Distinctly Montana Magazine

53 w w w. d i s t i n c t l y m o n t a n a . c o m Livingston Goes East death." The body was also missing "part of one foot." Dunbar said that he had found the petrified man on the Mis- souri River, "in the Fort Benton area." The man was lodged in the sand in shallow water. Dunbar told the New York Times it took "most of a morning to get a rope on him and haul him out of the water." One imagines that at 365 pounds it must have been difficult, and at one point even the apparently stone man gave way. "That's when the left ankle and the great toe got broken off," Dunbar said. But Dunbar didn't want to be a showman forever. After reported- ly declining a visiting European count's offer of $5,000 for the man, Dunbar sold him to Livingston en- trepreneur A. W. Miles. Miles dis- played the petrified man himself to even greater success; at two bits a head, he now made some $60 a day off the old boy. Soon, another tour was mounted. Doctors at every whis- tlestop were consulted. Inevitably, those doctors would seem- ingly admit that the body was legitimate. One William F. Cog- swell, a doctor for the Northern Pacific, examined the body and said, somewhat confusingly, that "the features are clear-cut and natural. So natural, in fact, does the entire body appear that a person knowing him as an animal could not fail to recog- nize him as a mineral." The tour was an unmitigated success—enough for Miles to convince two more speculators (Jardine businessman Harry T. Bush and Livingston attorney Hugh J. Miller) to form The Mon- tana Wonder Company, which offered $25,000 in stock certifi- cates to eager investors who quickly bought them up. Miles and his fellow inves- tors must have seen the petrified man as the next national sensation, the next Cardiff giant (but real!) when they booked their next tour. What else could account for the sheer audacity of a nation- wide expedition that would travel east along the Nothern Pacific's stretch all the way to St. Paul, Chi- cago, and New York City. Part of his plan to promote the body was to claim that the identi- ty of the man was none other than famed Irish revolutionary, Civil War hero, and territorial governor of Montana Thomas Meagher, who in 1867 had died somewhat mysteriously on the Missouri River, apparently falling from a steamboat into frigid waters while ill. Speculations about his death abounded then, and still do today. The idea that the body was Meagher was not entirely with- out merit. Indeed, while on display in Butte, one miner, having enjoyed a wee nip before the show, exclaimed that it was the General, by god, the General himself! As a matter of fact, that's where Miles got the idea from.

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