Hunting the Wild People in History
“…and he reeled down across the continent into the Reconstruction South — a strange wild form of six feet four with cold uneasy eyes, a great blade of nose, and a rolling tide of rhetoric…” Thomas Wolfe
It is no wonder Thomas Wolfe could imagine the surprise that North Carolinians experienced when they first saw the tall W. O. Gant walk into town. Tales of wild men, women, and feral children raised by animals in the woods and swamps, persisted in historical accounts throughout the ages. It is interesting to explore how these, and similar stories, developed over time. Many tales were told in 19th-century newspapers. They all have similar themes. Wild people are found entering a town; they speak strange languages, possess unusual physical powers, and are adept at hunting and gathering in the wilderness. They eventually become the ones who are hunted.
On June 11, 1901, the Asheville Citizen-Times revealed that considerable excitement was caused in Polkton, NC when it was reported that several wild people had been seen near the town. First witnessed in Mr. Crump’s oat patch, “a man, woman, and two children, all of whom were perfectly nude, except that their bodies were covered with long, shaggy hair.” In Asheville’s Weekly Citizen on June 1, 1909, news from Wilson, NC tells of a Wildman who roams the woods day and night. When he sees that he is observed by passers-by, he “utters all kind of unearthly noises and makes for the lowest depths of the swamp.” On September 27, 1912, the Asheville Gazette-News shared from Poughkeepsie, NY the capture of Arthur Britton, 40 years old, found living in a cave in the mountains. He lived half-naked, “head and face covered in hair, armed with a club and barking like a fox.” Committed to the State Hospital, Arthur, thin, but “possessing the strength of a giant,” had served in the Philippines during the Spanish-American War. He had spent the past ten years alone in the woods, almost losing his ability to speak.
One of the earliest and best-known examples of feral children in history is the story of the founding of Rome by Romulus and Remus, who were raised by a wolf. The French tale of Valentine and Orson was printed in popular literature of the 16th century. One of the twin brothers abandoned at infancy, Orson becomes a wild man of the woods, raised by a bear, captured, and civilized. In 1853, clay tablets were discovered by archaeologists containing the ancient literary work “The Epic of Gilgamesh.” A modern translation of the poem appeared in the 1870s. It told of the feral creature named Enkidu who was raised in the wilderness, ignorant of the ways of other humans. Also affecting many American minds in the 19th century was the 1859 work by Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species, which provided compelling evidence we had indeed come from lower forms of animals. Exacerbating the legends of wild people in our country was P. T. Barnum, who, at his circus in 1880 and for the next twenty-five years, widely promoted the Wild Men of Borneo. They were in fact two dwarf men from Connecticut. In 1894, Rudyard Kipling continued the theme of feral humans with The Jungle Book, and in 1912, Edgar Rice Burroughs with Tarzan of the Apes. And tales of real or imagined sightings of wild people continued to appear in our newspapers well into the twentieth century.
A correspondent from the New York Times on August 9, 1870 wrote a column entitled “Orson Once More.” The article laments that for some years stories had persisted about a wild man on the loose about the country. The writer recalled several stories. Beginning in the Florida everglades with a soldier who had lost all reason during the Seminole Wars and lived many years wild in the swamps. Later a story reappears in Louisiana about the unsuccessful search for a lunatic in the swamps, who turned “a deaf ear to the bloodhounds, shotguns, and similar mild persuasives to civilization which the good people of the neighborhood brought to bear….” From Tennessee, stories were told of a wild woman in the woods, with the romantic notion that perhaps she was the victim of “unrequited love.” In Nevada and Colorado tales appear again and again of a lost soldier in the wilderness, thought to be a survivor of the 1848 Freemont Expedition. The wild man was described with long hair from head to toe carrying a wooden club. He terrorized encampments of emigrants in the mountains with unearthly howls.
Thomas Wolfe’s father’s native Pennsylvania was full of wild people stories. In 1871 Pennsylvanians in Berks County were terrorized for weeks by the appearance in the mountains of a man resembling “a huge overgrown bear” making hideous “beast-like howling” sounds. Alarmed citizens set out to catch him. He was witnessed on several occasions traveling on his hands and feet with the “swiftness of a deer.” He was caught wearing only a few rags, his hair and beard long, “giving him the appearance of a gorilla more than a human being.” He turned out to be an Irishmen from Connecticut who had lived for several years in the wild. He was given a new suit of clothes, but he reportedly returned howling to the mountains only to be hunted once more by upset local villagers. Again, in Pennsylvania, in 1873 reports surfaced about a wild woman who had spent the last eighteen years in the forests. “She sleeps in caves and under trees; lives on the game she kills, and she studiously avoids the sight of man.” The reporter speculated as to why someone would choose to live in “an inexplicably savage state,” explaining that perhaps savage was “the original state of mankind, and a homesick longing for the wild is hereditary in some people.”
In his work Of Time and the River Thomas Wolfe writes often about homesickness. He might inadvertently have explained the phenomena of wild people in history. “It was the furious desire, unceasing, unassuaged, of wandering and forsaken man — the lost American — who longs for ever for return — and who has no door to enter, no room to dwell in, no single hand’s-breadth of certain, consecrated earth upon that continent of wild houseless space to which he can return.”
