Featured on PDR in the collection A Very Tall Tale: Photograph of the Cardiff Giant (ca. 1869)

Early in the morning on Saturday, October 16, 1869, Gideon Emmons left his homestead in Cardiff, New York — a hamlet of Onondaga County — and hiked alongside Bear Mountain to Stub Newell’s farm, where he had been hired to dig a well. Life had been hard as of late, unmiraculous, dull. Having lost his left arm at the Civil War Battle of Gravelly Run — and forced to convalesce while his regiment celebrated their victory at Appomattox — he’d turned to alcohol for solace. He did not question why the farmer Newell had chosen him, a one-armed man, to sink the well that day: it was a means to a familiar end. Emmons and a fellow laborer, Henry Nicohols — Newell’s brother-in-law — began…