The Legendary Ancient Thunderbird Was Real And It May Actually Exist Even These Days..

Pearl pushed the date of the encounter back to 1886, and he described the witnesses as two prospectors who killed the bird and proudly showed off their trophy in Tombstone. Pearl also added some extra conflict by telling of a how a second Thunderbird snatched up a heckler who had ridiculed the prospectors and flew away with him in its talons. But Pearl’s most significant editorialization was this: he said that the Epigraph newspaper story had run with a photograph of the giant bird’s carcass, nailed up to a wall with its mighty wingspan unfurled, and a number of men posing next to it for scale.

This part of the legend, the Thunderbird photo, has taken on a life of its own. Pearl’s fictional account of a photograph of Old West settlers with a big dead bird was picked up and repeated time and again, multiplying and evolving just as it had before Pearl ever got hold of it.