The Monster of Partridge Creek, by Georges Dupuy, was a science-fiction short story published in the French magazine Je sais Tout in 1908. An English translation was published in The Strand later that same year. It is considered one of the earliest entries in the Weird West genre, centering as it does on a group of hunters in the Yukon who encounter a living dinosaur. The hunters (one of whom is Dupuy himself) are about to shoot a moose, when it runs away, scared off by the titular monster, which they manage to observe for ten minutes.
The monster itself is 50 feet long, and resembles a two-legged predatory dinosaur with a horn on its nose, with a body covered in what seems to be black fur or feathers. When the characters return to civilization with their story, they are ridiculed and mocked for it, and jokingly compared to Edgar Allan Poe.
The Monster of Partridge Creek is significant in several ways. It was one of the first works of fiction to center around Living Dinosaurs (being published four years before Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's more famous The Lost World (1912)) note . It was also the first work of any kind to depict "feathered" dinosaurs, something that would not happen again for decades.
The story is now in the public domain. You can find the full English version here
or the original French version here.
The Monster Of Partridge Creek contains the following tropes:
- Adaptation Species Change: In the French version of the story, Father Lavagneux identifies the monster as "le cératosaure du cercle arctique", while in The Strand's English translation, the creature is only ever identified as the nonspecific (and nonsensical) "dinosaurus of the Arctic Circle". Downplayed, however, in that the horn on its nose still clearly marks it as some kind of Ceratosaurus (or closely related genus) if you know your dinosaurs, and across this page it is referred to as such.
- Animals Not to Scale: The Monster is described as 50 feet long, much too big to be a Ceratosaurus note .
- Artistic License – Paleontology: The Monster doesn't look much like a Ceratosaurus, the genus it's supposed to be. In addition to being much too big, we now know that real ceratosaurs were scaly rather than feathered. The Monster also drags its tail, which we now know dinosaurs didn't do.
- Badass Preacher: Father Pierre Lavagneux, one of the main characters, is a rugged and outdoorsy Jesuit missionary. He also seems like one of the better-educated characters around, as it's him who identifies what kind of dinosaur they're dealing with.
- Bears Are Bad News: It's mentioned that a local mail-carrier was killed by a brown bear.
- Canadian Western: It's a frontier story set in the Yukon Territory.
- Cassandra Truth: Nobody believes Dupuy and his companions when they return to town.
- Direct Line to the Author: The whole thing is told as though it were a true story, which has led to more than a few people mistaking it for one.
- Gentleman Adventurer: Dupuy presents himself as one of these, an erudite Parisian gentleman who has traveled "the four quarters of the world".
- Goofy Feathered Dinosaur: An Unbuilt Trope; this was the first feathered dinosaur in fiction, but it's not goofy at all. Dupuy was ahead of the curve on this, as we now know there were indeed a few big meat-eating dinosaurs in cold climates that grew shaggy coats to keep warm, most notably the Yutyrannus. The Ceratosaurus itself, however, is not believed to be among them, but a lot could change in 145 million years.
- Hell Is That Noise: The monster's roar is "a hollow, indescribable, frightful sound".
- Lightning Bruiser: Despite the creature's size, it moves "with surprising agility, with movements resembling those of a kangaroo". Again, Dupuy was ahead of his time on this, as many dinosaurs are now known to have been active and agile creatures, although that concept was pushed aside in the timespan between the 1930s and 1970s.
- Living Dinosaurs: The Monster, obviously.
- Our Cryptids Are More Mysterious: A weird example. The short story itself was published as fiction, but that hasn't stopped the Partridge Creek Monster from being included in many listings of "real" cryptids, even though no one ever claimed to have seen it in real life. See Direct Line to the Author above.
- Police Are Useless: An RCMP sergeant is invited to come on the excursion to find the beast, but refuses, confident they won't find anything. When our heroes return to report that they did indeed find a living dinosaur, the sergeant doesn't believe them, and has no interest in investigating their story himself.
- Prehistoric Monster: Right there in the title. Downplayed in a few other ways, however, as the monster never presents a direct threat to any of the human characters, and indeed, seems not to even notice they're there, and is more interested in hunting moose and caribou.
- The Savage Indian: Downplayed, but still present, with much of the
Values Dissonance you'd expect from a story written in 1908. The native Klayakuk tribe aren't depicted as dangerous or threatening, but they are frequently referred to as "savage", and Father Lavagneux jokes that when he dies, they'll bury him in a coffin made of twigs. This ties in with the idea of the frontier as a "primitive" place where Living Dinosaurs might plausibly dwell. - Swamp Monster: The monster seems to make its lair in a marshy region around some natural sulphre springs, which ensure that the place stays humid and swampy even during the cold Yukon winter. Justified, since these springs - referred to as "moose-licks" - naturally attract the monster's prey.
- Weird West: A Canadian Western variant. Its premise of rugged frontiersmen encountering something that, by all rights, should not exist fits in very well with this genre. The story is sometimes compared to the earlier The Monster of Lake LaMetrie, another story in which a thought-to-be-extinct-animal turns up on the North American frontier - in that case, an Elasmosaurus living in a Wyoming lake.
- Whateversaurus: Averted in the original French text, which specifically identifies the monster as a Ceratosaurus (which it mostly resembles, aside from its feathered coat and gargantuan size). However, for some strange reason, the English translation only ever refers to it as a "Dinosaurus".
