07/08/2026
The Ozark Howler waits patiently in the dark for his victims. There is a grain of truth in every legend, and in the Ozarks, there is no exception. In the expanses of mountains and valleys, intrepid travelers and settlers awoke to screams in the night: animal attacks led to tales of devil cats-the Wampus Cat, with some saying it possessed supernatural powers, but almost all suggested that at the very least, it was ferocious. When big cats were hunted to extinction, the tales grew outlandish—the tall tales told to outsiders, tongue-in-cheek: a bear-like creature, covered in shaggy grey fur, sometimes with horns that looked like everything from boar tusks to fangs, depending on the teller of the story. The Ozark Howler has since the early days been amorphous yet staunchly present.
From 200 year old accounts, such as Benjamin Crowley’s favorite horse being mauled by what was assumed to be a bear or catamount (mountain lion) on the first night the family slept on the ridge that still bears their name, in the eastern Ozarks, to highway billboards and beer glasses decorated with the Howler’s current mug, selling wares, the Howler has always roamed the forests and mountains of the Ozarks, or at least the imagination of those laying their heads upon a pillow in these old hills; and no matter what we call the dark things staring back in the night, the rush of fear running up your spine feels just as cold.
The Ozark Howler has had a resurgence in popularity—he seems to have found an internet connection in the mountains and garnered a whole new fanbase that is convinced The Howler is indeed a real, corporeal beast, with big city TV producers being particularly susceptible to his frightening roars in the night. Yes, we have fielded those calls. But this time , he appears to be a Sasquatch with goat-like horns and piercing red eyes, and perhaps has returned to his voracious appetites of old, when not selling ale and souvenirs to the tourists.
What’s real and what’s not? A humorous tale told in relief when big cats and bears no longer posed a constant threat, or a real monster waiting in the mountains, the silence broken by its screams in the night? Some say (black) panthers or mountain lions are again in our midst, while others vehemently deny the possibility. Though a hunter in Iron County, Missouri seems to have recently settled the argument, in favor of existence, though transient, as his own account made clear that the big cat had looked up at and then walked past the stand in which he was sitting; and that excitement on his part led him to shoot the suspected Howler from behind, as it walked away. There was a problem; mountain lions are a protected species in Missouri, and it is illegal to shoot them unless in self-defense. That last hitch raised the attention of the Prosecutor, and complications arose.
Could mountain lions be the explanation to the Howler question? To be fair, plenty of other creatures are said to inhabit the Ozarks, MoMo, The Blue Man, The Arkansas Wild Man to mention a few, but the Ozark Howler has in recent years spun a reputation worthy of legend separate from devil cats.
Where the long-standing tales were of a beast, just frightening enough to cause a listener to ignore the unlikely description of its features, the Ozark Howler in the internet age has a PR savvy that he lacked in the days of newsprint. It is the stories themselves that are now sensational, the Ozark Howler rubbing elbows with Daniel Boone and Auguste Chouteau and witches. Or did he?
Modern Howler chroniclers tell tales of Daniel Boone running into the Ozark Howler in the territory that became Missouri. What we do know is that Boone was fond of telling stories, and during his last years repeatedly told the story of “killing a ten-foot, hairy giant he called a ‘Yahoo.’ What was unmentioned in Boone’s telling was that Yahoos were giant beasts in human shape from Boone’s favorite book, Gulliver’s Travels. It was a tall tale that Boone repeated to a number of people during his last year, one such as he would have told in a winter camp.” Was there a separate story involving the Ozark Howler? Not that was directly recorded, it appears.
Auguste Pierre Chouteau was of the family of fur traders that did much to establish early settlement in Missouri decades before it was a part of the United States. A repeated tale is found in the Howler’s internet presence that Auguste is responsible for the Howler’s existence. The tale spun by the online Howler chroniclers says that Auguste forsake his Osage wife to marry Therese Cerre. Here is where the tale becomes a bit murky:
“The lucre was too much for Auguste to give up, but first, he needed an excuse to save face with his Osage in-laws, with whom he would still have to trade. Auguste turned to a piece of black magic that he had learned of from his nanny as a child in New Orleans. He cursed his Osage wife, transforming her once beautiful body into a warped and wild form, covered with dark hair, slavering with hunger, her human mind gone. Chouteau’s wife ran amok amongst her settlement, killing four of her own cousins before she disappeared into the hills, howling in fury. Auguste pretended not to understand what had happened, and asked to mourn his wife, for she must now be considered dead. The Osage agreed, feeling shame in ignorance of Auguste’s betrayal of them. Within months, Auguste was married to Thérèse Cerré, and abused the misplaced guilt felt by his former in-laws to negotiate favorable terms with them in his expanding fur trading empire. Auguste’s wife is said to remain in the Ozarks to this day, feeling nothing but an aching loss, calling out a terrible cry in the night for the human life she has lost… having become the Ozark Howler.”
This tale names Auguste’s wife as Therese Cerre, but in fact Therese was his mother. As for Auguste, he was born and raised in St. Louis, not New Orleans, and was one of the first men from Missouri to be appointed to West Point. Chouteau did continue the family fur trade among the Osage. He established his home in present-day Salina, Oklahoma. In 1832, Washington Irving visited the post and described it in Tour of the Prairies.
Chouteau did have children by multiple women who were at least partly Osage, including Rosalie Lambert. He also married Sophie Labbadie, a cousin of French descent, who stayed in St. Louis while he lived on the frontier. He had at least nine children with his wife Sophie Chouteau. Rosalie lived with him until his death at Fort Gibson, Indian Territory, in 1838. But there is no record of Rosalie, or anyone else, running amok, etc.
The Howler is evolving again, through the refound Ozarks tradition of tall tales
The modern tales do not seem content with morphing the details of the creature, nor mere historical hyperbole. One such example has the Ozark Howler being a creature summoned by a witch to rescue trapped miners in Huntington, Arkansas in 1899, in an pointedly tongue-in-cheek account of the Ozark Howler, which doesn’t mention the real miners’ strike in Huntington in 1899 that culminated in three attacks upon miners by employees of the mines, including attacks by way of dynamite explosions. But no trapped miners are mentioned in the real life reports, nor a witch intervening, or a monster.
These historical sounding tales are recent Howler lore, borne mostly on the internet, perhaps a legend in search of its own origin story. So, what is the Ozark Howler? It seems that it is what our fears or imagination envision at a given point in time. But does that mean there is nothing in the night screaming and staring back at us with shining red eyes? Not necessarily. By the same token, the Ozark Howler may be furiously typing his memoirs on a laptop in a cave somewhere deep in the Ozarks as we type this article. Let’s hope he isn’t on dial-up.
Sources:
https://encyclopediaofarkansas.net/entries/huntington-sebastian-county-6368/;
https://frontierpartisans.com/27540/daniel-boone-the-yahoo-the-ozark-howler/;
https://ozarkhowlers.com/index.php/2020/09/19/august-chouteau-and-the-ozark-howler/;
Shirley Christian, Before Lewis and Clark: The Story of the Chouteaus, the French Dynasty That Ruled America's Frontier (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2004);
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auguste_Pierre_Chouteau;
Ozark Howler Encounters, Peregrin Wood, 2022.;
http://stateoftheozarks.net/showcase/?s=panther
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Image vintage drawing. Courtesy of collection of Lisa L Martin .
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