What is the origin of 'yes siree!'?

We all know it from cowboy films and the like but where does the 'siree' come from? Is it a deliberate mispronunciation of 'sire' ?

Solution 1:

According to wikipedia, it seems that it is derived, not from "yes sire", but from "yes sir". (Although both sir and sire themselves obviously come from the same roots.)

Noun siree (uncountable)

(slang) Sir. Used as an intensifier, emphatically, after yes or no.

e.g.

"-Are you coming?"

"-Yes, siree."

(taken from wikipedia)

It seems from Google N-grams that the phrase first came about in the late 19th century (although this post suggests there it was used as early as 1846) Here is the N-gram, which includes all variants on spelling. (There is no one commonly-accepted spelling)

Solution 2:

The OED explains that the siree element is a variant of sorry. That’s not the apologetic sorry, but a variant of sirrah, an earlier and pejorative term of address used to men and boys. The earliest recorded use of yes siree is dated 1846. No siree appeared a year earlier.