byChrisWhite (2025)

They called him Big Foot. Not because he smelled of pine needles and wet dog or made a mess of chicken coops, but because he left prints the size of two dinner plates and walked with his chin high and shoulders back, like God bequeathed him dominion over grave and gravity.

Bigfoot wasn’t some blurry backwoods beast caught on a shaky camcorder near a baited deer feeder. No, this was Thomas Sharp Spencer. Some say 400 pounds of muscle, flesh, bone, tobacco spit, and calloused knuckles, The first white man foolish enough – brave enough – though in Tennessee those words tend to mean the same thing, to plant corn in what would some twenty years later become the State of Tennessee. A place where the soil still belonged to the Cherokee, the Chickamauga, the Chickasaw.

Bigfoot Spencer arrived in Middle Tennessee in 1776 when it was still the wild west. Back when it was still just babbling creek-songs and blood memories, and the land had more wolves and buffalo than Baptists. He came with no map, just guts and muscle, but he left a legacy and stories behind that Presidents spoke about and men fought about in bars.

There were other Longhunters soon to follow, the most famous of which, Daniel Boone, looking to explore and settle lands for themselves, as a means to settle up with the newly formed government. Settling the untamed as recompence, land for sacrifice, having served in the bloody revolution.

There were rumors and there were legends; we know this much is true: Bigfoot Spencer was tall enough to be mistaken for a tree trunk and strong enough to raise cabins single-handed or toss men over ten-rail fences for insulting his timing. He lived alone, mostly, inside a hollowed-out sycamore tree the size of a silo, except for the ghosts of a few men too weak to keep up. He didn’t marry the land so much as conquer it, and then, like all men of myth, he vanished before history could lay claim to him. Ambushed, they say. Killed on a ridge they now call Spencer’s Hill. Fitting, that. Most legends end where the land finally says enough.

But let’s go back.

To the lick.

Bledsoe’s Lick, Sumner County. Before it was Castalian Springs. Before the Spring Hill Inn, before the DAR, before anybody with clean fingernails showed up to make sense of things. This is where Tennessee’s Bigfoot carved his myth out of tree bark and bone marrow. Where he slept in the hollow of a sycamore bigger than the ambitions of what would later become Nashville. They say the nine foot diameter sycamore leaned to the south like it was bowing down to him. And maybe it was. You spend a whole winter in a tree trunk, you earn the land’s respect—or perhaps its vengeance.

His companions left that winter, citing pissed off Indians and general good sense. Spencer stayed. Built himself an “upper story” inside the tree with nothing but rope and borrowed ingenuity; good sense stole from the natives. Pulled up his ladder when danger came. Watched Cherokee hunters walk below like deer with rifles. Never said a word—never knew he was inside.

See, Spencer didn’t need to say much. He was the kind of man people remembered because they couldn’t stop looking at him. John Carr said he could toss rail logs like cordwood. General Hall said he was afraid to punch a man for fear of killing him. Bob Shaw, who once got thrown over a fence by Spencer, famously asked him to kindly toss his horse over the fence afterwards so he could ride home in shame.

And Demonbreun? The French-Canadian merchant who lived in a cave on the Cumberland River for a year and helped found Nashville, smacked Spencer with a stick once in a moment of confused bravado? Spencer taught him a physics lesson, then greased him in buffalo tallow from head to toe and walked out of the store without another word. That’s Tennessee justice. Primitive, sure. But they named a street after him in Nashville, so it could have been worse.

In a state full of characters with two last names and more tall tales than teeth, Thomas Sharp Spencer stands out because he did what few men had the stomach to do: he lived in the dangerous wilds of Tennessee before it was Tennessee. He didn’t pass through. He staked it, claimed it, planted corn in it, buried friends in it, bled in it.

And no one—not even time—has been able to kill him off completely.

Spencer’s Country

The land he loved was rough. Not like a boxer puppy is rough, not playful, no, rough like an unbroken horse or a mother who tells you the truth when you need it most. Rocky ridges like the spine of an ancient giant, river-bottoms thick with canebrake and rough enough to drown the careless. Game was thick, but so were the men who wanted it. Some hunted with flintlocks. Others hunted with knives. Some just hunted other men.

Bigfoot Spencer first came down through Kentucky with the long hunters, names we see on roadside history markers now, but were once living, breathing contemporaries of a “Big Foot.” Isaac Bledsoe, Kasper Mansker, soldiers once, men who thought living three straight winters in a cave was a good time. They didn’t settle. They scouted. And they all pointed Spencer toward the Cumberland Plateau. Told him the soil was black and deep, the game abundant, and the women—well, I reckon they’d come later.

He stayed when the fearful others left. Took a man named Holliday with him. Or maybe it was Holloway. Or Drake. That’s the trouble with Appalachian history, too many rotten mouths and not enough teeth to chew it right. The point is: Holliday didn’t last, not like Bigfoot Spencer.

History says Spencer liked him enough to break his knife and give him half when he left. Broke it clean. Said something like, “You take this and go, might need it, I’ll keep the point.” That’s the kind of man he was. Didn’t talk much, but everything he said and did could have a good story baked into it.

He staked four claims, big, flat tracts that promised corn if you could keep the Cherokee and Chickamauga from harvesting it first. Built cabins on all of them. Figured that if he put a roof and a row of corn on a 640-acre parcel, it’d be his. A sort of backwoods Manifest Destiny without all the Bengay and Tylenol; with fewer lawyers and more blisters.

It didn’t always work that way. But Spencer wasn’t much for fine print.

What he was good at was living.

Hunting. Building. Defending.

And surviving—Lord, was he good at surviving. For a while, he was good at surviving.

They say one night, he and a companion made camp near the Duck River. Lit a fire. Roasted meat. Just before the coals turned to ash, a war party fired from the brush. Spencer’s friend dropped dead right there. Most men would’ve dropped too. Spencer picked up both rifles, slung his dead companion’s body over his shoulder, and sprinted through the cane like a damned ghost. The Indians followed but didn’t press too hard. They figured any man who could carry a corpse and two rifles through a thicket at full sprint probably wasn’t worth catching.

He buried the man. Hauled the guns back to Nashville. Didn’t brag. Just did it and survived to repeat it.

That was his way.

And later, when more settlers came, and some of them tried to measure him, to rank him against other men, he didn’t flinch. He didn’t fight unless provoked. But if you pushed him, God help you.

One story says he was sick during a cabin raising. Hogan and Haney—two ox-sized men themselves—were struggling with a log. Spencer, flat on his blanket, told them if he were well, he could do it himself. Hogan laughed. Cursed at him and called him soft. Spencer stood up, walked over, lifted the log by himself, and set it like it weighed no more than a possum. Then quietly walked back to his blanket.

Bigfoot Spencer had nothing to prove.

But that didn’t stop him from proving it anyway.

Law, Land, and the Whiskey Economy

Now let’s not mistake Bigfoot Spencer for some hairy dumb mute that grunts incoherently for his breakfast. There’s a great deal of surviving official records of his exploits. He served on juries. Bought and sold land. Made claims through North Carolina military warrants. Owned over 3,000 acres at one point, though you’d be hard-pressed to find a title with his signature on it that wasn’t smeared with tobacco juice and otherwise poorly spelled.

The courts knew him. So did the sheriffs.

So did every backwoods tavern keeper with a jug and a ledger.

He once told folks at Fort Nashborough (Nashville) he’d throw the Davidson County courthouse into the river, log by log, for a quart of rum. Another version says he offered to do it for a dollar a log. Either way, that’s a man who knew the value of his time. And of good rum.

While in service to a Nashville trial jury in 1784, he once fined a Mrs. Katherine Lafever 200 pounds, the modern equivalent of approximately $50k, for gossip against another woman. He also sued men for unpaid debts, and occasionally got sued himself—usually for the same reasons. When someone slandered him, they regretted it. When he slandered back, they paid for it.

Once, he got sued by his old friend Frank Haney. Over a land deal gone sideways. Haney must’ve forgotten that Spencer once saved him from being scalped. Or maybe friendship ends where property begins. What we think of as morals spiked with modernity aren’t always modern.

Either way, the court sided with Haney.

Even Bigfoot wasn’t above the law—just stronger than it.

Land was his currency. Muscle was his bank. And legend? Legend was his interest-bearing account.

He bought up tracts on Station Camp Creek, on the Harpeth, on Drake’s Creek, and in Gallatin, which wasn’t even Gallatin yet. One piece of land was so fine, folks called it “Spencer’s Choice.” Rich, black soil. Rolling hills. Good for corn and good for burying the past. It still carries his name, though developers now pave over it without a second thought.

They ought to be made to read his story first. Or watch grainy Bigfoot videos. One of the two.

Death on Spencer’s Hill

He died the way a man like him had to die.

Not in bed, not in town, not old and surrounded by squabbling heirs or nursing staff smelling of urine. He died alone on a ridge, with gold in his saddlebag and lead in his gut. Shot by a Cherokee ambush party near what is now Crab Orchard, Tennessee—April 1, 1794.

Fitting, the date. April fool’s day for the death of a man who never tried to fool a soul.

They say the Cherokee Chie—Doublehead, pulled the trigger. A warrior known for taking scalps and dealing justice the old way. And for all the legends piled on Spencer’s shoulders, there’s no record that he saw it coming. He and a man named James Walker rode ahead of their party. At the gap in the mountain, the rifles cracked. Spencer fell. His saddlebags of gold vanished into the hills. His body stayed.

Sampson Williams buried him near the trail. A hole in the earth, a man-sized debt paid in full.

Later they named the town after him, Spencer, Tennessee. But the mountain was already his.

No need for a marker. The land remembered.

What Remains

The state would later erect a plaque where the giant sycamore once stood, near the Lick—Spencer’s Lick. A bronze tablet, platitudinous words, bird shit dripping down, real official. Says he planted the first corn, slept in a tree, and built a cabin. True enough. But plaques are for tourists. These stories are what matter, they’re for the Tennesseans that live in places like Spencer, Tennessee, or neighborhoods called Spencer’s Choice in Gallatin, or catch fish in Spencer’s Creek in Franklin.

One pioneer said he was a loner. One called him a bad woodsman, an average hunter, a ruffian with poor breeding. Colonel William Martin, who clearly missed a few hugs in childhood, called him “ugly, cross-grained,” and “cared for nobody.” But the rest? They remembered him like you remember the first man who dared something impossible. They didn’t all love him, but they sure as hell didn’t forget him.

He didn’t lead battles. He didn’t build churches. But he was there. He was there for protecting those who needed it and there for the purpose of creating civility in an uncivilized place. He carved out space in a wilderness that had no intention of being carved. He did what he pleased, lived how he wanted, and answered to no one but the trees and the God he probably didn’t speak to much.

And isn’t that, in some crooked way, the Tennessee way?

And the irony of it all, Chief Doublehead, one of the most feared warriors of the Cherokee-American wars in the Upper South region, the man who killed one of the toughest, strongest, bravest men during the times of westward expansion—he was later deemed a traitor by his own tribe and assassinated for conspiring with the U.S. Indian Affairs Commissioner for under-the-table deals that made him rich.

The Myth Lives

Walk the ridges near Castalian Springs, East of Gallatin, and ask the dirt. It remembers.

Ask the farmers on land called “Spencer’s Choice” why the corn grows thick and the wind bends a little lower when it passes. Ask the old-timers in Van Buren County if they’ve seen him, tall shadow, wide prints, eyes like musket ball scars. Some’ll nod. Some’ll smile.

Don’t ask the tourists. They’re too busy trying to spell “Bledsoe.”

Thomas Sharp Spencer. Bigfoot. Not the blurry cryptid in a Washington state forest, but the real deal. Tennessee’s first settler. A man who made the land answer to him, who gave it blood, bark, and the echo of big, hard footsteps. He wasn’t carved from stone or stitched together from myth. He was born, lived hard, breathed hard, died hard, and the stories just happened to survive.

You can believe the stories or not.

But know this.

He came first.

Before the cities. Before the roads. Before statehood and whiskey taxes and men with ideas about how Tennessee should be. Spencer came when it was still claws and tomahawks and silence; he carved his name into the dirt with a knife and a pair of boots and a legend that has spawned many a book, television series, and movie plot.

And when he died?

The earth rolled him over once, swallowed him down, and didn’t bother spitting him back up.

That’s all you really need to know.