The Unearthly Unearthing of the Cardiff Carving

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n                       It was forty years before thenPiltdown hoax was finally debunked but the fake known as the Cardiff Giant fellnapart in a matter of weeks. I have mentioned the blow to American nationalnpride caused by the remarks of the Comte de Buffon previously here, and thensubsequent search for the remnants of large American land animals, and onenexplanation of the enormous bones found at Big Bone Lick, Kentucky in the 1740snwas that they were the remains of giants who had perished beneath the deluge ofnNoah’s flood. Cotton Mather, in his vast Biblia Americana, wrote,  

nechoing Job 26:5 

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nJoseph Priest, in his American Antiquities and Discoveries in the West (1835),ndescribed the excavation of Indian graves in which were “… found several scullsn[sic] leg and thigh bones, which plainly shows that their possessors werenpersons of gigantic stature.” 

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nOne evening in 1866, George Hull was in Ackley,nIowa, chasing up his brother-in-law who was late in paying for a consignment ofncigars, when he got into an argument with Rev Mr Turk, a Methodist revivalist,nabout the veracity of the Biblical tales of giants, particularly Genesis 6:4n“Now giants were upon the earth in those days,” which Rev Turk insisted wasnliterally true, whereas Hull, an atheist, denied it, saying it was metaphoricalnat best. Hull settled on the idea of making a giant of his own, “I thought ofnmaking a stone giant, and passing it off as a petrified man,” and found a largenblock of gypsum in Fort Dodge, which, he told the quarrymen, was to be madeninto a statue of Abraham Lincoln in New York. 

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nThe block was transported tonChicago, where German sculptor Edward Burghardt was commissioned to carve thengiant. In a bid to add an aged patina, the figure was stained and a gallon ofnsulphuric acid was poured over it, and Hull hammered darning needles into anblock of wood, which he used to pummel the appearance of pores onto the surfacenof the stone. In November 1868, the finished piece, over ten foot long andnweighing over 3,000 lbs, was shipped to Hull’s home at Binghampton, and fromnthere to his cousin’s farm at Cardiff, New York. 

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nWilliam C ‘Stub’ Newellnsecretly buried the figure behind his barn, and on October 16^thn1869, he engaged Gideon Emmons and Henry Nichols to dig a new well at the pointnhe indicated. When they were three feet down, they struck stone and seeing anfoot, one of them shouted out, “I declare, some old Indian has been buriednhere!” 

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nHull and Newell erected a tent over the ‘petrified man’ and chargednvisitors 25c a head to see the marvel. Word spread and wagonloads of sensationnseekers arrived, so two days later the price of admission was upped to 50c. 

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nAlthough Hull had sworn all involved to secrecy, he found out that Cousinn‘Stub’ had let word slip so, knowing that the truth would soon come out, he soldnhis part-share to a syndicate of local businessmen for the sum of $23,000. OnnNovember 5^th 1869, the Cardiff Giant was unearthed and shipped tonSyracuse, where one eminent churchman declared “…we have here a fossilizednhuman being, perhaps one of the giants mentioned in Scripture,” although othersnwere not so easily beguiled – Yale palaeontologist Othniel C. Marsh pronounced,n“It is of very recent origin, and a most decided humbug.” 

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nThe showman Phineas TnBarnum became interested in the Giant and offered to buy it from the syndicatenfor $50,000, and when they declined to sell, Barnum sent an undercover artistnto make a surreptitious wax model of the figure. 

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nFrom this, and using thenmeasurements taken from advertising flyers, Barnum had a plaster reproductionnof the Cardiff Giant made, which he exhibited at his museum in New York. DavidnHannum, leader of the syndicate, expressed his opinion on the popularity ofnBarnum’s copy with the words, “There’s a sucker born every minute,” a phrasenoften attributed to Barnum himself and happily appropriated by him later. Thensyndicate sought a court injunction to stop Barnum’s exhibit, only to be toldnby the judge, “Bring your giant here, and if he swears to his own genuinenessnas a bona fide petrifaction, you shall have the injunction you ask for.” OnnDecember 10^th 1869, George Hull confessed all to the press and onnFebruary 2^nd 1870, the court ruled that both Giants were fakes, andnBarnum could not be sued for displaying a fake of a fake. 

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nThe Cardiff Giant wasnsold to a publisher from Des Moines, who sold it in 1947 to the Farmer’s Museumnin Cooperstown, New York, where it is now exhibited in a reproduction of thenoriginal tent raised on ‘Stub’ Newell’s farm in October 1869.

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