7-Foot Skeletons Claimed for Science
Claims that giant skeletons from prehistory had been dug up and delivered to scientific institutions are not hard to unearth in 19th-century U.S. newspapers. Such tall tales were popular in part because they underscored White prejudices that Native Americans were an exotic inhuman species, their extermination worthy of no more human sympathy that, say, the fate of the passenger pigeon; and because believers in a literal, inerrant Bible could claim these ancient behemoths as evidence for the multiple Old Testament references to giants, most famously the demigods of Genesis 6:4:
There were giants in the earth in those days; and also after that, when the sons of God came in unto the daughters of men, and they bare children to them, the same became mighty men which were of old, men of renown. (KJV via BibleGateway.com)
Sometimes, however, the bones of long-dead people of unusual heights (anomalously tall or short) are indeed found – unsurprisingly, given the remarkable, everyday diversity of human anatomy.
And in some cases, finding them is made easier by the fact that indigenous peoples may have devoted special burial attention to anomalously sized individuals, an indicator of some sort of favored status in life.
I thought at first that writer Denver Michaels has exhumed a fine example of a bogus giant-skeleton story, from the Nov. 15, 1897, Baltimore American – but the article, though condescending and exaggerated, seems to originate in an actual Frederick County archaeological find.
Even better, the find is associated with a remarkable self-taught Black scientist from Baltimore, who deserves to be much better known.
I haven’t found a digital archive of the Baltimore American, but here’s the article I began with, as quoted by Michaels.
BONES OF GIANT INDIANS FOUND IN MARYLAND
PREHISTORIC MEN SEVEN FEET TALL WHO ONCE LIVED IN WHAT IS MARYLAND
There has just been received at the Maryland Academy of Sciences, the skeleton of an Indian seven feet tall. It was discovered near Antietam. There are now skeletons of three powerful Indians at the Academy who at one time in their wildness roamed over the state of Maryland armed with such instruments as nature gave them or that their limited skill taught them to make.
Two of these skeletons belonged to individuals evidently of gigantic size. The vertebrae and bones of the legs are nearly as thick as those of a horse and the length of the long bones exceptional.
The skulls are of fine proportions, ample and with walls of moderate thickness and of great strength and stiffened beyond with a powerful occipital ridge. The curves of the forehead are moderate and not retreating, suggesting intelligence and connected with jaws of moderate development.
The locality from which these skeletons came is in Frederick County, near Antietam Creek. …
Before the coming of the white man, this site was occupied as a village by Indians of great stature, some of them six-and-a-half to seven feet in height.
This story was especially timely in 1897, as the Maryland Academy of Sciences had been incorporated that very year, and newspaper readers were primed to read about its remarkable researches.
One telltale sign of a 19th-century newspaper hoax is that the story is published far from where the wonder supposedly occurred. When one then searches the wonder-adjacent local papers, they tend to be silent on that particular wonder, though they may well report a different wonder at some other location – equally distant and hard-to-confirm.
If these giant skeletons had been invented by a bored newspaper writer, the Frederick County papers of 1897 likely would have been silent about them. Instead, they confirm the basic story, with more detail and less exaggeration.
This account is from The News of Frederick, 28 Sept. 1897, Page 3:
Skeletons of Indian Warriors.
Mr. John Widgeon, curator of the Maryland Academy of Natural Sciences, Baltimore, visited Washington County on Saturday for the purpose of securing an Indian skeleton from the field on which the Delaware and Catawba tribes are supposed to have fought a battle 160 years ago.
Mr. Widgeon found a skeleton seven and one-half feet long near Sharpsburg, where the Antietam creek empties into the Potomac river. The skeleton was shipped to Baltimore.
About two months ago Mr. Otho Cray, a resident of Antietam, unearthed in the same locality a gigantic skeleton, which was sent to the academy of Natural Sciences.
The News published a brief update about two weeks later:
The skeletons of three Indians of great stature, unearthed near Antietam, Washington county, have been placed in the building of the Maryland Academy of Science.
Note that the two giant skeletons now have become three. Note, too, that whether the skeletons actually had been put on display was unclear. But this is a much more credible account than the American’s, and we now have a named scientist: “Mr. John Widgeon, curator.”
What The News doesn’t mention – in an era when virtually every Black person who merited mention in White newspapers was gratuitously labeled “colored” – was that Widgeon was a Black man. Today, we might take the newspaper’s silence for granted, or view it as a progressive move. But it may, alas, have stemmed from simple, racist embarrassment: a reluctance to acknowledge that the Baltimore expert in charge wasn’t White.
Widgeon was a self-taught polymath – scientist, preacher, writer – who initially had been hired by the Maryland Academy of Science not as a curator, but as a janitor. P. Nicole King summarized his remarkable life in a 2014 article:
Widgeon was born in 1850 to slave parents on the Eastern Shore of Virginia and at the age of twenty came to Baltimore. He was eventually hired as a custodian at the Maryland Academy of Sciences, the state’s oldest scientific institution … Because of his hard work and personal collection of various species, Widgeon eventually secured a regular position doing collecting for the Academy in addition to his custodial duties. Widgeon traveled to the West Indies to obtain specimens, surveyed Indian sites in Maryland, and collected a rare whale skeleton for the Academy. Widgeon often lived at the Academy …
In the early twentieth century, Widgeon moved to Fairfield and built the First Baptist Church of Fairfield, which opened in 1908 at the corner of Brady Avenue and Fairfield Road. A scientist and pastor, Widgeon also wrote essays, which were published in the Baltimore Sun in 1908, on the condition of civil rights. … Widgeon’s wife Lucy was also the postmaster of Fairfield for many years. In 1921, the Academy awarded Widgeon an honorary Master of Science degree at a ceremony in the First Baptist Church of Fairfield.
I will query the modern-day descendant of the Maryland Academy, the Maryland Science Center on Baltimore’s Inner Harbor, but in light of modern understanding about past desecration of Native American gravesites, I doubt these skeletons are still in its collection, much less on display. And I deplore the American’s glib assumption of an entire village of giant Indians, a sort of lost-race spin on the facts.
Still, I’m pleased that these skeletons seem to have actually existed, and elated to find that they form a Frederick County tie to the admirable John Widgeon. Archaeology circa 1897 is problematic today for many reasons, but the John Widgeons of any era are worth celebrating.
Sources
King, P. Nicole. “Preserving Places, Making Spaces in Baltimore: Seeing the Connections of Research, Teaching, and Service as Justice.” Journal of Urban History 40.3 (2014): 425-449. DOI: 10.1177/0096144213516072.
Maryland Science Center. “About: Mission and History.” https://www.mdsci.org/about/mission-history/. Accessed 30 Oct. 2021.
Michaels, Denver. “Giant Skeletons in Frederick County, Maryland.” 21 Nov. 2019. https://www.denvermichaels.net/giant-skeletons-in-frederick-county-maryland/. Accessed 30 Oct. 2021.
“News of the State.” The News (Frederick, Md.), 12 Oct. 1897, Page 4. Accessed 30 Oct. 2021 via Newspapers.com.
“Skeletons of Indian Warriors.” The News (Frederick, Md.), 28 Sept. 1897, Page 3. Accessed 30 Oct. 2021 via Newspapers.com.
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