Legendary American explorer, soldier, and folk hero Davy Crockett (1786-1836) may be known as the "King of the Wild Frontier," but we all know that title actually belongs to Bigfoot. I hadn't realized that the two actually met in 1835 in Nacogdoches, Texas, a year before Crockett's involvement in the Battle of the Alamo and his death. From Mysterious Universe:
Crockett purportedly took a seat upon a log, removing his sweaty shoes and digging into his small rations. As he ate his food, he sort of absent-mindedly tapped his axe against the wood, and that was when he claimed that an enormous bipedal beast that was “the shape and shade of a large ape man” and quite frightening in appearance materialized out of the trees and brush before him. He would describe the creature in a letter to his brother-in-law, Abner, as follows:
Whether it was the axe’s disturbance or possibly the heat of the sun which caused an apparition to slowly form in front of my eyes, I know not. As a Christian man, I swear to you, Abe, that what spirit came upon me was the shape and shade of a large ape man, the likes we might expect among the more bellicose and hostile Indian tribes in the Territories. The shade formed into the most deformed and ugly countenance. Covered in wild hair, with small and needling eyes, large broken rows of teeth, and the height of three foundlings, I spit upon the ground the bread I was eating.[…]
The monster then addressed a warning to me. Abner, it told me to return from Texas, to flee this Fort and to abandon this lost cause. When I began to question this, the creature spread upon the wind like the morning steam swirls off a frog pond. I swear to you, Abner, that whatever meat or sausage disagreed with me that afternoon, I swore off all beef and hog for a day or so afterward.