The San Marcial Serpent
Giant Snaiks in the Land of Enchantment
The Rio Grande is a lot like the Nile—a precious conduit of life-giving water, surrounded by verdant farmlands, snaking its way through the barren and lifeless deserts of New Mexico.
Just take a cruise down I-25 from Santa Fe to Las Cruces if you don’t believe me: the dense forests of cottonwood, the celebrated marshlands of the Bosque del Apache, the orderly rows of the pecan groves, and—further south, in the Hatch Valley—the huge fields of world-famous green chile, are impossible to mistake, with the serene and placid waters of the Rio Grande as the centerpiece of all of this agricultural munificence.
But the mighty Rio Grande, if legends are to be believed, isn’t the only thing snaking its way through the New Mexico deserts. Because every once in a while you hear a story or two about a giant serpent in these parts. Now I’m not talking about the occasional bullsnake or pissed-off rattler that any old cowpoke or absent-minded hiker stumbles across under a rock on a mesa top, or shading under a juniper on a hot summer’s day.
This is something very different…I’m talking about the sort of snake that’ll swallow a cowboy and his pinto in a single gulp, and still have a hell of an appetite left over.
The story I have in mind took place in a small town called San Marcial, which is—or, I should say, was—a little less than thirty miles south of Socorro. Now Socorro is a neat little town nestled in the lee of the Magdalena Mountains, and it has its own fascinating otherworldly history for those of you familiar with the Lonnie Zamora Incident—which is one I hope to detail in these pages someday.
But San Marcial followed a rather dramatically different trajectory in its history than the eponymous seat of Socorro County. Founded on the banks of the Rio Grande in the middle of the nineteenth century, San Marcial really took off in the roaring 1880s, when it was selected as the spot for a station on the famous Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railway. For a space of about thirty years, around the turn of the century, San Marcial grew into a bustling southwestern “metropolis” of nearly 2,000 souls—the second-largest town in the county.
Life was good in those days in San Marcial, and there was no reason to expect anything would change anytime soon. But mother nature had different ideas, and in the late summer of 1929, a series of immense floods pretty nearly wiped the town off the map, washing away buildings and railroad facilities with such thoroughgoing ferocity that the top brass at AT&SF decided to abandon the station there altogether.
Now all that’s left of San Marcial is a ghost town…if even that.
But, at the time when our story unfolded, all that still lay far in the future. In 1888, San Marcial’s fortunes were looking up; the railway was busy and the town was bustling, and, every so often, strange tales of strange things seen and experienced in the remote and unvisited desert east of town would filter into the saloons and dusty streets of Socorro County’s second city.
That’s how the world heard of the “San Marcial Serpent,” sometimes also known as the “Monster of the Jornada del Muerto.” The Jornada del Muerto, or “Dead Man’s Slog,” won its sinister sobriquet for a very good reason: it’s no one’s idea of a joke, and is the classic kind of desert that figures in everyone’s thirstiest nightmares—the sort of place where you’d have no trouble imagining Eli Wallach’s Tuco dragging Clint Eastwood’s parched, sunburnt, and footsore Man With No Name to a dismal, vengeful death.
Even the doughty conquistadors feared to venture into this vast, waterless expanse that stretched from present-day Las Cruces to Socorro; chasing dreams of gold and the conquest of lost civilizations was one thing, but contending with the oven-like heat and mocking mirages of the Jornada was too much even for those hard and ruthless men.
And perhaps they had another reason to steer clear of this fearsome desert. Because if our story is to be believed, maybe the Spanish conquistadors were well aware that something strange and prehistoric lurked in the Jornada, just waiting for an opportunity to waylay and devour some unwary and hapless travelers.
According to the Helena Independent of Jan. 27, 1888, the grizzled prospectors, station operators, telegraph troubleshooters, and “soiled doves” of San Marcial were all abuzz with news of a strange creature at large in the Jornada:
“The section of country about San Marcial, N.M., has been aroused of late by reports of Mexicans who state that near an extinct crater near the plain known as the ‘Jornada del Muerto,’ is the abode of a monster. Some say it is 100 feet long and about two feet in circumference. The Mexicans are now afraid to venture within miles of the crater. A Mr. Alexander, who owns some mining property in that part of the country, says that he saw the serpent once while crossing the Jornada on the way to his mines. He was about halfway across the plain, jogging leisurely behind his burro, dreaming of the immense wealth he hoped to realize from his property, when suddenly the burro stopped, erected its long ears, wheeled quickly around and made a mad stampede in the opposite direction. Mr. Alexander was at a loss to account for this strange freak of the burro, and was about to start in pursuit of the runaway, when he chanced to look ahead. Then his eyes gazed upon the monster. He was so struck with fear at first that, he says, his nerves had completely paralyzed, his hairs stood on end, and move he could not; he was rooted to the spot and his eyes were fixed upon the serpent. It was about a quarter of a mile from him and was traveling in the opposite direction—toward the crater. He says it appeared to be about sixty feet in length; but what surprised him most was the queer proportions of the creature. The foreparts were of enormous size, its head being fully as large as a barrel. A few feet behind the creature’s head two large scales were visible, which glittered in the sun like polished shields; further back were two huge claws on either side, about two feet apart, which were all the monster had in the shape of feet. The rest of its body was comparatively small and tapering to the end of its tail. It traveled at a rapid gait, sometimes rearing its whole body up from the ground, and walked on its four claws. He watched it till it disappeared over a little hill, and then he started to look after his burro.
“The Mexicans have the most deadly fear of the crater, and will not venture within miles of it, there being a popular tradition among them that it is the abode of some terrible serpent. The Mexicans asserted that on one occasion, a descent of the crater was made by three men, and as none of them returned, it was generally believed they were devoured by the monster.”1
Some extra information about this encounter comes, oddly enough, from a restatement of this news bulletin that can be found in the November 6, 1888 edition of The Woodend Star in Victoria, Australia, and which claims as its original source the St. Louis Globe Democrat. In this account, which is materially the same as that reproduced above, we find the additional intelligence that Mr. Alexander’s mining claim was located in “the San Andreas Mountains,” that is, the San Andres Mountains, which do indeed border the eastern marge of the Jornada del Muerto. So it appears someone, at least, was familiar with the geography of that godforsaken place.
As to the “extinct crater” in question, it is the considered opinion of local researcher John LeMay that what was meant was most likely Kilbourne Hole, a small volcanic crater in the Potrillo Volcanic Field of Doña Ana County not far from the Texas border. Or, perhaps the small shield volcano called Aden Crater, about twenty-five miles southwest of Las Cruces. Neither volcano is thought to have erupted any more recently than 16,000 years ago, and they’re not known to harbor any prehistoric relicts—although Aden Crater has disclosed the fossil remains of a giant “Shasta ground sloth,” which apparently fell to its doom in the vent sometime during the last ice age.
But these volcanic craters are far from the Jornada del Muerto, and a far likelier candidate is the aptly-named Jornada del Muerto Volcano, a shield volcano with attendant small cinder cone and lava tubes and vents that lies at the northernmost end of the Jornada, and just a short distance to the southeast of San Marcial. It also happens to be smack in the middle of a straight line drawn between that town and the San Andres Mountains, where the sole eyewitness of the serpent was said to have his mining claim.
So I think it’s safe to say that this is the place where Mr. Alexander encountered his New Mexican dragon, which presumably laired in the volcanic vents and spent its days stalking the Jornada as well as the malpaíses around the volcano and maybe even Carrizozo to the east, across the San Andres Mountains.
Verdict: So what can we say about the San Marcial Serpent?
Not much, since our only description of the beast comes from this spare and fleeting account, and although it mentions “Mexicans” being in deadly fear of the extinct crater wherein the creature had its abode, there is in truth no local folklore nor any local traditions about any sort of monster lurking in the plentiful and extensive lava tubes of the Jornada del Muerto Volcano.
At least, none that we know of.
The description of the serpent is certainly puzzling. It’s either a hundred feet long or sixty, and either way that’s got to be some kind of a record; meanwhile, it has “two large scales” behind its head that glitter like polished shields. Maybe this is akin to the “frills” found on the Australian frilled lizard? And what about the “two huge claws on either side, about two feet apart”? That sounds rather analogous in some way to the Tatzelwurm or Stollenwurm of the European Alps, with its serpentine body and two stubby forelegs. Or perhaps it was related in some fashion to the Draco Bipes or Draco Bononiensis,2 the two-legged dragon whose capture near Bologna in the sixteenth century was recounted by the great natural historian Ulysses Aldrovandi, and which is usually accorded the honor (or misfortune, as the case may be) of being the victim of Europe’s last dragon-slaying.
If so, the beast—or at least its distant progeny—had traveled far afield indeed, setting up shop over three centuries later in the very heart of New Mexico’s baking desert. And I suppose that’s not entirely implausible; after all, the San Marcial Serpent isn’t the only such creature said to be lurking in the Land of Enchantment’s many extinct and dormant volcanoes and lava vents. The San Ildefonsos, I’ve been told, have a tradition of their own about a gigantic serpent that lairs in a lava tube among the mesas of colorful Bandelier tuff, not far off Highway 4 on the way to Los Alamos.
Of course the most likely explanation is that the whole thing is just another cock-and-bull story of the kind nineteenth-century newspapermen so loved to dream up. New Mexico in general, and the Jornada del Muerto in particular, were suitably remote and romantic locales, and in the spicy days of the Old West they were places where literally anything could happen. Fortunes could be made, fortunes could be lost, outlaws won names for themselves that still endure, and if some bored writer decided to insert a wild “Snaik Story” to enliven his day and fill up some blank spaces on the broadsheets…well, who can blame him?
But if it was real, it’s a fair question to ask whatever happened to the San Marcial Serpent? Well, who knows—maybe it’s still there, somewhere, slumbering beneath the Jornada del Muerto malpaís, awaiting more favorable climate or conditions to stir from its sleep and seek its prey…whatever that might be, for despite the creature’s fearsome reputation, none of the accounts actually record it killing or devouring anything, human or otherwise.
Maybe, if the San Marcial Serpent endured in the area for another fifty or so years, it was finally scared away or killed by the Trinity Atomic Bomb Test in 1945—which, believe it or not, occurred only a few miles to the northeast of the Jornada del Muerto Volcano. And maybe all that World War Two business was just a damned cover-story…maybe the real reason the G-Men built and tested that bomb in just that spot was to kill the dreaded Monster of the Jornada del Muerto.
Betcha didn’t hear anything about that in Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer, did you?
Anyhow, the only way to know for sure, I suppose, is to do a little impromptu spelunking in the lava vents and tubes underneath the volcano, and try to find the serpent’s remains or—Heaven forbid—the monster itself.
Hell, maybe I’ll get around to it myself someday, with the handy help of a good express rifle, a grenade launcher or two, a few drams of liquid courage, and some muttered prayers to the spirit of Steve Irwin…
John LeMay, Cowboys & Saurians: Dinosaurs and Prehistoric Beasts As Seen by the Pioneers (Roswell, NM: Bicep Books, 2019), pp. 44-46.
Also known as the “Dragon of Bologna,” or the “Boncompagni Dragon.” Frankly, it has many names, and I suppose that’s only fitting for what just might have been Europe’s last dragon.
Don’t call it a comeback!
Glad to see another great post about a little known cryptid.
Awanyu. Quetzalcoatl. Or the feathered serpent that all North American Indians know.