Texas likes to brag about the biggest of everything, but Arkansas had early claim to the tallest tales about the most colossal creatures.

Next-door Texas makes a big thing of the Chupacabra, a blood-sucking dog or possibly spiny-backed lizard-thing. Big whoop.

Arkansas has tales of the Galliwampus, a giant panther, and the Giasticutus, an ill-tempered bird the size of an ostrich that walked around looking to peck somebody.

The natural state’s unnatural tradition started with reports of giant frogs, turtles and turkeys. By 1841, Thomas Bangs Thorpe had made such things official in his widely read yarn, “The Big Bear of Arkansas.”

Thorpe describes turkeys so overgrown, they fall with a wham out of enormous trees. And the bear! - why, this bear runs 18 miles just to warm up. This massive bruin shakes off a musket ball between the eyes.

State history provides the means to deal with such a beast: the foot-long Bowie knife, also called an “Arkansas toothpick.”

Arkansas’ once-roaring creatures seem to have gone to ground these days. They lurk, as monsters do - maybe scared to show themselves in light of the new competition:

Monster trucks.

Style, Pages 52 on 12/15/2013