YAHOO, YAYHO, YEAHOH - a bigfoot by any other name

There are at least three areas of the world where the term Yahoo is used when talking of sasquatch : West Virginia, Kentucky, Australia. 

The West Virginia Yahoo is said to be 8 foot tall with jet-black hair with a loud scream.  The southern legends add that it eats vegetables from gardens and steals pigs to eat.  His scream is said to sound like "Yahooooooooooooo" and he has a hostile attitude, both of which was featured in the Mountain Monsters series in "Yahoo of Nicholas County" and "Bigfoot of Clay County". He allegedly threw small trees at the men as they tracked him through the woods. He is also described as being highly intelligent and will often work cooperatively in small groups.


Kentucky tells us of Daniel Boone and his encounter with a ten-foot tall hairy giant he called a Yahoo. He is said to have taken the name from Jonathan Swift's book "Gulliver's Travels"  which was allegedly one of Boone's favorite books. In the book, the Yahoos were a tribe of hairy man-like creatures.


It is also said that aborigines in Australia call a hairy giant in the wilds a "Yahoo".  It has been conjectured that perhaps they too borrowed the name from Swift's book, having heard the stories from the book.


Richard Stoney, linguist cites "Australian Aboriginal Words in English" (1835 edition) : "The natives are greatly terrified by the sight of a person in a mask calling him 'devil' or Yah-hoo, which signifies evil spirit".


And then there is 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 favorite food . . . The name . . . of Yahoo being used to express a bad spirit, or 'Bugaboo', was common also with the aborgines of Van Diem[e]n's Land [Tasmania] . . . "


"Gulliver's Travels" was written in 1726. The above references come from the 1780s. Is it possible that the aborigines gleaned the name from Swift's book to give a name to the hairy giants in the area?




alleged photo of a Yahoo.

Nancy


"I'll spark the thought; what you do with it is up to you."

Thanks to :

 "Yahoo" - Cryptid Wiki

                  "Yeah oh, yahoo or bigfoot?" by Dave Tabler, May 20 2015/ Appalachian History