January 16, 2010
Web-Feeted Oregonians?
This curious news item appears to hint at many cryptid stories circulating at the time of its publication. What the cryptids described could be are anyone’s guesses.
Daily Alta California, Volume 26, Number 8883, July 28, 1874 p. 2.
The yearly season for cultivating sea and land monsters opens with flattering prospects.
First comes a most wonderful animal said to have been seen in the wilds along the route of the proposed New York and Canada Railroad. Its body was six feet long, and covered with flesh-colored fur; it was armed with a tail ten feet long, which terminated in two prongs, each a foot long; its eyes stuck out on the side of its head like a lobster’s, and between them was a horn — dimensions not given; then it had four legs, the feet of which were webbed, which leads us to suppose it is a native of
Oregon; last, though by no means least, it had two arms, each fifteen feet long, and terminating in a series of lesser arms, each fifteen inches in length; it wailed like an infant suffering with the colic, and when pursued to its mountain cave it captured a dog and a coat from one of its pursuers.
We turn reluctantly from contemplating this monster to a devil-fish, the body of which was half as big as a ship, and which was armed with legs one hundred feet long and as big as a saw-log. It attacked a schooner in the Indian Ocean, and sunk it, with two of the seven men on board — the others were picked up by a passing vessel.
Will some one give us now the annual sea-serpent and wild man of the woods, which are a little behind hand this year?
My thanks to researcher Chuck Flood for sharing this, and informing me that Californians often do not have nice things to say about people and creatures from Oregon.
About Loren Coleman
Loren Coleman is one of the world’s leading cryptozoologists, some say “the” leading living cryptozoologist. Certainly, he is acknowledged as the current living American researcher and writer who has most popularized cryptozoology in the late 20th and early 21st centuries.
Starting his fieldwork and investigations in 1960, after traveling and trekking extensively in pursuit of cryptozoological mysteries, Coleman began writing to share his experiences in 1969. An honorary member of Ivan T. Sanderson’s Society for the Investigation of the Unexplained in the 1970s, Coleman has been bestowed with similar honorary memberships of the North Idaho College Cryptozoology Club in 1983, and in subsequent years, that of the British Columbia Scientific Cryptozoology Club, CryptoSafari International, and other international organizations. He was also a Life Member and Benefactor of the International Society of Cryptozoology (now-defunct).
Loren Coleman’s daily blog, as a member of the Cryptomundo Team, served as an ongoing avenue of communication for the ever-growing body of cryptozoo news from 2005 through 2013. He returned as an infrequent contributor beginning Halloween week of 2015.
Coleman is the founder in 2003, and current director of the International Cryptozoology Museum in Portland, Maine.
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Filed under Cryptomundo Exclusive, CryptoZoo News, Megafauna, Sea Serpents, Year In Review