Surely there is something about fringe history beliefs that curdles even the most fertile of minds once faith supplants facts in the minds of the true believer. Have you ever heard of Richard J. Dewhurst? Dewhurst began his career producing legitimate work. He graduated from NYU with a degree in journalism and worked for ABC News, The Miami Herald, PBS, Fox, and many other outlets, including the History Channel. He also says he won an Emmy for his work on an HBO documentary about the Vietnam War, though his name does not appear in the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences’ online records. According to the Academy, the Emmys were awarded to writer Bill Couturie and producer Thomas Bird for Dear America: Letters Home from Vietnam (1988), although Dewhurst was a credited writer on the project according to IMDB. Somewhere along the line, he became a believer in fringe history, particularly the myth of the Mound Builders and the Bible Giants. According to Dewhurst, “Giants” once “ruled America.” Dewhurst believes that Native Americans did not build the prehistoric mounds of America, that Native Americans are conspiring to prevent research into the true builders of these mounds, and that the U.S. government is actively destroying evidence of a lost race of giants.
Oh, and of course these giants were “white” and had blue eyes and blond hair. Don’t take my word for it. One of his key pieces of evidence is a 1920s Ogden Standard-Examiner newspaper article titled “How Our White Indians Are Rising Out of Legend Into Fact,” about alleged blond Caucasian skeletons thousands of years old. Dewhurst claims to have derived his information from old newspaper stories about giant skeletons as well as alleged eyewitness accounts to the discovery of the same. His new book on the subject is The Ancient Giants Who Ruled America: The Missing Skeletons and the Great Smithsonian Cover-Up (Bear & Company, Dec. 2013), and he’s been on a media tour promoting it. The book is largely a collection of reprints of old newspaper articles. Regular readers will remember that there were no accusations of a Smithsonian cover-up until David Childress invented them in a 1993 article based on secondhand rumors and fake evidence. Here’s an example of the quality of Richard J. Dewhurst’s newspaper research. In an article promoting the book on Graham Hancock’s website he presents an 1871 newspaper account of the discovery of two hundred “giant” skeletons from Grand River, near Cayuga. (The newspaper identified the skeletons as “Anakim,” or Bible giants.) But Dewhurst claims that this took place near Cayuga, NY (a village in the county where I grew up), which shows that he paid no attention whatsoever to his alleged source, since the original newspaper article describes the events as taking place in Cayuga Township, Ontario—in Canada! Obviously, he hasn’t visited either Cayuga to do any firsthand research into his claims that an old newspaper account accurately reported the discovery of hundreds of giants. Worse: The fact that these skeletons were allegedly found in Canadian soil undermines his claim that the Smithsonian is suppressing the Bible giants. What interest did Canada have in following suit at a time when it was a part of the British Empire, an empire that the next year would celebrate George Smith’s discovery of the cuneiform Flood legend, which was believed at the time to have provided proof of the literal truth of the Bible, giants and all? But Dewhurst isn’t interested in truth but propaganda. Despite the fact the Cardiff Giant is on display at the Farmer’s Museum in Cooperstown, NY—where I visited it many years ago—he does not make firsthand observations of the carved statue and instead relies on a bad argument from authority—that “Harvard scholars” declared it a Bible giant—to claim it’s a real petrified man from Genesis 6:4! Dewhurst also relies on the dubious claim that 1.5 billion tons of copper were mined from Lake Superior in prehistoric times to give the giants copper weapons, a claim based on incorrect assumptions and faulty math, as I discussed when the same claim appeared on America Unearthed. Here’s where Dewhurst’s propaganda surpasses his facts and runs into disturbing territory. He discusses the fact that nineteenth and early twentieth century people destroyed many prehistoric mounds, leveling them for farmland and for growing cities. (In fact, my hometown of Auburn, NY planted Fort Hill Cemetery atop one such mound!) But he then suggests that this situation continued apace today as part of a program to destroy antiquities to deny biblical truths. Listen to this bit of propagandistic sleight of hand: “To compound matters, the Mound Builders still have no official standing as an indigenous Native American People, as no official descendents (sic) of the Mound Builders have ever been recognized by the courts of the United States.” Do you see the trouble? There being no singular or distinct race of Mound Builders, they can have no official standing. The mounds were the work of the Adena, the Hopewell, the Mississippians, and many more. They have long been recognized, though their relationship to post-Contact tribes is less certain due to the population collapse and great migrations that followed. But by phrasing his claim this way, Dewhurst suggests that the Mound Builders were a separate race, distinct from modern Native Americans, which in turn is a rhetorical point supporting the equally ephemeral idea that there were genetically distinct “white” giants in America. Denial of federal recognition now becomes spurious evidence of “suppression” of that which did not actually exist! Dewhurst asserts that the Mandan people were blue-eyed Europeans with blond and red hair. Although he differs from his fringe history colleagues in recognizing that the Mandan still exist today, he does not inform his readers that they are not blue-eyed or blond. Instead, he dismisses claims that they are Native Americans as “superstition, academic bias and ill-founded opinions.” To return briefly to the “White Indians” from the Ogden Standard-Examiner that forms one of his key pieces of evidence: Dewhurst concludes his Graham Hancock website article by claiming that the Smithsonian and the Fowler Museum covered up the discovery of two hundred giant skeletons on Catalina Island until they were forced to admit their existence in 2011. However, according to the Los Angeles Times, parts of the skeletons were used by the 1928 excavator, Ralph Gidden, to build a museum of the “white” Indians, literally embedding their bones in the walls. Gidden apparently purchased bones from curio shops to salt his finds and created a fake dig site as a tourist attraction. He kept hundreds of bones and 30,000 teeth at his museum until it closed in 1950, at which point they went to the Fowler Museum at UCLA. (The Smithsonian have never housed them.) In other words, these “suppressed” bones were publicly accessible from 1928 to 1950, which is hardly suppression. The Fowler Museum has not put the bones on public display because museum do not generally display Native American bones anymore and Gidden kept poor records, so they could not identify which came from the Catalina dig and which were purchased elsewhere. There are no “giants” in the collection, which in 2012 began undergoing a new round of scientific testing to determine its origins. So far, all signs point to Native Americans of normal size. Dewhurst conveniently leaves all that out because a newspaper in 1928 reported Gidden’s hype about Caucasian giants and everyone knows everything in the newspaper is always true. It is those evil scientists who lie.
20 Comments
Shane Sullivan
5/12/2014 07:53:02 am
It's generally accepted that the Ho-Chunk built mounds, although I don't know if that fact has been recognized by "the courts of the United States".
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Varika
5/12/2014 11:41:29 am
I don't know that "the courts of the United States" have any reason to recognize it, either. I mean, unless there comes a court case where that is pertinent information--a grave-robbing case, perhaps, or black market antiquities.
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DO Childers
4/16/2018 07:21:48 am
Guys seriously do the research on your own in any town history or geological/ archaeological survey of the counties and you will see that they bring up over 7 ft tall people even 9ft tall at times in the Midwest anywhere you look. You can can stay brainwashed and believe what you like but after all the ranting on how his research is bullshit do your own I live in Ohio and have gone through several county surveys and guess what I found. Look into it if like or just stay oblivious to this serious piece of history.
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titus pullo
5/13/2014 01:34:13 am
Where is the evidence of "giants"? Seriously are these folks slightly off kilter? If someone actually found bones of giants, it would be a huge find...if someone found Noah's ark it would be all over the media. The one thing I have learned in my 50 years on this planet is two people cannot keep a secret...let alone thousands...Alien remains, bigfoot, giants...minoian mining in the Great Lakes...I don't think so. This does give me pause and wonder if I wrote up some crazy fringe theory if I could sell enough books to leave my corporate marketing job and buy a condo on Isle of Palms in Charleston and enjoy life....I've always had a soft spot for Carthage..maybe a Cathagian outpost in the America's after its destruction by Rome...they moved inland and discovered uraninum, created fission reactors and created a ruled the natives. Then a disease almost wiped them out, the native rebelled and they were forced to retreat to the high north where the Franklin Expedition discovered them and forced the Carthagianians to wipe out the Franklin Expedition...the Carthaginians then formed the Council of Foreign Relations and the Federal Reserve to take control of America through the currency...
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Gunn
5/13/2014 04:29:48 am
I think the problem is that giants were real back in time, in some settings, but fringe types have garnered false reports to support modern untruths. In other words, something real has been totally blown out of proportion. Science cannot deny that giants existed, whether as "freaks of nature" only or as embedded "biological families," I should not venture to say, except that evidence does show giants within families, too, I think. So, there were (and are) giants, but probably not roving bands of giants.
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Only Me
5/13/2014 05:11:31 am
One sure way to tell if the Mandans (or their descendants) had European "donations" to their bloodline, would be through DNA testing. If they still exist, as Jason says, then the results would be telling.
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5/13/2014 08:01:14 am
The last full-blooded Mandan individual died several years ago, but there are records of Mandans from the last century, none of which show blonds. There are currently individuals who identify as Mandans who have Mandan ancestors. It's a little confusing because several tribes merged because of dwindling numbers, but at the same time due to the common practice of avoiding incest by marrying outside the group, it's rather hard to argue for racial purity in any given people.
Varika
5/13/2014 12:53:58 pm
Science does not and never has denied the existence of very tall people. It's rather difficult, when faced with a living 7'9" to 8'2" person talking to you across a table, to deny their existence. What science has found no evidence of is an entire population of nothing but these very tall people. Science has also found no evidence of someone in the 10 to 30 foot tall range, the classic heights of myth and fairytale. (According the to the Guinness World Book of Records, the tallest man ever recorded was just shy of 9 feet at 8'11.1". There are other records that dispute this, but nothing significantly over 9 feet. Or reliably verifiable.) And of course, these giants have occurred in every ethnicity on the planet. The largest population right now are actually to be found in China, and probably (though unverified) have to do with the feeding of growth hormones to children to produce basket ball players.
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Only Me
5/13/2014 01:47:53 pm
Agreed. Then you'd have the red tape involved with attaining permission to test pre-Columbian Mandan remains.
Gunn
5/14/2014 04:06:01 am
Good points, Varika, except that one wouldn't need to go back to pre-Columbian Mandan remains to test for European DNA, according to the pro's. Most professional archaeologists would say going back before the 1600's would be good enough (not 1492), since (in their collective opinion) no Europeans were in the general Dakota/Minnesota area prior to this time.
Gunn
5/14/2014 04:21:21 am
In hindsight, I should have mentioned that if (possibly) the mixed-blood Mandan Nation arose from the hundreds of supposedly vanished Greenlanders (coming to the Dakota area), then my money would have to go on 1350 or so as the beginning of the DNA exchange--250 years or so before the first acknowledged Europeans arrived in the region. Still Scandinavians.
Gunn
5/13/2014 10:26:34 am
The Mandans remain a perplexity. I'm just saying that, in my mind, they seem to have sprang up very near the Dakotas, where also I believe there were Scandinavians at an early time, well before the 1800's immigration period. Possibly coincidental, possibly not.
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Varika
5/13/2014 12:55:03 pm
That's a pretty cool sculpture, actually. I like it! Thanks.
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Carltina Johnson
5/16/2014 02:25:04 pm
This is the biggest lie that I have heard because the Native Americans became "White" by intermixing with Europeans and having children by them. The Giants were found in the Americas were not white, they were Africans. So this blog is a lie.
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Only Me
5/16/2014 03:15:49 pm
By that leap of stupendously absurd logic, any ethnicity that has intermixed with white people is in the process of becoming white. So nice to see that Afrocentists are now trying to appropriate Biblical literalism into the fold.
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BillUSA
5/18/2014 09:32:15 am
So.....we're to believe that the native American Indians are "conspiring to prevent research into the true builders of these mounds, and that the U.S. government is actively destroying evidence of a lost race of giants."
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6/30/2015 02:11:54 pm
I came across books by writer, Steve Quayle, that seemed to confirm, and with better evidence, the historical presence of giants throughout the Americas and the whole world in legend documented in newspapers dating back to the 1800s.
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Lee H Preston
2/27/2017 03:51:40 am
Yes, the blonde Eskimos were the invention of explorer Vilhjalmer Stefansson to help raise capital for one of his several arctic expeditions. He was a pretty good explorer...but had no qualms with doing whatever it took to raise funds. I believe he sold the "exclusive" rights to the story to about half a dozen newspapers. When he returned a few years later he had added a few Islands to the Dominion of Canada...however there was no trace of the blonde Indians.
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I invite all Nay-Sayers to read The Book of Mormon [B of M] that tells in great detail about several of these people(s) of the MOUNDS of New York along with the How & Why. The WHERE might be a tad more difficult until you Read & Study "The lost mounds of Western New York ISBN: 0-615-13319-3 by Norman Brockenshire (C) 2006 Reading the B of M entirely is a bit much and to make it easier start with The Book of Mormon & Ether which are books 13 & 14 of the 15 books contained in the B of M..... Brockenshire's book for me is a bit dis-jointed in that that in my opinion the end should be the beginning and visa versa. However he makes a strong case for his observations by personal knowledge from a life time of investigation.Mocked and criticized the B of M has never proven false; it is true and contains a way for anyone to prove it for themselves by reading the last 2 paragraphs of the Introduction + following the instructions. ALSO Brockenshire admits to being a Mormon and it would follow that he has read & studied the B of M.
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Elizabeth
10/26/2017 11:16:09 pm
The snarky tone of this review belittles Mr. Colavito, not Mr. Dewhurst. Did the Smithsonian pay you to write this bit of baseless slander, Jason? Shame on you.
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