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Hidden Valley


Mutant Snake

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I read somewhere about a man who went to the yukon and a native american told him about a valley he and his son went to and found Mamoths. the native and his son were in there a while and told the man where it was. Has anyone heard anything or read anything about it. it happened in the 1800s

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Is this the story you were referring to, Snake?

"Rummaging around the attic looking for something else I recently came across a file I began keeping years ago on Alaska improbabilities. Among the accounts of talking whales, lost emerald mines, backward-flowing rivers and mountainleveling beavers was the story told by a Klondiker who signed himself Harry Tukeman. It was printed in McClure's magazine in October of 1899 and, unlike the other improbables, it had consequences.

Tukeman told of encountering mammoths, living mammoths, on the Porcupine River near the Alaska/Yukon border.

While wintering at Fort Yukon in 1890, he said, he passed the time by reading aloud to an Indian friend named Joe. One of the stories concerned elephants. When he showed Joe a picture of an elephant the Indian became excited. He said he had seen such an animal, up there, pointing north and east.

Joe said he had been hunting on the upper Porcupine River when he came to a cave filled with bones of big animals. The cave opened onto a valley, and in the valley were fresh tracks, "footprints longer than a rifle." Joe followed the tracks to a lake, and in the lake stood a creature of size and shape he had never seen, or heard of around the campfire.

"He is throwing water over himself with his long nose, and his two front teeth stand out before his head for ten gunlengths, turned up and shining like a swan's wing in the sunlight. Alongside him, this cabin would be like a two-week boar cub beside its mother."

Tukeman said Joe wouldn't guide him to the cave but told a younger tribesman named Paul how to get to the mammoth stomping grounds. They found the cave, found the valley, and, sure enough, found a mammoth. But how does one bag a mammoth?

Tukeman theorized that most mammoths had disappeared during a period of intense volcanic activity. If so, the descendants of the survivors would hate fires.

So he and Paul built a shooting platform in a tree. Then they built a smudgy fire below the tree. Sure enough, the mammoth came to stamp it out. All the time the mammoth was stomping, they were shooting. Killed him, too.

It took weeks to skin the monster and cut out its enormous tusks. After measuring the internal organs, they left the valley with the trophy skin and tusks. Somehow they managed to descend the Porcupine to the Yukon, the Yukon to the Bering, and from there they made it to Seattle.

Tukeman wrote that his plan was to turn the specimen over to the British Museum, but a shy American millionaire bought it, had the skin stuffed and presented it, anonymously, to the Smithsonian. He wanted no credit for his charity and pledged Tukeman to remain silent until after his death. He had died in 1898 leaving Tukeman free to tell the story.

Mammoth stories were always worth repeating. This one appeared in McClure's, a publication largely devoted to serious stuff. The mammoth yarn was sandwiched between an essay by Gov. Theodore Roosevelt of New York on the career of Admiral George Dewey and a report from Paris on the trial of Captain Alfred Dreyfus for alleged treason.

Not only did Tukeman's mammoth whopper stimulate arguments in saloons from Tacoma to Dawson City, it drew swarms of visitors to the Smithsonian. They wanted to see the creature that in one account had become "big as a governor's house, with tusks as long as the moral law, and a tail resembling the mainmast on a clipper ship." Told that the Smithsonian had no such exhibit, that no mammoths had existed for thousands of years, they were indignant with the Smithsonian.

Finally, the Smithsonian's paleontology expert, Charles Schuchert called a press conference. He and a representative from McClure's explained that Henry Tukeman was really an American short story writer named H.T. Hann. McClure's editors had thought the fantasy was so apparent that there had been no need to identify it as fiction. The mammoth tale was not intended as a hoax, just "an interesting story without foundation in fact."

Here's a link to the website;

http://www.tpl.lib.wa.us/v2/NWROOM/MORGAN/Tukeman.htm

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woh,that's some work redcurran i must say eh,posting all your replies with the identical messages 'don't forget to check out American Monsters!','come visit American Monsters',bla...bla......just get it straight pal,you're promoting your site eh?crap..... disgust.gif

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You've got a point, and an apology due... it was a long night, and I was just trying to get folks to take a look. A tactless tactic, I admit, just trying to offer some additional resources for those interested. Don't judge the work based on my lack of online etiquette.

If I post, it will be with propa' responses from now on!

Truce?

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Red,

An easier, diplomatic way to advertise your site would be to contact the webmaster/administrator of this forum Saruman. Click on his name under any category listing and send him an Instant Message requesting that you do a banner exchange between sites, or alternately apply for inclusion to his web ring. That way interested parties will have access to your site without all the hassle of spaming the threads with links to your articles and photographs. Just a friendly suggestion.

Magikman

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