Forgotten Ages Research

A Gathering of Giants, Part One—The Unofficial History of an Unrecognized Race

Product ID: VC4

Report Topics:

• Native American myths and legends regarding a race of Giants who inhabited North America before they arrived, and who they eventually exterminated
• Remains of Giant bones and artifacts that have been unearthed across the continent

Full Report:

Many North American Indigenous peoples have regarded themselves as having inhabited the New World for many long ages, and their folklore is filled with memories of events, environments, and descriptions of the flora and fauna of the Ice Ages. Yet also among the Indian myths is a thread running throughout which tells the curious story that once—even longer ago before their Paleo-Indian ancestors populated the land—the American continents had been inhabited by another race of humans, a race of Giants. Among many Native folklore are preserved the story of how the first Indians, in their earliest remembered migrations, fought great battles against these Giants. Over a lengthy period, between prehistoric times through up until fairly recent history, the Native Americans eventually totally destroyed most of the Giants and their civilization.

If what the Native Americans say is true, then we are looking at a forgotten race that is incredibly old. As for the Indigenous peoples themselves, the old prevailing view proposed at the beginning of the last century was that between 17,000 and 15,000 B.P. (Before the Present), a Mongoloid stocks of tribesmen from Asia crossed over what is called the Bering Straits land bridge through an ice-free corridor between two glaciers and entered the New World, eventually developing into the modern Native Americans. But, beginning in the 1920’s, this picture was greatly upset by a rapid succession of finds. First came the discovery of Paleo-Indian Clovis and Folsom spear points among Ice Age remains, the first recognized evidence pushing the antiquity of humans in America further back than 17,000 B.P. Since then, more recent human skeletal artifacts are revealing even earlier dates: Laguna Beach man—21,000 B.P.; Santa Rosa Island stone tools among mammoth bones—40,000 B.P.; the Del Mar skull—44,000 B.P.; UCLA’s “Black Box” six skeletal remains—52,000 B.P.; the Sunnyvale skull, found outside San Francisco—70,000 B.P.; the Flagstaff site—100,000 to 150,000 B.P.; and Louis Leakey’s Calico Hill—at least 200,000 B.P., perhaps extending back to 500,000 B.P.

Along with these finds have been others showing the evidence for out-of-place cultural traits such as agriculture, construction, domestication of animals, etc. Paleo-Indian sites in southern California have brought to light grinding tools for corn or grain from 70,000 to 170,000 B.P.; a stone wall almost equally as old was also unearthed from one California site; corn pollen indistinguishable from modern domesticated corn pollen came from Mexico, circa 80,000 B.P.; horse bones with shin splints, a characteristic of domesticated horses, were discovered at the Old Crew site in the Yukon, going back to 38,000 B.P.; and engraved stones have been excavated at Flagstaff from 100,000 B.P.

Yet if, as some of the modern-day descendants of these Paleo-Indian peoples claim, there was an even older race already present in the Americas before them, and one that was even more civilized than they were, this means that there once existed a lost race who inhabited these lands between 100,000 and 500,000 years ago.

In 1833, a work party of Spanish soldiers was ordered to dig a foundation for a powder magazine at an army outpost on Lompock Ranchero in California. Their spades barely broke the surface when suddenly the soldiers came upon a layer of carefully placed stone and gravel. Breaking through this with bars and picks they came upon an astounding sight.

Below was a stone coffin surrounded by carved shells, a massive stone axe, large flint spear points, and several tablets of porphyry covered with an unknown script. But what the soldiers could not believe was what was in the coffin—the skeleton of a man who in life would have stood over twelve feet tall. The cranium exhibited double rows of upper and lower teeth.

A priest from a local Spanish mission was summoned by the commanding officer to see if he could read the stone with writing and determine the Giant’s origin. Though versed in several European languages and Church Latin, the padre found the script alien and could only repeat Bible passages concerning the days when “giants were in the earth” when he examined the bones.

The Native Americans in the nearby settlement, however, heard of the find, and the medicine man of the tribe solved the mystery of the Giant’s history. The bones, he said, were that of the Allegewi, a race of titans who, according to their legends, had occupied the country before the Indians, and who the Indians wiped out in a war of extermination.

The medicine man demanded the bones be turned over to his tribe, for the spirit of great strength and cunning were still in them to be worshipped and rekindled in his people.

But a potential uprising was the last thing the commander of the outpost wanted. So, as one of the officers who witnessed the event later recorded, the commander gave the bones and artifacts to the priest at the local mission, and he reburied them in a secret place. They have yet to be rediscovered today.

The Native American legend which the medicine man told is not just an isolated story, but is a tradition found among many Indigenous nations across North America.

The Piute of Nevada still speak today with strong distaste about a race of Giants called by them Si-Te-Cahs or Siwash. They were red-haired, light-skinned “like white men,” long faced, and practiced cannibalism. The Piute tell how long ago the Giants would dig large holes in their ancestors’ trails at night, trapping the Indians, then carry them off to eat them. The Siwash also ate their own dead, and would even steal bodies from Indian burial grounds for consumption.

Piute tradition tells how their people became disgusted with these acts and waged a three-year war against the Giants, at a time when the Siwash population was dwindling and numbered just 2,600 individuals. After great casualties were inflicted on both sides, the early Piute finally cornered the Giants in a cavern 22 miles southwest of Lovelock, Nevada, known as Lovelock Cave. Here they built great fires at the mouth of the cave and in ten days suffocated all the Siwash to death.

In 1911, James H. Hart and David Pugh began mining Lovelock Cave for bat guano, and to their surprise uncovered several human skeletons and mummies with red hair and measuring 6.5 to 8 feet tall, along with thousands of artifacts. A few years later, John T. Reid, a mining engineer and also an amateur archaeologist, attempted to get professors from the University of California to see the strange remains.

Finally one arrived, accompanied by another “authority” from New York. The two gathered potsherds and basketry, and later published an article on these—but they would not have anything to do with the “nonconforming” giant bones.

In 1931, more skeletons, these 8.5 to 10 feet long, were brought to light from the Humboldt Lake bed near Lovelock Cave. These had been bandaged in a gum-covered cloth like Egyptian mummies. And in 1939 still another specimen, this one 7 feet 7 inches, was discovered on the Friedman Ranch near Lovelock itself.

Tragically, while various findings were well-documented, the bones themselves were eventually either thrown away or destroyed by fire. The only surviving remains were owned by Clarence Pike Stoker, a resident of Lovelock and curator of his own museum, who has since died. His exhibit had included a Siwash skull, baskets, nets, arrowheads, and a stone calendar with 52 dots on one side and 365 dots on the other. The whereabouts of these last few remnants has now been lost. There are reports, however, that a one foot tall cranium and related bones and artifacts still exist at the Humboldt County Museum in Winnemucca, Nevada, and various other artifacts are also held at the Nevada State Historical Society Museum in Reno.

In Texas, the Tonkawa, the Caddoan and Comanches all remember a tribe of Giants they called the Karankawa—also known as the Capoques, Kohanis, Kopanes—who once lived along the Gulf Coast from Galveston Bay to Corpus Christi. They were said to measure anywhere from 6 to 8 feet tall, tattooed and pierced themselves, were excellent hunters and fishers, but had the distasteful habit of eating human flesh piece by piece, while their victims were still alive.

The Texas Giants were first encountered by Europeans in 1519, by Spanish conquistadors under Alvarez de Pineda. Later, in 1768, Spanish missionaries recounted in detail the cannibalistic rituals of these “giant savages.” Soon after this, the local Indian tribes began a campaign of extermination, and by 1860 the last of the Karankawa was slain.

In 1891 at Crittenden, Arizona, a huge stone coffin was unearthed containing the body of a man who had been twelve feet tall. A carving on the granite case portrayed the Giant as having had six toes.

Not far from here, in the Grand Canyon region, the bodies of two petrified human beings who stood 15 and 18 feet in height were discovered in 1923.

An article published in the August 5, 1947 issue of the San Diego Union disclosed that only a few days before explorers in the Death Valley region of California, near the convergence of the Arizona-Nevada-California state lines, had discovered the mummified remains of strangely dressed Giants. Back in 1931, a retired physician from Cincinnati, Dr. F. Bruce Russell, had found a series of underground tunnels in the desert, but it was not until 1947 that he was able to return with two companions—Howard E. Hill and Dr. Daniel S. Bovee, both of Los Angeles—in order to penetrate deeper into the shafts.

What they found in one location was a large cavernous hall containing the bones of extinct tigers and elephants which dated to 80,000 years old. And in the midst of these remains they also brought to light the mummified bodies of several human males who had once been 8 to 9 feet in height. Hill described the Giants’ attire: “They are clothed in garments consisting of a medium length jacket and trouser extending slightly below the knees. The texture of the material is said to resemble gray dyed sheepskin, but obviously it was taken from an animal unknown today.” Surrounding these remains were pieces of carefully polished granite on which had been carved various symbols and other pictographs in a language no one could recognize.

In the June, 1970 issue of Wild West magazine, author Ed E. Repp told of his experience while working with two experts in desert antiquities, H. F. Cowden and his brother, Charles C. Cowden. It had been back in 1898 that the trio had discovered the fossil remains of a giant human female measuring 7.5 feet, in Death Valley. The find was made at a depth of 5 feet in a “hard rock formation of conglomerate containing small amounts of silica, which required longer time to petrify than normal desert sands.”

According to the Cowdens, the giant female had been “a member of unprecedented large primitives which vanished from the face of the earth some 100,000 years ago.” This date had been ascertained by the fact that the human skeleton had appeared in a layer in which were the “remains of prehistoric camels and mammals and an elephant-like creature with four tusks instead of the present-day two, plus petrified palm trees, towering ferns and prehistoric fish life”—the Death Valley flora and fauna of the early Pleistocene era, long before it became a desert.

Repp also described in the area the existence of what he believed were the lost giants’ homes, “hand-hewn cavities in chalklike cliffs, almost inaccessible from either top or bottom approaches.” As yet no exploration of these mysterious caves has ever been conducted.

Another woman titan from antiquity had come to light only three years earlier, in July, 1885, at Bridal Veil Falls in the Yosemite Valley, California. Several miners under the supervision of G. F. Martindale discovered a stone pile against a cliff wall in which they found a wall that exhibited a good knowledge of masonry. The joints between the blocks were only one-eighth of an inch in thickness, and one of the miners later told a newspaper reporter that the masonry was “beautiful, as pretty as any wall on any building that I have ever seen.”

Breaking through the wall, the workmen found a vault 9.5 by 18.5 feet in size containing a mummified body on a rock ledge. It was of a woman measuring 6 feet 8 inches, clutching a child, both wrapped in dried animal skins and covered in a strange gray powder. The two corpses were transported to Los Angeles—and today may be stored forgotten in any number of the city’s museum basements.

The discoverers concluded that the prehistoric corpses must have belonged to a race of Giants who had inhabited the area long before the present coastal Indians had arrived, over a thousand years ago.

As an interesting confirmation, the Native Americans who lived in the Yosemite Valley, the Ahwahneechees, preserve legends that they once tried to co-exist with a tribe of gargantuan people they called the Oo-el-en. But these primordial folk were vicious cannibals who began raiding the Indian villages and carried off their kidnapped victims to eat. It was said that they cut the bodies into pieces and hung them out to dry into strips of jerky just outside their hiding place, near the foot of Cascade Falls. The local Indians finally killed all the Oo-el-en and burned their bodies. The last surviving member of the Ahwahneechee tribe died in 1947.

The New York Times of August 16, 1936 reported the following discovery made near San Bernardino, California:

“Portions of a gigantic human skeleton, believed to be the bones of a prehistoric man, were unearthed the other day in a gravel pit by a steam-shovel operator. The skull was half again as large as that of a modern man’s. It had a huge prognathous jaw, high cheek bones and jutting teeth in the upper jaw. It was Mongolian in conformation, and was partly fossilized. Nearby, several vertebrae, a leg bone and three finger bones were uncovered. They were dimensionally proportionate to the skull.”

The Somerville County Museum, located on the courtyard square in Glen Rose, Texas, exhibit’s the bones of a seven-foot female, unearthed in the 1950’s by Dr. Ernest Adams, a local attorney and amateur archaeologist. The remains had come from nearby Chalk Mountain. According to the July 30, 1974 Dallas Morning News, Dr. Adams believes it was a Giantess who had died in childbirth.

The Washington State Historical Museum in Olympia contains a archival report filed in 1910 concerning two bodies found at the 7,500 foot level on Mount Rainier near Seattle. An archaeologist discovered the remains while exploring an ice-covered cave hidden behind piles of stones blocking the entrance. The cave housed the frozen corpses of a man over 7.5 feet tall, and a woman 7 feet tall.

Both were wearing animal skins and carved jewelry, and had been placed on a rock ledge surrounded by the bones of normal sized humans. Deeper into the mountain, another cavern revealed a small lake with a skin-covered boat on its shore.

Near the headwaters of the Bruneau River in Idaho is a region the local Shoshone feared as a “land of giants” they called the Tsawhawbitts or Tso’apittse. The central Idaho Sawtooth Mountains are still remembered by the Indigenous Peoples as Coapiccan Kahni or Giants House. Several locations in these mountains are covered with many symbols and petroglyphs, said to have been the creation of the titan tribes.

The Idaho Giants were said to be of such a huge size that they could bound across wide creeks in a single step, or cross over the mountains with superhuman ease. They were described as having had large red eyes, dug deeply into the heights (mining?), and attacked their foe with very sharp weapons (metal?). What made them so fearful was their appetite for human meat. The Giants hid in the rocky crags and attacked Indian travelers, catching them and carrying them away in huge baskets. Tired of these constant assaults, the Shoshone began to trap the Giants in caves, either burning gathered wood in front of the entrances to smother them, or blocking the entrances during winter and allowing the Giants to freeze to death. Eventually the gigantic cannibals were killed off.

Author and researcher Ivan T. Sanderson reported an unusual discovery made during World War II by American servicemen stationed on the Aleutian island of Shemya. While building an airstrip, an engineer and his crew bulldozed a series of low mounds and exposed inside them a number of crania and leg bones. The crania measured from 22 to 24 inches from base to crown. Compare this with the normal 8 inches for the same length in modern adult males, and the implication of the immense size of these prehistoric buried individuals is made very clear.

In 2000, student anthropologists from Dixie College unearthed a must unusual skull in the St. George region of southern Utah. What has fascinated experts who have examined the cranium is that its occipital bone is two inches thick—larger than even that of a Neanderthal. It bears no resemblance whatsoever to local modern Indigenous Peoples’ skeletal structure, and its geological situation of burial indicates that it may be as much as eight to ten thousand years old. The extreme thickness of bone growth indicates that the individual must have had parentage which included a strain of pronounced giantism.

Some of the most extensive discoveries of Giant skeletons and remains were found in the Midwest, Eastern and Southern states from the late eighteenth to the mid-twentieth centuries.

According to the Native American accounts preserved in Volume 12 of Memoirs of the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, in the distant past the Delaware Lenni-lanape peoples swept in a flood of migration from the far West. But on reaching the valleys west of the Mississippi, they were confronted by a well-entrenched people of tremendous stature and possessing a high civilization. These people they called the Allegewi or Telligewi, after whom the Allegheny River and Mountains were named.

The progress of the Delaware Leni-lenape was stopped and they were driven back, but not discouraged. At the same time the ancestors of the Iroquois people were trying to find passage through Allegewi territory from the north. The two migratory peoples eventually entered into an alliance together, and proclaimed war against the Giants. One by one the Allegewi strongholds fell, and the Giants were forced to become wanderers along the streams and river systems they had defended.

Another tradition affirms that the early Indian invaders, because of their great numbers, successfully overwhelmed the ancient gargantuan inhabitants of the north-central states, and that the last great battle in this area was fought at the falls along the ancient Ohio River.

The Giant remnant was driven upon a small island below the rapids, and there the whole of them was cut to pieces. The Indian chief Tobacco informed General George Robers Clark of a legend in which were preserved the memory of a battle fought at Sandy Island, where, “the first peoples of the land” had been slaughtered by his distant ancestors.

Another Native American chief, Cornplanter, told that Ohio, Kentucky and Tennessee had once been inhabited by a gigantic white-skinned people who were familiar with the arts of civilization, which his own forefathers knew nothing of. The chief also declared that many old burial places were the graves of these indigenous Giants, made at a much later time when the last of the Giants and the Red Peoples were on friendlier terms. But long before this it had been the Giants who had build great fortresses now vanished from the land, belonging to the “long ago men” who had been white complexioned.

The Indian elder expressed his astonishment that present-day white folk would want to live in a region which had been the scene of such terrible conflicts. An old Sac Indian, in 1800, said that Kentucky and parts of Illinois and Missouri was filled with ghosts of its slaughtered Giant inhabitants, and wondered why the White Peoples could make it their home.

In 1825, David Cusick, a Tuscorora by birth, wrote that among the legends of the tribes of the Ohio River valley were stories about a powerful people they called the Ronnongwetowanca. They were of gigantic size, and had a “considerable habitation” in the region. After a long period of “enduring the outrages of these giants,” the Tuscorora and other tribes banded together against them, and with a final force of over eight hundred warriors, successfully annihilated the titan race. This, Cusick recorded, was supposed to have taken place “2,500 winters before Columbus discovered America,” or circa 1000 B.C.E.

Not all encounters between the Giants and the Native Americans were hostile. Folklore collector James Mooney, who died in 1921, noted this example:

“James Wafford, of the western Cherokee, who was born in Georgia in 1806, says that his grandmother, who must have been born about the middle of the last century, told him that she had heard from the old people that long before her time a party of giants had once come to visit the Cherokee. They were nearly twice as tall as common men, and had their eyes set slanting in their heads, so that the Cherokee called them Tsunil’kalu’ or ‘the slant-eyed people.’ They said that these giants lived far away in the direction in which the sun goes down. The Cherokee received them as friends, and they stayed for some time, and then returned to their home in the west.”

William H. Crane, in his Memoirs of Townships, included in The Firelands Pioneer of November, 1858, wrote concerning Native legends:

“In this connection I would say that Mr. Jonathan Brooks, now living in town, stated to me that his father, Benjamin Brooks, who lived with the Indians fourteen years and was well acquainted with the language and traditions, told him and others that it was a tradition of the Indians (Chippewa, Sandusky and Tawa peoples) that the first tribe occupying this whole country was a black-bearded race, very large in size, and subsequently a red bearded race or tribe came and killed or drove off all the black beards, as they called them.”

Still other Native American legends speak of a Giant tribe called the Susquehannocks or Andastes who ranged across what is now the northeastern coastal region of the United States, and were said to average 6 to 7 feet tall, with many examples reaching 8 to 10 feet in height. They too were eventually wiped out by migrating Indian peoples.

Confirming the Native American legends, many titan remains have made unexpected appearances.

In 1835, numerous mounds in Lake County, Illinois revealed the presence of skeletons ranging between 7 and 8 feet tall.

In 1886 a number of large skeletons measuring between 8 and 10 feet in size was unearthed in Logan County, with “artifacts showing a degree of advancement much higher than the native population had attained.”

In 1891, members of the Bureau of Ethnology and the Smithsonian Institute discovered a large skeleton between 7 and 8 feet tall near Dunleith, Illinois.

In 1894 the interior of a conical shaped mound in Pike County, Illinois revealed a skeleton over 7 feet tall.

The Historical Encyclopedia of Illinois and History of Lake County, published in 1902, took note of several mounds in the area:

“These mounds are quite numerous and excavations have revealed the crumbling bones of a mighty race. Samuel Miller, who has resided in the County since 1835, is authority for the statement that one skeleton which he assisted in unearthing was a trifle more than eight feet in length, the skull being correspondingly large, while many other skeletons measured at least seven feet.”

From a mound 71 feet in diameter and about 4 feet high located at Brewervillle, Indiana, a number of investigators uncovered in 1879 groups of skeletons, one of which was 9 feet 8 inches long. A necklace of mica was strung about his neck, and at his feet a human figure of fired clay embedded with pieces of flint had been placed. Flints and axes also buried with the bones were determined by the Indiana State Historical Society to be unlike any of those of the Indians of that area. These remains, however, were lost in a flood in 1937.

About the same time, in Ohio, the American Antiquarian (volume 18, page 60) reported that another mound produced a copper axe 22 inches long and weighing 38 lbs. In 1925 at Walkerton, 20 miles southwest of South Bend, Indiana, a group of amateur archaeologists opened still another mound, this one containing eight skeletons from 8 to 9 feet tall, wearing heavy copper armor. The bones and artifacts were unfortunately scattered and lost.

As early as 1800 a local farmer named Aaron Wright, a resident of New Salem (now Conneaut), Ohio, reported the existence of “ancient burial grounds about four acres” in size that contained hundreds of bones once belonging to “men of large stature” so old that upon exposure to air they turned to dust.

In 1829, while a mound was being removed where a hotel was to be constructed near Chesterville, Ohio, a large human skeleton was dug up that was said to be at least 8 feet long. Several local physicians examined the cranium and found it to be proportionally large, with more teeth present than by any living humans of that day. The skeleton was taken to Mansfield, and has been lost sight of since.

The Indianapolis News of November 10, 1975 reprinted an account written a century earlier concerning a skeleton “of unusual size” dug out of a mound in Ashland County, Ohio by a local medical doctor, who testified that the remains were definitely that of a human being.

Scientific American of August 14, 1880 reprinted an article first published by the Kansas City Review of Science, that in Brush Creek Township in Ohio a large excavated mound was found to contain clay coffins with several skeletal remains of humans who had once stood up to 9 feet tall. With them had been buried a large stone tablet “with unknown inscriptions similar to Greek writing.”

In 1872, when the Bates Mound, located in Seneca Township, Ohio, was opened by excavators, they unearthed three skeletons who had been at least 8 feet in height. One unusual feature is that they all had “double teeth in front as well as in back of the mouth and in both upper and lower jaws.”

The American Antiquarian, volume 3, of 1880 mentioned that “a skeleton which is reported to have been of enormous dimensions” was brought to light in a clay coffin with a sandstone slab covered with hieroglyphs during the excavation of a mound near Zanesville, Ohio.

The Chicago Record of October 24, 1895 told of a mound near Toledo, Ohio that preserved the remains of twenty skeletons, seated and facing east, with jaws and teeth “twice as large as those of present day people.” Accompanying the bodies was a large bowl with “curiously wrought hieroglyphic figures.”

In 1878, excavators in Ashtabula County, Ohio unearthed a skull and jaw which were of such a size that the skull would fit easily over a modern man’s head like a loose fitting helmet.

In 1881 a jawbone of great size belonging to a human being was discovered in Medina County, Ohio. The jaw, with eight teeth, were of “enormous size, and “would pass over any man’s face with entire ease.”

The History of Marion County, Ohio, compiled in 1883, included this statement:

“Evidence for the occupation of this region before the appearance of the red man and the white race is to be found in almost every part of the county, as well as through the northwest generally. In removing the gravel bluffs, which are numerous and deep, for the construction and repair of roads, and in excavating cellars, hundreds of human skeletons, some of them of giant form, have been found. A citizen of Marion County estimates that there were about as many human skeletons in the knolls of Marion County as there are white inhabitants at present.”

An 1892 issue of the Ironton Register recounts of unusual finds made in Proctorville, Ohio:

“Where Proctorville now stands was one day part of a well paved city, but the greater part of it is now under the Ohio River. Only a few mounds remain. One of these was near the C. Wilgus Mansion and contained a skeleton of a very large person, with double teeth, and a jaw bone that would go over the jaw with the flesh on.”

In 1898, eight skeletons were found near the United States Coast Guard lighthouse on the Lake Erie Islands, Ohio. The remains had been buried in a crude tomb of black stone slabs, and covered by the roots of a huge stump, indicating a great age. One of the skeletons measured over seven feet in height.

In 1856, a human skeleton measuring 11 feet long was discovered by laborers who were plowing a vineyard near Wheeling, West Virginia.

In 1875, workmen constructing a bridge near the mouth of the Paw Paw River near Rivesville, West Virginia uncovered three skeletons with strands of reddish hair still clinging to the skulls. The skeletons were of men who had once stood about 8 feet tall.

Cyrus Thomas, in his Report on Mound Explorations of the Bureau of Ethnology, volume 6, 1884, chronicled the finding of a skeleton 7 feet 6 inches long inside a massive stone structure that was likened to a temple chamber, buried within a mound in Kanawha County, West Virginia.

In 1882, near White Day Creek, West Virginia, the remains of a Giant placed in a sitting position was unearthed, along with artifacts of stone and flint.

In the 1850’s, while digging out a root cellar in Palatine (East Fairmont) in Marion Country, West Virginia, workers uncovered two large human skeletons measuring more than 7 feet tall. The site also possessed hundreds of pieces of pottery, flint weapons and stone carvings.

In the summer of 1883, James A. Faulkner of Smithtown unearthed a human skeleton found to be 7 feet 4 inches long. It was examined by a local doctor who confirmed that the specimen had indeed once belonged to a human being.

In his book, The Natural and Aboriginal History of Tennessee, author John Haywood described the finding in 1821 of “very large bones” in stone graves unearthed in Williamson County in his home state. In nearby White County an “ancient fortification” preserved human skeletons averaging 7 feet in length. In 1890, the remains of another 7 foot Giant was discovered in Roane County.

On April 4, 1874, workmen digging a railroad passages between Wildon and Garryburg, North Carolina, unearthed several skeletons of Giants and their artifacts. A newspaper report of the day, given in the Daily Independent of Helena, Montana, described the find:

“The skulls were nearly an inch in thickness; the teeth are filed sharp, as those of cannibals, enamel perfectly preserved; the bones were of wonderful length, the femur being as long as the leg of an ordinary length, the stature of the body being probably as great as 8 or 9 feet. Near the heads were sharp arrows, some mortars and the bowls of pipes, apparently of soft soapstone. The teeth of the skeletons are said to be as large as those of a horse.”

The Twelfth Annual Report of the Bureau of Ethnology, released in 1894, described an unusual find made in Mound A at Etowah, Georgia:

“A stone sepulcher, 2.5 feet wide, 8 feet long and 2 feet deep, was formed by placing steatite slabs on edge at the sides and ends, and others across the top. The bottom consisted simply of earth hardened by fire. It contained a single skeleton, lying on its back with the head east. The frame was heavy and about seven feet long. The head rested on a thin copper plate ornamented with impressed figures.”

The January 30, 1876 issue of the Louisville Courier-Journal printed a story concerning finds made by cave explorers made near Columbia, Kentucky:

“In the northeast corner of the first gallery, about five feet from the ground, they noticed some strange characters or hieroglyphics neatly carved in the wall, which, upon close examination, proved to be the head-rock of a vault. A few minutes prying served to loosen this and disclose to view the interior of an enclosure in the solid rock of about five by ten feet, which contained the remains of three skeletons, which measure eight feet seven and a half inches, eight feet five inches and eight feet four and three quarter inches in length respectively. The heads were lying toward the east, each body parallel to the other. Beside them lay three huge (what looked to be) swords, but they were so decayed that upon being touched they crumbled to dust.”

The Adair County (Kentucky) News of January 5, 1897 described the opening of a mound on the farm of Harrison Robinson four miles east of Jackson, Ohio and the discovery therein of two skeletons of enormous size, accompanied by a great quantity of jewelry and other remains.

In 1965, an amateur archaeologist named Kenneth White unearthed a “perfectly preserved skeleton” from under a large rock ledge along Holly Creek in Kentucky. The skeleton measured 8 feet 9 inches in length when reassembled. White stated: “The arms were extremely long and the hands were large. The skull was 30 inches in circumference. The eye and nose sockets were slits rather than cavities, and the area where the jawbone hinges to the skull was solid bone.”

The New England states and neighboring Ontario Province in Canada have likewise seen the discovery of several gargantuan finds.

Turner’s History of the Holland Purchase reported that in 1792 seven and eight foot skeletons “with broad flat-topped skulls” were found at an earthen fort in Orleans County not far from Buffalo, New York.

In an account included in the Illustrations of the Ancient Monuments of Western New York is the report that in 1849 an elliptical mound near Conewango Valley contained eight large skeletons. One thigh bone was measured to be 28 inches long. Other remains unearthed in the area were of complete skeletons 9 feet in length. Accompanying these were “exquisite stone points, enamelwork and jewelry.”

During the 1880’s, construction of a rail link between Cazenovia and Canastota, New York, five skeletons were unearthed, one of which was more than 11 feet long.

In more recent times, The Conservationist for December, 1966–January, 1967, a publication of the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation in Albany, released an article entitled, “The Lesser Wilderness-Tug Hill,” in which the editor described an unusual find in this area. Here were found “skeletons of giants, with double-rows of teeth in each jaw.” These remains of a people of “gigantic size,” the report said, had preceded the Iroquois.

At Tioga Point (now Athens), Pennsylvania, a team of antiquarians dug into another mystery mound. Among the team were state historian Dr. G. P. Donehue, Professor A. B. Skinner of the American Investigating Museum, and Professor W. K. Morehead of Philips Andover Academy. The astounded experts uncovered the bones of sixty-eight men, none of which were less than 7 feet tall. The remains were promptly sent to the American Investigating Museum in Philadelphia--and just as promptly lost. Apparently someone in authority had thought the finds to be unimportant and had them disposed of.

The 1884 History of Erie County, Pennsylvania off this piece on local history:

“Many indications have been found in the County proving conclusively that it was once peopled by a different race from the Indians who were found here when t was first visited by white men. When the link of the Erie and Pittsburgh Railroad from the Lake Shore Road to the dock at Erie was in the process of construction, the laborers dug into a great mass of bones at the crossing of the public road which runs by the rolling mill. From the way in which they were thrown together, it is surmised that a terrible battle must have taken place in the vicinity at some day so far distant that not even a tradition of the even has been preserved.

“Among the skeletons was one of a giant, side by side with a smaller one. The arm and leg bones of this native American Goliath were about one-half longer than those of the tallest man among the laborers; the skull was immensely large and the teeth ere in a perfect state of preservation. The lower bone of the leg was nearly a foot longer than the one with which it was measured, indicating that the man must have been eight to ten feet in height.”

In December, 1886, an amateur archaeologist named W. H. Scoville of Andrews Settlement probed into another mound near Ellisberg, Pennsylvania and found bones of a man close to 8 feet in length. In the same year, a group of professional investigators discovered dozens of huge skeletons with oddly-shaped skulls in a mound at Sayre, Pennsylvania, near Elmira, New York. The skeletons averaged 7 feet, some even taller, and appeared as if they had been part of a mass grave hastily dug after a battle. What intrigued the investigators was that “the skulls had bony protuberances like budding horns on their foreheads.”

The August 23, 1871 issue of the Daily Telegraph of Toronto, Ontario recorded unusual findings made by local excavators in Cayuga Township situated 40 miles west of Niagara Falls:

“When they got to five or six feet below the surface, a strange sight met them. Piled in layers, one upon top of the other, some two hundred skeletons of human beings nearly perfect—around the neck of each one being a string of beads. These skeletons are those of men of gigantic stature, some of them measuring nine feet, very few of them being less than seven feet.

“Some of the thigh bones were found to be at least a foot longer than those at present known, and one of the skulls being examined completely covered the head of an ordinary person. There were also deposited in this pit a number of axes and skimmers made of stone. In the jaws of several of the skeletons were large stone pipes. From the appearance of the skulls, it would seem that their possessors died a violent death, as many of them were broken and dented. Some people profess to believe that the locality was formally an Indian burial ground, but the enormous stature of the skeletons and the fact that pine trees of centuries growth covered the spot goes far to disprove this idea.”

The American Antiquarian, Volume 7, 1885 gave the account of the discovery of a vault covered with inscriptions found inside a mound near Gasterville, Pennsylvania that contained a skeleton measuring 7 feet 2 inches. The Giant was described as having “hair that was coarse and jet black, and hung to the waist, the brow being ornamented with a copper crown.” These and other remains, including beads made of bone, a covering made of straw or reeds, and animal skins, were removed and sent to the Smithsonian Institute—and were never heard of again.

Another region which has seen a particular concentration of Giant remains is in present-day Minnesota and Wisconsin. A Delaware Indian legend preserved by two Moravian missionaries named David Zeisberger and John Heckwelder in the 1700’s was originally recorded in a bark book called the Wolam Olan, and tells how when the Sioux migrated into Minnesota they found a population of Giants, who they fought against for possession of the land.

In his journal for 1817, Major William Long reported exploring strange earthen fortifications in the vicinity of Prairie du Chien along the Wisconsin River, fortifications the Indians claimed they did not built but were the work of “giants, a race of white men similar to those of European origin.” He reported the finding of eight skeletons 8 feet long.

In 1885, historian G. I. Butler, in his work Facts for the Times—A Collection of Valuable Historical Extracts, gave this account of the discovery of “a human being of gigantic stature,“ made by quarrymen employed by the Sauk Rapids Water Power Company of Minnesota who were building a dam across the Mississippi River:

About seven feet below the surface of the ground, and about three and a half feet beneath the upper stratum of solid granite rock, the remains were found imbedded in the sand, which had evidently been placed in the quadrangular grave which had been dug out of the solid rock to receive the last remains of this antediluvian giant.

“The gave was twelve feet in length, four feet wide, and about three feet in depth, and is today at least two feet below the present level of the river.

“The remains are completely petrified, and are of gigantic dimensions. The head is massive, measures thirty-one and one half inches in circumference, but low in the os frontis, and very flat on the top. The femur measures twenty-six and a quarter inches, and the fibula twenty-five and a half, while the body is equally long in proportion. From the crown of the head to the sole of the foot, the length is ten feet nine and a half inches. The measure around the chest is fifty-nine and a half inches. This giant must have weighed at least nine hundred pounds, when covered with a reasonable amount of flesh.”

Years later, on June 29, 1888, the Chatfield Democrat and the St. Paul Pioneer Press recorded that mounds located west of Chatfield yielded six skeletons 7 to 8 feet tall, all with receding foreheads. At Clearwater, seven giant skeletons were found, again with receding foreheads, and presumably buried by the Indians, for they were found face down--traditionally the Indian position of disgrace.

At La Crescent, mounds contained titan bones of individuals 7 to 8 feet long, with teeth “double all the way around, not like those of the present race of men.” Accompanying these remains were utensils made of copper.

The American Anthropologist, no. 5, vol. 8, page 229, described a stone axe head discovered “with the point embedded in the soil” at Birchwood. It was exhibited in the collection of the Missouri Historical Society, which found the axe to be 28 inches long, 14 inches wide, and 11 inches thick. The problem was it weighed 300 lbs.

In August, 1896, the St. Paul Globe published an account of the findings of a 9-foot skeleton on a farm near Lake Koronis. The bones of 7-foot men turned up near Moose Island Lake, while a gravesite at Pine City brought to light seven more gargantuan skeletal frames of approximately the same height.

Another detailed report of Giant remains was printed in the May 4, 1912 New York Times, reporting from the Wisconsin State Historical Museum in Madison, Wisconsin. In a large mound located at a Lake Lawn farm near Lake Delevan, eighteen peculiar skeletons were unearthed. They had receding foreheads, long and pointed jawbones, and teeth that were all molars. Several women’s and children’s remains were found nearby. The adult frames all measured over 6 feet.

Perhaps the most remarkable of the northern Giant finds came from a mound in Warren, Minnesota excavated in 1883. The May 23 issue of the St. Paul Pioneer Press reported that here, ten titan skeletons were unearthed, both male and female. But a further mystery was that, along with the remains were the bones of horses. Since the age of the skeletal remains and the artifacts associated with them were far older than the days when the first European colonists reintroduced horses on the North American continent, it can only mean that the remains date back well over twelve thousand years, when the original horse population in the New World became extinct.

[Cpyright 2009. Joseph Robert Jochmans. All Rights Reserved.]