Tombstone's Flying Monster
The Old West cold case on the Thunderbird photo is solved in our eyes.
By: Jana Bommersbach 05/01/2007
Think about it a second. Can’t you just see the guys, all in cowboy hats and boots, some with guns on their hips, some with mustaches, most looking grungy, standing next to an unpainted—or badly peeling—barn with a big bird nailed to the side. It’s not hard to see.
As Hall puts it: “The status of the infamous ‘Thunderbird photograph’ has remained the same for years. A lot of people think they have seen the picture. Everyone wants to see it. But no one can produce a copy.”
The bottom line seems clear: The evidence is overwhelming that this “photograph” just never existed.
Was there a Thunderbird?
It’s from Indian folklore we get the idea of giant bird-like creatures called Thunderbirds. Some believe they truly exist; others are convinced they are mythical, like the Unicorn.
We don’t know if The Tombstone Epitaph reporter had his tongue in his cheek when he reported on the killing of a Thunderbird in 1890, but we do know a Los Angeles newspaper took the report seriously. Again, thanks to Horace Bell’s book: “Commenting on the story in the Arizona paper, a Los Angeles paper in May, 1890, said: ‘Such a bird, reptile or monster was seen about three years ago by three Mexican rancheros living near Elizabeth Lake.”
Bell reported “this flying amphibious monster was seen several times from 1881 to 1886” in the Elizabeth Lake area of California. “But not long thereafter it was seen emerging and flying away eastward. Since then it has never been seen in its native valley because it was found and killed eight hundred miles from Lake Elizabeth, as is proved by the ... article that appeared in the Epitaph, Tombstone, Arizona.”
Bell wasn’t the first, nor would he be the last, to report on thunderbirds as real creatures.
So maybe there really was a giant bird in Arizona Territory at the end of the 19th century, and maybe two ranchers really did track it down and shoot it, and maybe they did come into town and get some “prominent” men to go with them to bring it back.
But whatever happened next was so unspectacular, so uninteresting and so unremarkable that nobody spoke of it again. Would that have been the response if there really had been a dead dinosaur-like bird outside of town? Hardly.
So you’re left thinking the story of the Tombstone Thunderbird was the fantasy of a bored reporter on a spring day when nothing else was going on in that down-and-out town.
Even knowing all this, Troy Taylor hasn’t called it a day on this Old West cold case. “Are thunderbirds and mysterious flying creatures actually real?” he asks in his book. “Such creatures remain a mystery but one thing is sure, the sightings have continued over the years.... So keep that in mind the next time that you are standing in an open field and a large, dark shadow suddenly fills the sky overhead. Was that just a cloud passing in front of the sun, or something else?”
Nor has Taylor thrown in the towel on the “missing” Thunderbird photo. “What if the photo does exist and it’s out there, just waiting to be discovered in some dusty garage, overflowing file cabinet or musty basement,” he writes. “I, for one, haven’t given up quite yet—and I have a feeling that I am not the only one who is still out there looking.”
You know he’s right about that.
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