Sacred Places: The Grand Mesa,(Thigunawat) Colorado and the legend of the Thunderbirds.

The Ute name for Grand Mesa is 'Thigunawat' which roughly translates into 'Home of the departed spirits'. Another name for the place is 'Thunder Mountain'...

The Grand Mesa is at 10,000’, being the largest flat-top mountain in the world, rising more than a mile above the valley floor. It is almost entirely located within the Grand Mesa National Forest.


In the valley below there are some 200 small natural lakes that provide some world class trout fishing.


Part of the Thunderbird legend comes from a natural rock outcropping on the side of the mesa.


did you spot it on far left...? No maybe this will help




Another hard to see from the photos are 3 exposed white limestone formations. Ute Legend had it there 3 Thunderbird nests atop Grand Mesa and the white lines on the cliff faces were the bones and droppings from those Monster birds.



At the very base of the Mesa as legend tells, lived a giant serpent.

As for the legend itself.
Long ago a Ute Chef and his son had camped out at the base of the Mesa. while he was away hunting, 'Bahaa Nieche' one of the Thunderbirds swooped into camp and took his son. The chief angry dressed himself up in the sacred red cedar and began to climb the cliffs up to where the nest's were. it took all day to make that climb and when the giant birds flew overhead the Chef would hold very still to make himself look like a tree.

when he got to the top the Chef found his son had already been devoured. to take revenge on the thunderbirds he threw their chicks out of the nest where they fell to the base of the cliff's and were quickly eaten by the great serpent who lived below.

Later when the thunderbirds returned and saw their nests empty, they suspected the serpent and swooped down took him in their talons and carried him up as high as their wings would take them. there in the air they ripped apart the giant snake apart with the beaks and claws and as the pieces fell back to earth they hit with such tremendous force, they created the hundreds of small lakes that dot the valley floor.


Now you could say this was nothing an old campfire story about giant monster birds who carried off Indian children to eat them... I mean sure no bird that big has ever flown over the sky's of the Western US, right?

Still there is another story. In April of 1890, two cowboys supposedly killed one of these great birds in Arizona and dragged it to town. Legend says it had featherless wings and a face like an alligator. In a story that appeared in the Tombstone Epitaph on April 26, 1890, the creature’s wingspan was 160 feet, the body was 92 feet long and 50 inches around the middle, and the head was eight feet long. Curiously, one wonders how the cowboys managed to drag this gigantic carcass to town with nothing but their two horses. Sounds like a tall tale, especially since the photograph that was supposedly taken at the time is missing.

but here are a few others to give you an idea of what they claim to have found.




Well that is the legend of Grand Mesa and the Thunderbirds.
and before you write it off as just another campfire story...remember most of these old legends do have some basis in fact.

Interestingly enough, the Dine (Navajo) have a similar tale of a great bird that gets slain by Nayenezgani (Monster Slayer), one of the Hero Twins. Here's a quote from Raymond Friday Locke's Book of the Navajo on this part of the Hero Twin tale:

The Hero Twin tarried at home only one day; then he set off to destroy Tsenhale, that monster whose father was a bunch of eagle feathers. He traveled far until he came to a great black rock which looks like a bird, and while he was walking along there, he heard a tremendous rushing sound overhead, like the sound of a whirlwind. Looking up, he saw a creature of great size, something like an eagle in form, flying toward him from the East.(pg. 117)

I put the interesting part in bold as relating to Grand Mesa because it references a great black rock that looks like a bird. What I've found is that the Navajo tend to describe places based on distinguishing features so someplace like Black Mesa is called Black Mesa because parts of the mesa are blacker than other mesas in the area. All Navajo names are descriptive like that. The other fun quote is the death of Tsenhale, this tremendous bird monster.

He had not waited long when drops of rain began to fall, thunder rolled, lightning flashed, and the male Tsenhale returned and perched on the rock to which the young (Tsenhale's children) had pointed. Whereupon Monster Slayer hurled a lightning arrow and the monster tumbled to the foot of Winged Rock, dead.(pg. 117)

So why did I bold "lightning arrow"? Well, in the Navajo language, lightning is called "atsint'lish". Again, the Navajo language is a descriptive language so this word is actually a combination of words to become a name. In this case, the interesting part is "tl'ish" and "tl'ish" means snake. So the arrows that Nayennezgani uses to kill Tsenhale, the great bird, are made out of lightning--which is a sky snake.

Ah ha!

a reply to: HardCorps

Beautiful country and a very interesting story. I've seen pictures of the large bird before but never knew it's story.

I'll have to watch the video later today but the legend of the thunderbird is definitely interesting. It's also interesting that another tribe has a legend of a large bird, as WhiteAlice posted.

a reply to: WhiteAlice
My grandpa used to tell me all these stories...
according to him the Thunderbirds used to live top of Shiprock.. But when all the people came they moved to Chimney Rock....

I Think all the tribes around here all have some Monster bird stores. Dine, Ute, Arapahoe ... comes pard and parcel with living in this part of world.

BTW... Butch Cassidy was supposed to have a hide-out in the Grand mesa valley and up on the Face o the cliff's ... is suppose to be a hidden cave that only the Ute chef's knew how to find.

a reply to: HardCorps

I have seen a photo years ago of Union soldiers around a Pterodactyl and it looked authentic , the bottom photo you used looks staged to me but i have never come across that photo since

answers.yahoo.com...
The original has gone through many tests of authenticity including carbon-dating and bimolecular compounding, and it has been concluded that this photo is in fact real.



powerpointparadise.com...

i think i found it

a reply to: douglas5
I have looked at theNewspaper in question. hoping to find a photograph... nothing... but there were a lot of little local newspapers
back then... Just have to go threw all of them one at a time I guess...

a reply to: Jennyfrenzy

The Navajo and Ute are geographic neighbors, albeit unfriendly ones according to my Navajo ex. Whether the story of Tsenhale is an adoption of Ute legend or not is hard to say but the Hero Twins and Monster Slayer, in particular, are very much Navajo legend. While it might seem odd that the Navajo might have adopted the legend from an enemy tribe, with the Navajo, it's uniquely possible as portions of their beliefs also stem from the Pueblo, another neighboring tribe. Of course, the Pueblo adoptions to the belief system were relating to corn growing, which the Pueblo decided to do to slow down Navajo raids.

Obviously, there's no corn growing reason for the potential adoption of the Thunderbird type story; however, there is a couple Navajo clans that have an Ute lineage--the Nóóda'i (Ute) dine'é Táchii'nii and Nóóda'í dine'é clans are both Ute in origin. Clan formation within the Navajo is based on the maternal start of the clan so for both the Ute Táchii'nii and Ute Dine, their starts would've been Ute women, who could very well have brought in Ute beliefs to the tribe. Unlike in other cultures, captives by the Navajo were treated as equals and adopted into the tribe--especially if they bore Dine children. I was adopted into the clan for giving birth to my daughter and I suppose, based on the above, that would make her primary clan Bilagáana (White People) dine'é. Those two clans Ute origins, however, do indicate a blending of the tribes.

a reply to: HardCorps

Lack of a picture is not key to the existence or not of those creatures in those days. It was not yet the time for "pics or it didn't happen." The telegraph was the source of info transmission in those day and it had no capability to transmit photographs. That is why drawings were common to depict important events.

originally posted by: HardCorps
a reply to: WhiteAlice
My grandpa used to tell me all these stories...
according to him the Thunderbirds used to live top of Shiprock.. But when all the people came they moved to Chimney Rock....

I Think all the tribes around here all have some Monster bird stores. Dine, Ute, Arapahoe ... comes pard and parcel with living in this part of world.

BTW... Butch Cassidy was supposed to have a hide-out in the Grand mesa valley and up on the Face o the cliff's ... is suppose to be a hidden cave that only the Ute chef's knew how to find.

Yep, pretty sure all the tribes do, too. It makes it really hard to say whether or not there were very big birds buzzing around the skies at one point or if the story got passed along between them. Taking a look at Chimney Rock, it doesn't surprise me that there's a legend surrounding something living atop it. It reminds me of the great pillar in Canyon de Chelly with its spire that is supposed to house Spider Woman.

And the treasure stories, too. I heard from my Navajo ex and his uncles, one of whom was determined to find it, knew of a Spanish cache that was stashed somewhere in the Painted Desert area. The story goes that someone out there found the armor of a Conquistador so who knows but it's enough of a tale that one of those uncles does poke around for it.

a reply to: WhiteAlice

Meet the planet mercury in arc mode. Travelling through ancient skies.

Personifed later on by the Egyptians as Thoth/Hermes - Buddha to the Far East. Apollo to the Greeks. etc etc


The Great Hermaphrodite - embodying both the Feminine (Suns Charge) and Masculine (Saturn's Charge).

a reply to: douglas5

In the Yahoo link.....At the bottom he tells you he is joking.......

a reply to: ParanoidAmerican


powerpointparadise.com...

Have a look at this site for the photo

a reply to: douglas5

...oh and who did this testing? How would you 'C-14 test' a photo of that period?

Mark me extremely skeptical of such claims. Naturalists of the time were very interested in dinosaurs and the large mammals being found, I find it highly unlikely that such creatures would have existed and no notice was taken of them.

originally posted by: 131415
a reply to: WhiteAlice

Meet the planet mercury in arc mode. Travelling through ancient skies.

Personifed later on by the Egyptians as Thoth/Hermes - Buddha to the Far East. Apollo to the Greeks. etc etc


The Great Hermaphrodite - embodying both the Feminine (Suns Charge) and Masculine (Saturn's Charge).

Uhhhh, next time, please utilize full sentences and it'll go a long way in making your posts more comprehensible. As it currently is, I do not see at all how what you wrote in response to my post on geographic location and intermarriage between tribes is in any way, shape or form related to what I said.

Well there was mammoths still alive on a tiny Island up until around 700BC, and giant man eating Eagles in the south Pacific around up until around 1400AD! They hunted Moa's mostly until humans killed all them off so the eagles started going after pretty much anything even people.

So I can see this actually being something real, the tail end of an old species of a giant flying creature. Unfortunately they were probably the last of their kind and just died off or were hunted by people.

originally posted by: WhiteAlice

originally posted by: 131415
a reply to: WhiteAlice

Meet the planet mercury in arc mode. Travelling through ancient skies.

Personifed later on by the Egyptians as Thoth/Hermes - Buddha to the Far East. Apollo to the Greeks. etc etc


The Great Hermaphrodite - embodying both the Feminine (Suns Charge) and Masculine (Saturn's Charge).

Uhhhh, next time, please utilize full sentences and it'll go a long way in making your posts more comprehensible. As it currently is, I do not see at all how what you wrote in response to my post on geographic location and intermarriage between tribes is in any way, shape or form related to what I said.

Sorry didn't mean to quote you.



But since you got your knickers in a knot:

1. Elevation is the biggest indicator of its relationship to the god's (Those guys living up in Heaven) Most commonly referred to as THE PLANETS (Saturn, Mars, Jupiter, Mercury, Uranus, Neptune and the most recent addition Venus.)

2. You'll also generally find a clear unobstructed view of horizon. A wonderful example of the planet Mercury depicted as a Giant Bird can be found at Pottery Point in Louisiana. Other observations from ancient (2400BC and later) will generally be aligned to a NorthWest by SouthEast orientation. Indicating where they were literally seen in the skies.


The intermarriage of tribes? I'm not sure what this means. Is it a common philosophical identity your hinting at? Or is it more of a shared form of artistic expression? Both of which are firmly rooted in the religious concepts of ancient mans notion of God(s). When one for example leaves the viewpoint of humans on planet earth - entire religious constructs are replaced by the more important deity. For Example: Venus Figurines (the polar column of planets seen orbiting earth resembling that of a seated woman) and Matriarchal societies are replaced with more relevant cosmological references and Patriarchs. (The Eye of Ra, Eye of Providence) seen universally residing above our celestial North Pole.

This process is repeated throughout mankind's history ultimately culminating in the only Deity worthy of our worship today - SOL - our sun. Though Christianity perverts this with 40k years of man's oral and written record - wherein you'll find numerous references to Saturn and Jupiter and the rest of the gang.

The coma, electrical tail, plasma plumes of comets seen entering and exiting our solar system in modern times can help you form a visual basis as to why ancient man drew them as birds. Along with almost every other conceivable visual design / inspiration we have knowledge of over the last 40-50 thousand years.

a reply to: Hanslune

Why did they copy a photo , maybe to discredit it and some of the answers at the bottom of the article do make interesting reading about Yahoo and Google

powerpointparadise.com...

originally posted by: douglas5
a reply to: Hanslune

Why did they copy a photo , maybe to discredit it and some of the answers at the bottom of the article do make interesting reading about Yahoo and Google

powerpointparadise.com...

If you are seriously concerned about these photos here is what I suggest you do:

Find the first mention of their existence. I suspect they will be very modern, post 1960. Second, If you cannot find them in 19th century materials - I think you'll have your answer. You might also want to consider what was required to take a photo at that time. You may also want to trace the history of what was known about that creature in that time frame. (the historic time frame).

www.prairieghosts.com...

The photos, story, personal experiences and articles have been widespread since the 1920's. Pre-"photoshop".

a reply to: Hanslune

If you read my original post i stated that i had seen a earlier photo which looked more genuine to me and i managed to drag it up , and just like today people follow armies about to document and record things maybe the guy had a wagon and a little [ coloured helper ] to hold the flash for him .