British Mound Monster
Some old historians dismissed reports
of bizarre finds from Western New York, but most acknowledged mystery. We should
be suspicious of stories from frontier papers that stood to gain plenty from
tall tales. These are from historical texts.
When the Whites arrived, Western New York was littered with the works of
earlier people. Stone walls, graded roads, and fortifications were
reported, though most commonly these markers were earthen mounds or
enclosures. The Native Americans seldom had any tradition about the people
who had put them in place. Most of us now believe that the influence of
the Mississippian (Mound-Builder) culture was behind them. The settlement
and the plow have been lethal to most of these fragile works, and even the
old mound-fanatic E. G. Squier confessed ruefully in 1849 that the Western
Door held little any more worth looking at. As these works were destroyed
in the last century a stablefull of curiosities seems to have come out.
T. Apoleon Cheney notes (in Illustrations of the Ancient Monuments of
Western New York) that a twelve-foot high elliptical mound above
Cattaraugus County’s Conewango Valley held eight big skeletons. Most
crumbled, but a thigh bone was found to be 28” long. Exquisite stone
points, enamelwork, and jewelry (like that of Mexico or Peru) were also
unearthed in the area. The mound looked like those of the Old World.
Cheney also mentions a skeleton seven-foot-five (with an unusually thick
skull) from a Chautauqua County site near Cassadaga Creek. Inside a very
old mound near Cassadaga Lake were some large skeletons that were examined
by medical gentlemen.” One measured nearly nine feet. (In 1938 Charles
Hunnington of Randolph was so inspired by Doc Cheney’s finds that he made
two giant “wooden Indian” statues, probably still at the museum in Little
Valley.)
The History of Cattaraugus County notes the town of Carrollton’s “Fort
Limestone,” whose rough figure-eight enclosed five acres. In 1851 the
removal of a stump turned up a mass of human bones. Some were enormous.
Franklinville’s Marvin Older virtually gamboled about the site with them:
a skull fit over his size seven-and-a-half head; a rib curved all the way
around him, a shinbone went from his ankle to above his knee, and a jaw -
with bodacious molars - went over his own. Its first owner had probably
stood eight feet tall.
Stafford Cleveland’s History and Directory of Yates County refers to
skeletons from a conical burial mound by Keuka Lake in the early 1800’s. A
Penn Yan doctor found that many were seven footers. (Tales of ghosts and
buried treasure cling to this vicinity as well.)
Turner’s History of the Holland Purchase reports an ancient three-acre
earth fort in Orleans county (about one and a half miles west of Shelby
Center) that covered seven- and eight-foot skeletons. Their skulls were
well developed in front, broad between the ears, and flattened on top.
Also, Turner notes that, upon digging a cellar on his town of Aurora farm,
Charles P. Pierson found a giant of his own.
The 1879 History of Allegany County noted a circular mound between
Philip’s Creek and the Genesee in the village of Belmont. Several feet
high and fifteen or so in diameter, it disgorged human bones, some very
large, when the railroad was made in 1849 and 1850.
Giant human skeletons don’t ring any bells with us. Some think the
Scandinavians were in Western New York, and they were considered virtual
giants in the ancient world (whose people were traditionally much shorter
than those now). Many Vikings would seem tall even today, but they were
not routinely seven-footers.
Not all the humanlike skeletons found about the Western Door were so
surely human. Several old histories discuss the two very bizarre skulls
taken in the early 1820’s from a mound on Tonawanda Island near Buffalo.
One early writer notes each "portentous, protruding lower jaw and canine
forehead." Another adds that the burial customs were entirely unlike those
of the region’s natives.
Our County and Its People (Truman C. White, 1898) mentions skeletons that
seem to have been "platycnemic" - flat-shinned. In the bluff at Fort
Porter (Buffalo) one such skeleton was found near ancient implements.
Burials of up to three such skeletons have been found high up on river or
lake banks about the region. Their flat shins and "other skeletal
peculiarities" were thought due to climbing and living in trees. These are
odd stories to make up.
In nature’s evident experiments toward Homo sapiens, some of the
discontinued models were very large (Gigantopithecus comes to mind); none
are thought to have set foot or dragged knuckle on any American soil. Jess
Stearn (in Montezuma’s Serpent) cites finds from the American southwest
implying some giant, bestial hominid was here. Jim Brandon’s Weird America
lists two such accounts from just outside the Western Door. An
eight-footer turned up in an Ellisburg, PA mound (near Wellsville, NY) in
1886. The same year a team of professors and professionals found dozens of
huge, oddly-skulled humans in a mound in Sayre, PA (near Elmira, NY). They
averaged seven feet, though some were taller, and some had horny knobs on
their foreheads. Several went to the American Investigating Museum in
Philadelphia, into which they disappeared. Modern fans of Bigfoot (seen in
almost all the states of the Union) might rejoice at historical testimony
of monster bones; for the rest of us the matter is just... weird.