“Traces of a Prehistoric Race of Supermen”: The Real Story of the Soyopa “Giants”

Archaeologists racing to excavate the bones of a lost race of giants in a remote wilderness. Hints of a lost civilization. An attack by hostile Natives, and sensational dispatches from a reporter on the scene. But how much of it really happened?

​When the Copyright Term Extension Act of 1998 extended copyright protection for an additional 25 years, it had the effect of freezing the public domain for much of my adult life. As a result, material from the 1920s and 1930s was often quite difficult to access, making it hard to check on particular claims—but easy for pseudohistory writers to make claims, knowing most readers would never be able to find the truth. However, now that the public domain has been unfrozen and material from 1930 has entered the public domain, a particular claim about a race of giants in a remote part of Mexico is much easier to research to find the real story the fringe writers left out.

​Our case in point today is the mystery of the lost race of giants of Sonora, Mexico along the Yaqui River, three hundred miles south of the U.S. border. It’s a tale you’ll find in truncated and incomplete form in books and articles from fringe writers like Harold Wilkins, Brad Steiger, Jim Vieira, and more, but the full story has never been told until now. The account that follows is based on contemporary newspaper reports, published U.S. and Mexican records, and standard reference works.
 
The story began in late 1930, with a man named J. E. Coker, an expatriate American from Nogales, Arizona, who had been mining for gold, silver, and copper in Sonora since at least 1909, according to Mexican government records. He had been the manager of the Soyopa Silver Mines Company of Soyopa, Sonora since 1920, when he obtained a tract of land in Hidalgo near Soyopa on behalf of the company and began operations. Soyopa—whose name means “hot land” in Yaqui—had once been a rich silver-mining region in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, but most experts believed the veins had long been tapped out since the mining collapse of the 1880s and the Yaqui violence against miners in the early 1900s. Coker, however, thought there was still wealth to extract from the exhausted mines.
 
When operations did not pan out as expected and the mine shut down in 1922, he became the superintendent of the El Canario Copper Co. under J. P. Harvey. Coker left the copper-mining outfit to work as a manager for T. B. Lewis of Birmingham, Alabama, supervising a mine near Hermosillo, the state capital. He also returned to the Hidalgo site and began renewed mining operations there, striking what seemed to be a rich vein of “silver-gold ore” shortly thereafter. However, by 1926, it seems that his fortunes had turned. The 1926 Mines Handbook reported that Coker had provided no new information since 1923, though the 1925 International Mining and Metallurgical Manual listed fifty men employed at Coker’s mine that year.
 
Coker had evidently continued mining operations, albeit with limited success, to judge by how quickly his name fell out of the mining records after 1925. In order to improve his luck, in the fall of 1930, he sent his men to hunt for gold on the Yaqui River, in an area where the local Yaqui people had spent the previous four centuries fiercely resisting Spanish, Mexican, and American efforts to take over the land. (Another report said he had instead claimed the men were clearing ranch land.) Digging through four feet of dirt, the men in his employ had discovered three ancient bodies whose height Coker measured at more than eight feet. They dropped all pretense of searching for gold and spent the day uncovering the grave. The fossilized remains were those of one man and two women, the bodies of the women having been stacked atop that of the man. The biggest skull, Coker said, was a full foot long. Alongside the bones, Coker said he found stone tools and elaborate pottery.
 
“We were almost struck dumb by the discovery,” Coker said a few weeks later. “They were not the bones of humans such as we had expected. They were the bones of giants.”
 
Despite Sonora having its own archaeologists and anthropologists, Coker contacted Dr. Byron Cummings, the 70-year-old dean of the archaeology department at the University of Arizona and the director of the Arizona State Museum, to tell him about the find, which he claimed may have been the grave of a family. Cummings had moved out to Arizona in 1915, and by 1925 he had developed a special interest in the archaeology of the Sonoran Desert, though primarily on the American side of the border. In the fall of 1930, Cummings and his students had just finished digging at Blackstone Ruin, 27 miles southwest of Tucson. His next dig, at University Indian Ruin, was scheduled for the spring of 1931 under the auspices of the Civilian Conservation Corps. He had a few weeks between digs and between semesters with nothing planned.
 
The idea of recovering an entire tribe of giants was immediately exciting for Cummings, who was aware of the occasional claimed discovery of an overlarge human body. “There never has been several found together so that the existence of a tribe or race of giants could be proven,” Cummings said, according to the Border City Star. However, he expressed grave reservations that Coker’s claims were accurate before he left for the expedition. “Every people throughout the ages has had its stories of giant,” he later told the Associated Press, “but they have never been substantiated scientifically.”
 
Coker had told him that the local Yaqui people there were superstitious and hostile. Therefore, an expedition needed to leave immediately to recover the remains before the Yaqui destroyed them in what he implied would be a fit of ignorance and pique. Cummings agreed that the find should be properly documented. He immediately telegraphed the Mexican government in Sonora for permission to excavate the site, and he wired the Smithsonian’s Science Service in Washington for assistance in facilitating an expedition. Cummings told Washington that he was concerned that the local Yaqui people would damage the artifacts, and he proposed traveling to Mexico with four student assistants.
 
The Associated Press ran a report on its wire on December 2, 1930, on the word of Coker, who had begun calling newspaper offices and press agencies to share the story with the media in the hope of garnering more publicity for “his” find. The AP, however, was skeptical of the claims, quoting Bernard Brown, the curator of the American Museum of Natural History, to the effect that amateur investigators like Coker almost always mismeasure skeletons and exaggerate their height. “So far we have found no proof of a race of giants,” Brown said, “or any indication that there was a race in ancient days of greater stature than that of living peoples.”
 
On December 4, the United Press pushed a wire story asserting that Cummings’s team would be searching for “a fabled race of ‘Cyclops’ [who] once inhabited the earth,” referring to the one-eyed giants from Greek mythology. However, according to Cummings, his interest was in recovering the pottery Coker saw, which Coker claimed was more intricate and better made than any other pottery recovered from that region of Mexico. He supposedly told the United Press that the skeletons, if they truly were larger than average, might be used to prove Darwinian evolution, though the wire service did not elaborate on exactly how.
 
Cummings led his four assistants and United Press special correspondent Charles Holloway across the border on December 9, traveling south into Mexico by train. Holloway was a native of Iowa and had moved to first Nebraska and then Arizona with his parents. At just 26 years old, he was already a veteran of the Omaha Bee and the Tucson Citizen. He had also provided stories for the Associated Press before joining United Press. Friends and colleagues described him as charming and cultured, and as a bilingual writer, he provided English articles and Spanish ones to newspapers in Arizona and beyond.
 
In Hermosillo, the capital of Sonoma, the team met with the governor—though Holloway varied in his reports about whether this was Governor Francisco Elias or Provisional Governor Abelardo Sobarzo—and outlined the importance of the expedition. Coker told the governor that the bodies were eight feet tall and that he was sure there would be many more. The governor assigned the state’s historical and geographical research scientist, Manuel San Domingo, and several of his associates to aid the expedition, agreeing that it was important for scientific progress. The expanded team continued on by what Holloway called a “tiny branch line train” to Tonichi, the closest railway stop to the site where Coker had been digging. However, Tonichi was no thriving metropolis. The community had only a couple of hundred residents living around a seventeenth century Jesuit Mission. The train from Hermosillo to Tonichi ran only once per week. It happened to be leaving that evening.
 
The team arrived in Tonichi late on December 9, but they were still more than a hundred miles from where they needed to be. The trouble was that the bodies lay in a wilderness so remote—even by Tonichi standards—that it had no transportation infrastructure and few inhabitants. The team southeast traveled along dirt roads by automobile from Tonichi to Soyopa, an unincorporated village around yet another Jesuit mission and inhabited mostly by Native people. There they spent December 10 making preparations for the final leg of the journey. From Soyopa they traveled twenty miles north along the Yaqui River, leaving early on the morning of December 11, atop a caravan of burros, guided by local Native people, whom Holloway described as “docile” Natives employed for manual labor.
 
Before the team left for the site, Holloway filed another dispatch for the United Press, hyping the expedition as “an international quest for traces of a prehistoric race of supermen” and an effort to find “the long sought race of giants.”
 
Holloway claimed that the scientists on the team were confident that they were about to prove the existence of the giants spoken of in world mythology. However, according to his initial report, Holloway did not travel with the archaeologists and remained in Soyopa while they worked. The next day, December 12, for his afternoon dispatch, he filed a report lamenting that “no word had been received from the party this morning.”
 
That changed on December 13, when someone from the party supposedly returned to Sopoya and told Holloway that the archaeologists had spent the night of December 11 and all day and night on December 12 having their Native assistants dig tirelessly, turning up five bodies of incredible size, including the petrified remains of a boy six feet eight inches tall and several jars of cremated human remains. Holloway, who was not present at the site and filed his report from Soyopa, nevertheless quoted Cummings as confirming that they had uncovered a burial ground. The next morning, he quoted Cummings as saying that they had found the horrifying remains of a girl buried alive in some terrible rite of human sacrifice. Holloway somehow got quotes from every member of the party each day, despite the twenty miles and hours-long burrow ride between them—and the distinct lack of telegraph facilities at the camp.
 
The only sour note came from Coker, who ominously warned about danger ahead. “The roving band of Yaqui Indians are our only source of worry,” he said. “They are all armed and we are compelled to keep a sharp lookout for them at all times.”
 
Sure enough, within hours, that prophecy came to pass, as though scripted for a Hollywood film. On December 14, Holloway said he began to become concerned because no word had filtered down from the archaeologists’ camp for a full day. The next morning, a message reached Soyopa, but the news wasn’t good. The Yaqui had attacked.
 
However, at this point, Holloway’s reports started to change. In dispatches filed on December 14 and December 15, Holloway now began writing in the first person, describing himself as part of the expedition and an active participant in excavating the bodies—even though he had stated in his earlier reports that the archaeologists had left without him, and all of his reports were filed from Soyopa. (It is possible he commuted to the site, but with a travel time of six hours or more by burro in each direction, this seems unlikely, especially with the short days as the winter solstice approached and the time needed to write and wire his stories.)
 
The archaeologists, it seemed, had to stop their excavations quite suddenly because of hostility from the local Yaqui people, who entered the archaeologists’ camp armed with rifles and knives. In the first version Holloway reported, the Yaqui were enraged that the archaeologists were desecrating a burial site and vowed to protect it with their lives. In the second version, San Domingo, the Mexican government scientist, tried to mediate, but was shocked when a Yaqui man took the butt of his rifle and crushed one of the excavated skulls. His companions proceeded to hack and smash the other skeletons, according to the report. They demanded that the archaeologists cease digging up bodies, and the “fanatical tribesmen” forced the scientists to flee, taking with them only those artifacts they could gather in their arms as they ran.
 
And wouldn’t you know it, Holloway said that the incursion of hostile Yaqui prevented the team from learning “the secret of the hitherto mythical race of giants.”
 
Holloway claimed that the team fled early on December 16 and reached Soyopa a few hours later and were safely in the capital of Hermosillo by nightfall. Cummings, he said, was disappointed but grateful that the skeletons of the children showed that “The race of supermen actually existed.”
 
It was all very dramatic and compelling for readers of the newspapers where Holloway’s stories were published. Unfortunately, however, Cummings himself denied Holloway’s reports the moment he arrived back in Tuscon on December 16, having left Mexico the day before according to plan and contrary to Holloway’s claims.
 
Cummings had indeed uncovered skeletons, thirteen in total, and the land was, as suspected a cemetery. However, the rest of the story of what happened at camp seems to be wildly exaggerated, though based in real events. When Cummings returned to Tucson on December 16—having caught the weekly train on its morning run and made it back to Arizona in less than a day—he found a local reporter stringing for the Associated Press waiting for him. There was, Cummings told the AP, no evidence of “anything near gigantic proportions” among the skeletons he excavated. Indeed, upon further inspection, he could not find any evidence that Coker’s story about the giant skeletons and elaborate pottery had any factual foundation at all, beyond the fact that there were indeed bones on site.
 
The AP pushed several reports about Cummings’ findings in the 24 hours after his return. The first, filed only hours after Cummings arrived in Tucson, explained that while no giants had been found, the trip may not have been a total failure, for Cummings had gained support for his hypothesis that the ancient peoples of Arizona and Mexico were “allied.”
 
Cummings was upset enough about Holloway’s wild reports to refute them point for point in a lengthy AP interview:

“We followed Coker’s directions to the place where he had reported giant skeletons, and found what obviously is an ancient burial ground.
 
“In our excavations we uncovered 13 skeletons, five of them adult males, the others women and children.
 
“The males ranged in height from six feet to six feet six inches—good sized Indians, but by no means gigantic. The women were entirely normal in stature, the tallest being five feet, ten inches. The children also appeared normal.
 
“The tribe evidently was an ancient one. The craniums were long—they were long headed Indians, seeming to correspond closely to our ‘Pithouse’ people of Arizona, one of the early tribes which made its abode in pits in the earth.
 
“We found no pottery, hence these people were of a period before the manufacture of pottery began.
 
“In a stratum two feet above the level of the skeletons, however, we found two urns, containing cremated bones, and several pockets in the earth into which ashes had been poured—these particular persons apparently being too poor to afford urns for their remains.
 
“This top stratum indicated a later period of development, in which the burial customs of the people had changed.
 
“There was an absence of pottery, as such, however, throughout the excavations. There were some small shell ornaments, several crude stone implements which evidently had been used in the making of shell ornaments, and a few large shells from which the ornaments were made. These last came from the ocean.
 
“We did not find the skeletons which Coker had reported having seen. There were holes in the ground which apparently had contained remains, but whatever skeletons were there were gone when we arrived.”

Interestingly, Holloway had some real information about bodies, cremations, and other details, but his report, whether through his own doing or the exaggeration of his source in the archaeologists’ camp, extrapolated wildly from the basic facts, interpolated details that were untrue, and spun narratives the evidence did not support.

The AP’s reporter asked Cumming specifically about Holloway’s claim that the Yaqui had threatened them with rifles and destroyed artifacts, Cummings denied it had happened. “No, there was nothing like that,” he said. He added that the Yaqui were upset about the excavation but there were very few living in that area, and they gave the team no trouble. Instead, the team left on the planned day of departure because they had finished their work.
 
Cummings seems not to have considered the adventure academically significant or worth discussing again. He did not report the brief expedition in his 1931 summary for the American Anthropologist of archaeological work the University of Arizona performed in 1930.
 
The media lost interest in the story after Cummings’s comments, though papers farther afield reprinted the original United Press dispatches into the early months of 1931. United Press doubled down, writing a Spanish language story for the Los Angeles paper La Opinión on December 23 falsely claiming that Cummings believed there was still proof to be had of giants in the Western United States and that the six-foot-eight juvenile skeleton was real. The article went on to claim that the Yaqui attacked for yet a third reason, greed. The piece now alleged that San Domingo had spread the story that the giant skeletons were “worth millions of pesos each,” and claimed that the miners who employed them to mine the land ordered the Yaqui to stop the excavations so they could sell the bodies. Holloway was almost certainly the author since he is the credited writer of every other Spanish-language UP piece on the expedition published in La Opinión.
 
The article was the last published piece I could find from Holloway, who left United Press in 1931. Charles Holloway died in June 1932 during an operation to remove a bullet from a shot sustained while attempting to stop Francisco de la Cruz from murdering a woman in Tucson.  
 
The story of the “giants” of Soyopa had a strange afterlife. In 1933 the story returned and persisted for several years in a radically new form as the ever-expanding tale of dozens of Old World mummies buried in Mexico. A December 8, 1934 International News Story piece claimed that Cummings had announced the discovery of 37 mummified giants in Sonora in Yaqui territory. These bodies wore “oriental turbans” and were supposedly buried in the manner of ancient Egyptians, and he supposedly claimed that Paxson C. Hayes had found the bodies and was in the process of uncovering their lost city. Hayes, a bullshit artist of the first order, first made the claim about “slant-eyed” mummies in 1933 and would go on to use Holloway’s 1930 articles as the basis (sometimes verbatim) for his increasingly elaborate hoaxes about ancient “supermen” in Sonora that became a minor media sensation during the Depression. But that is another story.
 
Harold T. Wilkins included a very close paraphrase of Holloway’s articles in his book Secret Cities of Old South America, though he got the year wrong and never mentioned Cummings’s denial. Jim Vieira and Hugh Newman wrote about it in various books and articles. While they bettered Wilkins by using more than one newspaper article, they omitted the conclusion to the story for obvious reasons and instead endorsed Hayes’s fantastical version. Brad Steiger cited the story in his book Real Aliens, but only from the first 1930 AP report that ran in the New York Times. Frank Joseph, too, used the story in The Lost History of Ancient America, but his garbled account was derivative of earlier writers’ own somewhat incorrect summaries.
 
From there, it circulated around the internet, bouncing between websites and social media posts of believers in Bible giants and ancient astronauts. Few, if any, mentioned Cummings’s denial of Holloway’s claims, and most accounts failed to mention that Cummings did not find any actual giants—or indeed to go beyond the short AP story about Coker’s claims that started it all. Ironically enough, that story had it right all along, when Bernard Brown said that excitable amateurs are likely to measure skeletons incorrectly. ​