Long before anyone uttered the word “Bigfoot,” settlers in eastern Arkansas were already running into something enormous, hairy, and very much not human.
Between the 1830s and 1850s, newspapers from Baltimore to Boston to New Zealand carried accounts of a creature called the “Wild Man of the Woods.” The reports described a being of gigantic size, covered in hair, with footprints nearly twice the length of a man’s foot. It chased cattle. It leaped impossible distances. And when cornered, it fought back with terrifying strength.
These weren’t campfire tales passed along by anonymous drifters. They were published accounts in major newspapers, sourced from named witnesses and prominent citizens. They appeared in the Baltimore Sun, the Memphis Enquirer, the Boston Daily Bee, the New Hampshire Patriot and State Gazette, and papers as far away as the Wellington Independent in New Zealand. The story of the Arkansas Wild Man may be one of the most consistent and well-documented pre-modern Bigfoot accounts in American history.
And the most striking part? The witnesses described almost exactly what people would start calling Sasquatch a century later.
The Landscape: A Perfect Hiding Place
To understand why something large and unknown might thrive unseen in 1840s Arkansas, you have to picture the land.
Eastern Arkansas in the mid-19th century was a world away from the settled cities of the East Coast. The Mississippi Alluvial Plain stretched flat and low, blanketed in dense bottomland hardwood forest, swamps, cane thickets, and bayous. Travel was difficult even on dry ground, and much of the terrain was anything but dry. The region was sparsely populated, with small communities of settlers scattered across vast stretches of wild country.
Rising out of this flat, swampy landscape was Crowley’s Ridge, a narrow geological formation that runs roughly 150 miles from southeastern Missouri down into eastern Arkansas. The ridge stood 250 to 550 feet above the surrounding lowlands, covered in thick oak and hickory forests. The swamps on either side of it were nearly impenetrable. Settlers used the ridge as a north-south travel corridor because the bottomlands around it were too wet and tangled to cross easily.
St. Francis, Greene, and Poinsett Counties, where the Wild Man was reported most often, sat right along or near Crowley’s Ridge. This was frontier country with vast tracts of unexplored swampland, dense forest, and very few human eyes watching. If a large, reclusive creature wanted to remain hidden, it would be hard to imagine a better place to do it.
1846: The First Published Reports
The earliest known newspaper accounts of the Arkansas Wild Man appeared in February and March of 1846. The sightings took place near Crowley’s Ridge, in the swamps close to the Arkansas-Missouri border.
The Baltimore Sun reported on March 13, 1846, that a creature had been spotted in this area. The account described the being as a “man in a wild state” and provided physical details that went well beyond what you’d expect from a simple feral human. According to the paper, “his track measures 22 inches, his toes are as long as a common man’s fingers, and in height and make, he is double the usual size.”
The Boston Daily Bee carried a similar report on March 16, 1846. The details were consistent: enormous footprints, extraordinary height, and a build far beyond normal human proportions.
A 22-inch footprint is remarkable by any standard. For comparison, most reported Bigfoot tracks in modern databases range from 14 to 18 inches, with some exceptional cases reaching into the 20s. Whatever left those tracks in the Arkansas mud was, by the witnesses’ descriptions, significantly larger than any person.
1851: The Hamilton Encounter
The next major wave of reports came five years later, and this time the details were even more vivid.
In the spring of 1851, a man named Hamilton was hunting in Greene County, Arkansas, with a companion. They noticed a herd of cattle running in a state of alarm, clearly being pursued by something. When the hunters got a clear look at what was chasing the animals, they saw something they struggled to explain.
The Memphis Enquirer carried the story, and it spread rapidly. The New Hampshire Patriot and State Gazette ran an account on May 29, 1851, noting that an expedition was being organized in Memphis to hunt “the wild man.” The same paper followed on June 5 with a front-page report quoting the Memphis Enquirer directly. The Vermont Watchman and State Journal and the Wellington Independent in New Zealand also picked up the story.
The description published across these papers was remarkably detailed. The creature was described as being “of gigantic stature, the body being covered with hair, and the head with long locks that fairly enveloped his neck and shoulders.” It bore what the papers called “the unmistakable likeness of humanity,” yet it was clearly not an ordinary person.
After staring at the two hunters for a short time, the creature turned and fled into the wilderness “with great speed, leaping from 12 to 14 feet at a time.” Hamilton’s report noted that the creature’s footprints measured 13 inches each.
The Memphis Enquirer added a crucial piece of context: the Wild Man had been seen in St. Francis, Greene, and Poinsett Counties by local sportsmen and hunters for approximately 17 years. That pushed the earliest sightings back to around 1834, meaning the creature had been a known presence in the area for nearly two decades before the Hamilton encounter.
The story prompted action. According to multiple newspaper accounts, Colonel David C. Cross, a prominent Memphis resident for whom Cross County, Arkansas, is named, teamed up with a Dr. Sullivan to organize a search expedition. The two men planned to lead a party into the swamps to find and capture the Wild Man. Researcher Margaret Ross, writing in the Arkansas Gazette in 1971, noted that no record of the expedition’s results has been found. Whether the hunting party ever set out, or what they found if they did, remains unknown.
1856: Violence on the Red River
The reports took a darker turn in 1856. That year, accounts appeared describing not just sightings but a violent confrontation with the creature.
The Pittsfield Sun reported on January 3, 1856, about a “wild man, seven feet high” roaming the Mississippi River bottom. But the most dramatic account appeared in the Wisconsin Patriot on May 10, 1856, describing events along the upper Red River in southwestern Arkansas and northern Louisiana.
According to this report, the Wild Man had been spotted breaking the ice on a frozen lake. He was described as “covered with hair of a brownish cast” and was noted for being “well muscled.” A party of men from Louisiana went into the wilderness on horseback, intending to capture the creature.
One hunter rode ahead of his companions and attempted to take the creature alone. It was, by all accounts, a terrible decision. The newspaper reported that “so soon as the wild man saw the horse and rider, he rushed frantically toward them, and in an instant dragged the hunter to the ground and tore him in a most dreadful manner, scratching out one of his eyes and injuring the other so much that his comrades despair of the recovery of his sight, and biting large pieces out of his shoulder and various parts of his body.”
In perhaps the strangest detail of the entire saga, the Wild Man then reportedly made off with the injured man’s horse.
The hunter’s companions gave chase, joined by a party of Choctaw Indians who happened to be in the area. The pursuit led into the Ouachita Mountains, which were covered in snow from a particularly harsh winter. Despite their combined efforts, the men never caught the creature.
What the Locals Thought
People at the time tried to make sense of the Wild Man with the explanations available to them. The most popular theory was that the creature was a survivor of the catastrophic New Madrid earthquakes of 1811-1812.
Those earthquakes, centered in northeastern Arkansas and southeastern Missouri, were among the most powerful ever recorded in North America. The ground split open, entire landscapes sank or rose, and the Mississippi River temporarily flowed backward. The devastation was immense across the very region where the Wild Man would later be reported. Many people in the 1840s and 1850s assumed that a human survivor, thrown into the wilderness as a child by the quakes, had grown up feral and wild in the bottomland swamps.
It was a reasonable theory for the time. But it doesn’t hold up well against the actual descriptions. A feral human, no matter how long they lived in the wild, wouldn’t grow to “double the usual size” of a man. They wouldn’t leave 22-inch footprints. They wouldn’t be capable of leaping 12 to 14 feet at a bound. And they wouldn’t be strong enough to drag a mounted man from his horse and overpower him in hand-to-hand combat.
The descriptions point to something else entirely.
The Bigfoot Connection
Read the newspaper accounts of the Arkansas Wild Man alongside modern Bigfoot sighting reports, and the similarities are hard to dismiss.
Consider what the witnesses consistently described: a creature of enormous height and build, far larger than any person. A body covered entirely in hair. Long hair on the head and shoulders. Incredible speed and agility, including leaps of 12 to 14 feet. Massive footprints. A tendency to observe humans briefly before retreating. An association with cattle and livestock. Habitation in remote, heavily wooded, swampy terrain.
Every one of those features appears regularly in modern Sasquatch reports. The physical descriptions match. The behavior matches. The habitat preference matches. The only thing missing is the name.
The term “Bigfoot” didn’t enter popular culture until 1958, when large footprints were found at a construction site in Bluff Creek, California. “Sasquatch,” an anglicization of a Salish word, had been used in British Columbia since the 1920s but wasn’t widely known in the United States. In the 1840s and 1850s, Arkansas settlers had no framework for what they were seeing. They called it a “wild man” because that was the closest concept available to them.
What makes the Arkansas Wild Man case particularly compelling is its consistency over time and geography. These weren’t isolated reports. They came from multiple witnesses across three counties over a span of more than 20 years. They were documented in multiple newspapers across the country. Named individuals, including Colonel David C. Cross, a figure prominent enough to have a county named after him, took the reports seriously enough to organize an armed expedition.
A Legacy That Never Ended
Stories of large, hair-covered, man-like creatures have continued in Arkansas from the 1850s to the present day. The Ouachita and Ozark Mountains, the Mississippi and Red River swamps, and the dense forests of the state’s interior have produced sighting reports across every generation.
The most famous descendant of the Wild Man legend is the Fouke Monster, also known as the Boggy Creek Monster, which gained national attention in 1971 when Bobby and Elizabeth Ford reported a terrifying encounter at their home in Miller County. That case inspired the 1972 film The Legend of Boggy Creek and remains one of the most well-known Bigfoot cases in the South.
When the Fouke Monster sightings made headlines, journalist Margaret Ross wrote a piece for the Arkansas Gazette titled “Fouke ‘Monster’ Had Look-Alikes,” connecting the 1971 reports to the 1851 and 1856 Wild Man accounts. The descriptions, separated by more than a century, bore a striking resemblance.
Whether the Arkansas Wild Man was an early Bigfoot, a now-extinct primate, or something else entirely, the historical record is clear: people in eastern Arkansas were encountering something large, powerful, and unexplained long before Bigfoot became a household name. The witnesses weren’t looking for monsters. They were hunters, settlers, and frontiersmen going about their daily lives in wild country. And what they found in those swamps left tracks that, in more ways than one, we’re still following today.
Have you experienced a Bigfoot sighting or encounter with something unexplained? We’d love to hear your story. Send your report to Reports@ParaRational.com
