Cowboys & Saurians

Pioneer life was tough. If your stagecoach wasn’t getting held up by outlaws, chances are you were suffering from dysentery along the Oregon Trail. If you weren’t toughing it through a drought, you might be enduring a hard flood. And, if the wolves and the mountain lions didn’t get your livestock, chances are the Sabretooth Tigers and Sarkastodons would. Wait, did you just say Sabretooth Tigers and Sarkastodons…as in prehistoric megafauna?                                         

That’s right, remnant dinosaurs weren’t the only cryptids that supposedly made it into the Nineteenth Century. Along with the surviving saurians came giant prehistoric armadillos, mastodons, cave bears, and a bevy of other prehistoric monsters. Pioneer newspapers were rife with reports of livestock being killed by mysterious, brutal beasts that defied description, and some of the creatures were simply too big to be anything living at that time and instead seemed like holdovers from the last Ice Age.                                       

In the pages ahead you’ll ask yourself: Did a Wild West showman named “Idaho Bill” really capture a saber-toothed tiger in Mexico and bring it to Washington, D.C.? What was the creature that people described as a cross between a dinosaur and a prairie dog in Nemaha County, Nebraska? Does Bear Lake, Utah, harbor a giant prehistoric beaver? Did the Duke of Westminster really hunt for a Ceratosaurus in the Arctic Circle? And finally, is there a real “land that time forgot” hidden within the caldera of an extinct volcano in the North Pole?