Cardiff Giant: 'America's Biggest Hoax'

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The Cardiff Giant being exhumed in 1869. Credit: Public domain

By Jessie Szalay, Live Science Contributor | August 16, 2016 11:44pm ET

The Cardiff Giant, sometimes referred to as “America’s Biggest Hoax,” is a 10-foot-long stone figure that was touted as a petrified giant. It was created during the 1860s by George Hull, a businessman from Binghamton, New York, and briefly captured the imaginations and pocketbooks of thousands of Americans.

Paleontologist Othniel C. Marsh declared that it was a fake and on February 2, 1870, the Chicago Tribute published an exposé that included confessions from the masons who had worked on the giant. Hull walked away from the encounter with between $15,000 and $20,000, a small fortune at the time. Today, the Cardiff Giant can be seen at the Farmers’ Museum in Cooperstown, New York.

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Though the Cardiff Giant appealed to a wide range of viewers, George Hull’s primary impetus for creating it was to demonstrate the gullibility of religious believers. Hull was an atheist, which, even in a time of increased interest in science, put him in a tiny minority and made him something of an outcast, according to Scott Tribble, author of “A Colossal Hoax: The Giant from Cardiff That Fooled America” (Rowman & Littlefield, 2008), who spoke to Live Science about the Cardiff Giant.

Hull worked as a tobacconist in Binghamton, New York. In 1867, he went to Ackley, Iowa, for business and, while there, had a long discussion with a traveling Methodist revivalist preacher called Reverend Turk. They argued over the biblical passage, “there were giants in the earth in those days” (Genesis 6:4). The preacher argued that everything in the Bible, even that phrase, should be taken literally. Hull disagreed, but the preacher’s assertion got him thinking. According to Jim Murphy’s “The Giant and How He Humbugged America” (Scholastic, 2013), Hull stated that he lay in bed that night “wondering why people would believe those remarkable stories in the Bible about giants when suddenly I thought of making a stone giant, and passing it off as a petrified man.”

http://www.livescience.com/55787-cardiff-giant.html

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1. The Petrified Man by Mark Twain

... In the fall of 1862, in Nevada and California, the people got to running wild about extraordinary petrifactions and other natural marvels ... The mania was becoming a little ridiculous. I was a brand-new local editor in Virginia City, and I felt called upon to destroy this growing evil; we all have our benignant, fatherly moods at one time or another, I suppose. I chose to kill the petrifaction mania with a delicate, a very delicate satire. But maybe it was altogether too delicate, for nobody ever perceived the satire part of it at all. I put my scheme in the shape of the discovery of a remarkably petrified man ..

... I told, in patient, belief-compelling detail, all about the finding of a petrified-man at Gravelly Ford (exactly a hundred and twenty miles, over a breakneck mountain trail from where---- lived); how all the savants of the immediate neighborhood had been to examine it (it was notorious that there was not a living creature within fifty miles of there, except a few starving Indians; some crippled grasshoppers, and four or five buzzards out of meat and too feeble to get away); how those savants all pronounced the petrified man to have been in a state of complete petrifaction for over ten generations; and then, with a seriousness that I ought to have been ashamed to assume, I stated that as soon as Mr.----heard the news he summoned a jury, mounted his mule, and posted off, with noble reverence for official duty, on that awful five days' journey, through alkali, sage brush, peril of body, and imminent starvation, to hold an inquest on this man that had been dead and turned to everlasting stone for more than three hundred years! And then, my hand being "in," so to speak, I went on, with the same unflinching gravity, to state that the jury returned a verdict that deceased came to his death from protracted exposure ...

... From beginning to end the "Petrified Man" squib was a string of roaring absurdities, albeit they were told with an unfair pretense of truth that even imposed upon me to some extent, and I was in some danger of believing in my own fraud. But I really had no desire to deceive anybody, and no expectation of doing it. I depended on the way the petrified man was sitting to explain to the public that he was a swindle ...

As a satire on the petrifaction mania, or anything else, my petrified Man was a disheartening failure; for everybody received him in innocent good faith, and I was stunned to see the creature I had begotten to pull down the wonder-business with, and bring derision upon it, calmly exalted to the grand chief place in the list of the genuine marvels our Nevada had produced. I was so disappointed at the curious miscarriage of my scheme, that at first I was angry, and did not like to think about it; but by and by, when the exchanges began to come in with the Petrified Man copied and guilelessly glorified, I began to feel a soothing secret satisfaction ...

http://americanliterature.com/author/mark-twain/short-story/the-petrified-man

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2. Virginia City Territorial Enterprise, October 4, 1862

A petrified man was found some time ago in the mountains south of Gravelly Ford. Every limb and feature of the stony mummy was perfect, not even excepting the left leg, which has evidently been a wooden one during the lifetime of the owner - which lifetime, by the way, came to a close about a century ago, in the opinion of a savan who has examined the defunct. The body was in a sitting posture, and leaning against a huge mass of croppings; the attitude was pensive, the right thumb resting against the side of the nose; the left thumb partially supported the chin, the fore-finger pressing the inner corner of the left eye and drawing it partly open; the right eye was closed, and the fingers of the right hand spread apart. This strange freak of nature created a profound sensation in the vicinity, and our informant states that by request, Justice Sewell or Sowell, of Humboldt City, at once proceeded to the spot and held an inquest on the body. The verdict of the jury was that "deceased came to his death from protracted exposure," etc. The people of the neighborhood volunteered to bury the poor unfortunate, and were even anxious to do so; but it was discovered, when they attempted to remove him, that the water which had dripped upon him for ages from the crag above, had coursed down his back and deposited a limestone sediment under him which had glued him to the bed rock upon which he sat, as with a cement of adamant, and Judge S. refused to allow the charitable citizens to blast him from his position. The opinion expressed by his Honor that such a course would be little less than sacrilege, was eminently just and proper. Everybody goes to see the stone man, as many as three hundred having visited the hardened creature during the past five or six weeks.

http://www.twainquotes.com/18621004t.html

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3. A stone(d) man is pretty common today