Case file · Cryptid
Boone's 'Yahoo' and the Hillbilly Beast
In his last years Daniel Boone liked to tell of killing a ten-foot hairy giant he called a 'Yahoo'. Eastern Kentucky lore of a huge hairy 'Hillbilly Beast' near the Ohio River continues the theme.
1819 CE · 38.57, -82.83 · status: legend
The account
Boone's biographer John Mack Faragher records the tale and notes Boone probably took the name from Gulliver's Travels. Folklorists have collected several Kentucky stories of hairy wild people living in caves.
The sceptical view
A frontier tall tale; there is no evidence for the killing.