The Giant of Wawawai
A crew grading a road near the Snake River unearths the remains of a man estimated to be thirty feet tall.
The story, cleaned up
A cleaned-up reading of the newspaper page: spelling and layout repaired, one story lifted off a crowded page. It follows the original closely but it is not a transcription. The original page is below; read it if a detail matters.
In the mind of many people, especially those most calculated to be informed in such matters, the Pacific Coast or Territory, and especially the eastern portion of it, was inhabited by a race of mammoth human beings, or giants, as well as by animals of equally mammoth proportions. Discoveries of bones and skeletons from time to time, buried deep in the bowels of the earth, leave in our mind no doubt of the correctness of this long-existing idea. The latest proof of this proposition is shown by the following well authenticated discovery. A collection of fossil bones were discovered by a party of men who were grading a road from Wawawai to the top of a hill north of Snake River. The fossils have the appearance of having been a mammoth human being, and calculations made, it is estimated that the former possessor of these bones was a man some thirty feet in height, and who would weigh about two and one-half tons. The bones when found were embedded in the solid rock, thirty feet under the surface of the ground, in such a perfect manner as to leave no doubt as to their being those of a human being. It remains for the scientists of our land to ferret this matter out, and there is certainly a large and extensive field for study in our Territory for scientific men.
“The bones when found were embedded in the solid rock, thirty feet under the surface of the ground, in such a perfect manner as to leave no doubt as to their being those of a human being.”
While modern archaeology identifies these 'giant' reports as misinterpretations of prehistoric megafauna bones, they speak to a 19th-century fascination with the unknown deep history of Washington's landscape. Even today, the region's rugged topography continues to yield surprising fossil discoveries that capture our collective imagination.
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