The Gowrow: The 1897 Arkansas Monster That Became an Ozark Legend

The Green Gowrow of Searcy County

The earliest known Gowrow account appeared on page 16 of the Daily Arkansas Gazette on January 31, 1897.

The story centered on William Miller, described by the newspaper as a well-known Little Rock businessman who had recently been traveling through Searcy County in northern Arkansas.

Near Blanco in Calf Creek Township, Miller supposedly encountered a community already terrified by something in the surrounding mountains.

The animal was said to descend after dark and attack cattle, horses, hogs, dogs, and cats. Its name came from the strange cry it supposedly made while roaming the countryside:

Gowrow.

The hunt began after a youngster out rabbit hunting discovered enormous and unusually shaped tracks in fresh snow.

Reconstruction of the enormous tracks in fresh snow that reportedly led the 1897 posse toward the Gowrow's cave.

Miller said a posse armed itself with shotguns and Winchesters and followed the tracks for miles until they disappeared at a riverbank.

Searching along the water, the men reportedly found an enormous cave concealed beneath a shelf of rock and screened by cedars.

The cave turned the account from a strange-animal report into something much darker.

Inside were supposedly skeletons and skulls belonging to animals—and humans.

The posse withdrew and waited.

What Did the Gowrow Look Like?

When the creature finally appeared, the newspaper described something almost impossible to place in the animal kingdom.

Its head was ponderous and somewhat human in appearance. Two enormous tusks projected over its lower lip.

Its legs were short and thick. Its feet were broad and webbed like those of a duck, except each toe ended in a vicious claw.

The body was covered with large scales of a sickly green hue, while short horns or spines ran along its back.

Then there was the tail.

Long and thin, it ended in a sharp bony formation that the creature supposedly wielded like a sickle.

Artist's reconstruction based on the Gowrow's January 1897 newspaper description. This is not the lost photograph attributed to William Miller.

The posse opened fire.

According to the story, the Gowrow “died hard.” Its tail lashed through the surrounding vegetation and struck one of the men, Tom Brennan, identified in the account as a former Iron Mountain Railroad section hand.

Brennan supposedly lost a leg.

Then the monster was dead.

Or at least the newspaper said it was.

The Photograph That Became an Illustration

The January 31 page was dominated by a large drawing of the creature. Beneath it appeared a tantalizing caption:

“From Photograph by Wm. Miller.”

What survives today is the newspaper illustration. No authenticated original Miller photograph or negative has surfaced.

The story also claimed that the creature's remains would be collected and sent to Washington for examination.

No verified Gowrow specimen ever arrived at a museum.

Arkansas Did Not Wait Long to Call It a Fake

The Gowrow barely had time to die before people started arguing about it.

On February 2—only two days after the original story—the Daily Arkansas Gazette returned to the subject.

Arkansas legislators familiar with Searcy County had noticed Miller's extraordinary account.

Senate president William L. Moose said he had recently traveled through the area around Blanco and had heard nothing about a giant unknown animal terrorizing the countryside.

Representative U. S. Brattan was considerably less diplomatic.

He called the account an “unfounded fake” and objected to the picture it painted of Searcy County.

And this was not skepticism that appeared decades later, after the story had hardened into folklore. People who knew Searcy County were calling foul within forty-eight hours of the Gowrow's first appearance.

Then the Gowrow Became the Joke

Three days later, on February 5, the monster was still generating newspaper copy.

One correspondent essentially argued that everyone was looking at the controversy the wrong way. Even if the story made Searcy County sound ridiculous, all the attention might actually be good publicity.

Other commentary simply mocked the affair.

Then came February 6.

A letter signed “Hard Shell” promised “further facts” about the terrible animal.

What followed was obvious satire. The writer connected Gowrows with railroad magnates, financial “green-backs,” and an absurd history involving Gould and Fisk.

No careful reader was supposed to mistake it for zoology.

Less than a week after its first appearance, people were already inventing new Gowrow lore for fun.

The monster was becoming folklore almost in real time.

Fred Allsopp Explains the Gowrow

Twenty-five years later, Fred W. Allsopp looked back on the episode from inside the newspaper world that had produced it.

In his 1922 book Little Adventures in Newspaperdom, Allsopp identified Elbert Smithee as the writer and Elmer Burrus as the artist.

According to Allsopp, Smithee had a commercial traveling friend named William Miller who returned from northwestern Arkansas with a tale about an extraordinary animal that had supposedly been killed there.

The raw story did not remain raw for long.

Allsopp described Miller and Smithee talking about the creature before Smithee went out for the evening, returned, and wrote up the yarn while drawing heavily on what Allsopp called a vivid imagination.

Burrus then joined in and created the monster illustration.

Allsopp compared the resulting story to a fairy tale.

His final judgment was clearer still:

“It was a great fake, probably without foundation in fact.”

Allsopp was not an outsider trying to debunk the Gowrow generations later. He came from the newspaper world that had produced it—and was telling readers how the monster had been made.

How the Gowrow Grew in the Telling

There is another wonderful problem with Allsopp's version.

His Gowrow is already different.

The creature that had no exact size in 1897 was now twenty feet long.

The river near its cave had become a lake.

Tom Brennan losing a leg had turned into one of the attackers being killed.

The bones inside the cave became even more gruesome, and the vague plan to send remains to Washington hardened into a story about specimens that were supposed to reach the Smithsonian but somehow never did.

Allsopp was openly calling the creature a fake while simultaneously remembering a bigger, deadlier and stranger Gowrow than the one Arkansas had met twenty-five years earlier.

That is not clutter around the legend.

That is how the legend grew.

By 1922, the Gowrow had grown to twenty feet long and acquired a lake that never appeared in the original 1897 account.

And the monster was nowhere near finished changing.

Over the next few decades it would acquire enormous eggs, young of its own, new caves, new stories and eventually an entire supposed species.

The Gowrow was being rebuilt every time somebody told it.

The Gowrow Becomes Ozark Folklore

By the middle of the twentieth century, the Gowrow was no longer simply an old newspaper stunt.

Folklorist Vance Randolph found the creature living in Ozark storytelling.

His 1950 article Fabulous Monsters in the Ozarks, followed in 1951 by We Always Lie to Strangers: Tall Tales from the Ozarks, preserves a creature that had changed dramatically.

There were now Gowrows.

The monster had become a species.

By the mid-twentieth century, the Gowrow had moved beyond its 1897 newspaper origin and into the wider storytelling tradition of the Ozarks.

They supposedly lived in caves and beneath rocky ledges. They were carnivorous. Their soft-shelled eggs were said to be as large as beer kegs.

Some storytellers even claimed that a mother Gowrow carried her young in a pouch like a possum.

Randolph also recorded claims that Gowrow stories stretched back into the 1880s. No independently dated pre-1897 document has surfaced to confirm that earlier beginning, so those older dates remain part of the oral tradition rather than the surviving paper trail.

But something more interesting had already happened.

A monster that appears to have begun as newspaper invention had become genuine regional folklore.

The Gowrow is one of several strange creatures woven into the Ozarks' storytelling tradition; more are covered in our guide to cryptids of the Ozarks.

The fake creature had escaped its creators.

Devil's Hole Was Not the Original Gowrow Cave

One of the most common modern Gowrow stories places the monster at Devil's Hole in Boone County, Arkansas.

But that is not where Miller's posse supposedly cornered the creature in 1897.

The original newspaper story never names its cave. Its events take place in Searcy County.

Devil's Hole belonged to a separate Ozark cave tradition involving something mysterious beneath the ground. Somewhere along the way, later storytellers attached the Gowrow name to it.

The combination was almost irresistible: a strange cave in the Ozarks and a gigantic cave-dwelling monster.

Eventually, two stories became one.

The Gowrow is not the only Ozark creature reshaped by generations of retelling. The Ozark Howler follows a very different path, built around stories of an unidentified animal and its unsettling cry rather than an acknowledged newspaper tall tale.

The Captured Gowrow Nobody Ever Saw

Then there is perhaps the most perfectly Gowrow story of them all.

Randolph preserved a tale associated with Mena, Arkansas, in which a man claimed he had actually captured one.

His method was ingenious.

He supposedly fed the creature dried apples until they expanded inside it, swelling the Gowrow so enormously that it could no longer retreat into its burrow.

With the animal trapped, there was money to be made.

The exhibitor began charging people a quarter to see the captive monster.

There was just one problem.

The customers never actually got to see it.

Instead, the performance ended in apparent catastrophe.

The Gowrow had escaped.

The showman appeared in torn clothing.

Panic did the rest.

The people who had paid to see the monster suddenly became far more interested in getting away from it.

It is not evidence for a living Gowrow.

It is something better as folklore: a monster exhibition where the monster remains safely invisible and the audience scares itself.

From Newspaper Fake to Modern Cryptid

By now, it is easy to see how the modern Gowrow became such a strange combination of stories.

The green monster of 1897, Allsopp's twenty-foot creature, Randolph's egg-laying cave dwellers and the later Devil's Hole tradition gradually piled on top of one another until they looked like one continuous history.

They were not.

But that may be the most interesting thing about the Gowrow.

First, a monster appeared in a newspaper.

Then Arkansas argued about it.

Readers joked about it.

Storytellers improved it.

Folklorists preserved it.

And modern cryptid culture gave all of those different Gowrows one biography.

What Survives of the Gowrow?

The trail left behind by the original Gowrow points strongly toward a newspaper tall tale rather than a documented unknown animal.

People familiar with Searcy County challenged the story almost immediately. Satire followed within days. And Fred W. Allsopp later described the whole thing as a “great fake, probably without foundation in fact.”

No authenticated photograph, specimen or other physical evidence has surfaced to change that picture.

But the Gowrow itself did not disappear.

What began as an 1897 newspaper monster escaped into Ozark storytelling, picked up new caves and new victims, started laying enormous eggs, multiplied into an entire species and eventually entered modern cryptid culture.

The animal may have been invented.

The legend was not.