Roamer: The Irish conman responsible for ‘America’s greatest hoax’

With next month’s US presidential election looming, and for a little light relief, the time is ripe to revisit Mitchell’s account of what’s often called America’s greatest hoax!

The historic fraud was conceived in a field in New York State 155 years ago, almost to the day.

Like most of Mitchell’s stories there’s an Irishman involved who he introduced here in September 2018, thus:

The star of the extraordinary swindle was George Hull, a remittance man.

Mr Hull was also a superior conman, an Irish-born smooth-talker who parlayed a chunk of rock into a hoax that netted him 100,000 dollars – substantially over a million pounds today!

Remittance men weren’t uncommon in the 19th century.

When a well-to-do family had a son who was a bit of a ‘black sheep’ they’d send him off with a one-way ticket to ‘the colonies’ or America, and wire him a regular allowance – a ‘remittance’ – on condition that he stayed there and didn’t embarrass them.

George Hull was from an Anglo-Irish family in Co Cavan and it’s not clear what he did that got him banished from the Emerald Isle.

Hull’s family set him up in a little cigar store in New York State and this, with his remittance, kept him comfortably.

But he wanted more!

His great con began when, half-drunk, he staggered into a hell-fire evangelist’s tent service one spring night in 1868.

The preacher’s sermon was based on Genesis 6, verse 4, about prehistoric giants just after the creation of the world.

“How big was those giants?” George bellowed.

“Ten to 12 feet,” answered the preacher, who must have been getting the information from God himself, for their height isn’t mentioned in the Bible.

George reckoned people would pay at least two-bits (a quarter of a dollar) to see one of those big fellows!

What, he thought, if he could persuade people that one of those giants had become petrified through the aeons?

He decided he’d find such a body and profit from it.

To cut a long story short, he got a large block of gypsum and hired a stonemason (sworn to secrecy with a generous bribe) to sculpt a 10-foot-tall naked man.

He had the body buried in a field in Cardiff, New York State (as opposed to the capital of Wales!) and a year later asked workmen to dig a well for him in the field.

And so, on the morning of October 16 1869 some well-diggers unearthed what became known as the Cardiff Giant.

It was a sensation.

Scientists and clerics examined it.

The gypsum bore dark streaks that looked like human veins and this seems to have convinced the ‘experts’ for they pronounced – “It’s a petrified human being.”

Before the ink was dry on the newspaper stories announcing the find there was a big tent over the ‘grave’ and people were paying 25 cents to see the ‘fossilised giant’.

Soon the admission was 50 cents, then a dollar, then the Cardiff Giant went on a nationwide tour, to sell-out audiences.

The ‘giant’ cost Hull 2,200 dollars in purchases, haulage costs and hush money.

By the time the scam was exposed, he had netted more than 100,000 dollars.

The fraud has been called ‘America’s greatest hoax’.

There’s no word on whether Hull reverse-remitted any of his new-found wealth to Ireland.

It was left to the press, the good old fourth estate, to debunk the fraud.

A reporter began nosing around the Cardiff farm which had previously ‘needed’ a well, and wondered why a well hadn’t been dug.

In a mini-Watergate of its day, the reporter, and others who got on the scent, traced the giant back to the block of gypsum and to George Hull.

Hull, who knew this day would come, just laughed and admitted the whole thing.

Old Hoaxey, as the stone man came to be known, passed through several hands before coming to rest in peace in the middle of the last century in the outdoor Farmers’ Museum in Cooperstown, New York, 80 miles from where he was ‘born’ in Cardiff.

And a copy of the Giant is displayed at The Fort Museum and Frontier Village in Fort Dodge, Iowa.