William T. Cox

These were the tall tales and whimsical beasts invented by loggers in the 19th and early 20th centuries to pass the time and entertain each other in the deep, isolated woods.

The legend of the squonk was first widely published in William T. Cox's 1910 book, Fearsome Creatures of the Lumberwoods, which described it as a creature native to Pennsylvania.

According to the lore, the squonk's skin is ill-fitting and covered in warts and blemishes, causing it immense psychological distress.

Now, it's a reclusive animal, and hunters who have tried to track one have found it a simple task, as they can just follow the tear-stained trail left on the forest floor.

It gained widespread attention.

And then this author, William T. Cox, wrote Fearsome Creatures of the Lumberwoods.

So Cox was a forester by trade.

He compiled this tale and others into a collection of, you know, folklore tales, that sort of thing, all across lumber camps in North America.

So yeah, so it's definitely in the higher elevations.

So...

William T. Cox, this author who wrote this Fearsome Creatures of the Lumberwoods, he described it, its hunting method in very vivid details.

It would secure itself to the side of this deep mountain, remain hidden until it spotted prey, and then would release itself, like slide down the mountain, and then just like chomp its prey, I guess.

The squonk got into print in 1910 in a small book called Fearsome Creatures of the Lumberwoods.

The author was William T. Cox, a government forester who later became the first state forester of Minnesota.

Cox had spent years around logging camps, and he collected the animals the loggers talked about and wrote each one up with a straight face, the way a naturalist would describe a deer or a beaver.

One colleague supplied a mock Latin name for every creature, and another drew the pictures.

In 1910, this genre of animals got its name.

William T. Cox is the first to use the term fearsome creatures to refer to the menagerie of monsters that were the subject of the practical jokes and tall tales originating chiefly in the logging camps around the Great Lakes region.

The canon grew through a 1928 book about the Hodag, the book Paul Bunyan Natural History in 1935, and a new volume of Fearsome Critters in 1939.

The dingbat appears in none of these books.