The Seven-Headed Serpent of the Santa Cruz, Tucson 1891

This is part two of a two-part case. Start with part one, the Salton Lake sea serpent, the Phoenix dispatch this story answers.

The setup

In August 1891 the Santa Cruz River was in flood at Tucson. On 22 August the weekly edition of the Arizona Weekly Citizen ran a story headed “SEA SERPENT. Seven Headed Monster Below Town. CAME UP THE SANTA CRUZ.” The Yuma Sentinel later referred to it as appearing in “Tuesday’s Tucson Citizen,” so it probably ran first in the daily edition. The ledger hasn’t checked the daily.

The story opens as straight local news. “Last night at 12 o’clock” the fire bell rang, and people rushed to the engine house. There was no fire. Instead, a “belated traveller” told the crowd he had seen a sea serpent while crossing the flood at Stevens Avenue, where the water had spread across a watermelon patch the paper identifies as Sing So’s. “Everyone laughed at the tale,” but he showed the splintered end of his wagon, which he said the creature had bitten.

The crowd grew. People came, the paper said, from Barrio Libre, from over the railroad tracks and from the gas works neighborhood, and offered theories. One was that the beast came “from the Salton lake, as published in the Republican.”

The sermon

Under a full moon the crowd reached the river, and the monster was there. It was estimated at a hundred feet long, with seven heads and seven sets of teeth, and many of the onlookers fainted. Then it spoke. “Did not Editor Vail, even as John of old, foretell my coming?” it asked, claiming that he had announced it “in a special dispatch to the Republican from Yuma, even as one crying from the wilderness.”

What followed was a booster’s prophecy. The serpent claimed the new desert lake as its own work, promised that Arizona’s rainfall would increase “fourfold,” and foretold ditches, settlers “in thousands,” mansions and thriving Tucson merchants. Then the water rose, the monster sank, and the crowd went home “agreeing that the Santa Cruz truly had good prospects.”

So the joke cuts two ways. It mocks the Phoenix paper’s sea serpent, and it mocks the boom-town habit of turning any event, even a flood, into a sales pitch. The piece also contains a passing ethnic caricature of the period, which the ledger doesn’t reproduce.

“Editor Vail”

The most useful thing in the spoof, for the Salton case, is the name. The Citizen pins the Salton dispatch on an “Editor Vail” and calls it a Republican special from Yuma. That’s a contemporary accusation of authorship. But it’s made inside a satire, so the ledger treats it as the Citizen’s jibe, not as a fact about who wrote the dispatch.

The rebuttal

On 5 September the Yuma Arizona Sentinel compared the “Sea Serpent,” “Seven Headed Monster” story to the work of two notorious fake-news correspondents, Tombstone’s “Homo” and the “Pete Burke fake guy” who wrote from Yuma for the San Francisco Chronicle. It told the young writer to stop imitating them and “write no more such trash.”

Weighing it

Explanation	Status
Newsroom satire of a rival paper’s monster story	Best fit. The monster preaches, and the piece names its target.
A real teamster’s scare in the flood, embroidered	Possible seed, but unknown. The wagon and the traveller may be invented.
A real creature	Not supported.

Ledger status

Hoax (newspaper satire). The flood was real; the seven-headed serpent was a parody of the Salton Lake sea serpent, and a rival paper called it “trash” within two weeks.

Visiting

No map pin. The story is set at a street crossing of the 1891 flood, and there’s nothing there to visit.

Sources

• Arizona Weekly Citizen (Tucson), 22 Aug 1891, p.3, “Sea Serpent” (OCR checked) — loc.gov
• Arizona Sentinel (Yuma), 5 Sep 1891, p.1 (OCR checked) — loc.gov
• Arizona Republican (Phoenix), 7 Jul 1891, p.1, “An Immense Sea Serpent in Salton Lake” (OCR checked) — loc.gov