In 1891, Californian newspapers reported "dragon" sightings in the area around Fresno. The monstrous creatures were supposedly pterodactyls. Or perhaps not, since many newspaper editors blamed moonshine or outright hoaxing. There were true believers and skeptics already back in 1891.
The most original claim is that the 1891 tall tale was a garbled version of a real incident involving a socialist-Marxist-utopian commune in the Sierra Nevada, the Kaweah Colony. After being forced off their land by the US army, the evil socialists supposedly imported two large and extremely dangerous Australian birds known as "boas", which were expected to physically attack the horses and mules of the soldiers!
Nobody knows what on earth a "boa" might be (perhaps a garbled reference to moa?), but there is a flightless bird that roughly fits the description: the cassowary. Except, of course, that the story of how the Kaweah colonists imported them as a bio-weapon is probably just another tall tale. Still, I suppose Juan Posadas might have been interested in this fakelore...
No comments:
Post a Comment