by Jim Murphy
After describing the discovery, what the giant looked like, and listing its important dimensions, such as “Length of second finger from knuckle joint, eight inches,” the pamphlet gets down to the important issue: Is the giant a petrified human being or a statue?
A poster for the Cardiff Giant’s stay in Albany, showing his vital statistics. (© Bettmann/Corbis)
Using extracts from newspapers, The American Goliah presented evidence that the giant was a statue (quoting Boynton at length) and a petrifaction (quoting a variety of scientists and citizens at even greater length). The pamphlet clearly leaned toward the petrifaction theory. Still, the owners must have sensed that the debate itself could actually increase business since its discussion ended with: “The unsettled point of what it is, undoubtedly furnishes an additional attraction regarding the mysterious stranger, as every person wishes to see for himself and become judge in the trial of Statue versus Fossil.”
Not only did the ten-thousand-copy first edition of The American Goliah sell out in the first few weeks, but the crowds continued to pour in to little Cardiff. To make extra money, Lydia Newell sold gingerbread cookies and sweet cider to those waiting on the viewing line. Down the road a bit, a neighbor wanted to feed both horses and humans and hung out a sign that advertised “Warm meals, Oysters and Oats.”
Already, villagers were building two taverns within five hundred feet of the Newell farm to quench the thirsts of visitors; one tavern was named The Giant Saloon, the other The Goliath House. A very lively carriage trade developed to carry train passengers from the station to Newell’s and back again. The hotel in Cardiff was packed with paying customers, as was just about every farmhouse in the area with a spare room or couch. One clever manufacturer even found a way to use the Cardiff Giant in his advertisements:
“The proprietors of the Stone Giant think they will have to take his giantship out of his pit . . . before long, for it’s growing cold, and they’re afraid he’ll freeze.” The answer to this dilemma? Simple: purchase “The Oriental base burning heating furnace, sold at Pease, Johnson & Plaisted, 77 South Salina, Syracuse.”
Newell and his partners may have been the ones making the big money, but it seemed that everybody in Cardiff was trying to benefit economically from the giant’s presence.
Attendance at the Newell farm dropped off slightly following the crush on Sunday, the result of very bad weather and the obligations of work. But giant fever was still in full swing in newspapers everywhere as hundreds of people offered their opinions on the subject.
The vast majority of folk still felt the giant was a petrified person. A University of Rochester professor believed this but offered as his only evidence the fact that his friend the Reverend E. F. Owen did, too: “It is the opinion of Mr. Owen, and indeed of most scientific men who have given it an examination, that it is a petrified human body.” Some concocted a “scientific” explanation for why petrifaction could happen, such as local doctor Ashbil Searle. He was confident that a combination of cold underground water and “wet alluvial oil” had speeded up fossilization so much that the body had no chance to rot. Still others pointed to the thousands of fossilized plants, tree trunks, insects, and fish already unearthed and asked, “Will any one say that under favorable circumstances a fossil man cannot be formed?”
But the biggest reason cited for petrifaction was the giant himself. His immense size, the look on his face all spoke to people of the distant past. One visiting minister was quoted by Andrew White as saying, “Is it not strange that any human being, after seeing the wonderfully preserved figure, can deny the evidence of his senses, and refuse to believe . . . that we have here a fossilized human being, perhaps one of the giants mentioned in Scripture?”
Of course, the statue theory had its advocates. Contrary to popular belief, most scientists believed the Cardiff Giant was man-made. Boynton came back for a second examination and exclaimed, “It is positively absurd to consider this a ‘fossil man.’” Archaeologist Wills De Hass proclaimed it a statue and wondered, “May not a wandering sculptor have penetrated the Valley of the Onondaga or a wave of more advanced civilization settled here in pre-historic times.” While former New York State Geologist and then Director of the New York State Museum of Natural History, James Hall, was adamant that “the Giant . . . is a statue. . . . ”
Yet all of these esteemed scientists proclaimed the giant to be ancient and an important find. Boynton’s no-nonsense voice turned downright reverential when he admitted, “The statue, being colossal and massive, strikes the beholder with a feeling of awe. . . . [It] is one of the greatest curiosities of the early history of Onondaga county. . . . ” Hall took this a step further, saying, “Altogether, it is the most remarkable object yet brought to light in our country, and . . . deserving of the attention of archeologists.”
Whatever side of the debate a person was on, the fact that citizens and scientists alike found the Cardiff Giant a true marvel was extremely satisfying. The giant linked the present inhabitants of the United States to a distant and inspiring past, one that might even rival the cultures of ancient Egypt, Greece, and Rome. In a very real way, it allowed the people of a young and unsophisticated country to feel they were on an equal footing with their older, more established European counterparts. As the Commercial Advertiser pointed out, “The Syracuse people hold their heads higher than ever now that their ancestors are found to be so imposing.”
But Newell wasn’t thinking about the origin of the giant or what it might mean to his neighbors or the country. Unpleasant questions were being asked about the giant’s authenticity, and Newell was trying to figure out how to answer them.
Not everyone was convinced that the giant (whether petrified or sculpted) was a true antique. James Lawrence, an experienced, hard-nosed Syracuse lawyer, visited the giant and wrote an accusing letter that was published in a local newspaper. In it, he pointed a suspicious finger at Newell and demanded to know why he needed a second well when the first one was still working just fine. He also noted that the farmer had only two cows and a horse to water.
Why exactly did he want a second well? And wasn’t it a little too convenient that Newell had made sure he had a lot of workers there as witnesses, picked the precise spot of the well, and instructed those workers to dig down four feet? “Why, all this show and parade,” Lawrence asked in concluding his case, “unless to cover up the real object, viz: finding a treasure?”
Other rumors then began to circulate in the newspapers. Cardiff hotel owner Avery Fellows remembered putting up a man named George Hull at his establishment a year earlier. He also recalled driving Hull over to a spot near Newell’s farm. Hull was a particularly easy man to remember. At six feet three, he towered over almost everyone else, had slicked-back hair and a big, bushy mustache, and often wore a long, black coat that flapped dramatically in a breeze. But it was his eyes that mesmerized and intimidated folk. “Those eyes looked right at us,” a man who knew Hull remembered, “and seemed to pry . . . and cork-screw their way clear down into the innermost recesses of our souls.”
Even if he hadn’t been physically memorable, people wouldn’t have forgotten him. The forty-eight-year-old Hull had a long and shady past that included being a quick-talking horse trader and the inventor of a new sort of marked playing cards, which he had tested out on unsuspecting folk in the area. He was also thought to be related to Newell, though no one knew whether this was actually true.
Mention of Hull brought forth reports that several people had seen him a year earlier traveling through local villages by wagon. The wagon was being drawn by four very large, very powerful horses, and carried an oversize iron-bound box. The box, folk insisted, had been big enough to have contained the giant.
At first, newspapers printed these rumors without saying whether or not they believed them. But editorials did point out that western New York had had a number of extremely unusual people and odd situations that had cropped up in the past. The New York Herald reminded readers
that Joseph Smith, the founder of the Latter-day Saints, had claimed to have been led by an angel to a site not many miles from Cardiff, where he found golden plates. Smith insisted they were a holy book written in an ancient language that only he could read, using two small stones given to him by the angel. Smith’s beliefs were strongly criticized by the outspoken and openly anti-Mormon essayist Ezra C. Seaman who called Smith’s religion “the grossest, foulest, and most corrupting imposture which has been successfully imposed upon a people. . . . ”
Other papers pointed out that the region was also the birthplace of the Millerites. The group had been founded by William Miller, who had claimed the world would end in 1843 (and when it didn’t, the date was moved to 1844 and then 1845).
It was also home to the Fox sisters, two young girls who, in 1848, insisted they could communicate with the dead. Both Miller and the Fox sisters had amassed a very large and enthusiastic following.
The Fox sisters Maggie (left) and Kate (center) claimed that rapping sounds were how dead souls communicated with the living. Leah (right) would later manage her sisters’ careers as mediums. (© The Granger Collection)
And then there was the Silver Lake Monster that terrorized the area in the mid-1850s. It turned out that a Silver Lake hotel owner, Artemus Walker, had constructed a sixty-foot-long snake from wire and waterproof canvas with glowing red eyes and a wide-open mouth filled with long, sharp fangs. Walker towed his creation around the lake at night to alarm residents and (he hoped) to boost tourism. His prank had worked very nicely for two very profitable summer seasons before being exposed. Looking at the region’s history, the New York Sun ridiculed Cardiff residents for being so gullible and added, “Western New York is, for some unaccountable reason, a permanent hotbed for the growth of all sorts of humbugs.”
As if to strike a fatal blow to the Cardiff Giant story, another letter to the Herald claimed to reveal the true tale. The letter was signed “Thomas B. Ellis, a resident of Syracuse.” Ellis reported that a dying local quarryman, George Hooker, became friends with a strange hermit named Jules Geraud. Geraud was also in failing health, but Hooker insisted that he had seen a statue of a giant man that Geraud was chiseling in his wood cabin. Geraud’s cabin burned down shortly after his death and the statue was never found, but Hooker swore that Newell’s giant was “the same statue found lying in the cabin of Jules Geraud.” These new claims prompted the Herald to run a boldfaced headline that announced the Cardiff Giant to be “A STUPENDOUS HOAX.”
Newell denied the rumors and even swore out an affidavit that he had no knowledge of the giant before its discovery. All of the men who had been there when the giant was discovered did the same, swearing that they had seen nothing unusual at the farm, except the giant itself. Newell also revealed that he had signed a new clause to his partnership agreement. It stated that if the giant was proved to be a fake within three months, he would return all of the money given to him and forfeit the money still owed.
Most newspapers and most people were impressed that Newell and the other men had sworn they were telling the absolute truth. Apparently, they weren’t concerned that because they hadn’t done this in a court of law it had absolutely no legal standing whatsoever. They also felt that the fraud clause showed that Newell was a man of pure intentions.
Meanwhile, Hull appeared in town and explained that he had indeed been in the area a year before, but was there to ship machinery on the railroad. He was even able to produce a receipt from the railroad company as proof.
Finally, sentiment in favor of Newell grew stronger when it was revealed that the Geraud story was actually an elaborate practical joke. A person identified only as “W” confessed that he’d done it because he disliked all the attention Cardiff and its resident giant were getting.
The American Goliah pamphlet also addressed the issue of a hoax in a section labeled: “Is There Any Fraud or Deception?” Its answer is self-serving, of course, but rang true for the vast majority of people. “It has the marks of the ages stamped upon every limb and feature,” it states with authority. “I have not seen the first person who entertained any doubt of its great antiquity. . . . ”
The Syracuse Daily Journal then reaffirmed its belief that the giant was a true antiquity, citing the views of all the scientists who had examined it. It finished by praising Newell and saying, “His good character, the circumstances of the discovery, and the evidence open to the public scrutiny, contradict these rumors.” Other newspapers followed suit, with the Daily Standard condemning anyone who made up or spread such nasty rumors as “lacking greatly in the upper story.”
Ordinary people also came to the giant’s defense. One letter writer to the Daily Courier identified only as F.C.W. weighed in with “As I have looked upon this wonderful object, I will give you my first impressions, which I believe, are those of nine-tenths of the people who look upon him, viz: that the object before me was once a living human being.” People, Andrew White pointed out, had a “joy in believing” and “came to abhor any doubts regarding the Cardiff Giant.”
After producing his receipt and declaring he had nothing to do with the Cardiff Giant, George Hull slipped out of town and away from the limelight. Newell repeatedly declared that his giant was genuine and even had his new business partners invite more scientists in to study it. The suggestions that the Cardiff Giant was a complete humbug never completely went away, but the initial wave of doubt passed and the show went on.
The ugly truth was that Stub Newell was a bold-faced liar!
Yes, Stub Newell was lying! But he wasn’t as big a liar as George Hull. Hull had the unique ability to look a person straight in the eyes and say convincingly that he was being absolutely honest when in truth he was stealing the person blind. Newell, on the other hand, was beginning to feel that time was running out, and that he might well be charged with fraud. He never confessed openly, but his actions spoke volumes. He secretly put his farm up for sale and began preparing to move away from Cardiff.
What exactly was the truth?
Hull claimed that he got the idea to create the giant in 1867 while on a business trip to Ackley, Iowa. While there, he met and began talking about the Bible with a saddlebag preacher named Henry B. Turk. Turk was, in Hull’s words, “an earnest and a zealous worker in the Lord’s vineyard” who believed every word in the Bible was one hundred percent accurate. Hull, an avowed nonbeliever, took the preacher to task on a number of issues, especially regarding the existence of giants. It was, Hull remembered, “a long discussion and a hot one.”
George Hull as he appeared several years after the Cardiff Giant hoax. (Broome County Historical Society)
Hull attacked as absurd the notion that giants once existed. Turk held firm, saying, “I believe there were giants. I don’t know how big, but the Bible says that Og’s bedstead was nine cubits long and four cubits broad [so] I suppose that he was fifteen or sixteen feet [tall].”
Their argument went on for several hours, with Turk finally stating that “We have to believe these things, they are in the Good Book.” Hull was just as adamant, and went to bed that night with his mind churning over the conversation. “I lay awake 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.”
Hull was in many ways a common criminal, but he was also clever and reasonably well-read. He had studied Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species and followed discussions of his controversial theory about evolution in the newspapers. He’d also attended lectures and read a number of books on fossils and geology.
Like many people at the time, Hull was fascinated by all branches of the sciences—whether it was how engineers designed and lay down the transatlantic telegraph cable or what archaeologists were discovering about ancient civilizations around the world. People were interested and eager to learn as much as possible. “We live in the midst of a general and high development of knowledge,” the Rev
erend Benjamin Martin said in a lecture, “the age is scientific.” And Hull was happy to cash in on this collective desire to know more.
He also understood that people could be fooled if the object looked authentic enough and was “discovered” and presented in a believable way. He found examples of this in the numerous private museums around the country then being operated by people like Joseph Wood and P. T. Barnum. These places were filled to the brim with real and phony “wonders of the world.” Hull knew about and admired one of Barnum’s most famous frauds from the past, the Feejee Mermaid.
The Feejee Mermaid as it appears today. (Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology)
In 1842, Barnum bought a three-foot-long shriveled carcass that was humanlike above the waist and had the fin and tail of a fish below. To create interest in his mermaid before actually presenting it to the public, Barnum wrote a series of bogus letters to New York City newspapers about a certain Dr. Griffin who had made many wonderful discoveries during his world travels. Naturally, this also included the preserved remains of a real mermaid.
Barnum then hired a friend to play the part of Dr. Griffin, who gave a learned lecture on mermaids. The paying public and newspapers ate up Griffin’s talk, with one paper proclaiming “Mermaid Is World’s Most Fascinating Discovery!!!” As cultural historian John Kasson noted, “Americans [at the time] were easy targets for anything couched in blandly neutral scientific and technological language.”
Today, specialists who are experts in marine biology and anatomy would be brought in to examine such a find and decide whether or not it was real. But few people who claimed to be “specialists” back in 1869 actually possessed a deep knowledge of the subjects. Prehistoric archaeology was a fairly new field of study at the time. Harvard University wouldn’t award a graduate degree in prehistoric archaeology until 1894. In addition, universities were only just beginning to offer graduate degrees in such subjects as geology, general archaeology, and paleontology. Hull knew he could use this general lack of knowledge, plus Americans’ love of science, to manipulate people into seeing what he wanted them to see. But to fool the public, he would first have to create a truly “real” giant.