vacation tours pegleg or peralta? - Desert Magazine of the Southwest

motion in the corrals. Hideous roars and
the shrill screams of terrified horses
were heard. Several armed ranch-hands
ran to the corral, arriving in time to see
the outline of a huge, winged monster
disappear into the darkness. Two horses
were gone and four injured. Chico Lopez
had had enough of the Lake of the Devil
and sold out.
In October, 1886 a Los Angeles newspaper
carried another account of the
monster. The beast was attempting to
devour a steer when noises of the struggle
attracted a Don Felipe Rivera. Unable
to swallow the longhorn, the monster
finally gave up and retreated. Felipe
ran after the monster as it entered the
lake and emptied his .44 caliber Colt
into its hide. The striking bullets sounded
as if they were hitting a heavy iron
kettle.
He described the monster as being
about 45 feet long and as large as an
elephant. Its head resembled a huge bulldog
and it appeared to have six legs
with two large leathery wings folded on
his back.
Some weeks later several local citizens
observed it emerging from the lake
and flying to the east. It was never seen
again in that area and is believed to have
been the monster killed 800 miles away
in Arizona a few years later.
In the summer of 1890, two cowboys
rode into Tombstone, Arizona and
bought implements to skin a creature of
huge proportions. They swore they had
killed a flying monster in the desert
country between Whetstone and the Huachuca
Mountains. The creature they described
greatly resembled the extinct pterodactyl,
but was many times larger. They
claimed it had a wing span of 150 feet,
an eel-like body 92 feet long and 4l/2
feet in diameter, and its two feet protruded
from the body in front of the
wings. The beak was eight feet long,
the jaws armed with rows of enormous,
sharp teeth. The great protruding eyes
were as large as dinner plates. Its wings
were of a thick, transparent membrane
with no feathers, hair or scales.
When the cowboys first saw the fantastic
creature it was apparently exhausted
from a long flight and could only fly
a short distance at a time, being forced
to rest after each flight. Mounted on
horseback and armed with rifles the men
chased the. monster for several miles
wounding it a number of times. Though
it frequently ceased running and attacked
them several times it was so ponderous,
awkward, and exhausted that they
evaded it easily. Eventually the rifle
slugs took their toll and the creature collapsed
and died.
This incident was carried in an 1890
issue of The Epitaph, Tombstone, Arizona
stating: "The men cut off a small
portion of the tip of one wing and took
it home with them. Last night one of
them arrived in this city for supplies and
to make preparations to skin the creature.
The hide will be sent to eminent scientists
for examination. The finders returned
to the kill early this morning, accompanied
by several prominent men
who will endeavor to bring the strange
creature to town before it is mutilated."
No record that any of this was accomplished
can be found. What really did
happen? Was the monster left to rot in
the hot desert? Could there actually have
been such a flying monster? Were the
cowboys just spinning a tall tale? No one
knows.
Almost as fantastic is the tale of the
Walker Lake Serpent. This monster has
been seen by numerous individuals and
is assumed to live in an underwater cave
near the rocky cliffs of the western shore
of the lake. Two men have been close
enough to photograph the creature. One
of the men still lives in Hawthorne, Nevada
at the lake's edge. One of the
photographs was published in a Reno
paper.
Strangely enough the description of
this monster tallies exactly with that of
the ichthyosaur fossils that have been uncovered
100 miles to the east of Walker
Lake. These fierce prehistoric beasts
ruled the great inland seas when they
covered much of Nevada and the ocean
rolled its waves on what is now its
western borders. The graveyard of these
great beasts is now a state park.
Who is able to prove definitely that
the Thunderbird, Phoenix, the Great
Bear, the Great Serpent, and other terrible
monsters revealed in Indian legends
did not actually exist? Perhaps these
monsters of the West did come from Indian
legend; perhaps from knowledge
of the huge ichthyosaurs, extinct and
turned to stone millions of years ago;
perhaps they are real, a throwback of
Nature from prehistoric times; who can
say he really knows? •
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July, 1968 / Desert Magazine / 31