The Cardiff Giant
On 16 October 1869 men digging a well on William Newell's farm at Cardiff, near Syracuse, struck a stone man ten feet tall. It cost fifty cents to see, the queue lasted all day, and clergymen argued over whether this was a petrified giant out of Genesis. It had been commissioned by Newell's cousin George Hull, a tobacconist and an atheist who had lost his temper in an argument with a preacher: a block of gypsum hauled from Fort Dodge in Iowa, carved in Chicago, aged with sulphuric acid, stippled with darning needles for pores, and buried a year before it was found. Hull confessed that December. P. T. Barnum, refused the original, exhibited a copy of his own — and the public paid to see both.
The Davenport Tablets
In 1877 the Reverend Jacob Gass excavated a mound near Davenport, Iowa, and brought out slate tablets inscribed in several ancient alphabets at once, with a cremation scene. The Davenport Academy of Natural Sciences held them to be proof of contact between the Old World and the New. A century later the archaeologist Marshall McKusick went through the Academy's own archives: the slate matches roofing tiles from a demolished local brothel, and the alphabets on the tablet are copied, errors included, from a plate in the 1872 edition of Webster's dictionary. The correspondence suggests they were planted by members of the Academy itself, who resented the newcomer Gass.
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