The Greene County Wild Man, Arkansas (1851)

Greene County, Arkansas. 1851. The county was larger then than it is today, taking in part of what is now Clay County. Its landscape was Crowley's Ridge, delta swamp and bottomland. And according to local hunters, something lived there. The creature, one newspaper wrote, "has long been known traditionally in St. Francis, Greene and Poinsett counties," with Arkansas sportsmen and hunters describing it as long as seventeen years before.

"During March last," the account began. Mr. Hamilton of Greene County was out hunting with a companion. The two men noticed a drove of cattle in a state of apparent alarm, "evidently pursued by some dreaded enemy." They halted. The cattle fled past them.

Behind the cattle came something else. An animal "bearing the unmistakeable likeness of humanity." It was of gigantic stature.

Its body was covered with hair, and the long locks on its head "fairly enveloped his neck and shoulders." It looked at the two men deliberately for a short time. Then it turned and ran away with great speed, "leaping from 12 to 14 feet at a time." Its footprints measured 13 inches each.

Hamilton was not the only one. A planter had seen the creature very recently, the report said, but kept quiet "lest he should not be credited." Only the account of Hamilton and his friend, the paper declared, placed the existence of the animal "beyond cavil."

The Memphis Enquirer published the story, and it travelled. Reprints appeared in the New Hampshire Patriot and State Gazette, the Vermont Watchman and State Journal and the Arkansas Gazette. In Memphis, Col. David C. Cross and Dr. Sullivan were organising an expedition. Cross had come from Gates County, North Carolina, and Cross County would later be named for him. Writers today often call their venture the first organised Bigfoot hunt in America.

What the expedition found is unknown. Dale Cox of Explore Southern History found no written documentation of the results. Margaret Ross, writing in the Arkansas Gazette in 1971, found no mention of them either.

The people of the region had their own theory. The most common idea held that the wild man was a survivor of the earthquake that desolated the region in 1811. Thrown helpless upon the wilderness, he had grown up in a savage state, until he bore "only the outward resemblance of humanity."

Later readers have looked at it differently. Beachcombing's Bizarre History Blog saw the story as a bridge between the traditional wild man, the hermit or outcast, and modern cryptozoology. No hoax has ever been alleged against Hamilton or the newspaper. Still, the account reaches us second hand, through the editors who printed and reprinted it.

In 1846 the Boston Daily Bee reported a man in a wild state seen in the swamps near Crowley's Ridge, his track measuring 22 inches. Another Arkansas wild man followed in 1856. When the Fouke Monster appeared in 1971, Margaret Ross tied it back to these old accounts. More than a century later, the wild man of Greene County was back in print. What ran behind the cattle that March has never been explained.