The original idea was masterminded by George Hull, a self-styled atheist and a cigar manufacturer. Much evidence indicates that the simultaneous appearance of two figures in New York City prompted Hull to boast about his discover yof a 10-foot petrified man.
During Hull’s visit in 1866 to his sister in Ackley, Hull became enraged at the stupidity of a fundamentalist Methodist preacher, identified only as the Rev. Mr. Turk. It was at that point that the two men continued their back-and-forth arguing about each being right and the other being wrong. The argument seemed to center around the existence of giants in the world.
Though I’ve found no conversation as such, George and his sister probably got into a discussion about building their own giant and presenting it to the public in such a way as to make it look real.
Hull had learned from his sister that the region close to Ford Dodge held what may be the world’s largest deposit of gypsum. Gypsum, up until then, was a hard, cool rock used only by miners to store and preserve produce and beer. At some point, the produce took on too much odor from the beer and was ruined, leading the owners to search for other uses of the gypsum.
With this knowledge in hand, Hull went to Fort Dodge to purchase a 12-foot block several feet thick and managed to haul his huge piece of rock to the nearest railhead by wagon. From there, he took it by train to a Chicago stonecutter who was willing to try his hand as a sculptor. When the “petrified giant” was completed, it was probably washed with sulfuric acid to age it.
Once his work was completed, Hull shipped the sculpture to New York and smuggled it to his cousin Stub Newel’s farm under cover of darkness. “I figured it out to age in the ground for a while before being dug up,” he said later in life. “I didn’t really have any idea how long it should age in the ground, so I left it for two years.”
After the two years, Hull told Stub to tell the newspapers that he had been finding lots of fossil bones in the area near the small town of Cardiff in Onondaga Valley. Stub had earlier told the townspeople that his well was drying up and would have to dig a new well soon.
On dig day, Stub found two men willing to dig a new well, coincidentally on the exact spot the giant was buried. You can only imagine what happened next. Experts came from around the world to study the authenticity of what had been named the Cardiff Giant from Fort Dodge.
Measured by any standard, the giant whose raw material lay close to the Des Moines River is central to the most successful hoax of the 19th century. Controversy about his origin raged so furiously that he is still given space in standard reference works.