Distinctly Montana Magazine

52 D I S T I N C T LY M O N TA N A M A G A Z I N E • W I N T E R 2 0 2 3 - 2 4 ThePetrified Man of W ESTERN AMERICANS IN THE 19TH CENTURY WERE VERY MUCH LIKE US; their lives were hard, and they felt they deserved a little entertainment by and by. Like us, many of whom are great fans of true crime or scary mov- ies or paperback thrillers, those Montanans of yesteryear didn't mind if the entertainment was a little gruesome, outre, or weird. So, amid the larger profusion of oddities like two-headed an- imals, conjoined piglets, Fiji mermaids, ancient Viking rune- stones found buried in Midwestern fields, bearded ladies, pick- led punks, "savages," and other bizarre traveling attractions, there emerged a very specific and surprisingly popular variety: the petrified man. The ur-petrified man of modern American literary mythol- ogy is the hoax contrived by Mark Twain during his days as a newspaperman. Twain called the profusion of touring specta- cles the "wonder-business," and set out to lampoon it with a satirical story about the discovery in a cave of a man turned to stone. A slow, steady drip of limestone water had, over a few cen- turies, fossilized him. Plans were made, he wrote, to blast him out with dyna- mite so they could give him a proper Christian burial. Perhaps not sur- prisingly, the joke was lost on many (despite the body's hand having been frozen with its thumb on its nose and its fingers extended in the traditional "nana nana boo boo" pose). As Twain himself put it, "As a satire on the petrifaction mania, or anything else, my petrified Man was a disheartening failure; for everybody received him in innocent good faith, and I was stunned to see the creature I had begotten to pull down the wonder-business with, and bring derision upon it, calmly exalt- ed to the grand chief place in the list of the genuine marvels our Nevada had produced." And there was, of course, one of the most infamous 19th-cen- tury hoaxes ever perpetrated against a credulous public. We re- fer, naturally, to the eight-foot-tall Cardiff giant, "discovered" decades after Twain's creation, and subsequently found to be roughly carved from stone. But not before P.T. Barnum tried to purchase it for $50,000. Rebuffed, Barnum decided to simply "discover" a couple of Cardiff giants of his own. So it is safe to say that the "petrified man" was well ensconced in the Montanan consciousness well before 1899, when Tom Bunbar started touring his petrified man throughout the state. Displayed on a platform in a tent, the petrified man was modestly sized but heavy. A Boze- man Daily Chronicle reporter paid to see Dunbar's entry into the "wonder-busi- ness," and wrote "the Petrified Man is 5 feet 8 inches in height and weighs 365 pounds. His hair is perfectly marked, two teeth protrude from the lips, vein markings are visi- ble in the skin, and his hands are tied across the breast with a pet- rified thong... A bullet hole in his forehead indicated the cause of by NICK MITCHELL

• Cover