Early in the morning on Saturday, October 16, 1869, Gideon Emmons left his homestead in Cardiff, New York — a hamlet of Onondaga County — and hiked alongside Bear Mountain to Stub Newell’s farm, where he had been hired to dig a well. Life had been hard as of late, unmiraculous, dull. Having lost his left arm at the Civil War Battle of Gravelly Run — and forced to convalesce while his regiment celebrated their victory at Appomattox — he’d turned to alcohol for solace. He did not question why the farmer Newell had chosen him, a one-armed man, to sink the well that day: it was a means to a familiar end. Emmons and a fellow laborer, Henry Nicohols — Newell’s brother-in-law — began to remove oatmeal-like soil from the swale, and around eleven o’clock, the diggers struck something hard. Looking down, they glimpsed a sobering site: a giant, petrified foot resting amid the clay. “I declare, some old Indian has been buried here!” one of them exclaimed. A few hours later, the ten-foot gypsum titan had been exhumed.

Within days of the petrified giant’s discovery, newspapers across the country were reporting this sensational tale. By Tuesday, the New York Daily Tribune ran a cover story, while the Syracuse Daily Standard described its presence as practically inescapable, stomping into every social space and home:

One cannot “drop in” anywhere—at place of public resort, at the social board, or at the fireside gathering, but that “remarkable—how natural—how grand—how distinct this vein or that muscle—fossil, petrifaction, putrifaction; Indian, Caucasian—what a monster—statue, work of art—master artist—a thousand years ago—the Jesuits—how possible to get it there—who, when, where, how,” and so on, strikes the ear, and will most assuredly resound therein for minutes or hours, as the case may be, unless forced aside by determined effort.

Of course, the mid-nineteenth-century American religious imagination was primed for colossal miracles, particularly of the lithic variety. The Bible told stories of Goliath and Og, giants who once walked the Earth. In recent years, petrified bodies had been discovered all across the United States. In 1847, an “iron man” was dug up in Scioto County, Ohio: “And here is a theme for geologists!” declared the Cincinnati Chronicle. In 1850, a Georgia woman’s corpse was slated to be rehomed, when gravediggers found they could no longer lift the coffin: she had turned to posthumous stone. “Discoveries of human petrifications became so widespread by the 1850s”, writes Scott Tribble in his history of the Cardiff Giant, “that one Philadelphia printed collect the most sensational cases for a pamphlet: A Descriptive Narrative of the Wonderful Petrification of a Man Into Stone As Perfect As When Alive.” And in Cardiff and its nearby settlements, the Onondaga peoples had long told stories of the Stone Giants, who conquered their homelands and ancestors. The only problem was that the Cardiff Giant looked distinctly Caucasian. As one newspaper subsequently reported, an Onondaga man inspected the body only to conclude: not ours.

Of course, the truth finally came out, as it tends to do. This was an ingenuous hoax, powered by that familiar two-stroke fuel of American ambition: resentment and striving. The farmer Stub Newell was in on the con, but it’s mastermind was George Hull, a well-practiced swindler with eyes that Cardiff residents described as seeming “to pry, and gimlet, and cork-screw way clear down into the innermost recesses of our souls.” He had made a living as horse trader, then a card cheat, then a failed tobacco tycoon. He was either illiterate, as contemporaries attested, or, by his own account, a voracious reader of Hume. He had married his niece, when she was sixteen and he thirty something. And in 1867, he got in a late-night argument with one Henry B. Turk, a Methodist preacher, whose theological literalism would prompt Hull to carve his colossus. The details of the debate are cloudy, but Hull became incensed that his interlocutor actually had faith in the behemoths of old. “I lay wide awake [that night] wondering why people would believe those remarkable stories in the Bible about giants”. As a later biographer wrote: “It occurred to his mind that if he could only find one of these giants in some form it would be easy to demonstrate whether the people can be deceived now as well as in former times.”

First, he had to quarry. Teaming up with the Vermonter Henry Martin, Hull traveled to Fort Dodge, Iowa, where attempts to obtain a five-ton block of gypsum drew local suspicion. Then, he had to transport the giant’s uncut body. At the height of summer, oxen and horses struggled to move the block to Montana, where it was eventually transported as railway cargo to Chicago. Here, the marble cutters Frederick Mohrman and Henry Salle got to work, modeling the giant after Hull, who posed naked and supine as they carved. The details were exacting. After seeing the statue’s carved ringlets of hair, Hull met with a local geographer, who confirmed that curls did not in fact fossilize. The hair was subsequently cut off, but the body still looked too new. The team poured ink over the stone, and then sulfuric acid, which gave it an ancient appearance. The choice of Stub Newell’s farm for the giant’s temporary resting place may have been a family matter: Hull later claimed that “the son of [Hewell’s] sister-in-law’s sister was his nephew”, writes Tribble, a relation made even more complex, perhaps, by Hull having married his own niece.

The hoax was soon exposed — due, in part, to the first president of Cornell University, Andrew D. White, who discovered that there was no legitimate reason to dig a well where Newell had planned. But Hull came out just fine. He had instructed Newell to charge pilgrims to view the giant, an exhibition that earned four thousand dollars in modern money after just a few hours. Hull later traded his stake in the giant to a syndicate of investors, who refused to sell their gypsum monster to P. T. Barnum, despite the sideshow mogul’s persistent overtures. No matter: Barnum made his own giant out of plaster, claiming that his was the original and Hull’s a fake. It was this second-order hoax that some think gave rise to the phrase, “There’s a sucker born every minute”. But that tale, too, may be rather tall.

The glass plate negative above was made by a Canadian immigrant named Calvin O. Gott, who ran a photography studio in Syracuse, circa 1869. He was hired to take official photographs of the Cardiff giant as it was hoisted out of the ground at Newell’s farm and transported to Syracuse — the first stop in a tour across the United States that Gott was asked to manage. Gott later purchased a controlling stake in the giant, which spent many of its later years in his front yard, locked in a box. For more on the Cardiff Giant, we recommend Scott Tribble’s fantastic A Colossal Hoax: The Giant from Cardiff That Fooled America (2009).