TOMBSTONE THUNDERBIRD

Opening

On 26 April 1890, page 3 of the Tombstone Epitaph carried a short item headed "Found on the Desert". Two unnamed ranchers riding home from the Huachucas with Winchester rifles had chased and shot a winged creature like a huge alligator on the desert between the Whetstone and Huachuca mountains "last Sunday". They measured it at about 92 feet long, with one wing of 78 feet and a span of about 160 feet.

The item ends with one of the men in town buying supplies to skin the creature and send the hide east to scientists. No follow-up ran, and the article never mentions a photograph. Yet from 1963 onward, magazines and writers described a picture of men posing with a giant bird nailed to a barn. Nobody has ever produced that photograph.

Timeline

Sunday 20 April 1890, if the article's "last Sunday" is counted from the 26 April issue. The two ranchers say they found the creature exhausted, chased it for several miles, wounded it and killed it.

26 April 1890The Epitaph prints the story on page 3. One of the men is said to have arrived "late last night" for supplies, and to have gone back that morning with "several prominent men" who hoped to bring the creature to town.

1930Horace Bell reprints the story in his book On the Old West Coast.

May 1963Jack Pearl's article "Monster Bird that Carries off Human Beings!" in Saga magazine is the first known mention of a photograph. It dates the event to 1886.

September 1963H. M. Cranmer writes to Fate magazine describing the photograph. He appears to be the source behind the Saga version.

1972Ivan Sanderson discusses the photograph in Pursuit.

November 1984Tombstone historian Ben Traywick and Wallace Clayton state in the National Tombstone Epitaph that the 1890 article never ran.

Key figures

The two ranchers are never named in the 1890 item, and neither is the Epitaph writer.

Jack Pearl and H. M. Cranmer are the first known sources for a photograph. Both wrote in 1963, 73 years after the article.

John Keel, Ivan Sanderson, Mark Opsasnick and Vincent Gaddis all later said they remembered seeing such a photograph. Keel recalled a barn and men standing in front of it. The editors of Fate believed for a time that they had printed it, but they had not.

Jodi Nuñez, a University of Arizona librarian, located the original article after the 1984 denial.

Mark Chorvinsky, editor of Strange Magazine, did the most thorough tracing of the story, published as "Cowboys and Dragons" in Strange Magazine no. 21. Most of the later history in this report rests on his work.

Physical and documentary trail

There is one contemporary document: the 26 April 1890 Epitaph item. It describes a featherless creature with smooth skin, two feet set just in front of the wings, an eight-foot head with sharp teeth, protruding eyes as large as dinner plates, and wings of thick, almost transparent membrane. The men cut off a small piece of one wing tip and took it home. No later Epitaph issue reports the hide, the carcass or the scientists.

The photograph exists only in recollection. Chorvinsky collected many people who were sure they had seen it in a book or magazine, with details that varied, but none could produce a copy or a citation. An earlier version of this report said the creature was brought into town on a wagon and had a wingspan of about a hundred feet, and mentioned remembered "window" pictures and empty letters to the Smithsonian. The 1890 text says the creature was left on the desert and gives about 160 feet, and I could not source the Smithsonian or window details, so they have been replaced with the documented recollections above.

Late last night one of them arrived in this city for supplies and to make the necessary preparations to skin the creature, when the hide will be sent east for examination by the eminent scientists of the day.

Things you might not know

• The article was once declared fake. In 1984 Tombstone's own historian said it never ran. A librarian later found it on page 3.
• It was not a bird. The 1890 text describes a featherless, alligator-like creature with membrane wings, closer to a dragon or pterosaur than a thunderbird.
• The photo's first known appearance gave the wrong year. Saga's 1963 article put the event in 1886.
• A magazine remembered printing a photo it never printed. Fate's editors believed they had run the picture, and found they had not.
• Flying crocodiles were a western newspaper genre. The Gridley Herald in California ran a flying-crocodile story in 1882, and there were dragon tales from Lake Elizabeth and Fresno in the same era.

Competing explanations

A real giant flying animal. This depends entirely on the 1890 item. No hide, carcass, wing tip or second account was ever reported, although the article promised scientific examination.

A newspaper tall tale. Western papers of the period printed invented wonders, including other flying-reptile stories. The unnamed witnesses, the absence of any follow-up and the impossible size fit this reading.

A real photograph of something else, later attached to the 1890 story. Many people describe the same kind of image, which suggests they saw something, perhaps a hunting photo of a large bird or a staged picture. No one has produced the image, so this cannot be tested.

A shared false memory. The details of the remembered photograph vary from person to person, and its first known appearance is 73 years after the article. Chorvinsky treated this as a serious possibility.

Later life of the case

The missing photograph has become better known than the article. It is a fixture in thunderbird literature. Chorvinsky's tracing showed that the story had changed: a 160-foot reptile in an 1890 newspaper became, decades later, a giant bird nailed to a barn.

Finding

The 1890 Epitaph story is real and readable today. It was most likely a tall tale of a kind common at the time, since it names no one, was never followed up and describes an impossible animal. The photograph is a separate, modern problem, and the evidence for it is only memory. The strongest reading is folklore built in two stages, with an 1890 newspaper story and a 1960s photo legend joined later.

What still will not resolve: why so many careful researchers recall the same missing picture. If a copy exists in some old magazine, nobody has found it.