Currently, the most popular episode in Knoxville History Project’s podcast series, Knoxville Chronicles, is the story, “Creature of the Cumberlands,” written by Jack Neely and read by Alex Haralson. It’s not a Halloween-related story, but it’s a bizarre, autumnal, spooky tale from the frontier days before Tennessee was even a state.
Neely’s account is based on a short news item that first appeared in the Knoxville Gazette in early 1794, which was also picked up by other state newspaper publishers, and internationally, too.
The Derby Mercury was one overseas paper that ran the story and, as Neely writes, “For thousands of people in Great Britain, it may have been their introduction to the new word Knoxville.” What’s astonishing to me is that Derby is my hometown! And back then, on the masthead of the Derby Mercury, it even states that the publisher, John Drewery, had his print shop “In the Irongate,” a street with which I’m most familiar. Irongate is a short, partly cobblestoned street that extends from Derby’s downtown Market Place up to the Cathedral, which dates back at least a couple of hundred years before the date of our Tennessee story. Growing up in Derby, I’ve walked those streets many times.
What the citizens of Derby or Knoxville made of the story is impossible to know. What is known is that in February 1794, something very odd appeared before a small unit of mounted infantrymen who were riding through an area named Cove Creek, some “15 miles into the Cumberland Mountains.” The party was in search of hostile Indians, for relations between white settlers and native Cherokees and Creeks were still highly fraught. Being of a rather common name for a stream, it’s hard to say with any certainty where this Cove Creek was. But it was likely somewhere west of Knoxville and north of the old Cumberland Road that wound its way through what we know today as the area near Crab Orchard and Crossville, and onward to Nashville.
Knoxville was then the capital of the Southwest Territory, and the incident occurred only two years after Governor William Blount built his frame house overlooking the Tennessee River, reputedly known to the Cherokee as the “House with Many Eyes,” due to their fascination with the first windowpanes that they had ever seen. Today, Blount Mansion is Knoxville’s only National Landmark. Gov. Blount, himself, may have read this story in the Knoxville Gazette.
Two men were named in the party: Captain John Beard, who served in Gen. John Sevier’s militia, and one Ensign McDonald, who was sent ahead of the scouting party. What McDonald and then the entire group saw was so staggeringly strange to them that nothing on the frontier resembled it. Capt. Beard described it thus:
“It had only two legs and stood almost upright, covered with scales of a black, brown and light yellow color in spots like rings; a white tuft on the top of its head, about four feet high; a head as big as a two-pound stone and large eyes, of a fiery red.”
Beard added, “It stood about three minutes in a daring posture… Mr. McDonald advanced, and struck at it with his sword, when it jumped at least eight feet, and let on the same spot of ground, sending forth a red kind of matter out of its mouth, resembling blood, and then retreated into a laurel thicket, turning around often as if it intended to fight.”
Beard also described the creature’s footprints as resembling “those of a goose, but larger.”
Although they had no means of reference, they must have talked about it with some friendly natives who “report that a creature inhabits that part of the mountain… which, by its breath, might kill a man, if he does not instantly immerse himself in water.”
Could it have been a bird, maybe a really large vulture? Those birds are known to regurgitate their last meal when they’re stressed. Having served as the director at Ijams Nature Center for many years and having personally handled a turkey vulture on a glove, I can personally attest to that fact. What a vulture coughs up can be pretty vile. If not a vulture, how about the hawk-like Crested Caracara, perhaps? However, they primarily reside in Florida and the southwestern United States.
A related species, the Guadalupe caracara, was particularly hostile to goat populations on Mexico’s Guadalupe Island off Baja California. Desperate farmers, who considered it extremely vicious, hunted it to extinction around 1900.
We can’t possibly know what these soldiers saw that day over two hundred years ago. But there is a Knoxville artist who may already have unwittingly conjured up something similar in his own imagination—Chancellor’s Professor Beauvais Lyons, divisional dean for the Arts and Humanities at UT. Aside from being a renowned printmaker, Lyons also draws fantastical creatures as part of his “Hokes Archives” and “Association for Creative Zoology” exhibitions. “Nordic Hare Falcon,” struck me as bearing an uncanny similarity to what those military scouts may have witnessed back in 1794. What do you think?
You can find drawings like these by Beauvais Lyons at https://printcenter.org/90th/lyons/ and the “Creature from the Cumberlands” podcast episode by searching for “Knoxville Chronicles” on your preferred podcast app.
ABOUT KHP: The nonprofit Knoxville History Project tells the city’s stories, focusing on those that have not been previously told and those that connect the city to the world. Donations to support the work of the Knoxville History Project, an educational nonprofit, are always welcome and appreciated. Learn more at KnoxvilleHistoryProject.org.