Giant Skeletons and the Smithsonian Name: How the Story Began in North American Mounds

In 1894, Cyrus Thomas of the United States Bureau of Ethnology published a report of more than seven hundred pages on ancient earth mounds across North America. He recorded mound sizes, burials, objects placed with the dead, and human bones. His conclusion was direct: the mounds of the Mississippi Valley were built by Indigenous communities. They were not the work of a vanished secret race.

At the same time, local American newspapers printed a different stream of stories. A farmer ploughing a field, road workers, or treasure hunters opened a mound and claimed to have found a skeleton eight, nine, ten, or even twelve feet long. The final line often sounded familiar: the bones had been sent to Washington or to the Smithsonian. Later readers could not find such skeletons on museum display. The story then became much larger: Smithsonian investigators had collected giant bones and removed them because those bones did not fit the accepted history of North America.