There Be Dragons! part 1&2

[Ninurta]

I wonder if they are describing teratorns? They went extinct at a time when Native Americans would have been on the scene. The giant lizard might have been some sort of alligator.

There are some who think teratorns are still not extinct, but instead are just incredibly rare. Those people advance teratorn relict populations as a potential explanation for thunderbird sightings that continue on to this day.

The giant lizard is really more of a giant snake, and usually described as having wings and horns, but rarely ever described as having legs. The descriptions are more like the legless Chinese dragon than they are like the legged Japanese dragon. The Cherokee "Uktena" is also described as arrow-proof, except in one place, the 7th belly scale down from the head. It's also supposed to have a crystal in it's forehead, called the Ulusunti. It's difficult to get hold of an Ulusunti, because you have to kill the original owner, the Uktena, and the only way to kill it is through that 7th belly scale, which one would imagine might be difficult to hold steady enough to hit with a giant snake bearing down on you ready to eat you.

There is a tale among the Cherokee of a Shawnee who was captured long ago by them, and lived among them. the Cherokee perceive of the Shawnee as having an inordinate number of powerful wizards among them, and this particular Shawnee was said to have killed an Uktena and obtained the Ulusunti crystal from it's head, and so went on to become a powerful shaman by virtue of owning that crystal. Such crystals are said to still be in the possession of some secretive individuals among the Cherokee. They are usually kept wrapped up, but must be taken out once a year and "fed", with the owner dropping a single drop of human blood, usually his own, on to the crystal which then absorbs the drop of blood, and is content until feeding time the next year.

Regardless of what started the stories, reality has a way of morphing into all manner of legend. Not far from where @"Mystic Wanderer" lives, there is a river, and at a bend in that river there is a cliff towering over the river bend. The cliff has vertical streaks of a white mineral showing in it, and the legend that has grown around that circumstance states that a Tlanuwha bird nests near the top of the cliff, and an Uktena lives in the hole of water below, in the river bend, and that there is constant warfare between the two. The white streaks are explained as bird excrement coming from the nesting area. It is said that the Uktena tries to climb to eat the Tlanuwha's nestlings or eggs (reminiscent of the Great Serpent Mound in Ohio, a giant snake swallowing an egg), and the Tlanuwha dives from the cliff into the water to attempt to kill the Uktena. I found that story to be pretty similar to the one mentioned above that the Sioux tell, much farther west.

There are two rivers in west Virginia, one the Great Kanawha, and the other the Little Kanawha, that are said to have gotten their names from the Shawnee word for "it swallows", because the Shawnee said they were inhabited by Giant Horned Snakes that would eat the unwary passer-by. Another, more mundane explanation for the names, however, is that they were named after the Conoy tribe, an extinct tribe that once lived along their waters.

For reality, as opposed to legend, I can offer a couple of observations.

My Dear Old Dad grew up in the backwoods of West Virginia, which is almost entirely backwoods. He told me a tale on several occasions of a giant snake running through those woods in the summer of 1941. He said he never saw the snake himself, but that he DID see tracks it left in the dust of dirt roads, and that it looked like someone had dragged a 14 inch stove pipe in a serpentine pattern. He stood behind that tale until the day he died.

I myself saw what I would call a giant bird on two occasions, several years ago near Madison, NC. it wasn't so big as legends tell, nor was it as large as a teratorn, but it was the biggest bird I've ever seen with my own eyes. It was solid black, from beak to tail, with no off-color markings. it had a large, heavy beak, along the lines of what you would expect to see on an eagle, or perhaps a vulture. One one of the occasions I saw it, it was flying at treetop level and flew between two pine trees about half way down my driveway, which was around 100 yards long with trees on either side. As it flew between the pines, I noticed that each wingtip just touched the tops of two pines, so I marked the two pines and measured the distance between their bases, which was 12 feet, 6 inches center to center. It was some sort of bird of prey, but I'm familiar with all of the regular birds of prey there, which are loads of black vultures and turkey vultures, and the occasional Bald Eagle, and even rarer Golden Eagle. The largest wingspans among those birds belong to the turkey vulture and the golden eagle, neither of which exceeds about 7 feet tip to tip in a large example. Folks tell me that it was probably an over-sized Golden Eagle, and I'm prepared to accept that, but if that's what it was, it was a big-'un, almost twice the size of any of it's fellows.

For sheer size, the bird approached the size of a condor, of which there are  two varieties still living: the California Condor, and the Andean Condor. Their wingspans regularly fall into the 12 to 14 foot range, but the bird I saw was no condor. it didn't have the bald, featherless red head or the white neck ruffle of feathers that condors have. Either type of condor would have had to have been WAY off course, and far from home, to appear in the North Carolina woods, anyhow. Some folks believe that condors are the modern-day descendants of the teratorns of old.

So I can find a basis in personal experience for the legends, but I can't explain that basis.

Almost all of the Indian tribes had such legends of "Thunder Birds" and "Giant Horned Snakes", going back at least to the Mound Builder cultures - I posted a Mound Builder engraving of a Giant Horned Snake earlier, an American "Dragon". Here, they are generally associated with water, usually rivers and lakes, but the Shawnee believe they can even inhabit the brackish water that collects in tree stumps in the woods. There is no shortage of evidence for the Indian pan-tribal belief in them, going back for at least centuries. La Salle mentioned an engraving of a giant "Piasa Bird" that natives had carved into a cliff face of the Mississippi River near Alton, Illinois, during his trip down the Mississippi in the 1600's.

As far south as the Aztec and Mayan cultures, they had legends of giant winged or feathered serpents - the Aztecs worshiped one called "Quetzalcoatl", and the same entity was named "Kukulcan" among the Maya.

Legends usually have a basis in something more concrete, but often grow in the telling over generations.

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