When Giants Roamed the Americas

Let’s start this investigation with the very interesting song “Holocaust of Giants” by Rasputina:

When I was nine years old
Way back in Ohio
The hired man was digging up a well
On my father’s land
He found a fossil there

It was a massive bone
And since then I’ve known
That a race of giants lived in the northern hemisphere
Ten thousand years ago they lived right here

It seems incredible
But yet it’s the truth
That a fossilized and petrified
Calcified primeval brute

Was turned to stone
But he was not alone
There were hundreds of them walking on the sand toward river
Even giants think they’ll always live forever

Where a stream once flowed
Into the Ohio
Everything was turned to stone
The bible speaks of this
There were giants in our midst
But they slaughtered one another in a meaningless war
Thank your lucky stars that we don’t do that anymore

That gravel-encrusted skull
That was found on a river shoal
Double rows of very sharp teeth
The massive jaw measured twenty-five feet

Well it’s turned to stone
There were hundreds of them walking on the sand toward river
Even giants think they’ll always live forever

Locations of Giant Remains Reported in America

Must admit, when I started looking into tales of American giants I was quite astonished how often they pop up in our folklore. In fact, there is a fable about a giant man (or woman) associated with most every major industry in America!

Of course we all know the tall tales about Paul Bunyon and his blue ox Babe, (thanks to Disney)  who not only logged the Northwest but were responsible for such landmarks as the Great Lakes, the Grand Canyon, the Mississippi River and the Black Hills.

A more obscure folk hero is Captain Alfred Bulltop Stormalong, the giant baby raised in Cape Cod who became a 30 foot tall seaman and built a ship so big his sailors needed Arabian horses to travel from one end to another!

His most impressive feat was to wrestle the troublesome Kraken into whirlpool from which it could not escape, thus allowing the Atlantic shipping industry to finally flourish.

But I was surprised to learn about so many other “friendly giants” in regional folklore like:

Joe Magarac, an enormous man made of steel who worked 24/7 in Pittsburgh steel mills;

Kemp  Morgan, a Texas roughneck who built rigs so high they had hinges so he could lower them to let the moon and sun pass;

Johnny Kaw, who was 6 feet tall just 5 minutes after his birth and grew so big his family had to move west… he piled up the Rocky Mountains while clearing the land for their Kansas farm; and

Febold Feboldson, a Swedish giant called the “fix-it” farmer from Nebraska who brought rain to the drought-stricken prairies.

Mose Humphrey was a new one to me, too! He was rescued from a burning building in NYC in 1839, so the firemen dubbed him Fireboy. He grew to be over 8 feet tall with hands like ham hocks and flaming ginger hair!

When Mose reached adulthood he joined Fire Station 40, who welcomed his strength and enthusiasm, but had to make accommodations for his size — thus creating the first fire pole!

Throughout the 19th century, Mose assumed legendary status for fighting New York’s fires and breaking up vicious brawls. Tall tales told how he could swim across the Hudson in two strokes, how he pulled up pavement slabs to hurl between warring gangs and how he saved the babies from a burning orphanage by scooping them up in his stovepipe hat.

Many plays and penny novels were written about Mose’s exploits and his attempts to woo the girl of his dreams, Lizi. It was rarely mentioned that Mose was based on an actual man who was on the roll of parishioners at St. Andrew’s Church and documented leader of the Bowery Boys.

Also rarely mentioned is Annie Christmas, the black-skinned giantess of New Orleans who stood 7 feet tall and broke all the race and gender biases by running a fleet of keel boats along the Mississippi around the turn of the 19th century crewed by her 12 illegitimate sons.

She commanded respect by drinking hardened sailors under the table and wore a necklace strung with pearls representing every man she had defeated. She was buried with her necklace of 32 pearls.

Annie was famous for calling out bullies for their callous actions.

One day, a man named Mike Fink came to town. When he saw Annie Christmas, she was picking up a bale of hay to load onto the boat. Now Mike was a big strong man, but he was not very smart. He looked at Annie and laughed. “Why, Miss,” he said, “you should be home making socks and not trying to do a man’s work.” Well, the whole city went quiet, waiting to see what Annie would do.

Annie stood up slowly and looked at Mike Fink. “Mister,” she said quietly, “you seem to have a lot to say about who should do what and where.” Then she lifted that bale of hay over her head. Everyone thought she would throw it at Mike Fink, but she didn’t. She threw it into the river so hard that it caused a tidal wave ten feet high. That tidal wave picked up Mike Fink and carried him all the way to Natchez, more than 150 miles away. Annie went back to her work, and Mike Fink was never seen in New Orleans again.

Although these giant tales have been presented to us as fanciful amusement, there are quite a few cold hard facts to back up the stories that giants have roamed the Americas for eons.

Let’s start with a relatively recent example because there is photographic evidence.

The gentleman in the above photo is Martin van Buren Bates, the “Kentucky River Giant,” born in 1837, measuring 7 feet 11 and a 1/2 inches tall and weighing 478 pounds. He served in the Civil War as Captain of the 4th Kentucky Infantry and later toured the US and Canada.

Anna Swan, the Giantess of Nova Scotia born in 1826, had toured with P.T. Barnum’s European carnival acts. When she came to America she met Martin and they were instant friends who were eventually betrothed.

Their wedding was the event of 1871 — Queen Victoria herself gifted a diamond ring and Anna’s wedding gown. They toured for a time as the World’s Tallest Married Couple but eventually settled in Seville, Ohio where they built a colossal home and became the toast of the town.

Stepping a bit further back in history we find a different type of giant characterized as having double rows of teeth. These types of giants remains were typically found on or near the ancient mounds complexes.

Some mound sites, like McKees Rock in Pittsburgh, were excavated by civilians so there are records of these giant skeletons,  but they lack the “official documentation” necessary to give them credibility.

Newspapers in the 1800’s were full of accounts like the following of workers unearthing giant skeletons:

Judging by how often they come up, giants were of great interest to the general public in the 1800’s.

I found dozens of references to them in old newspapers, with stories ranging from actual listings of known giants to fanciful tales and horror stories along with LOTS of  long detailed articles about the Cardiff Giant hoax. . . that story was picked up for years in newspapers all over the country.

I think it is no coincidence that one of the first acts of the newly formed Smithsonian Institution was to send out expeditions to locate, excavate and catalog these mounds. Even in their own reports were detailed descriptions of giant burials and skulls containing multiple rows of teeth.

The teeth of many crania of this mound were, without exceptions, in a perfect state of preservation, the vitrified enamel of these organs being capable of resisting exposure for centuries… Not one carious tooth was found among the hundreds in the mound. Many were entire in the lower jaw, the whole compactly and firmly set. In some the second set was observed, while one jaw had evident signs of a third set, a nucleus of a tooth being seen beneath the neck of a tooth of a very old jaw…

Pursuing my investigations, and excavating farther toward the southeast face of the mound, I came upon the largest sized stone ax I have ever seen or that had ever been found in that section of the country. Close to it was the largest and most perfect cranium of the mound, not crushed by pressure of the earth, complete in its form, quite dry, and no sand in its cavity… contiguous to this was nearly a quart of red ochre, and quite the same quantity of what seemed to be pulverized charcoal, as materials of war paint. Anticipating a perfect specimen in this skull, I was doomed to disappointment, for, after taking it out of the earth and setting it up so that I could view the fleshless face of this gigantic savage, in the space of two hours it crumbled to pieces, except small portions. According to the measurements of the bones of this skeleton its height must have been quite seven feet.

Despite numerous reports in scholarly journals that such impressive structures were not made by the tribes currently residing in the Americas, the Smithsonian “expert”  Cyrus Thompson (he was a physician and politician who served as the Secretary of State for North Carolina ) declared after a few years of research that all of the mounds were made by the current native tribes. He flat ignored the indigenous folklore and popular public opinion that they were originally made by the giants and modified over the ages by later civilizations.

The giant skeletons were not limited to the Mound Culture, however. In the islands off California, especially Catalina, numerous amateur archaeologists discovered hundreds of giant remains of a tribe whose members ranged from 7 to 9 feet in height.

Although the researchers were dismissed as frauds, the rumors of Queen Califia and her Amazonian Warriors still persist in the region. My investigations into the Polar Continent of Hyperborea have led to my theory that this race of “sophisticated giants” migrated into the Americas from the North Pole when their homeland was destroyed.

When you step even further back into history you find evidence of giants of much greater size who were feared by America’s inhabitants because they had ferocious appetites and preyed on humans.

They roamed the continent from Peru to Canada and were noted on many pre-1800 maps, sometimes referred to as Antropophage, a European term that William Shakespeare used in Othello, describing them as men whose heads do grow beneath their shoulders.

Another topic to consider from that Rasputina song is the reference to petrified giant remains. Turns out a lot of settlers in that region were digging up not skeletons but actual stone giants.

In fact, the 1800’s papers are full of evidence of “instant petrification,” especially when they would exhume recently buried citizens of their town only to find the corpse had turned into stone! Some entrepreneurs even re-purposed the petrified remains they found as Cigar Store Indians and hitching posts.

FYI, instant petrification is not a fanciful idea, modern scientists have been able to turn wood into stone in just a few days using chemicals and heat to create silification, the same process the Smithsonian claimed was responsible for the Petrified Forest in Arizona.

Do you have any idea how many rock formations in the Americas have names that directly relate to giants?

• Grandfather Mountain, a mountain in North Carolina that resembles a reclining man
• Indian Head, Lincoln, New Hampshire
• Mansface Hill, Wyoming
• Mother Ann, a rock formation in Massachusetts that resembles the silhouette of a reclining woman
• Mount Mansfield, a mountain in Vermont that resembles the silhouette of the face of a reclining man
• Mount Susitna, “the Sleeping Lady”, is located on the west bank of the lower Susitna River northwest of Anchorage, Alaska
• Mount Timpanogos, in the Wasatch Range of Utah
• Mummy Mountain in Nevada
• Olancha Peak, a mountain ridge in California that resembles a reclining woman
• The Old Man of the Mountain, a rock formation in New Hampshire that collapsed in 2003
• Profile Rock, a rock formation in Freetown, Massachusetts, within the Freetown State Forest, that resembles the profile of a Native American man
• Sleeping Giant, several mountains in Connecticut that together resemble a reclining man
• Sleeping Giant, a mountain ridge on the island of Kauai in Hawaii that resembles a reclining man
• Sleeping Giant, a mountain and ridge in Montana that together resemble a reclining man
• Ute Mountain, a series of mountains in Colorado that resemble a reclining man
  

For further contemplation of giants hidden in plain sight, I found the breakdown of the movie BFG by Jay Dreamerz to be full of juicy ideas!

Jay ponders the evidence that many giants were petrified by divine intervention and that all those weird gargoyles on top of churches and monuments were made to remind them that we have the power to turn them into stone.

I was also impressed with Max Igan’s theory that with each reset, creatures get smaller!

More giant research in my Hyperborea blog.

~ by weewarrior on April 19, 2019.