The Adventures of The Great Willie Young

A possible descendant of the monster that took poor Delbert's feet.

In case you need to catch up: a brief primer on The Great Willie Young.

The saga of The Great Willie Young is a long and sordid one, filled with adventure, romance, intrigue, terrible violence and very occasionally, football. I will do you my best to bring you brief glimpses into his glorious life, but forgive me if details sometimes don't make sense or contradict one another. After all, I am a mere historian, piecing together fragments of half eroded documents and translating crude etchings in rocks. Sometimes, you get a complete picture, sometimes you get chased after by jungle natives with blow darts and bad intentions. Indiana Jones gets it and that's good enough for me.

Anyway, on with the Adventures of The Great Willie Young!

No one quite knows when he first appeared. Our histories record him being present in the pre-Revolutionary War era of American history. But there are other texts - most of which have been declared heretical at one time or another by The Vatican - which seem to point to The Great Willie Young being many thousands of years old. It is difficult enough for some to accept that he has been with us for hundreds of years, but it is nearly impossible for the skeptical and the pea-brained to accept that he is an immortal being for whom time and space has no meaning. There are accounts of him being a Great Lord of the Kalahari even while he was known to be entrenched in the Louisiana Bayou. Many will call these tales fiction, but they are small minded fools, mere mortals with a sad, mortal perspective on the universe. To hell with them, for we know the truth.

Today's tale takes us to the Florida Everglades in the early 19th century. It would seem that over a two week period, a small band of American soldiers were pinned down by a rampaging horde of Seminole Indians. The militia men, a mixture of young, raw, wide eyed recruits eager to take their first scalp and see the world beyond the farm and tough, grizzled veteran Indian hunters, had spent several days being picked off one by one. At night they would hear the howling of the savages, and when they would awake, one more of their men would be missing. Occasionally, while scouting during the day, they would find the desecrated remains of one of their men, and then the young recruits would weep with fear and even the old men would shake and turn ghostly white. They would stare at the sky and shake their fists at a God who had abandoned them, and in their hearts they would know that they were dead already.

Sadly, these men had been separated from their General, a man named Andrew Jackson and from Jackson's mysterious right hand man, a fearsome giant the men knew only as Big Willie. The men had grown accustomed to the sight of Big Willie, his eyes wide with a primal savagery, his heart lusty with conquest, loping through the midst of a battlefield, covered in native blood, naked and wild. Well, as much as a man can grow accustomed to the sight of a living god wreaking havoc on mere mortals anyway.

But Big Willie wasn't with them now. No, he and Jackson had been captured by the brutal Seminoles and their men feared that they were now dead. They couldn't imagine Big Willie falling to anything short of the forces of Armageddon itself but where was he? Why had he not come to them in their hour of need?

It was of no consequence, for no matter the circumstances, they were left to fend for themselves, vastly outnumbered, starving, dying slowly, one by one in the Florida swamps. A journal entry, recovered many years later by a toothless alligator farmer in the Everglades hints at the sheer terror felt by those beleaguered men:

"We haven't eaten in three days. We are tired and everywhere we hear the howling of the Seminoles. They seem to exist everywhere and nowhere at the same time. We can here them, and our men are slowly being killed by them but yet we do not see them. It is a unique sort of terror, awful and unrelenting. There is no battle, no struggle between men. There is just dark fear and rank death. The veterans say to remain calm, that Big Willie will save us all, but he has not come and even the old men seem afraid and unsure."

Several tales have come to us down through time of those terrifying nights. Fragments of a story too rough and incomplete to tell except in summary hint at one of these wild nights. Apparently, the whole night sky lit up and in the distance men could hear an awful racket, like a thunderstorm except the thunder was not thunder at all but the desperate voices of men engaged in a brutal struggle. The lights seemed to be fire in the sky, but it was fire that seemed to be coming directly from the ground. It was later whispered among the men that The Great Willie Young had somehow managed to tap into the magma of the earth and caused a miniature volcano to erupt. Geological evidence for such an event is inconclusive, but over two hundred years later, scientists did find the charred remains of alligators and a handful of what were believed to be dead Seminoles. No one could explain how they had all been burned to death. The initial theory was that they had all been part of some sort of ritual sacrifice, but could it be that they were all the unfortunate victims of the rage of The Great Willie Young?

But why would a man like The Great Willie Young need to resort to such an epic feat to defeat mere mortal men? Surely he could have just reached out with his massive hands and strangled the life out of them. There must be more to the story.

Sure enough, among the men who survived that brutal fortnight in the Everglades, it was believed that the only way the Seminoles could capture The Great Willie Young was through supernatural means. The journal of a veteran soldier named Hiram Dixon elaborates:

"Now, I been around a long time. A long time. And I heard things. I heard stories that you would not believe. Indian huntin' is dangerous business. Let me tell you that. But it's not just the savages you gotta worry about. It's that Panther God of theirs. I seen it with my own two eyes. By God, I tell you the truth. I saw it come into camp one night and it musta been sixteen, seventeen feet tall, walkin' on hind legs like a man. But it had the head of a panther and it killed 60 men! I ain't lyin'. Big Willie finally come outta his tent and chased the infernal beast away, and then they done struggled and an awful racket went down all through the night until finally, Big Willie came back, all scratched and bleeding and lemme tell you, that was the first time I saw Big Willie look like he was, well, I won't say scared 'cause Big Willie don't get scared, but damn it all, I tell ya, that was the first time I saw him look, so . . . so grim. [Editors note: Yes, the half literate Indian hunter used italics while writing his account. Unbelievable but true.] From that day on, Big Willie's eyes were always roamin' about, scannin' the horizon. He would never say what he was lookin' for, but we all knew that he was waitin' for that beast to come back and get its revenge."

It would seem likely that the Seminoles' Panther God did in fact exact its revenge. Scattered accounts seem to hint at the Panther God stalking into camp and killing the guards before abducting a sleeping Willie Young and Andrew Jackson. When the men awoke the next morning, they found their leaders missing and thus began their two weeks of hell.

Following that night when the sky lit up, the men were greeted by a bright morning sun and were relieved to find that none of them had been taken in the night - with the exception of a scout named Skeeter, but he had fallen into the swamp and was eaten by an alligator and so the men didn't count him. They huddled together, cautiously, and several of them later complained that they suffered from involuntary erections brought on by the musk of their fellow soldiers. Now, I don't know about any of that and it's possible that they just had morning wood, but those were desperate times, scary and confusing and we won't judge those men for the strange reactions of their bodies, will we?

Ahem. In any event, later that night, the men were overcome with joy when an exhausted Andrew Jackson stumbled out of the trees and into camp. He was naked and damn near delirious. All he could do was beg for water and gibber on incoherently about giant hellcats and Seminoles violating him with axe handles. The men were concerned but happy to have their leader back. They asked Jackson about Big Willie and at that name, Jackson finally smiled and said that they had all been delivered from certain death. He then passed out and spent the next several hours in a deep sleep.

The men passed one more night alone. It was a tense and uneasy night, but it was also, for the first time, a silent night. The only action came from a drunkard named Delbert who had miraculously survived the onslaught. He got piss drunk [Editors note: It would seem odd that the soldiers would be starving and without food but they would still have liquor. I know it seems that way, but who are you to judge? You weren't there. This is just history and I will not argue with the facts.] and stumbled upon a nest of baby alligators. He proceeded to poke at the gators with sticks and laughed and laughed while the other men told him to shut the hell up. But he wouldn't listen until he was attacked by the mama alligator, who dragged him into the water. His screams brought the whole camp to life and the men managed to drag him out, but he was missing both feet. He cried and carried on until finally, a giant figure emerged from the darkness and slapped him back to his senses. Finally, The Great Willie Young had returned.

The men all celebrated and even the drunkard with the missing feet seemed glad. For good measure, Willie waded into the water and grabbed hold of the mama alligator and then beat it to death in front of the men, who all cheered. He then scooped up the nest of baby gators and put them in a large satchel he carried with him. These baby gators were later reputed to be seen guarding his plantation deep in the Louisiana Bayou some 50 years later. By then they had grown giant and fearsome and were said to have been made immortal, but this is all part of another story that must be told at a later time.

The men all gathered around Big Willie and asked him what had happened. All he did was smile and then say "That damn beast forgot that my daddy was a Cheetah God." The men didn't know what that meant but they all cheered anyway. It was then that Jackson awoke and staggered out of his tent, his naked and battered body wrapped in a tattered blanket. He rushed forward to embrace Big Willie and the men all cheered once again - possibly because as we have seen, several were closeted homosexuals or at the very least bi-curious.

The two men embraced and when they did, Jackson's tattered blanket fell to the ground. Big Willie looked at Jackson and reportedly said "Andy, you might want to cover your shame."

Jackson reportedly just laughed and said "Willie, I've got nothing to be ashamed of." The men all cheered and Big Willie just laughed. They were all still stuck in the Everglades with no food and miles to go before they found any trace of civilization, but Big Willie was back and Delbert the drunk had just died from his wounds after that gator ate his feet, so they could always eat his corpse in a pinch. Everything was finally alright. Yes sir. Big Willie was back and the world made sense again.