Tombstone's Winged Monster and the Thunderbird Photo That Never Was

On Saturday, 26 April 1890, page three of the Tombstone Epitaph carried a column of local items: a soaking rain in the Huachucas, a dance at Mining Exchange Hall, a new sauce made from mescal root. In the middle of them sat a story headed “FOUND ON THE DESERT.”

What the Epitaph printed

According to the item, two ranchers riding home from the Huachuca Mountains “last Sunday” (20 April) came upon an exhausted winged creature on the desert between the Whetstone and Huachuca ranges. It looked like an enormous alligator with a long tail and a huge pair of wings. They chased it on horseback for several miles, shot it with their Winchesters, and measured it: about 92 feet long, with eyes “as large as a dinner plate,” jaws full of sharp teeth, and featherless membrane wings that came to roughly 160 feet tip to tip. They cut off a piece of wingtip as a souvenir. One of them came to town for supplies and to arrange to skin the creature so the hide could be shipped east to scientists.

Nobody is named. No scientist ever received a hide, and no follow-up story appeared.

Florence wasn’t fooled

A week later, on 3 May 1890, the Arizona Weekly Enterprise in Florence reprinted the story nearly word for word. It ended with a three-word credit: “The Epitaph Liar.” That’s a contemporary Arizona newspaper telling its readers exactly what kind of story this was. Frontier papers swapped tall tales the way modern sites swap viral clips, and the joke was part of the trade.

The photograph that wasn’t

Here the case turns from a hoax into something more interesting. Many people say they remember a photograph of the Tombstone creature: a huge bird or pterosaur nailed to a barn wall, with men standing in a row beneath it, arms outstretched to show its size. Some recall it in a book, some in a magazine, some on television.

Researchers who went looking found that the photograph enters print in 1963, not 1890. Mark Chorvinsky of Strange Magazine traced its first known mention to a May 1963 Saga article by Jack Pearl, which said the picture had run in the Epitaph in 1886, four years before the story did. That September a reader named H. M. Cranmer wrote to Fate describing the photo, claiming a 36-foot wingspan and saying it had appeared in newspapers across the country. In a 1966 follow-up letter Cranmer said he had heard about it from “a lady in Tombstone,” which leaves it a friend-of-a-friend story. True West reports that Epitaph staff searched their own files in the late 1960s and found no photo and no follow-up article. Others have since searched the magazines people name, without success.

The Epitaph’s 1890 page has no illustration with the story, and no verified copy of the “Thunderbird photograph” has ever been produced. The best-known image circulating under that name is a fake. True West identifies it as a doctored copy of an 1890s photograph of the captured train robber John Sontag. The ledger hasn’t independently verified that origin and doesn’t reproduce any of those images.

Competing explanations

• A real winged animal killed in 1890. Rests on one unsigned newspaper item with impossible dimensions, no named witnesses, no hide, no follow-up, and a neighboring paper calling it a lie within a week.
• Frontier tall tale. Best supported. The item fits a familiar 19th-century genre, was labeled as fiction by a contemporary, and left nothing behind.
• A real photo, since lost. The two earliest claims (1963) contradict each other on the date (1886 vs. about 1900) and on the size. Decades of searching have turned up nothing, and the original article had no picture.
• Shared false memory. The investigators’ conclusion: a vivid, often-retold description, plus later fakes, hardened into a “memory” of a picture that never existed.

Ledger status

Marked hoax for the 1890 creature. The photograph is folklore: a modern legend about a picture rather than an animal. The two layers work as a pair. One is a newspaper joke that a rival paper called out on the spot. The other is a lesson that remembering a picture vividly doesn’t mean the picture exists.

Visiting: the Epitaph’s 1880 building in Tombstone’s historic district, pictured above, is open to visitors; check current hours locally. This file gives no location in the desert. The ground between the Whetstone and Huachuca ranges includes private ranches, state trust land and Fort Huachuca military land, and there’s nothing out there to find.

Sources

Primary (Library of Congress, Chronicling America; 1890 U.S. newspapers, public domain):

• Tombstone Epitaph (Tombstone, Ariz.), 26 Apr 1890, p.3, “Found on the Desert” — loc.gov
• Arizona Weekly Enterprise (Florence, Ariz.), 3 May 1890, p.4, reprint signed “The Epitaph Liar” — loc.gov

Secondary:

• Mark Chorvinsky, “Cowboys & Dragons,” section 6, “Investigating the Thunderbird Photo Story,” Strange Magazine no. 21 — strangemag.com
• Jana Bommersbach, “Tombstone’s Flying Monster,” True West, 1 Jun 2007 — truewestmagazine.com