The Journal and Tribune
Knoxville, TennSun, Jun 22, 1890 ·Page 15
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Jersey Mosquito
- Thread starter jeff of pa
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Sun, Jun 22, 1890 ·Page 15
Red-Coat
Gold Member
Tall tales such as this commonly appeared in ‘Old West’ newspapers, usually as a mechanism for boosting sales and sometimes further propagated by townsfolk in the interests of bringing sightseers (and money) into town.
That story was originally published in the ‘Tombstone Epitaph’ on 26 April 1890 and republished verbatim on 22 June 1890 in the article you found from the ‘Knoxville Journal and Tribune.’
The original story adds: “The finder returned early this morning accompanied by several prominent men who will endeavor to bring the strange creature to this city before it is mutilated.”
Tombstone was ‘on its uppers’ at the time, following the collapse of its silver mining industry, and an influx of curious tourist visitors would have been highly welcome, but there seems to have been no attempt to promote any kind of freak show to exploit the claimed find. It wasn’t even mentioned in Tombstone’s other competing daily newspaper, ‘The Nugget’, or ever mentioned again in any kind of follow-up article. There was also no published photograph.
One Los Angeles newspaper picked up on the story in May 1890 with: “Such a bird, reptile or monster was seen about three years ago by three Mexican rancheros living near Elizabeth Lake” and “…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.”
However, the notion that a photograph did exist emerged in 1963 via a guy named Jack Pearl, writing in ‘Saga’ magazine. He erroneously claimed it had been published in the Tombstone Epitaph in 1886 (four years before the article was actually published) and that it showed the creature “nailed to the wall [of a barn]”, having been hauled into town by wagon. Allegedly, lined up in front of it were six men with their arms outstretched, fingertip to fingertip to show it measured about 36 feet from wingtip to wingtip.
H.M. Cranmer, writing in ‘Fate’ magazine in 1963 further incorrectly claimed that the picture (which came to be known as the ‘Thunderbird photo’) had been published in newspapers all over the country. Ivan T. Sanderson (an eminent researcher in strange phenomena) claimed to have once had a photocopy of the picture which he had loaned out but never got back and it was also claimed to have been shown by him on Canadian TV (for which no evidence has been found).
Then in 2006, the website ‘cryptomundo.com’ published two photos and a drawing under the headline “Lost Thunderbird photo found?” but the alleged creature is not shown nailed to a barn wall. One of the pictures shows five men standing behind a giant bird on the ground; another shows eight Civil War soldiers with it at their feet; and the drawing shows eight men holding it upside down.
The first picture is demonstrably fake. It’s a heavily doctored version of a photograph of the posse that took down train robber John Sontag at the Stone Corral in Tulare County, California. The people in the posse have been rearranged by photo-manipulation and the outlaw’s wounded body replaced by something large and birdlike.
Original photo of posse members with Sontag’s body [Courtesy California State Library]:
Manipulated photo with fake thunderbird [Courtesy Library of Congress]:
[Condensed from an article by Jana Bommersbach on ‘truewestmagazine.com’]
That story was originally published in the ‘Tombstone Epitaph’ on 26 April 1890 and republished verbatim on 22 June 1890 in the article you found from the ‘Knoxville Journal and Tribune.’
The original story adds: “The finder returned early this morning accompanied by several prominent men who will endeavor to bring the strange creature to this city before it is mutilated.”
Tombstone was ‘on its uppers’ at the time, following the collapse of its silver mining industry, and an influx of curious tourist visitors would have been highly welcome, but there seems to have been no attempt to promote any kind of freak show to exploit the claimed find. It wasn’t even mentioned in Tombstone’s other competing daily newspaper, ‘The Nugget’, or ever mentioned again in any kind of follow-up article. There was also no published photograph.
One Los Angeles newspaper picked up on the story in May 1890 with: “Such a bird, reptile or monster was seen about three years ago by three Mexican rancheros living near Elizabeth Lake” and “…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.”
However, the notion that a photograph did exist emerged in 1963 via a guy named Jack Pearl, writing in ‘Saga’ magazine. He erroneously claimed it had been published in the Tombstone Epitaph in 1886 (four years before the article was actually published) and that it showed the creature “nailed to the wall [of a barn]”, having been hauled into town by wagon. Allegedly, lined up in front of it were six men with their arms outstretched, fingertip to fingertip to show it measured about 36 feet from wingtip to wingtip.
H.M. Cranmer, writing in ‘Fate’ magazine in 1963 further incorrectly claimed that the picture (which came to be known as the ‘Thunderbird photo’) had been published in newspapers all over the country. Ivan T. Sanderson (an eminent researcher in strange phenomena) claimed to have once had a photocopy of the picture which he had loaned out but never got back and it was also claimed to have been shown by him on Canadian TV (for which no evidence has been found).
Then in 2006, the website ‘cryptomundo.com’ published two photos and a drawing under the headline “Lost Thunderbird photo found?” but the alleged creature is not shown nailed to a barn wall. One of the pictures shows five men standing behind a giant bird on the ground; another shows eight Civil War soldiers with it at their feet; and the drawing shows eight men holding it upside down.
The first picture is demonstrably fake. It’s a heavily doctored version of a photograph of the posse that took down train robber John Sontag at the Stone Corral in Tulare County, California. The people in the posse have been rearranged by photo-manipulation and the outlaw’s wounded body replaced by something large and birdlike.
Original photo of posse members with Sontag’s body [Courtesy California State Library]:
Manipulated photo with fake thunderbird [Courtesy Library of Congress]:
[Condensed from an article by Jana Bommersbach on ‘truewestmagazine.com’]
OP
OP
- Thread starter
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Red-Coat
Gold Member
All of those pictures are completely fake, and modern. The original of the first picture can be seen here in colour, titled “Hill Country Barn and Wagon: Old barn and wagon near Fredricksburg, Tx”:
https://www.foundmyself.com/Rustic Images/art/hill-country-barn-and-wagon/59519
The image has been manipulated with the creature assembled from other components including the highly enlarged wings of a bat and then gray-scaled and sepia tinted to make it look old.
https://www.foundmyself.com/Rustic Images/art/hill-country-barn-and-wagon/59519
The image has been manipulated with the creature assembled from other components including the highly enlarged wings of a bat and then gray-scaled and sepia tinted to make it look old.
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