No Bones About It, Giants Lived in MO
Part 1: Mysterious and Weird Missouri
Steelville is known as the Floating Capital of Missouri, but it is also the home of a peculiar 1933 discovery—a giant set of bones in a cave above the Meramec River. Oddly enough, a year later in another Ozark region, a farmer digs up seven skeletons on his farm, including one more eight-foot giant.
It was May 1933 when Billy Harmon entered a cave on the Meramec River looking for “Indian relics”. He and his parents lived on Puckett farm, and Puckett cave was part of its landscape. While searching the cave for arrowheads, he found a hole in the ground. Billy shined a light into it and saw something white. He reached in and pulled out bones, but they were not the run-of-the-mill animal or human kind.
Billy reported the find to his parents, and his father proceeded to the cave with a spade. After digging three feet down they found a complete skeleton. The giant skeleton had been buried beneath layers of dirt and ash in the cave in a sitting position, with its head down. After the bones were retrieved, the local doctor reported that they were quite old, though he admitted he was not qualified to determine much more.
By June 11, the story of giant bones in Steelville was fully featured in the St. Louis newspaper, including the photo featuring a six-foot Steelville resident lying next to the giant’s skeleton. Speculation at the time was the giant was part of the mound-building race. Another was that he may have been an Osage chief, since a man of that stature certainly couldn’t be just an Osage brave.
Aside from plenty of ash in the cave, there were broken pieces of crude pottery. The bones were slated to head to the Smithsonian for expert examination. The mystery remained as the story of the giant discovery vanished once in the hands of the scholars. Weirdly enough, giant bones allegedly have a habit of disappearing once in the hands of east coast scholars.
Decades before the Steelville giant, stories of large human-like bones were reported across multiple states, including Ohio and Virginia. Curiously, the graves in America seemed always to be found near ancient burial mounds. Hence, the theory of a giant race of mound builders was born.
In fact, in the 1890s news reports of giant remains were reported worldwide, including Sicily and Ireland. This also came with an equal number of skeptics who considered the cultural stories of giants (including the Old Testament of David and Goliath) to be no more than myths or burials of tall white men who obviously ate their ancient Wheaties. And of course, there was always at least one joker in the crowd faking the relics to earn a buck. The hoaxes usually became evidence for discrediting all other finds of ancient giant bones.
So, I supposed the skeptics were really surprised when an enormous graveyard of giant remains was uncovered near Hopkinsville, Kentucky in 1903. A young girl led the initial discovery after she heard the story of bones that had been plowed from the soil of a local farm. Hopkinsville is about two hours away from the southeast border of Missouri. And of course, nearby were more mounds.
A Massachusetts professor of archeology led the dig into an ancient cemetery that would recover 150 giant skeletons. In a few days, the excavation team would uncover 200 graves of giant men and women, though the report did not include an exact measurement. Underneath the soil were slab stones covering the graves. The speculation again was that these were mound builders and not Native American tribes. Pottery, pipes, beads, and sharp flints were part of the relics recovered at the site.
The large stone slabs showed no signs of being cut or split. With no evidence of the stones being quarried near the site, the slabs became an even bigger mystery to the excavating team.
Three decades after Hopkinsville, and just one year after finding the giant bones in Steelville, another discovery was made near the Lake of the Ozarks. J.D. Crain, an Otterville, MO resident had recently purchased a farm near the area. In the spring of 1934, he began to remove the mound that obscured his view from his front porch.
After digging for several days and hauling away the dirt, he was finally approaching ground level. And that’s when he discovered broad, flat rocks, similarly described in the Hopkinsville gravesite. Seven skeletons, six of normal size, and one of a giant were found beneath the slabs. Like Steelville's discovery, the giant was about eight feet, four inches long.
Crain reported the jaws as immense, with a skull more than a half-inch thick. He also found a petrified rock shaped like a human heart, but no other clues as to the history of the bones. Crain dug a deep hole near his front porch and reburied the bones. Both Steelville and Lake of the Ozarks were not exactly places attracting anthropologists and archeologists to call home. Perhaps the bones still remain somewhere on the property, underneath a golf course resort or outlet mall.
The discovery of giant bones are similar though no slab was found with the giant buried in the Meramec River bluff. The cave was likely a regular spot for shelter more than a gravesite. Given the final skeletal position, he probably keeled over after preparing another fine meal of Meramec catfish and gar.
Still, plenty of mounds existed in Missouri, and he may have been the last of his kind, evicted from in an ancient version of eminent domain, and forced to live in a cavern down by the river. By the time he was discovered, the mounds were also disappearing in the name of progress.
A few can still be found on this side of the Mississippi River, sort of. Gravois Bluffs shopping center in Fenton is built on a former mound. O’Fallon has a mound preserved in Dames Park. Hence, St. Louis was nicknamed Mound City for a reason.
However, the name faded as mounds were removed to build the city’s riverfront commerce. A large rock from the original Big Mound was all that remained when I was a kid. It was featured near its original location at Broadway and Mound Street. The rock has since been moved to make way for the Stan Musial Bridge. It’s not too far from the new bridge and looks like an oversized paperweight, so even in its diminished size its hard to miss.
Fortunately, an effort to save the remaining mounds on the east side of the Mississippi River occurred around the giant discovery in Hopkinsville. The Cahokia, Illinois mounds are today regarded as one of the largest and oldest mounds of civilization. It’s a great place to visit, but I don’t recall seeing any large bones at the museum on my visit last year. The only giant to see across the river is that of Robert Watlow, the Alton Giant.
About the same time two Missouri giant bones were discovered, Watlow was a teenager, and already about the same height, just over eight feet. He had a pituitary disorder which contributed to his enormous growth. He would grow to nearly nine feet tall surpassing the ancient giants before dying at only twenty-two. His casket weighed 1000 lbs., was 12-foot-long, and took more than a dozen men to get him into the ground. He too would come to rest beneath a concrete tomb, somewhat fitting for a local giant.