Wednesday Weird: North American Giants

One of my all time favorite Broadway musicals is Into the Woods. I mean, fairy-tale retellings, all wrapped up together? It's the original Once Upon a Time. With awesome songs.

One of the songs happens when Jack comes back from climbing the bean stalk and sings Giants in the Sky:

Then of course, later, some giants come down and wreak havoc and kill a crap load of the characters, including the play's narrator.

Anyhoo. What does this have to do with Wednesday Weird? Simple. Today we're talking about North American Giants. Because forget the giants in the sky. They're not nearly as interesting and weird as the giants that lived among us.

Now. I don't mean people that are born as giants, those occasional people who grow to extreme heights and typically die young because their hearts can only support them so long.

No. I'm talking about actual races and peoples that lived in North America and were giants.

The Paiute Indians of Nevada told tales of the Si-Te-Cah, which they said were red-haired men and women with light colored skin as tall as 12 feet who lived in the area when the Paiute first arrived. They said that these human giants liked to eat the Paiute, which as you can imagine, pissed them off.
Finally, the tribes of the area joined together to put an end to the Si-Te-Cah. They ambushed the giants and killed most of them and the remaining giants took refuge in a cave. So the Paiute piled the entrance to the cave with brush and set fire to it. Any giants that then tried to escape were shot with arrows until all the Giants were killed that way or were asphyxiated in the cave.

Great story, right?

In 1911 bat guano harvesters (harvesting for fertilizer I assume, right? Anyone know for sure? Just curious...) started working in Lovelock cave (formerly known as Horse Shoe cave in the 1800s). After digging out like 4 fee of bat guano, they began to find broken arrows fired into the cave.

And then they found the giants.

Even in shrunken, mummified conditions, the skeletons ranged in height from 8 feet to just under 12 feet (depending on the source, heights listed vary. Some sources say heights only ranged from 6.5 feet to 8 feet. Still quite large).

This whole shebang is cool on it's own. But it's not the only time giant human skeletons and remains have been discovered in North America.

In 1931 two giant skeletons were found in Humboldt lake bed. Both skeletons were wrapped in a gum treated fabric. The first skeleton was 8 and a half feet tall, the second was just under 10 feet.

In 1877 prospectors outside of Eureka Nevada found a human leg broken off four inches above the knee cap including the foot. This leg was found sticking out of solid red quartzite rock dating from the time of the dinosaurs. They measured from heel to knee at 39 inches. The owner would have stood over 12 feet tall.

These are seriously just the top of a huge iceberg of giants found in North America. A quick google search and you can come up with dozens more. Here's a list (though it's uncited. I had a list, with citations I was going to post, but now I can't find it. Sorry). Unfortunately, it's hard to find the remains found in North America in any museums. I've heard most of them are snatched up by the Smithsonian and never put on display, but who knows how true that is.

 But that's not to say that North America is the only place the remains of giants have been found. Peru especially has a lot of uncovered giants, and you can see them in Peruvian museums if you're up for some travel. There's also the Breitenwinner cave on the German/Swiss border as well as these bones in turkey:

Though singular bones and bodies are still fascinating, they're easy to discount as genetic abnormalities. It's much more interesting, to me anyway, when there are multiple bodies discovered, hinting at a separate species or race.

So, what are your thoughts on North American giants? Or giants in general?