The Giant and How He Humbugged America

by Jim Murphy

  Hull realized that to create a stone giant would require a very large block of stone and a skilled sculptor, and that both would cost more money than he had. After a brief search, he came upon Henry Martin, a successful blacksmith and inventor. Hull told Martin about his scheme and made him an equal partner in exchange for cash to cover half the giant’s expense. Hull got the other half of the required money by burning down two of his own cigar businesses and collecting the insurance.

  A mule-drawn wagon filled with chunks of gypsum, the material from which Hull’s giant was made. (Utah Historical Society)

  After several months of scouting suitable stone quarries, Martin found the perfect material from which to fashion a giant: Fort Dodge (Iowa) gypsum. This particular gypsum was abundant and fairly inexpensive; it was also soft and easily carved. Hull and Martin ran into a problem when a prominent Fort Dodge quarry owner took a disliking to them and refused to cut them a huge block of gypsum. It seemed as if the scheme was at a dead end when Hull learned about a Chicago marble dealer named Edward Burkhardt.

  Burkhardt was used to handling large and very heavy slabs of quarried material. He had the skilled workers who could excavate and transport the stone and had contacts with a number of sculptors. Burkhardt liked the idea of producing a giant sculpture and making money from it, so he agreed to help as long as he was made an equal partner and as long as he was paid his regular fees for any work he did.

  At the end of June, the three men rented an acre of land in Fort Dodge and set a team of workers digging and cutting out their gypsum block. The 6,560-pound slab was loaded onto a sturdy army wagon and slowly hauled forty miles to a railroad station in Montana, where it was shipped to Chicago. Burkhardt then brought in marble cutter Frederick Mohrmann as well as his assistant, Henry Salle, to design a clay model of a giant and sculpt it. Both Mohrmann and Salle were paid a flat fee for their labors, with a promise of more money once the scheme began paying off.

  With Hull, Martin, and Burkhardt advising (and Hull actually posing for the sculpture), Mohrmann and Salle went to work. Eighteen days later they presented the partners with a giant. This first version sported curly hair on the giant’s head, which Hull had removed. Hull had learned from his various readings that hair could never be fossilized.

  “On the under side of the body I cut away some places,” Hull told a reporter years later, “as I did not wish to have the giant too perfect, because there should be some parts of his flesh which had not petrified and therefore rotted away.” He further aged his creation by having the cutters sand it head to toe to make it look worn, colored it with blue ink, and then washed the entire surface with sulfuric acid. A final, creative touch was to pound knitting needles through a piece of wood and whack the giant all over to create tiny pores in the skin.

  Once aged to perfection, Hull and company had to find a spot to bury and unearth their giant. The key was to locate a place where fossils were common so that finding the giant would not seem so unusual or odd. Places were considered in Connecticut, Massachusetts, and even Mexico. Finally, Hull suggested that somewhere in western New York State might be the best place because, as Hull recalled, “Geologists say it was at one time a lake, and many petrified fish and reptiles have been found there. . . .”

  On September 24, 1868, the statue—now weighing 3,720 pounds—departed Chicago via the railroad in an iron-bound box headed for New York State. While waiting for it to arrive, Hull visited several villages trying to find the best location. In the end, he decided that Stub Newell’s farm was just about perfect. Newell, eager to make a buck, was brought in as an equal partner, and Hull arranged to have the giant transported there.

  Hull next hired two men, one being a twenty-one-year-old relative, to move the boxed giant by wagon to Newell’s farm. It was during this journey that Hull stayed in Cardiff and had hotel owner Avery Fellows drop him off near the farm. It was also when the wagon was spotted by curious residents as it crept along back roads and through little villages on the way to Cardiff.

  Hull and his two drivers arrived at night and stored the giant in Newell’s barn, covering it completely with straw and hay. They returned a week later to bury their creation. By prearrangement, Newell and his family were away visiting relatives, and Hull and the other men were able to work undetected during the following seven nights. After the giant was in the ground and the hole filled in, Hull spread clover seed on the bare dirt. As with all of the others involved, the drivers were paid well for their help and promised more money later (as long as they kept their participation in the scheme a secret).

  The men packed some machinery Newell had left behind in the barn in another metal box, and Hull had it shipped off, carefully pocketing the receipt. The larger iron-bound box was destroyed and everyone returned home to wait. Hull calculated that the entire scheme had cost almost $3,000 ($48,700).

  He was desperate for cash at the time, but he knew he would have to be patient if the deception was to work. And so, the giant would rest in the wet soil until a full year passed and it was time to unearth him.

  This is the shortened version of the creation, transportation, and burial of the Cardiff Giant. In The Giantmaker, Hull insisted he pulled the hoax to tweak the noses of people who took the Bible to be literally true. Despite this claim, it’s clear that at the center of his deception were a monumental ego and a craving for big money.

  Newell added another layer of deception to the scheme by failing to tell his new business partners from Syracuse that Hull or anyone else was involved or that the remaining twenty-five percent interest in the giant was being split. To do this would be to admit that the giant was a fraud and obligate him to repay the money he’d received.

  Newell’s six new partners were indeed nervous that the giant might be a fake. That was why it was they (and not Newell) who had insisted that Newell add a fraud clause to the original partnership agreement and asked that several other experts view the giant. But they never really bothered to look very deeply into the issue. After all, experts like Boynton and Hall had already called the statue a genuine ancient artifact, not once but twice. Besides, they were already looking to the future for even greater profits.

  To maintain their healthy flow of money, they decided to take their giant on a national tour. They planned to begin by exhibiting it in Syracuse, followed by visits to a list of cities that would include Albany, New York City, Boston, Philadelphia, New Orleans, Chicago, and even San Francisco.

  But before they took the show on the road, a new group of esteemed scientists, doctors, judges, and ministers came to examine the giant one more time. On Wednesday, November 3, this group looked over the giant very carefully and came to a unanimous conclusion: It was a legitimate antique. As one paper put it: “For the present, it must suffice for us to know that the charges of [fraud] were utterly rejected by the investigators.”

  Two days later, on Friday, November 5, the tent and fence were removed and a derrick was erected over the giant’s pit. In addition to a large group of observers, Calvin O. Gott was there to take the very first official photographs of the great wonder.

  The Cardiff Giant being lifted from his watery grave. (The New York State Historical Association Library )

  At around 11:30 in the morning, a specially hired crew hauled away on the heavy ropes, and the pulley wheel began to squeak. Slowly, slowly, the giant emerged from his muddy grave until he was dangling four and a half feet above the lip of the pit. The work was halted briefly while Gott staged another photograph, which was followed by a rousing cheer from those assembled.

  An oversize wagon had to be built to haul the Cardiff Giant to Syracuse. (© Bettmann/Corbis)

  Thick boards were placed over the pit and a wagon driven in under the giant. Finally, the workers lowered the giant into a large box filled with sand. Later, a local humorist penned this little rhyme:

  Take him up tenderly,

  Move him with care,

  Doing no harm,

  For he’s
worth more to-day,

  Than Stub Newell’s farm.

  The giant was taken to a factory in Syracuse where he was cleaned and weighed. On Saturday morning, he was paraded through the streets of Syracuse followed by an estimated one thousand cheering citizens and a marching band. Newspapers noted that the band played “See, the Conquering Hero Comes.” Eventually, the parade ended at Shakespeare Hall, which had a large exhibition arcade.

  Colonel Joseph H. Wood had been hard at work on the space to have it ready for a Monday opening. The giant was placed in the center of the room on an eight-inch-high pedestal. A railing was constructed around him with richly designed fabric draped over it. A six-foot-tall platform was built around three sides of the giant and a mirror was placed behind him so viewers could see his arm behind his back. Because the show was much grander than the one at Newell’s farm, the owners increased the entrance charge to one dollar.

  Visitors would first walk along the platform, seeing the stone wonder from above. They would then descend the stairs to stand in front of him for a closer examination. After just a few minutes, ushers would escort them out of the room to make way for the next group.

  The Monday opening was an instant hit, with over 1,000 people paying to catch a brief glimpse of the discovery. Attendance increased all week long, with Saturday seeing 2,000 paying customers come through the doors. Attendance would average between 1,500 and 2,000 a day, but over 4,000 eager customers lined up to see the giant on the day after Thanksgiving. So many people were traveling to see the wondrous discovery, that the New York Central Railroad had trains stop for ten minutes near the hall so riders could run in for a quick view. By November 26, when the giant was shipped off to its next engagement in Albany, somewhere between 35,000 and 40,000 people had visited the Cardiff Giant.

  The owners of the Redington & Howe music store placed this ad in The American Goliah, hoping to attract some of the curious tourists to their store. (The New York State Historical Association Library)

  Hull would later admit that even he was surprised at how enormously popular his giant had become. He had no way of knowing it, but the giant had touched a deep emotional nerve in a vast number of Americans.

  The United States and Europe were experiencing what historians have come to call the Industrial Revo-lution. Basically, coal-fueled steam engines allowed businesses to manufacture a wide variety of goods with automated machines. This in turn created a need for more and more factory workers, which resulted in the growth of cities near manufacturing facilities.

  But as cities grew in size and importance, rural towns and villages began to shrink and farms began to disappear. People still living in these places felt left behind, and wondered if they would have any sort of significant future, if in fact they mattered at all to the country at large. “The future having failed to give them hope of relevance,” cultural historian John Kasson explained, “townspeople turned to the past to assert themselves and their way of life.”

  An increasing number of small towns established historical societies that published books and pamphlets; they also staged commemorations to honor and celebrate past events and significant individuals. The discovery of the Cardiff Giant in a rural village fed into this desire to be relevant and important. “[The giant] had the potential to establish Cardiff as the cradle of the American nation,” Kasson reasoned. And with it, all other small towns and villages felt their status elevated as well because no one knew what other wonders were yet to be discovered.

  The six new partners didn’t really care what emotional needs their giant satisfied. They just knew that the swarms of customers meant that they had already earned well over their original investment of $30,000. And they still had many lucrative stops to come. One of these partners was particularly pleased. Newell’s friend William Spencer managed to sell half of his one-eighth share, which originally cost him $1,250 ($20,300), to a Utica merchant named Benjamin Son for the tidy sum of $5,000 ($81,200).

  Stub Newell was probably the happiest giant owner as he left Syracuse. He had unloaded the remaining quarter share of the giant he held with Hull, Martin, and Burkhardt to thirty-four-year-old John Rankin, a businessman and future mayor of Binghamton. The price was a cool $25,000 ($406,000), almost all of it in bank notes that would be paid off at a later date. So as not to raise any suspicions and cast further doubts on the giant, Newell and Rankin kept the deal a secret.

  The giant’s owners and former owners might have been less self-satisfied if they knew that other men had secrets of their own. And that those secrets were aimed at undercutting everything they had so carefully built up.

  On Monday morning, December 6, a strange procession made its way up Broadway in New York City. The mini-parade was composed of a single wagon carrying a huge iron box being pulled by twelve massive Flanders horses. Flanking the wagon were one hundred colorfully dressed hired marchers. Crowds soon lined the sidewalks and word began to spread: The Cardiff Giant had come to town. This impression was reinforced by a sign attached to the side of the box that read: “The Petrified Giant for Wood’s Museum.”

  But this wasn’t a museum owned by the Colonel Wood who had staged the giant’s homes at Newell’s farm and in Syracuse. It was instead George Wood’s place, and this Wood was a business partner of the nationally known showman P. T. Barnum.

  Initially, Barnum had said he wasn’t interested in making an offer on the real Cardiff Giant. But as the days turned to weeks and the giant managed to stay in the headlines, Barnum became more and more intrigued. Late in November, Barnum slipped into Syracuse to see “his stone majesty.”

  P. T. Barnum posed for this photograph with his “man in miniature,” General Tom Thumb. (Library of Congress)

  Barnum was impressed and thought it “the greatest marvel of the age.” He then got down to business, offering $50,000 ($812,000) for a quarter interest to Newell (who was still believed to own a portion of the giant) and the other new owners of the giant.

  This was a very substantial offer, but the giant’s owners took only a few minutes to reject it. Barnum would up the offer several times, but the partnership said no again and again. Part of their reasoning was that the giant was attracting large crowds all by itself, so they really didn’t need the master showman’s skills to draw an audience. A few of the men, lead by Amos Westcott, did not want Barnum’s soiled reputation as a humbug artist to sully either the giant’s or their good names.

  While Barnum did not get to possess the giant, he didn’t leave Syracuse empty-handed. He had been following the goings-on in Cardiff closely by reading newspaper reports and had come across an article about a local sculptor’s attempt to duplicate the giant. Those who believed the giant was a petrified human insisted that no sculptor could create such a lifelike statue. “[Carl Franz Otto] was led to make this attempt,” the Daily Journal explained, “[after] hearing it asserted that such a thing could not be done.”

  After Otto visited the giant several times and studied the recently taken Gott photographs, he made a large clay model. Following this, he made a cast of the model, then he filled it with plaster of paris, marble dust, and other pieces of small stone. When it was dry, he colored his giant blue-gray and began to age it. Even before being completely finished, a newspaper pronounced that Otto’s “imitation of the original is very perfect.”

  Barnum was impressed by the imitation giant and began negotiating with Otto to purchase it. Because Otto had gotten himself into legal trouble by selling his giant to several different people at the same time, Barnum began by offering to pay off these claims. Otto was finally persuaded to sell when Barnum said he would pay him $100 ($1,620) a week for three months and put him up free of charge at a fancy New York City hotel. The deal done and signed, Otto’s giant was shipped to its new home in New York City.

  Both Barnum and Wood were big-time showmen who aimed to awe and impress citizens in order to entice them to their museum. Their December 6 parade was meant to get the city’s attention in a big w
ay, and it succeeded. Even before they officially opened their exhibit, newspaper editors flocked to the museum for a private viewing of the discovery. Hull later claimed that they had paid off reporters to get good reviews, and it’s possible that some bribes were accepted. Several papers were always kind to Barnum even after it was clear that his giant was not the original.

  Barnum and Wood also flooded the city with advertisements. An ad in the New York Daily Tribune announced: “A MOST IMPRESSIVE MYSTERY! THE PHENOMENON OF THE CENTURY, THE STONE MAN OFONONDAGA!” They challenged people to come to the museum to decide the ultimate question: “Is it a Statue? Is it a Petrifaction? Is it a Stupen-dous Fraud? Is it the Remains of a former Race?”

  When the doors opened on Monday, several hundred people braved cold winds and icy rain to see this new giant. It was displayed in the center of the exhibit space on a raised, pyramid-shaped pedestal. Dark green globes covered the gas jets, creating dim, solemn lighting, much like the interior of a cathedral. The railings and woodwork were draped in thick black cloth and the ushers wore slippers to maintain the somber quiet.

  The New York City newspapers quickly noted that there seemed to be two Cardiff Giants, with several referring to the Barnum-Wood giant in a positive way as a “colossus” and a “dis-tinguished visitor.” The New York Herald took a decidedly more negative stance when it said: “We forbear to distinguish between these giants or to decide which is the greater of two humbugs.” Meanwhile the New York Commercial Advertiser took a middle ground that still managed to promote the Barnum giant, suggesting that “truth is mighty and must prevail. . . . Between these two [giants] the public, which pays its money, is at full liberty to make its choice.”