entering a cave and encountering a female Yeahoh. The story grows stranger and darker from there. The man has a child with the creature, later escapes by ship, and the Yeahoh tears the child apart. It is not a simple animal sighting story. It belongs to the world of wonder tales, warnings, gendered danger, cave mystery, and mountain storytelling.
The word itself appears in several forms, including Yeahoh, Yahoo, Yahoe, and other spellings in later writing. That variation is important. Folklore does not always keep one spelling, one meaning, or one boundary. A word can shift as it moves from mouth to manuscript, from dialect to print, from local tale to outside interpretation.
The Yeahoh tales also show that southeastern Kentucky had its own traditions of wild, humanlike, or monstrous beings. Those traditions do not prove the Boone story happened. They do show that later readers were not working in an empty landscape. Kentucky mountain folklore already had room for strange beings in caves, forests, and remote places.
Yahoo Falls and the Place-Name Temptation
Yahoo Falls in McCreary County adds another layer to the confusion.
The place is real. The National Park Service identifies Yahoo Falls as Kentucky’s highest waterfall, dropping 113 feet in the northern portion of Big South Fork National River and Recreation Area. The short loop trail leads visitors down to the waterfall, behind it, and back above the falls. It is one of the most striking natural sites in the region.
But the real waterfall should not be treated as proof of the Boone Yahoo story.
Modern retellings sometimes connect Boone, Yahoo Falls, and Bigfoot as if the place name preserves the memory of Boone killing a creature there. That is tempting, but the evidence does not support it. The stronger documented Swift connection belongs to Lulbegrud Creek, not Yahoo Falls. The name Yahoo Falls has its own complicated local history, including debated traditions about a supposed massacre connected with Cornblossom and the Troxell family.
Those Yahoo Falls traditions must also be handled carefully. The Forest Service history includes a chapter on Princess Cornblossom and Big Jake, but later researchers and local historians have raised serious doubts about the massacre story. Recent historical summaries note that there is no contemporary documentary evidence for the alleged Yahoo Falls Massacre and that Cornblossom appears late in the written record. That does not mean the place lacks meaning. It means the historian has to separate documented landscape, oral tradition, family memory, and later invention.
Yahoo Falls deserves its own article. For the Boone Yahoo story, it should be mentioned only as a related place-name problem, not as proof.
Wild Men, Bigfoot, and the Modern Reading
By the time modern readers found the Boone Yahoo story, America already had a long history of “wild man” reports. Newspapers in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries regularly printed stories about hairy men, cave dwellers, hermits, giants, and strange figures seen in rural places. Some were hoaxes. Some were misidentifications. Some were crime reports turned into folklore. Some were entertainment.
Bigfoot as a modern national figure rose later. Joshua Blu Buhs, in Bigfoot: The Life and Times of a Legend, traces the broader legend from nineteenth century wild man accounts through the Yeti and Sasquatch traditions to the 1958 northern California reports that helped create modern Bigfoot culture. That framework matters because it helps explain why Boone’s story was reinterpreted.
A frontier giant story told in the orbit of Daniel Boone did not originally need to mean Bigfoot. After Bigfoot became a famous American monster, older stories were reread through that lens. Anything tall, hairy, wild, and humanlike could be pulled backward into the Bigfoot family tree.
That is not always bad history if done carefully. Folklore does have ancestors. Traditions borrow from older traditions. But it becomes bad history when a modern category is forced onto a source that never used it.
Boone did not write, “I killed a Bigfoot.” The available evidence does not even show that Boone himself called the creature a Yahoo. The strongest claim is that a late reminiscence preserved a Boone giant tale, and that later writers connected it to Swift, Yahoos, and Bigfoot.
That is still a fascinating story. It is just not the same story.
What the Evidence Can and Cannot Say
The evidence can say that Daniel Boone and his companions were connected to Gulliver’s Travels in Kentucky memory. It can say that Lulbegrud Creek preserves a Swiftian place-name tradition tied to Boone’s 1770 party. It can say that Buckner Payne, writing to Lyman Draper in 1875 and 1876, recalled a strange Boone story about a giant. It can say that Leonard Roberts collected southeastern Kentucky Yeahoh tales in the twentieth century. It can say that modern Bigfoot writers found these materials and connected them to the larger American monster tradition.
The evidence cannot honestly say that Daniel Boone wrote about killing a Bigfoot. It cannot prove that Boone killed a creature called a Yahoo. It cannot prove that Yahoo Falls was named because of Boone’s monster. It cannot turn a late reminiscence, however interesting, into a contemporary eyewitness document.
The best way to tell the story is to keep both truths together. First, the Bigfoot claim is too strong. Second, the folklore is too rich to ignore.
In that middle ground, the Boone Yahoo story becomes something better than a debunked monster tale. It becomes a window into how Appalachia remembers. A book carried into Kentucky became a creek name. A frontier hunter became a national hero. A giant in a reminiscence became a Yahoo in biography. A Yahoo became a Bigfoot clue online. A mountain folktale creature called the Yeahoh waited nearby in the oral tradition, ready to be drawn into the same family.
That is the real history here. Not proof of a hairy giant in the Kentucky woods, but proof that stories can survive by changing shape.
In the end, Boone’s “Yahoo” belongs less to zoology than to folklore. It stands at the meeting place of Swift’s satire, Kentucky’s hunting camps, Appalachian cave tales, frontier tall tales, and the modern hunger for monsters. It reminds us that the mountains do not only preserve facts. They preserve echoes, and sometimes the echo grows louder than the first voice.
Sources & Further Reading
Buckner Payne to Lyman C. Draper, November 6, December 8, December 11, 1875, and January 1876. Daniel Boone Papers, Draper Manuscripts, DM 16C23–16C26. State Historical Society of Wisconsin, Madison, WI. https://digicoll.library.wisc.edu/cgi/f/findaid/findaid-idx?c=wiarchives;view=text;didno=uw-whs-draper00c
Boone, Daniel. Deposition concerning Lulbegrud Creek, September 15, 1796. Daniel Boone Papers, Draper Manuscripts, DM 4C93. State Historical Society of Wisconsin, Madison, WI. https://digicoll.library.wisc.edu/cgi/f/findaid/findaid-idx?c=wiarchives;view=text;didno=uw-whs-draper00c
State Historical Society of Wisconsin. “Draper Manuscripts: Daniel Boone Papers, 1760–1911.” Archival Resources in Wisconsin: Descriptive Finding Aids. https://digicoll.library.wisc.edu/cgi/f/findaid/findaid-idx?c=wiarchives;view=text;didno=uw-whs-draper00c
State Historical Society of Wisconsin. “Draper Manuscripts, 1740–1891.” Archival Resources in Wisconsin: Descriptive Finding Aids. https://digicoll.library.wisc.edu/cgi/f/findaid/findaid-idx?c=wiarchives;view=text;didno=uw-whs-drapermss
Swift, Jonathan. Gulliver’s Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World. 1726. Project Gutenberg. https://www.gutenberg.org/files/829/829-h/829-h.htm
Filson, John. The Discovery, Settlement and Present State of Kentucke. Wilmington, DE: James Adams, 1784. Electronic Texts in American Studies, University of Nebraska-Lincoln. https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/etas/3/
Filson, John. The Discovery, Settlement, and Present State of Kentucke. American Journeys. Wisconsin Historical Society. https://www.americanjourneys.org/AJ_PDF/aj-125.pdf
Berea College Special Collections and Archives. “Leonard Roberts Papers.” BCA 0057 SAA 057. https://bereaarchives.libraryhost.com/repositories/2/resources/567
Berea College Special Collections and Archives. “Leonard Roberts Field Recordings.” Berea Digital Collections. https://berea.access.preservica.com/?name=SO_c65dd2ea-ce17-41a6-94de-ced994acf461
Berea College Special Collections and Archives. “LR-OR-057.” Leonard Roberts Papers, BCA 0057 SAA 057. https://bereaarchives.libraryhost.com/repositories/2/archival_objects/97503
Roberts, Leonard W. “Curious Legend of the Kentucky Mountains.” Western Folklore 16, no. 1 January 1957: 48–51. https://www.jstor.org/journal/westfolk
Roberts, Leonard W. South from Hell-fer-Sartin: Kentucky Mountain Folk Tales. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1955. https://archive.org/details/southfromhellfer0000robe
Collins, Robert F. A History of the Daniel Boone National Forest, 1770–1970. Winchester, KY: U.S. Department of Agriculture, Forest Service, 1975. https://foresthistory.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/A-history-of-the-Daniel-Boone-National-Forest.pdf
Collins, Robert F. A History of the Daniel Boone National Forest, 1770–1970. NPS History Electronic Library. https://npshistory.com/publications/usfs/region/8/daniel-boone/history/
Collins, Robert F. “A History of the Daniel Boone National Forest, 1770–1970, Chapter 5.” NPS History Electronic Library. https://npshistory.com/publications/usfs/region/8/daniel-boone/history/chap5.htm
Collins, Robert F. “Princess Cornblossom and ‘Big Jake.’” In A History of the Daniel Boone National Forest, 1770–1970. NPS History Electronic Library. https://npshistory.com/publications/usfs/region/8/daniel-boone/history/chap19.htm
Kentucky Historical Society. “Lulbegrud Creek.” Historical Marker Database. https://history.ky.gov/markers/lulbegrud-creek
Historical Marker Database. “Lulbegrud Creek.” https://www.hmdb.org/m.asp?m=167032
National Park Service. “Kentucky Trails.” Big South Fork National River & Recreation Area. https://www.nps.gov/biso/planyourvisit/kytrails.htm
Lindahl, Carl. “Daniel Boone, Yahoos, and Yeahohs: Mirroring Monsters of the Appalachians.” In North American Monsters: A Contemporary Legend Casebook, edited by David J. Puglia, 248–265. Logan: Utah State University Press, 2022. https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctv296mnsz.23
Puglia, David J., ed. North American Monsters: A Contemporary Legend Casebook. Logan: Utah State University Press, 2022. https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctv296mnsz
Utah State University Press. North American Monsters: A Contemporary Legend Casebook, table of contents and introduction. https://upcolorado.com/media/acfupload/Puglia_TOC_Intro.pdf
Faragher, John Mack. Daniel Boone: The Life and Legend of an American Pioneer. New York: Henry Holt, 1993. https://books.google.com/books?id=EBZ3AAAAMAAJ
Lofaro, Michael A. Daniel Boone: An American Life. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2003. https://www.kentuckypress.com/9780813122786/daniel-boone/
Lofaro, Michael A. Daniel Boone: An American Life. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2003. UKnowledge. https://uknowledge.uky.edu/upk_united_states_history/157/
Brown, Meredith Mason. Frontiersman: Daniel Boone and the Making of America. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2008. https://lsupress.org/9780807154458/frontiersman/
Trotti, Hugh H. “Did Fiction Give Birth to Bigfoot?” Skeptical Inquirer 18, no. 5 September/October 1994. https://skepticalinquirer.org/1994/09/did-fiction-give-birth-to-bigfoot/
Trotti, Hugh H. “Did Fiction Give Birth to Bigfoot?” Skeptical Inquirer 18, no. 5 September/October 1994. PDF. https://cdn.centerforinquiry.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/29/1994/09/22165113/p95.pdf
Zuefle, David M. “Swift, Boone, and Bigfoot: New Evidence for a Literary Connection.” Skeptical Inquirer 21, no. 1 January/February 1997: 57–58. https://cdn.centerforinquiry.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/29/1997/01/22165023/p57.pdf
Buhs, Joshua Blu. Bigfoot: The Life and Times of a Legend. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009. https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/B/bo6407648.html
Regal, Brian. Searching for Sasquatch: Crackpots, Eggheads, and Cryptozoology. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. https://link.springer.com/book/10.1057/9780230118294
Daegling, David J. Bigfoot Exposed: An Anthropologist Examines America’s Enduring Legend. Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira Press, 2004. https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/bigfoot-exposed-9798216235385/
Carden, Gary. “Appalachian Bestiary: Wondrous and Fearsome Creatures of the Southern Wild.” North Carolina Folklore Journal 59, no. 2 Fall-Winter 2012: 60–92. https://paws.wcu.edu/ncfj/NCFJ592.pdf
East Carolina University Digital Collections. “Appalachian Bestiary: Wondrous and Fearsome Creatures of the Southern Wild.” North Carolina Periodicals Index. https://digital.lib.ecu.edu/ncpi/search?keywords=author:Carden,+Gary
West Virginia University, West Virginia and Regional History Center. “Folklore.” Appalachian Studies Bibliography, 1994–2012. https://wvrhc.lib.wvu.edu/collections/appalachian-collection/appalachian-studies-bibliography/appalachian-studies-bibliography-1994-2012/folklore
Garrett, Ben. “Historical Context: The Massacre of Yahoo Falls.” Independent Herald, April 2, 2026. https://www.indherald.com/p/historical-context-the-massacre-of
Garrett, Ben. “Hike #3: Yahoo Falls.” Independent Herald, April 1, 2026. https://www.indherald.com/p/hike-3-yahoo-falls
Kentucky Tourism. “Waterfalls, Arches and Wildlife: Hiking Yahoo Falls.” July 25, 2023. https://www.kentuckytourism.com/trip-planning/travel-inspiration/articles/2023/07/25/waterfalls-arches-and-wildlife—hiking-yahoo-falls
Appalachian Regional Commission. “Appalachian Counties Served by ARC.” https://www.arc.gov/appalachian-counties-served-by-arc/
Author Note: This article treats the Boone “Yahoo” story as folklore with a paper trail, not as proof that Daniel Boone killed a Bigfoot. The point is to show how Kentucky memory, frontier storytelling, and later monster writing turned a giant tale into a much larger legend.