The Mogollon Monster in Print: A Short Explainer

Short explainer, thin sourcing. This file traces the Mogollon Monster’s print history, and it has a gap at the key point. Every source here is secondary. We’ll expand it once the 1967 article is found.

Arizona’s Rim country, the pine-forest escarpment around Payson, Pine and Show Low, has its own version of Bigfoot: a tall, hairy, foul-smelling figure people call the Mogollon Monster. It’s a campfire story with real staying power. How old is it in print?

What the record shows

• 1881–1882: territorial “wild man” items. Arizona Highways writer Matt Jaffe cites hairy-wild-man stories in the Tombstone Daily Nugget, the Weekly Arizona Miner and the Tucson Citizen. None of them is set on the Rim. They’re precursors, and we haven’t pulled the originals.
• 1903: the Grand Canyon wild man. The best-known early yarn is I. W. Stevens’s “wild man” story, which we’ve already filed as the Grand Canyon wild man of 1903. Jaffe treats it as the legend’s starting text, but it’s set at the Grand Canyon.
• 1940s: a Scout’s story. Don Davis later described an encounter at a Boy Scout camp near Tonto Creek. Arizona Highways dates it to the early 1940s, and an Arizona Republic column cited on Wikipedia says the mid-1940s. It was written down decades afterward.
• 1967: the name in print. According to Jaffe, the earliest known newspaper use of “Mogollon Monster” is a 1967 article about a Boy Scout trip in the White Mountains, which mentions the creature matter-of-factly. We haven’t identified the paper or found the article.

The pattern Jaffe describes is a camp-and-campfire tradition, passed along by storytelling well before anyone printed the name. The Scouting thread runs through both the 1940s story and the 1967 article.

What it probably is

The mainstream view is that people are seeing the Rim’s real large animals: black bears, elk and mountain lions. Grizzlies lived on the Rim until the early 1930s. Add the tradition of telling the story to Scouts after dark, and you have a legend that keeps itself going.

What this file doesn’t do

Some living communities have their own traditions about beings in these mountains. Those belong to the communities and aren’t part of the Mogollon Monster story, so this file doesn’t borrow them. We don’t pin sightings, the Scout camp (it’s private property) or reservation land.

Ledger status

Marked folklore. It’s a regional campfire legend whose name can’t yet be traced in print earlier than 1967, and even that rests on a magazine’s report.

Next checks: identify the 1967 article (likely candidates are the Arizona Republic and White Mountain Independent archives), and check the American Folklore Society’s 1970s Abstracts of Folklore Studies listing.

For a public, officially mapped place on the Rim, see Tonto Natural Bridge State Park or Woods Canyon Lake.

Sources

• Matt Jaffe, “Neither Hide Nor Hair,” Arizona Highways — arizonahighways.com
• Wikipedia, “Mogollon Monster” (used only to locate cited works: Clay Thompson, Arizona Republic, 4 Mar 2005; D. E. Brown, The Grizzly in the Southwest, 1985) — en.wikipedia.org