A Dinosaur in the Mojave Desert?
A Dubious Tall Tale From the Old West…
From time to time, I’d like to talk about some of the lesser-known and—shall we say—more dubious cryptids that have been said, from time to time, to reside in the western United States.
Frequently, the only reports of these intriguing sightings are to be found buried in the yellowing pages of ancient newspapers from the nineteenth or early twentieth centuries. Of course, that presents a problem of its own. Can we trust these reports? Are they true accounts of strange things seen in the remote parts of the country, or are they merely hoaxes and jokes in poor taste, meant to amuse or fill up blank spaces in the newspaper?
Figuring that out is the tough part, and it’s likely we’ll have a hard time separating the wheat from the chaff when it comes to these tall tales of the Old West. And some of these reports have gone on to become quite famous in their own right—witness the “Tombstone Pterodactyl” or the “Van Meter Visitor.”
But there are others that are far less well known, and sometimes it can be difficult figuring out what’s real and what isn’t. Take, for instance, the matter of the Mojave Desert Dinosaur—at least, that’s what I’ve decided to call it. There’s no real resolution to this mystery, and I certainly can’t say whether this mysterious desert cryptid is a prehistoric saurian survival or not.
But the description of the monster, which appears in the May 19, 1892 edition of The Los Angeles Herald, paints a pretty vivid picture of what sure sounds like some kind of relict dinosaur eking out a lonely and precarious existence among the dunes of the scorching Mojave.
I can do no better than to quote in full the article in question, which is entitled “Weird Desert Monster: Prospectors in Search of a Gigantic Reptile”:
“George Nay, the well-known mining man, for fifteen years a resident of the Needles, on the Colorado river, is at the Grand hotel, San Francisco, and tells a remarkable story of the discovery of a strange monster in the vicinity of Daggett.
Mr. Nay stopped at Daggett twenty-four hours on his way up. A party of prospectors headed by E. W. Spear had just arrived. Spear reported the finding of a curious trail eighteen inches wide in the sand of the desert, twenty miles toward Death valley from Daggett.
He followed the strange trail for some distance, when suddenly turning almost at right angles around a sand dune he beheld a monstrous reptile, or animal, at least thirty feet long, with a head, so he expressed it, ‘larger than a candle-box’ and ‘eyes as big as teacups’ and luminous in their brightness. Spear was alone, and being scared ran for camp as fast as his legs could take him.
When he had told his story he was greeted with loud laughter, for nobody believed it. Next day, however, Henry Brown, who was coming across the desert in the lead of another party, saw it. Both reported it at Daggett.
The Daggett people had taken no stock in Spear’s story, although he was always known as a truthful man. They thought, however, he was trying to play a practical joke on them. He stoutly persisted, however, that he had really seen the strange monster.
When Brown arrived in the next day and corroborated it in every detail and added particulars as to how it appeared, they remembered having seen curious trails in the sand over the Atlantic and Pacific track thereabout for two years past. Also that these trails were particularly numerous between Newbery and Haslett, nearby stations on the Atlantic and Pacific.
The greatest interest prevailed, and at once a party was organized to go and search for the monster, be it snake or some surviving specimen of a supposed long-extinct desert animal resembling one, and only found now in the large museums.
Horses and pack animals were at once secured. Two cowboys were among the party, and they took out with them a number of riatas, intending to ride close enough, if safe to do so, to lariat the monster and take him alive. It was the intention to exhibit him at the world’s fair.
Mr. Nay says the people of Daggett are fully convinced that there is some monster of the kind set forth loose on the Mojave desert, and they fully expect that the party they have outfitted will secure it.
Its trail looks almost exactly as if a sack of grain or ore had been dragged through the sand. What the unique denizen of the desert lives on is not known.”
Verdict: So what are we to say about this mystery monster of the Mojave? Not much, I’m afraid, since this is really the only account we have to go on.
And there are so many unanswered questions. Did the two cowboys in the expedition actually lariat the reptile and take him alive? Apparently not, since the creature was never exhibited “at the world’s fair” (meaning, presumably, the World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893, held in Chicago). I’m certain we’d all have heard about it by now if it had, and this part of the story is probably my favorite, since it sounds so much like something out of Conan Doyle’s The Lost World.
There are some parts of the story that hold up to scrutiny, doubtless to add a healthy dose of verisimilitude. Daggett, for instance, is a real place; originally called Calico Junction (a much better name, if you ask me), Daggett is an old mining community that’s not quite yet a ghost town.
Then there’s this “George Nay” fellow, who—if you read closely—is the only real source for this whole story, at least according to the unknown writer of the piece.
A search of some old records and publications shows that he was apparently a real individual, typically described as “an old miner,” who indeed lived in Needles, California, at around the time of The Los Angeles Herald story. The Santa Fe Employes’ Magazine mentions George Nay in a story about the slaying of some miners in Eldorado Canyon (near present-day Las Vegas) by a Piute Indian named “Ah-vote.” And an issue of The Chautauquan of 1909, in writing about the discovery of lost mines, mentions “George Nay, an old miner of the Needles, on the Colorado River…who reported that he had at last found the Mojave mine, one of the famous lost gold mines of the desert, which for thirty years had been one of the puzzles of the region.”
What with rediscovering lost gold mines and recounting tales of surviving species of dinosaurs, this George Nay must have been a real character.
So the verdict, in this case, seems to be pretty clear: this is just another Old West tall tale dreamed up by a bored but imaginative writer at The Lost Angeles Herald, who was doubtless tasked with filling up some space with additional copy. The only dinosaurs in the Mojave Desert are likely to be of the fossil variety—and maybe that’s quite enough for the time being.
Still, if anyone has any further information about the fate of that 1892 expedition to capture the monster, or knows of any more recent sightings of dinosaurs or giant reptiles in the Mojave Desert, be sure to let us know in the comments.