Stone Governor:

The Petrified Man of the Missouri River and the Anatomy of a Frontier Hoax

Introduction: A Nation Bewitched by Stone

In the decades following the Civil War, the American public developed a remarkable appetite for the impossible. Newspapers competed furiously for readers, the frontier West was still understood as a place where nature might do almost anything, and the science of geology and paleontology was new enough that ordinary people could still be persuaded that a human corpse, given sufficient time and the right subterranean chemistry, might harden into permanent stone. Into this cultural moment stepped a procession of entrepreneurs, showmen, and outright fraudsters, each claiming to have found exactly that: a petrified man. No chapter in this peculiar American tradition is stranger, or more revealing, than the case of the Missouri River’s own stone giant – a figure pulled from the riverbed near Fort Benton, Montana, in 1897, and swiftly promoted as the petrified remains of one of the territory’s most celebrated and mysterious figures.

The story of the Missouri River petrified man sits at the intersection of Gilded Age showmanship, unsolved historical tragedy, and the deeply human tendency to transform ambiguity into narrative. It rewards examination not merely as curiosity, but as a window into what nineteenth-century Americans believed, feared, and most eagerly paid to see.

The Cultural Soil: America’s Petrifaction Mania

To understand the Montana petrified man, one must first appreciate the broader phenomenon that made him possible. As early as October 1862, Nevada’s Territorial Enterprise reported the discovery of a petrified man found in nearby mountains, described as sitting in a posture against a mountainside to which he had become fused. The article was pure fiction, written by a young reporter named Samuel Clemens, who would later be known as Mark Twain. 

Twain’s motives were satirical. He later wrote that in the fall of 1862, throughout Nevada and California, people had grown wild about extraordinary petrifactions and natural marvels, noting that one could scarcely pick up a paper without finding one or two such glorified discoveries. He judged the mania to be becoming a little ridiculous, and, as a brand-new local editor in Virginia City, felt called upon to destroy what he saw as a growing evil. His chosen instrument was a very delicate satire.  The satire failed spectacularly – Twain was surprised at how many people were fooled. He had considered the piece a string of roaring absurdities, yet once he realized the deception had succeeded, he admitted feeling a soothing secret satisfaction. The hoax was reprinted in newspapers across the country and, by his account, eventually appeared even in the London Lancet. 

Twain’s accidental triumph illuminated something durable about the era’s appetite for such stories. His hoax was not even the first western example of its kind: an article entitled “Extraordinary and Shocking Death of Miner” had appeared four years earlier, in 1858, in the San Francisco Alta California and was widely reprinted under the title “Extraordinary Account of Human Petrifaction,” a piece so detailed and studded with technical terminology that it appeared to have genuine scientific credibility.

 

The appetite Twain had tried to mock only grew. By the end of the 1800s, fake giants and petrified men had proliferated across the country, becoming a strange and persistent phenomenon.  The most famous of all was the Cardiff Giant, unearthed in October 1869 on a farm in Cardiff, New York. In the first weeks after the Cardiff Giant was uncovered, more than three thousand people came to see it. Expert opinion was divided between those who believed it was a genuine ancient petrified man and those who took it to be an ancient statue, possibly carved by French Jesuits.  The Cardiff Giant had been manufactured by a New York tobacconist named George Hull at a cost of roughly $2,600 – a deliberate fraud from its inception, motivated in part by Hull’s desire to mock religious literalists who believed in biblical giants. A group of South Dakotans later fooled thousands of people with their own faked petrified man at the 1893 World’s Fair in Chicago, the idea belonging to a butcher named William Sutton. 

It was against this backdrop – petrified men as a recognized, if controversial, form of commercial entertainment – that a man named Tom Dunbar waded into the Missouri River sometime in 1897 and changed the course of Montana’s peculiar history.

Discovery on the Missouri: Tom Dunbar’s Find

Tom Dunbar claimed to have found a petrified body in the Missouri River, a short distance downstream from Fort Benton, in 1897. The river level was low at the time, and the body lay underwater, half buried in sand, as Dunbar would later describe to a New York newspaperman. He pulled the figure free with a rope and, having no wagon available, buried it in the sand well away from the river until he could return for it – which he did eighteen months later. 

Displayed on a platform inside a tent, the petrified man was modestly sized but remarkably heavy. A reporter for the Bozeman Daily Chronicle paid admission and recorded in print that the Petrified Man stood five feet, eight inches in height and weighed three hundred and sixty-five pounds. The reporter noted that hair was perfectly marked, two teeth protruded from the lips, vein markings were visible on the skin, and the hands were tied across the breast with what appeared to be a petrified thong of leather. A bullet hole in the forehead was said to indicate the cause of death. 

A reporter for the Bozeman Chronicle, in an article published September 7, 1899, filed a story after viewing the remains. He stated his belief that the figure was indeed petrified because the owner took a club and struck it over the body with a resounding whack.  Such demonstrations served as the era’s standard test of authenticity. Hollow objects ring; solid stone objects thud. To a credulous audience, this was persuasive evidence.

Dunbar, it appears, was no natural showman. He reportedly declined an offer of $5,000 from a visiting European count. In September 1899, he sold the figure to Arthur Wellington Miles, a Livingston entrepreneur, who promptly displayed it in a pine coffin in an empty building near his lumberyard. The curiosity brought in substantial crowds, and Miles earned roughly sixty dollars a day from admission fees, equivalent to approximately fifteen hundred dollars in present-day currency. 

The Ghost of Thomas Meagher

Miles recognized that the petrified figure, while compelling as a novelty, needed a story to take it east to bigger markets. He found one – or, more accurately, one found him. Miles was struck by something a miner had said upon viewing the curiosity in Butte: “It is the General! God rest his soul! It is the General!” The miner’s testimony was recorded in an article published in the New York World on December 31, 1899. 

The General in question was Thomas Francis Meagher, and his story was one of the nineteenth century’s most unresolved and dramatic chapters. Born and raised in Ireland, Meagher had taken part in the failed Young Irelander Rebellion of 1848, for which he was convicted of sedition and sentenced to death. After public outcry, his sentence was commuted to lifetime exile in Tasmania. Less than three years later, he escaped to the United States, became a citizen, began publishing a weekly newspaper, and studied law. 

At the outbreak of the Civil War, Meagher joined the Union Army, raised the Irish Brigade, and commanded it from February 1862 through May 1863. His fame and military record later prompted President Andrew Johnson to appoint him Secretary of the Montana Territory in 1865, and he eventually served as acting territorial governor from September 1865 to July 1867. 

Meagher’s tenure in Montana was as turbulent as his earlier life had been. In his short time in the territory, Meagher made many enemies with his pro-Irish stance and his support for a representative form of government. The most notable incident was when he ordered the release of James Daniels, a fellow Irishman convicted of manslaughter by a court of questionable jurisdiction. A prominent vigilante group responded by hanging Daniels that very night, the release order still in his pocket. 

At midday on July 1, 1867, General Thomas Francis Meagher rode into Fort Benton with a militia escort, his mission being to receive a shipment of arms from the federal arsenal. About ten hours after his arrival, he went over the side of the steamboat G.A. Thompson alongside the Benton levee, and a legend of controversy and mystery was born. 

Theories have been argued as to whether Meagher committed suicide, had a tragic accident, or was murdered. Authors such as Timothy Egan advocate the murder theory, while Paul R. Wylie concludes it was an accident owing to Meagher’s intoxicated state. Both theories carry merit.  Meagher’s political enemy Wilbur Fisk Sanders was present in Fort Benton that same day, a fact that has sustained the murder theory for generations of historians. The pilot of the G.A. Thompson reportedly described the Missouri’s waters at that location as instant death, with the river running twelve feet deep at ten miles per hour. Meagher’s body was never recovered, adding fuel to the mystery and to the persistent suspicion that his death had not been a simple accident. 

It was precisely this combination – fame, mystery, an unrecovered body, and a death by drowning in the Missouri River not far from where the petrified figure had supposedly been found – that made Meagher’s identity an irresistible fit for Miles’s marketing ambitions.

Building the Narrative: A Murder Solved in Stone

With the miner’s excited identification in hand, Arthur Wellington Miles organized a train tour for the petrified governor, set to begin in December 1899. The tour was planned to hit St. Paul, Chicago, and other cities on the way to the ultimate destination: New York City. 

The physical details of the figure were retrofitted to the story. There was a hole in the petrified man’s skull. Originally thought to have been a bullet hole, it was now said to have been caused by an arrowhead, and the hands were bound in thongs of leather, also petrified. The prevailing theory became that Meagher had been killed by Indigenous attackers – no one hearing the silent arrow – who dragged him from the river, bound his hands, and then, alarmed at the commotion made by Meagher’s companions on the steamboat, threw him back into the water, where he remained on the river bottom until Dunbar found him thirty years later. 

Medical authority was recruited at each stop along the tour route to lend legitimacy to the exhibit. At every whistle-stop, doctors were consulted, and they would seemingly admit that the body was legitimate. One William F. Cogswell, a physician employed by the Northern Pacific railroad, examined the figure and concluded that the features were clear-cut and natural – so natural, in fact, that a person knowing him as an animal would not fail to recognize him as a mineral.  The logic may have been tortured, but the testimonial was quoted in promotional materials regardless.

A photograph of the petrified man appeared in the New York World on December 31, 1899, shortly before the figure was to be exhibited in New York City. The promotional campaign billed the curiosity as “The Wonder of the Century” and assembled a roster of purported doctors and dentists who testified to its authenticity. If nothing else, the owners of the Montana marvel were skilled at advertising. 

Skepticism, Exposure, and Fading Crowds

The eastern tour did not succeed as Miles had hoped. The initial enthusiasm for petrified men had been significantly dampened by the exposure of the Cardiff Giant and the Solid Muldoon as outright frauds. Crowds were skeptical of yet another stone figure, even one allegedly embodying the remains of a celebrated Civil War general. The tour flopped, leaving the businessmen in the red. 

The figure continued to be exhibited on a smaller scale in subsequent years. An item in the September 20, 1922, Billings Gazette included a photograph of the “Petrified Man Snapped in Repose,” then on display at the Midland Empire Fair Grounds, suggesting the figure remained in circulation for at least two decades after the failed national tour. 

What the petrified man actually was – and what became of it – remains unresolved. The figure’s fate after Miles sold it, sometime following World War I, is murky at best. Today, the petrified man is lost. No one knows where it is.  Whether it was a carved stone figure manufactured from the outset as a deliberate fraud, a naturally occurring concretion that erosion had shaped into a suggestive human form, or some combination of both, cannot now be determined. The object itself has vanished into the same silence that claimed Thomas Meagher.

The Cultural Meaning of the Petrified Man

The Missouri River petrified man was not merely a curiosity or a confidence scheme. It was a document of its time, shaped by the particular conditions of the American frontier at the close of the nineteenth century.

It emerged from a culture that was simultaneously fascinated by science and deeply resistant to the implications science carried. The petrifaction craze drew its power from a halfway position between these two impulses: it claimed the prestige of natural history and geological process while delivering the emotional satisfactions of legend, recognition, and providential meaning. A petrified man was not merely dead matter – he was a person preserved by nature herself, as though the earth had decided his story mattered enough to be kept.

The specific association with Thomas Meagher also speaks to the period’s anxieties about justice and closure. Here was a man who had led revolutions, commanded armies, governed a territory, accumulated powerful enemies – and then vanished without a trace, without a body, without a verdict. Whether Meagher got drunk and fell overboard, or was thrown from the steamboat by political enemies, the mystery was one that would likely never be solved.  The petrified man, real or fabricated, offered an answer of sorts: Meagher had been murdered, his killer an anonymous Indigenous assailant whose guilt conveniently required no trial, no evidence, and no arrest.

This narrative dimension of the hoax carries its own troubling historical weight. By assigning the imagined killing of Meagher to an unnamed Indian attacker, Miles and his associates tapped into a well-established frontier trope that served to simultaneously exonerate Meagher’s known enemies and reinforce existing prejudices against Indigenous peoples. The story required no named perpetrator, no investigation, and no accountability – only the mute testimony of the stone figure itself, whose bound wrists and pierced skull told whatever story the promoters chose to give it.

Conclusion: The River Keeps Its Secrets

The Missouri River petrified man is, in the final accounting, at least two things at once: a fairly transparent commercial fraud of the Gilded Age variety, and a surprisingly complex artifact of its cultural moment. It drew on a tradition of petrifaction hoaxes that stretched back at least to the 1850s, capitalized on the unresolved mystery of a genuine historical disappearance, and toured a circuit of American cities that were already growing weary of such entertainments. It ended not with exposure but with neglect – slipping quietly from the fairgrounds and exhibition halls of Montana into a historical obscurity as complete as that of the river where it was supposedly found.

Thomas Meagher’s body was never recovered. The petrified man that bore his name, at least for a season, is also gone. Both remain, in their different ways, in the custody of the Missouri River and the long American habit of making myth where certainty cannot be found.

Works Cited

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