Lands of Giants? Land of "little people"
- By john meekins
- Published 01/29/2008
john meekins
John Meekins is a former newspaper reporter and always an adventurer. He has reported and written about news events over much of the United States and beyond. He covered the Vietnam War in Vietnam. He has a special interest in history and is currently working on a history of the 15th Indiana Volunteer Infantry Regiment from the Civil War. He was born in Oklahoma, raised in New Mexico and also has lived in New Hampshire, Indiana, Ohio--and Germany.
People 15 feet tall?
People 2 feet tall?
Doesn’t sound possible.
Yet, there are at least two stories of the giants, both based on bones. There are also at least three stories of little, but very fierce people.
In the one case, a soldier marching to Santa Fe during the Mexican War came across bones of human beings that he said must have been very tall.
“He” was Frank S. Edwards who stopped for the night at Pecos, New Mexico and wrote about it in his book, “A Campaign in New Mexico with Colonel Doniphan,” that can be found on the web. Col. Alexander William Doniphan led about 1,000 volunteer soldiers from Missouri to New Mexico as part of the Army of the West. The army was on its way to conquer New Mexico in 1846.
Edwards writes of these huge creatures whose bones he and some companions found in what they termed an Indian church, probably a "kiva" or something like it: “There are many traditions connected with this old church, one of which is that it was built by a race of giants 15 feet in height…”
But, then comes the opposite,
“…but these dying off, they were succeeded by dwarfs with red heads, who, being in their turn exterminated, were followed by the Aztecs. But a singular part of the story is that both the large and the small men were white. The bones which have been dug from the floor of the church are, certainly, of gigantic size. A thigh bone that I saw could never have belonged to a man less than 10 feet high.”
Curiously, none of the other soldiers in the Army of the West who marched through Pecos mention seeing the bones of giants.
When I emailed what is now a national monument at Pecos today about Edwards’s story, I got a reply saying Edwards's account sounded like a “tall tale,” and nothing else.
Pecos, if you read very much, was a significant Indian city in the recent history—by that I mean just before or right after Columbus “discovered” America. It was a ruin by the time Edwards arrived. Though a lot of people seem to have tried to link the people there to Aztecs, the general sense is the people who occuppied Pecos and the surrounding area were not related to them.
While Edwards’s story is the only one I’ve found that mentions about the race of giants at Pecos, it mirrors another story of a graveyard of similar-sized giants found in Augusta, Kentucky about 1800. These giants
Pioneers found so many of these huge bones scattered so randomly just beneath the soil at Augusta as they erected homes and planted crops, that they determined the place must have been the site of some pre-historic battlefield. That meant the giants were killed and their skeletons left randomly around. How “pre-historic” no one ever said.
There is a suspicion that the human bones found at Augusta might some how be related to the Indians who occupied that large metropolis of mounds at Cahokia in Illinois across the Mississippi River from St. Louis.
Nothing else is at least generally known about the giants of Augusta, and there is no mention of little people there.
The Lewis and Clark expedition mentions little people, though.
The official report tells of stories among the Indians of a race of very dangerous“little people” not far from where the Corps of Discovery wintered at Mandan, South Dakota on their way to the Pacific Ocean. The fearless explorers actually journeyed to the place where these “little people” were said to live—against the advice of Indians.
The Indians claimed the little people were only two feet tall, but that they were very fierce and killed intruders with their bows and arrows.
The Lewis and Clark adventurers did not find the little people or any evidence that they or anyone else lived on, near or the mound the Indians directed them to. They did see a hole in the side of the mound, but nothing about it suggested humans or human habitation.
The little people are not just of the past for the Indians where Lewis and Clark spent that winter.
A ranger who works at what is a state park near where Lewis and Clark looked for the little people said, “Some Indians still believe in them today.”
Finally, there is at least one other report of "little people" of a size that would match those described in Pecos, New Mexico and near Mandan, S.D. It is of a large number of caskets for little people of that size found near Coshocton, Ohio in 1829. The "caskets" do not seem to fit with the tales at Pecos or Mandan, but they were described as caskets for people about the same size. There is no other description of anything else about the people who might have used the caskets.And, there is nothing else about the caskets found at Coshocton, at least on the Web.
These are wonderful stories that challenge the inquisitive to try to unravel the mystery about these races of people reported by credible sources
