Summary:
Bel Geddes spent the summer of 1913 on the Blackfoot Reservation in Montana working for the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago, furthering a childhood interest in Native American culture and dress. By 1915 Geddes and his first wife, Helen Belle Sneider, had written a four-act play recounting the Blackfoot tribe’s legend of a multi-colored bird that appeared during a storm as a manifestation of thunder.
Thunderbird, with music by Charles Wakefield Cadman, was planned for production at Aline Barnsdall’s Los Angeles Little Theatre but appears to have never been performed.