Cardiff Giant
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Image:Cardiff giant exhumed 1869.jpg
The Cardiff Giant, one of the most famous hoaxes in American history, was a 10-foot-tall "petrified man" discovered October 16, 1869 by workers digging a well behind the barn of William C. "Stub" Newell in Cardiff, New York. It is so famous that both it and an unauthorized copy made by P.T. Barnum are still on display.
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Giant's creation
The Giant was the creation of a New York tobacconist named George Hull. Hull, an atheist, decided to create the giant after an argument with a fundamentalist minister Mr. Turk about a passage in Genesis that stated that there were giants who once lived on earth.
The idea of the petrified man did not originate with Hull, however. In 1858 the newspaper Alta California had published a bogus letter that claimed that a prospector had been petrified when he had drunk a liquid within a geode. Some other newspapers had also published stories of supposedly petrified people.
Hull hired men to carve out a 11-foot-long block of gypsum at Fort Dodge, Iowa, telling them it was intended for a monument of Abraham Lincoln in New York. He shipped the block to Chicago, where he hired a German stonecutter to carve it into likeness of man and swore him to secrecy. Then he transported the giant by rail to the farm of William Newell, his cousin, in November 1868. He had then spent $2,600 on the hoax.
When the giant had been buried for a year, Newell hired two men, Gideon Emmons and Henry Nichols, ostensiblly to dig a well. When they found the Giant, one of them has been attributed to saying "I declare, some old Indian has been buried here!".
Giant exhibited
Newell set up a tent over the giant and charged 25 cents for people who wanted to see it. Two days later he increased the price to 50 cents.
Archaeological scholars pronounced the giant as a fake, and some geologists even noticed that there was no good reason to try to dig a well in the exact spot the giant had been found. Some Christian fundamentalists and preachers, however, defended its legitimacy [1].
Eventually Hull sold his part-interest for $37,500 to a syndicate of five men headed by David Hannum. They moved it to Syracuse, New York for exhibition.
The giant drew such crowds that showman P.T. Barnum offered $60,000 for a three-month lease of it (in his memoirs he said he wanted to buy it). When the syndicate turned him down he hired a man to covertly model the giant's shape in wax and create a plaster replica. He put his giant on display in New York, claiming that his was the real giant and the Cardiff Giant was a fake.
As the newspapers reported Barnum's version of the story, David Hannum was quoted as saying, "There's a sucker born every minute" in reference to the suckers paying to see Barnum's giant. Over time, the quotation has been misattributed to P.T. Barnum himself.
Hannum sued Barnum but the judge told him to get his giant to swear on his own genuineness in court if he wanted a favourable injunction.
Scholars also criticized the giant. Yale palaeontologist Othniel C. Marsh called it "a most decided humbug". On December 10, Hull confessed to the press.
On February 2, 1870 both giants were revealed as fakes in court. The judge ruled that Barnum could not be sued for calling a fake giant a fake.
Imitators
The Cardiff Giant inspired number of similar hoaxes. In 1876 The Solid Muldoon emerged in Beulah, Colorado and was exhibited at 50 cents a ticket. There was also a rumour that Barnum had offered to buy it for $20,000. One employer later revealed that this was also a creation of George Hull, aided by Willian Conant. The Solid Muldoon was made of clay, ground bones, meat, rock dust and plaster.
In 1877 in Lake Cayuga, New York, Taughannock House hotel owner hired men to create a fake petrified man and place it where the workers that were expanding the hotel would dig it up. One of the men who had buried the giant later revealed the truth when drunk.
In 1892 Jefferson "Soapy" Smith, de factor ruler of the town of Creede, Colorado, created a petrified man out of concrete and exhibited for $1 a ticket. He named it McGinty and claimed he had bought it from couple of miners. When the locals got bored and an expert was coming to inspect it, he shipped it to Denver.
In 1899 one petrified man found in Fort Benton, Montana was "identified" as US Civil War General Thomas Meagher. Meagher had drowned in Missouri two years previously. The petrified man was transported to New York for exhibition.
Current resting place
The Cardiff Giant appeared in the 1901 Pan-American Exposition but did not attract much attention. An Iowa publisher bought it later. In 1947 he sold it to Farmer's Museum in Cooperstown, New York, where it is still on display. Barnum's duplicate is on display at Marvin's Marvelous Mechanical Museum, a coin-operated game arcade/museum of oddities in Farmington Hills, Michigan.
Popular culture
- In 1870, Mark Twain wrote "A Ghost Story" in which the ghost of the Cardiff Giant appears in the hotel room in Manhattan to demand that he be reburied. The Giant is so confused that he haunts Barnum's plaster copy of himself.
- American Goliath by Harvey Jacobs is a 1997 novel based on the Cardiff Giant.
- The film Made contains a fictional agency named Cardiff Giant.
References
- Mark Rose - When Giants Roamed the Earth (Archaeology magazine, November/December 2005)