The Giant and How He Humbugged America

by Jim Murphy

  Gott tried to get other cities to host his giant, but none responded. To make what amounted to pocket change, Gott would haul his giant out of storage and take him to county fairs, where curious folk paid a nickel to see “the stone giant that fooled the world.” Gott later built a hotel with the express purpose of exhibiting the giant in the lobby to attract paying customers. While the building was under construction, Gott rented space in a nearby barn to store the giant.

  Unfortunately, he ran out of money before the hotel could be finished. He then tried to sell the statue, but no one was willing to pay more than a modest amount. And so the Cardiff Giant was stuck in the barn until Gott died in 1890. The Cardiff Giant went to Gott’s creditors, who turned out to be former owners of the giant, John Rankin and David Hannum.

  John Rankin secretly owned a share of the Cardiff Giant and would later help George Hull write about the hoax. (Broome County Historical Society)

  They would eventually exhibit the giant at the 1901 Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo, New York, but it failed to excite much interest. The giant that had once intrigued scientists and citizens alike was brought back to Fitchburg, where he went into quiet retirement in the rented barn, his placid, stone smile fixed in place.

  What happened to the major players in the Cardiff Giant hoax? Stub Newell moved from his farm in Cardiff—and away from his angry neighbors—and bought another near Syracuse. Henry Martin threatened to “humbug the American people within two years, and [make] the Cardiff giant [seem like] a wooden nutmeg affair.” Nothing ever came of this threat and Martin disappeared from the public view. Edward Burkhardt was never paid a penny beyond what Hull gave him to excavate, haul, and arrange to have the gypsum block carved. He later claimed to have designed and carved the statue himself, but he never did anything else regarding the scheme.

  Because fraud was never proved before the January deadline, Hull sued the remaining owners for monies owed him. And won. The owners who had managed to sell their shares early on escaped the lawsuit and got to keep whatever profits they had made. Those who came late to the game were stuck with the bill. One of the last to buy into the giant was Stephen Thorne, who had mortgaged his farm to buy his share of the giant, but had no money to pay Hull. Even though the court relieved him of a portion of the debt, he was ruined financially.

  Another owner, Amos Westcott, was able to pay Hull what he owed him and came away in decent financial shape. But the embarrassment about being a part of a national fraud (and for having defended it so publicly) haunted Westcott. In July 1873, Westcott locked himself in his bedroom and shot himself, dying before medical help could reach him.

  According to The Giantmaker, Hull made between $15,000 ($244,000) and $20,000 ($325,000), a good deal of money, but not the fortune he had anticipated. And he never really undermined the religious beliefs of many people. His only recourse was to have the book produced, in which he took the lion’s share of the credit for thinking up and carrying out what he saw as a clever practical joke.

  Of course, nothing Hull did was ever straightforward. His original partner in the book project, Ezra Walrath, began researching and writing the book. But along the way Hull decided to let John Rankin oversee the making of the book—and never bothered to tell Walrath. Rankin and Hull then contracted with Samuel Crocker to do the actual writing.

  Walrath sent Hull a finished manuscript, but Hull avoided paying him anything by claiming that publishers simply weren’t interested in the story. Hull then shared the text with Crocker, who may have used parts of it in his own version. Crocker delivered his text, but Hull put it aside to work on another elaborate and time-consuming scheme he hoped would make him rich and famous.

  This hoax was much like the Cardiff Giant and had Hull and a partner creating a creature that was the “missing link” between apes and humans. It was made from portland cement, stood seven and a half feet tall, weighed over six hundred pounds, and sported a four-inch-long tail.

  The Colorado Giant resting comfortably on pillows. (Courtesy, History Colorado (10031823))

  Hull and his partner ran out of money before he could bury his new giant, so Hull turned to his onetime giant rival, P. T. Barnum, for cash. It took Hull almost ten years, but eventually the new giant was buried and “discovered” in Colorado, and it did attract a good deal of attention at first. But the sour feelings left by the Cardiff Giant episode came back to bite Hull. Scientists refused to become involved with the Colorado Giant, and newspapers tended to ridicule the discovery. The Syracuse Daily Journal commented sarcastically, “We have always felt confident that the Cardiff Giant had relatives somewhere. . . . ” It took only two months for the Colorado Giant to fizzle out and pass into humbug history.

  By this time, Hull was broke and being hounded by creditors. To make money, Hull began turning in illegal fishermen at a private lake for a meager bounty of $12.50 apiece. His last hope for big money was the book project. Over the years, first Walrath, and then Crocker, had died, so Hull gave all the book material he had to Rankin, who then began assembling the final version of the story that would become The Giantmaker.

  Before the text could be sold to a publisher, fate stepped in to end Hull’s career as a smooth-talking, deal-making fraud artist. He died in October 1902, at eighty-one years of age (and thirty-three years after the Cardiff Giant’s miraculous discovery). Rankin submitted the manuscript to various publishers, but each felt the book whitewashed Hull’s financial deception, and the book was never published.

  An illustration created for The Giantmaker that was found in John Rankin’s personal papers. (Broome County Historical Society)

  To his dying day, Hull never seemed bothered by the way he had taken money from people under false pretenses, that some people suffered great financial losses, or that one person had killed himself over the aftermath of the scheme. Hull’s only regret: “I made many mistakes in the management of my scheme or today I would have been a rich man.”

  Feelings about the Cardiff Giant and Hull have varied over the years. All those who were a part of Hull’s scheme—whether they were partners, hired hands, or, like Walrath, were promised financial reward—viewed him as little better than a common criminal. This was especially true of the people who had invested in the giant late in the game and never recovered their money. With the sad exception of Westcott, few expressed regret over their part in the hoax or that they had duped newspapermen, scientists, and tens of thousands of people. They viewed the giant as a business deal and felt Hull had not lived up to his side of the bargain.

  A few newspapers seemed willing to view Hull’s scheme as clever. In 1871, the New York Daily Tribune praised him: “The world must confess that it was never humbugged so brilliantly as it was a year ago last summer by the discovery of the petrified man near Syracuse, N.Y. The Cardiff Giant was the work of no ordinary genius.”

  Most other newspapers continued to hold a harder view of the whole affair. Ten years after the hoax, the Cleveland Daily Herald condemned everyone involved with the Cardiff Giant: “As I contemplated [what is called] the most gigantic humbug of the 19th century, I felt I could proscribe no limitations to American ingenuity in the pursuit of filthy lucre.”

  In fact, newspapers began to reflect what more and more Americans were feeling about the social and economic changes taking place around them. The Industrial Revolution created a modern urban-industrial economy, plus a national transportation and communications network. The individuals who financed and controlled the factories, railroads, steamship lines, telegraph companies, and banks grew fabulously wealthy, in part because they paid low wages to workers, provided them with no benefits, and allowed unsafe working conditions to exist.

  As the United States turned more and more into an industrial giant, large factories began to appear across the country. (© Image Asset Management Ltd./SuperStock)

  The era (which came to be called the Gilded Age) was also notorious for its unchecked greed, the ostentatious display of wealth by the
rich, and political corruption. Ordinary people hungered for a simpler, less commercial, and what they saw as a more honest time, and began to criticize anyone who seemed avaricious or underhanded. Because the Cardiff Giant had captivated and ultimately disappointed such a huge number of Americans, it became an easy target for this anger. Andrew White summarized his feelings about Hull and the others involved in the hoax with, “The Cardiff Giant brought out the worst in these folks, demonstrated the unbridled self-interest and individualism that represented the excesses of [American] democracy.”

  But this anger at the excesses of the Gilded Age and public hoaxes did have some positive results: By exposing how Americans had been exploited, author Scott Tribble said, incidents like the Cardiff Giant actually “pointed the way to reform. . . . This new generation of reformers emerged from the increasingly modern American university, targeting corrupt city bosses, noncompetitive business practices, as well as exploitation of labor.”

  The latter part of the nineteenth century saw reformers establish a number of organizations aimed at increasing professional standards, such as the American Historical Association and the American Medical Association. Most of these organizations took on the responsibility of monitoring and disciplining members who violated their codes of ethics. Graduate programs were set up in a number of universities to better train journalists, archaeologists, anthropologists, geologists, and students in a number of other sciences. And the Smithsonian’s Bureau of American Ethnology began anthropologic research, helping to expose and correct a number of frauds and myths in American history.

  These experts and their accumulated knowledge made pulling another Cardiff Giant hoax less likely. Instead of rushing to announce an opinion on a new discovery, experts grew cautious, aware that their professional reputations were at stake. And possibly their jobs. It became customary to bring in other experts to examine and test a find before an opinion was offered.

  In addition, experts realized that they often had to argue against public opinion when stating their findings. Andrew White understood how the popularity of an opinion could be extremely daunting. It was, he noted, a “peculiarly American superstition that the correctness of a belief is decided by the number of people who can be induced to adopt it.” So instead of immediately publishing and debating their opinions in the daily newspapers, experts began submitting them in detailed written form to professional journals, where other experts could study and debate their contents. Such care reduced the chances that a fraud similar to the Cardiff Giant could happen again—but didn’t eliminate it altogether.

  At least twelve imitations of the Cardiff Giant were discovered after it had been proven a fake, including Hull’s own Colorado Man. The shelf life of these fakes all turned out to be surprisingly brief, stirring up public interest via the newspapers for a week or two, but quickly being dismissed by experts. And at least one petrified baby was found in 1875 in the gravel bank of the Pine River in Michigan. Local curiosity was stirred, but this fraud was soon condemned as a “second edition of the Cardiff Giant.”

  Once the hoax was revealed, the Cardiff Giant appeared in county fairs for what amounted to pocket change. (The New York State Historical Association Library)

  The negative opinion about the Cardiff Giant lingered into the twentieth century. In 1907, then-president Theodore Roosevelt grew impatient with writers he considered “nature fakers,” people who romanticized the wilderness in what he saw as a silly and false way. In an article for Everybody’s Magazine, the president took such well-known writers as Ernest Thompson Seton, William J. Long, and Jack London to task, saying, “There is now no more excuse for being deceived by their stories than for being still in doubt about the silly Cardiff hoax.”

  As for the Cardiff Giant himself, he was moving here and there, changing hands at least eight times between 1910 and 1935, with his price dropping as low as $100. In 1935, the publisher of the Des Moines Register and Tribune, Gardner Cowles Jr., bought the giant and put him on display in his knotty-pine basement (which he called his “whoopee room”), complete with several old posters from the giant’s original tour.

  The Cardiff Giant resting comfortably in Gardner Cowles’s knotty-pine basement. (© National Geographic Stock)

  By this time, all of the main players in the Cardiff Giant hoax were long dead and memories had faded about the financial and personal tragedies it had caused. People began to view it as a symbol from a more innocent and naive past, a silly and humorous episode and little more. Carl Carmer turned this emerging myth into “history” in his 1936 book of American folklore, Listen for a Lonesome Drum. It was all a big joke, Carmer insisted: “The whole country bent just about double over Stub Newell’s giant and how he fooled the professors—and six million people went to look at him.”

  A mock funeral was held at the Farmers’ Museum in 1948 for their newest guest. (© Bettmann/Corbis)

  Finally, in 1948, the Farmers’ Museum acquired the Cardiff Giant from Cowles and installed the stone giant in its museum in Cooperstown, New York. On the day the exhibit opened, the museum staged a mock funeral, which featured the giant lying in a large, open grave. The facility’s librarian at the time, James Taylor Dunn, seemed to have forgotten or excused the darker aspects of the prank when he welcomed the giant with these words: “It is appropriate that this American belly laugh in stone, the greatest sensation ever known on a New York State farm, should end its days at the Farmers’ Museum, which seeks . . . to portray every aspect of life in this state.”

  One would think that the real Cardiff Giant could at last rest in peace for eternity as a major museum attraction. But no, competition has surfaced once again, this time in Farmington Hills, Michigan. Standing eleven feet tall, what is billed as “The Cardiff Giant” looms over the arcade machines, sideshow wonders, and coin-operated fortune-tellers at Marvin’s Marvelous Mechanical Museum. The explanation sign for Marvin’s colossus does mention (in very small type) that this stone giant is actually the one P. T. Barnum had made for his museum. So even in retirement the original Cardiff Giant has stiff competition for the public’s attention.

  A duplicate Cardiff Giant appears in Marvin’s Marvelous Mechanical Museum in Farmington Hills, Michigan. (© Marvin’s Marvelous Mechanical Museum)

  And so George Hull (with his Cardiff Giant) comes down to us today, linked with P. T. Barnum (and his Feejee Mermaid) and Colonel Joseph Wood (and the Great Zeuglodon) as benign individuals who committed nothing more than elaborate practical jokes. There are indeed humorous aspects to these and other such hoax stories, but there are also cautions. It’s important to remember that at the heart of each episode, whether done for profit or laughs, was deception.

  The team of experts at the esteemed National Geographic Society certainly wish they had remembered this lesson back in 1999.

  In October of that year, the society held a major press conference at their headquarters to announce a significant fossil find. It was called Archaeoraptor liaoningensis, a chicken-size dinosaur that presumably lived from 125 million to 140 million years ago. At the same time, an article appeared in National Geographic magazine in which author Christopher P. Sloan noted that the fossil’s “long arms and small body scream ‘Bird!’ It’s long, stiff tail . . . screams ‘Dinosaur!’” It was, Sloan announced, “a true missing link in the complex chain that connects dinosaurs to birds.”

  In a much publicized press conference, the National Geographic Society proudly displayed Archaeoraptor liaoningensis as the missing link between dinosaurs and birds. (© Mick Ellison)

  Only it wasn’t. It seems that a Chinese farmer had found two separate fossils and glued them together, hoping to sell it for a handsome price to visiting fossil hunters. It eventually ended up at the National Geographic Society and in the excitement over discovering this “missing link,” their paleontologists overlooked obvious warning signs. They even ignored doubts raised by the Smithsonian Institution’s Curator of Birds Storrs Olson, who pointed out specific prob
lems he saw in the fossil and asked that other experts be brought in to examine it. In the rush to be the first to publish the story, National Geographic didn’t bother to bring in any other experts.

  When the hoax was revealed, a frustrated and angry Olson exploded, “National Geographic has reached an all-time low for engaging in sensationalistic, unsubstantiated, tabloid journalism.” A highly embarrassed National Geographic Society apologized for its blunder and tried to explain how it had been fooled. And its exasperated editor in chief, William Allen, wondered, “How did we get into this mess?”

  The answer, of course, is the same one that anyone who has been duped by a similar scam might answer: What they saw looked authentic enough even to their expert eyes. But in the end, they saw exactly what they wanted to see.

  The Cardiff Giant was an archaeological hoax (that is, the stone giant was supposed to have been the product of an ancient society). There have been many archaeological hoaxes, some done for money, some for religious reasons or advancement in a profession, and some simply as a practical joke. Here is a brief list of some notable frauds.

  Johann Beringer was the dean of medicine at the University of Wurzburg in 1725, but he fancied himself a rather good amateur archaeologist as well. One day while searching for fossils on a nearby mountain, he came across some very unusual rocks. The rocks were all carved with the shapes of various plants, lizards, frogs, and spiders on their webs, along with shooting stars and planets, and accompanied with Greek and Hebrew letters.