Rocky Mountain Horned Dragons and the DSU

"Feathered like the Coatls of Central America, but horny scales cover it as well.  It bears semblance to the Horned Lizard.  Although it is unknown if it can spit blood like it's lizard counterpart.  The feathers are brown, gray and yellow.  Formidable with earth and air magicks.  

This brood of dragons evaded the dragon slaying that dominated pre-Columbian North America.  They are now near-extinct, thought to have been extinct until recent reports.  Unlike European or Asian broods, dragons in North America were almost wiped out entire by Native American Slayers.  The typical adult female is forty to fifty feet long, with a sixty-foot wingspan.

Fewer in number, these dragons are far more vicious than even their European cousins.  Evidence suggests that this brood destroyed major Rocky Mountain Civilizations (the Obelisk People).   This would have been around 400 CE.  Native American Slayers drove them to near extinction.  But not before these Horned monsters succeeded in making core cities impossible to recognize.  The ruins are slag works easily mistaken for rocks or volcanic activity. 

The United States Multiversal Survey believed that any remaining members of this brood were either too old or too remote to be a major threat.  That has changed in the last few years.  

They've recommended the formation of a new Dragon Slaying Unit.  Congress has denied the funds to the USMS to begin the program on a repeated basis.  If any younger members of the brood emerge, it could result in devastation.  They could create vast damage in the Rocky Mountain regions within the US and Canada."

USMS Dragon Consensus Report, from its North America Region Supernatural Survey Unit (April 2012).

English immigrant Amelia King founded the first Dragon Slaying Unit in 1790.  It began as part of the treasury department.  Alexander Hamilton hired King after her stunning killing of Old Salt.  Old Salt was a vicious dragon that had migrated to the east coast.  Known as the Bureau of Draconic Management, they operated on their own for most of the 19th century.  Theodore Roosevelt merged them into the new United States Multiversal Survey in 1907.

The DSU has had continued off and on since.  Protests in the 1970s led to the disbanding of the five regional Dragon Slaying Units.  Most dragons had been slain, or so protestors claimed.  News refused to cover the protests.  Worse, several congressmen opposed funding the division.  The belief that dragons either were extinct or never had existed, which drove funding away from the DSU.

The USMS itself went under restructuring in the 80s.  The lack of multiversal and other supernatural events gave their decades of records no merit.  The DSU and other parts of the USMS were seen as government waste or nepotism.  Their loss has always been cast as being part of efforts to reform.

Private Dragon Slaying companies, on the other hand, never achieved the same rate of slayings as the DSU.  Even before being part of the USMS, the DSU put down around fifty dragons that had come to terrorize the west.  Dragon Slaying companies and other private ventures would only protect land belonging to Railroads.  Small towns in the western US that came across dragons turned to the DSU for help and often got it.

Recent years have suggested the return of many ancient Dragon Broods native to North America.  The suggestion that Dragonsteeth or some other means has led to their return, remains unconfirmed.  Ancient Dragons are unknowns.  No DSU currently exists in the USMS.  Few, if any Americans living today, possess the know-how and experience to slay a fully grown dragon or be able to withstand their dragonfear.