The Choctaw's War With Sasquatch

The Choctaw’s War with the Sasquatch: A Forgotten Frontier Legend

Among the deep pine forests and tangled river bottoms of the old Choctaw Nation—what is now Mississippi, Alabama, and parts of southeastern Oklahoma—there lingers an eerie legend of a war fought not against rival tribes, but against a monstrous, man-like beast. The Choctaw called it the “Shampe” or sometimes “Nalusa Falaya”—a creature towering over men, covered in dark hair, reeking of decay, and with a scream that could chill the blood of any warrior. In later generations, Anglo settlers would call the same being Sasquatch or Bigfoot, but to the Choctaw it was something far older—an ancient enemy from the shadowed places of the earth.

According to early 19th-century oral traditions recorded by missionaries and later by ethnographers like Henry Halbert, the Choctaw spoke of entire bands of these creatures living in the thickest woods and swamps. The Shampe were not mere beasts; they were cunning, fast, and capable of organizing ambushes. They would stalk hunters, raid camps, and carry off women and children into the night. Some tales even claimed the Shampe could mimic human voices, luring travelers off the trail before striking.

The most famous of these tales tells of a great war between the Choctaw and the Shampe, centuries ago, when the tribe first settled in their ancestral homeland east of the Mississippi River. It began, the story goes, when several Choctaw villages were attacked in succession—hunters went missing, horses were found torn apart, and watchfires revealed monstrous shapes in the treeline. The tribal council convened, and the leading war chief, said to be named Tushkalusa, declared that if these were indeed living beings and not spirits, they could be fought and destroyed.

The Choctaw gathered a large war party—over one hundred braves armed with bows, clubs, and stone axes—and tracked the creatures into the forested hills. There, in a moonlit valley, they found a series of enormous footprints and the smell of death. What followed was said to have been a horrific battle lasting through the night. Warriors described the Shampe as strong enough to tear trees from the ground and hurl rocks the size of boulders. Yet the Choctaw stood firm, forming circles of spears and driving the beasts back toward a ravine that ended in a high cliff.

By dawn, the surviving creatures fled or were forced over the edge. Those who fell were burned in great fires to prevent their spirits from returning. Afterward, the Choctaw chiefs forbade anyone from venturing into that valley again, calling it a place cursed by the old ones.

Whether myth or embellished memory, the tale of the Choctaw’s Sasquatch war reflects deep cultural meaning. Many scholars believe the legend may have emerged from early encounters with large black bears or even hostile outsiders misidentified in the dark. Others interpret it as an allegory—a story of humanity pushing back the wild, reclaiming order from the chaos of nature.

Even today, in the dense woods of southeastern Oklahoma and northern Mississippi, hunters still whisper about tall, hairy figures moving silently between the trees. Some Choctaw elders say the Shampe were never fully destroyed—only driven deeper into the wilderness, where they remain, watching mankind’s encroachment with ancient resentment. Whether real or imagined, the story endures as one of the strangest and most haunting chapters in Native American folklore—a war not against men, but monsters.

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