The Giant and How He Humbugged America Read online

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  THE CAST OF CHARACTERS

  I.

  The Discovery

  II.

  Word Spreads

  III.

  The Scientists’ Opinions

  IV.

  Open for Business

  V.

  Changes

  VI.

  Embarrassing Accusations

  VII.

  The Ugly Truth

  VIII.

  A Giant Move

  IX.

  Enter Barnum

  X.

  Giant Problems All Around

  XI.

  A Giant Farewell

  XII.

  A Final Resting Place

  OTHER FAMOUS HOAXES

  A WORD ABOUT MY RESEARCH

  SOURCE NOTES

  SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY

  INDEX

  About the Author

  Copyright

  THOSE WHO DUG UP THE GIANT

  Gideon Emmons

  Henry Nichols

  John Parker

  Smith Woodmansee

  THE GIANT’S ORIGINAL OWNERS

  George Hull

  Henry Martin

  Edward Burkhardt

  William “Stub” Newell

  THOSE WHO FIRST SPREAD WORD ABOUT THE GIANT

  John Haynes

  John Clark

  Silas Forbes

  PEOPLE WHO BELIEVED THAT THE GIANT WAS A PETRIFIED MAN

  Billy Houghton

  Eugene Cuykendall

  Elizah Park

  Henry Dana

  Miron McDonald

  E. F. Owen

  Ashbil Searle

  EARLY BELIEVERS THAT THE GIANT WAS AN ANCIENT STATUE

  John Boynton

  Wills De Hass

  James Hall

  THOSE WHO QUESTIONED THE GIANT’S AUTHENTICITY

  James Lawrence

  Fillmore Smith

  O. C. Marsh

  Galusha Parsons

  ORIGINAL SYNDICATE THAT BOUGHT THREE-QUARTERS OWNERSHIP OF THE GIANT

  William Spencer

  Amos Westcott

  ­David Hannum

  Amos Gillett

  (not mentioned by name in this book)

  Simeon Rouse

  (not mentioned by name in this book)

  Alfred Higgins

  (not mentioned by name in this book)

  SOME OF THE LATER OWNERS OF THE GIANT

  Benjamin Son

  John Rankin

  Calvin O. Gott

  Stephen Thorne

  Gardner Cowles Jr.

  THOSE WHO CREATED THE GIANT’S TWIN

  P. T. Barnum

  George Wood

  Carl Franz Otto

  THOSE WHO HELPED CREATE THE GIANT

  Frederick Mohrmann

  Henry Salle

  OTHER PLAYERS IN THE GIANT’S STORY

  Lydia Newell

  Joshua V. Clark

  James Andrews

  Andrew White

  Colonel Joseph H. Wood

  Avery Fellows

  ­Thomas B. Ellis

  Henry B. Turk

  George Barnard

  William “Boss” Tweed

  Ezra Walrath

  Horace Greeley

  Samuel Crocker

  THOSE INVOLVED IN THE NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC SCANDAL

  Christopher P. Sloan

  Storrs Olson

  William Allen

  PEOPLE INVOLVED IN OTHER ARCHAEOLOGICAL FRAUDS

  Johann Beringer

  ­David Wyrick

  Charles Dawson

  Sir Arthur Smith Woodward

  Gerrit S. Miller

  Joseph Weiner

  Shinichi Fujimura

  Shizuo Oda

  Charles T. Keally

  “On Saturday morning last the quiet little village of Cardiff . . . was thrown into an excitement without precedent, by the report that a human body had been exhumed in a petrified state, the colossal dimensions of which had never been the fortune of inhabitants of the little village to behold . . .”

  Syracuse Daily Courier, October 18, 1869

  The Saturday morning of October 16, 1869, was cool and damp in Cardiff, New York, as Gideon Emmons headed up the twisting dirt road. To one side, the maple and hickory trees had turned Bear Mountain into a blazing mass of yellow, orange, and scarlet leaves. It was a spectacular autumn scene, but Emmons hardly noticed. He was nursing a throbbing headache from drinking too much whiskey the night before. At 7:30 or so, Emmons met up with his friend Henry Nichols, and the two continued walking north.

  They were going to William Newell’s farm to dig a well for him. Nichols often did manual labor for Newell, who was his brother-in-law. He would perform simple chores, such as building stone walls, fixing leaky roofs, or cutting and stacking cornstalks. But this sort of work was unusual for Emmons.

  Emmons had lost his left arm in the Civil War four years before, so he wouldn’t be very useful at digging. Newell may have thought Emmons would be good at moving rocks and small stones from the hole while Nichols did the actual digging. Or he may have wanted to be charitable, since there wasn’t much work available in a farming community for a one-armed man who drank a little too much.

  A view from the cornfield of Stub Newell’s farm. (Onondaga Historical Association Museum & Research Center)

  Twenty minutes later, Emmons and Nichols arrived at the plain white farmhouse where Newell and his wife, Lydia, lived with their young son, William Jr. Newell, who was also called “Stub” because he wasn’t very tall, greeted them and immediately led them down a sloping hill to behind his barn. The ground there was spongy and wet, and the broad expanse that stretched out before them was more like a soggy marsh than a pleasant meadow. Fortunately, Newell pointed to a dry, raised area ten feet from the barn and told Emmons and Nichols to dig the well there. He thought they might hit a good supply of water if they went down around four feet.

  While the two young men began their work, Newell went back to his house where another day laborer, John Parker, waited. Newell was impatient to get his well dug and had a carefully thought-out plan for the day. While the well was being dug, he and Parker were going to select the stones that would eventually line the inside of the well and bring them to the site. Later in the morning, a fourth man, Smith Woodmansee, would arrive to stone the well.

  Newell’s plan ran into trouble from the start. The ground behind the barn was rocky and bound tight by a thick growth of clover and dead tree roots. Nichols chopped and hacked at the roots and paused often to let Emmons move rocks away from the hole. After almost three hours of backbreaking work, he had only managed to dig down two and a half feet.

  Newell was dumping a third load of lining stones at the well site when a loud clank rang out. Nichols had hit something solid. After banging his shovel on it several more times, Newell decided he’d hit a large stone and went to get a pick. While Newell was gone, his two workers continued to dig and clear the area around the stone. But they discovered something startling. The blue-gray stone was shaped exactly like a foot. A very large foot!

  “I declare,” one of the workers said, “some old Indian has been buried here!”

  Emmons or Nichols shouted for Newell to come see what they’d just uncovered. Newell hurried to find out what the commotion was about, trailed by Parker and the newly arrived Woodmansee.

  The five men stood around the foot, debating what they should do next. They wanted to know if they had really discovered a body, but hesitated, worried that the rest of it might be a rotting, stinking mess. Just then a horse and wagon driven by John Hayne
s came rattling up the road, headed for a fair in Syracuse. Woodmansee recognized Haynes and called out, “They have found a man’s foot down there!”

  By the time Haynes joined the others, Nichols had begun digging again. Haynes remembered looking into the hole and muttering, “It is a foot.” Haynes found himself as curious as the others and eager for action. “I took a shovel and got down into the hole,” he would later recall, “and as fast as they uncovered the body toward the head, I cleared the dirt off about up to the hand on the belly.”

  They worked quickly and managed to uncover the entire body in a matter of minutes. The diggers scrambled from the hole and all six men stood there, gazing in astonishment. Despite its being covered by a gnarly old tree root, they could see it was indeed a human body. A very old-looking one at that. And big. In fact, at ten feet, four inches long, it was nothing if not a giant.

  Even though it seemed worn and eroded in places, it was very detailed anatomically, with ribs, fingernails, toenails, muscles, and Adam’s apple clearly visible. But it was the facial features that truly mesmerized the men. Eyes gently closed and mouth set in a calm, straight line, the giant looked serene. As if he was sleeping peacefully and might wake up at any moment.

  Calvin Gott took the only known photographs of the Cardiff Giant when it was still on Stub Newell’s property. (Library of Congress)

  Someone suggested the figure might be an ancient member of the Onondaga Indian tribe. The Onondagas had once had many settlements in the area, including a large village up along Onondaga Creek, only a few miles from where they now stood. The men had grown up hearing Onondaga stories about the Stone Giants, very tall creatures that terrorized the region in the distant past. They had always taken the stories to be more myth than reality. But maybe what they were staring at was proof that the giants really had existed.

  Newell, though, had another, more troubling explanation. He told his friends that an earlier owner of his farm had found a long, straightedge razor in a hollowed-out tree stump. Newell said he was worried that what the previous owner had found was actually a murder weapon and that they had just unearthed the murder victim. He went on to say he did not like the thought that the killer could still be living nearby and might not like that they had found the body. Newell then proposed something almost as startling as the giant himself. He wanted to shovel the dirt back into the hole and forget about the whole thing.

  A close-up view of the Cardiff Giant. (The New York State Historical Association Library)

  Of course, it was already too late to hide the giant. Other folk heading toward Syracuse stopped to see why people were gathering at Newell’s farm, then told others they met on the road. His hired help also spread the word when they went home. By late afternoon, a sizable and noisy crowd of men, women, and children had gathered behind Newell’s barn.

  There was much chatter among those assembled about what they were looking at and where it had come from. A local store owner, Billy Houghton, speculated that the giant was in fact a petrified human being, and that underground water had chemically transformed the dead man’s flesh into stone. There was a buzz of agreement from the crowd. After all, hundreds of marine and plant fossils had been unearthed in area farms and quarries. Why not a human?

  Oddly enough, the visitors to Newell’s farm didn’t seem at all surprised that there was a giant lying in the muddy hole. They had also grown up with the Onondaga stories of giants as well as legends about giants from other countries. And no less an authority than the first president of the Onondaga Historical Association, Joshua V. Clark, had reported finding numerous large fossilized skulls and bones in the town of Delphi. Clark did not realize they were the remains of mastodons and other animals, so he solemnly informed his neighbors that “the skeletons taken from [Delphi] have usually been of a size averaging far above that of common men. Several exceeded seven feet.”

  This scene, from the biblical story told in 1 Samuel, shows young ­David frightening off an invading army by displaying the severed head of Goliath. (© The Granger Collection)

  Another reason they didn’t seem surprised was that the Bible expressly confirmed that giants had existed in the distant past. Most of the residents of Cardiff (and most of America, for that matter) had been brought up to believe that the Bible was an accurate historical record, that everything it said was literally true. There, in black and white, it told how young David had slain the giant named Goliath. And there was Og, whose very name meant “gigantic,” who was killed by Moses’s army at the Battle of Edrei. Very few at the Newell farm questioned the existence of giants.

  As the day wore along, and more and more neighbors came to visit, ideas were offered about what to do with the giant. Many thought it might prove to be a moneymaker, and several people offered hundreds of dollars to buy it outright from Newell or to own a small share of future profits. James Andrews stunned the crowd when he offered Newell a piece of land valued at over $1,000 (which one economist estimated was equivalent to $17,000 in today’s money). Andrews was a Methodist preacher, and he might have seen the giant as proof positive that the Bible was truly God’s Word come true.

  Newell appreciated all the offers but said he would like to sleep on them before making any decision. Others thought the giant should be removed from his grave site and brought to the fair in Syracuse. It was possible, they suggested, that someone in that sophisticated city would know something about its origins. At the very least, they added, Newell could charge money to let people take a quick glance at what everyone felt was an important discovery. Newell thought this was a good idea, and several men dashed off to get heavy ropes to haul the stone giant up.

  The Cardiff Giant resting in his watery grave. (The New York State Historical Association Library)

  While all this was taking place, another real concern came up. Literally. Water from an underground stream was slowly filling in the hole. By the time the sun began to set, the giant was almost completely covered, and Newell fretted that the water might somehow damage his potential source of income. When the men returned with the ropes, it was completely dark and Newell decided it was now too risky to attempt to move the giant. It had lasted in the wet ground for hundreds, maybe thousands of years, he reasoned, so another night would probably not damage it much.

  Lanterns were lit and Newell decided he would stand guard throughout the night. Neighbors began drifting home after this, and soon Newell was alone in the flickering yellow light, wondering what the future held for him and his giant.

  Even as Newell kept watch, word of the giant was spreading beyond the borders of Cardiff. John Clark was a lawyer and traveling temperance lecturer who had spoken in the village on Saturday evening about the evils of alcohol. Unfortunately, hardly anyone attended his talk. Afterward, he had gone to take a moonlit look at the giant, his chief rival for attention that day. Then he went back home to Syracuse. Before retiring, Clark went to a number of hotels to share news about the great find.

  He soon discovered that several ­people had already heard about the discovery. One of the original men to see the giant, John Haynes, had traveled on to the fair and had begun spreading the news there. Another visitor to Newell’s farm was Stub’s nearby neighbor, Silas Forbes. Forbes had business beyond Syracuse to the north, but he went out of his way to visit the office of a local newspaper, the Syracuse Daily Standard, to describe what he had seen to the editor. The Daily Standard would call the giant “the chief topic of conversation” and estimated that over 10,000 ­people—one-third of the city’s population—had heard about it within twenty-four hours.

  Newell, of course, had no idea this was happening. At dawn on Sunday, he finally went to bed, completely exhausted and eager for a long sleep. But it seemed that no sooner had he put his head to his soft pillow than the sounds of clomping horses and creaking wagons were heard, followed by the murmur of a gathering crowd. Most of these visitors were from surrounding villages, such as Lafayette and Tully, though a goodly number of Cardiff
residents returned for a second look. By the end of the morning, visitors from Syracuse began to arrive as well.

  Among the earliest visitors were ­people from the Onondaga tribe, who were in the city for the fair. Obviously, the Onondaga knew their ancestors had once had villages near Newell’s farm and wondered if this giant was related to those from their ancient lore. Almost immediately, they noticed something that none of the other visitors had: The giant had distinct Caucasian features and clearly ­wasn’t related to their past.

  An interior view of an Onondaga longhouse. (New York State Museum, Albany)

  At about the same time as the Onondaga were making their inspection, four new visitors created a stir in the crowd. Eugene Cuykendall, Elizah Park, Henry Dana, and Miron McDonald were local doctors who asked if Newell wanted them to inspect and offer an opinion on his find. Newell accepted.

  The good doctors circled the hole several times, carefully studying the prone figure and commenting to one another in whispers. It ­didn’t seem to matter that the giant was still nearly covered with murky water, which made it hard for them to get a close or clear look at the body. After much consultation, Cuykendall, Park, Dana, and McDonald made their solemn pronouncement: The giant was indeed a petrified man.

  The crowd responded to this news with an approving murmur. Here were real men of science and highly respected figures in the community who had confirmed exactly what almost ­every visitor believed. A giant had lived and died right there in tiny Cardiff. The exhausted Newell perked right up when he heard this. Verification by four learned men meant his discovery was probably even more valuable than he’d originally thought.