This is the second of three posts about the redheaded giant Indians discovered in Lovelock Cave, Nevada in the early 1900s. My first post commented the account given by the local Paiute natives, as recorded in Sarah Winnemucca's book, published in 1883, the scientific report onthe excavation sin Lovelock Cave by Lowe and Harrington in 1929, and John T. Reid, a local geologist and anthropologist who had explored the site and spoke to the guano miners who discovered it in 1911.
This is the full series
Post 1 - Lovelock "giants" revisited"
Post 2 - Lovelock "giants" revisited
January 2014 post mentioning Lovelock Cave.
The giants were not so gigantic
I found more information about Reid and the redheaded giants, in an article titled John Reid's Redheaded "Giants" of Central Nevada: Fact or Fiction? by Sheilagh Brooks, Carolyn Stark and Richard H. Brooks, published in the Nevada Historical Society Quarterly of Fall 1984. The authors analyze the size of the bones unearthed at Lovelock Cave and conclude they were not giants. They also try to explain the red color of these people (they were redheaded).
Background
Reid collected bones from many sites in this region in northwestern-central Nevada over the course of the years. His private collection included many artifacts too, but the core of it were the fourteen skulls and skeletons of this readheaded group of natives. The collection was acquired in 1984 by the Nevada Historical Society, and analyzed in depth.
The article sites Reid's biography by James Graves Scrugham, published in 1935 who wrote: "One of his great finds was a skeleton, found ahout twenty miles southerly of Lovelock, Nevada, showing that the body of which it was a framework, was exactly seven feet, seven inches tail. It is one of the "giant men" of an ancient race of which skeletons were unearthed in Central Nevada. (1935:228-229)" This is a remarkable height 7 ft. 7" is 2.31 meters tall!
The book then describes the tribe to which this person belonged, they seem to summarize the information provided by Winnemucca and Natchez that I transcribed in my first post:
"... a race of extremely tall redhaired people, referred to as Tule Eaters, who lived in the Humboldt Sink area. These people frequently were described as cruel, wicked, and possibly cannibalistic. Supposedly the Northern Paiutes feared and hated them. According to one version of the story, fighting broke out between the Giants and the Northern Paiutes. The Northern Paiutes chased the Giants into Lovelock Cave and covered the entrance with brush, which they fired to suffocate the Giants. Those Giants who tried to get out of the cave were shot by the Northern Paiutes' best marksmen. Some of the Giants did escape, and the fighting continued into the Humboldt Sink and around Pyramid Lake. All of the male Giants were killed, but a few of the females survived and later mated with Northern Paiute men. In some versions a few escaped and were chased to the northwest of Lovelock Cave; in other versions, they ended up as far away as Tule Lake, California."
I highlighted a new piece of information, that the surviving "giant" women were taken into the Paiute tribe as brides, and, the other version, that some escaped to Tule Lake in California. This lake (see it in Google maps) is 320 km (200 mi.) northwest of Lovelock, close to the California-Oregon state line.
Why did Reid conclude that these people were giants? He measured their femora (thigh bones) and compared them with his knee-to-hip distance. Simple maths lead him to calculate heights ranging from 7 ft. 7" to 9 ft. 6", 2.31 m to 2.9 m. These were tall men!
The hair was also reddish: "Hair is preserved on some of the skulls, which still have soft tissues adhering. The hair is a brownish red in color, confirming the description in the Redheaded Giant stories of these people being red haired. Because of his size estimates and the hair color, Reid was certain that he had found and identified the Redheaded Giants described in the Northern Paiute stories he had heard in his youth."
Many of the bones don't belong to complete skeletons, and the exact origin of many of them is unknown. Not all of them came from Lovelock Cave. The authors assume, that they came from Lake Humboldt and Lake Pyramid region, but are not certain of their provenance.
Furthermore, their dating is not known. They could be remains spanning tousands of years, from different ethnic groups. The authors treat them as belonging to a single time period. With these caveats, they concluded that the remains were of a normal stature. Not giants.
Only six male specimens had femora, and these were measured and using a formula devised by Trotter and Gleser, they estimated the height of these individuals, using left and right thigh bones, the range of heights was: 1.66 m to 1.79 m (5 ft 5" to 5 ft 11") plus minus 2" (5 cm). These are similar to other remains collected in the region in known sites.
The authors conclude that "some of the individual males were relatively tall" but the calculated values "in no way qualifies those persons as giants. Also, others were short for males..."
Their hair was red
The remains had red hair, and the article has two explanations: (1) the use of ochre, and (2) chemical action by natural decomposition and mummification.
"In the Reid Collection there are semi-mummified skeletons, and also in the burials recovered from Lovelock Cave by Loud and Harrington (1929). These are natural mummies, preserved by the arid climate. The hair of the mummies in the Reid Collection, when preserved, is a reddish-brown color. From archaeological research, and from ethno-historical accounts, data have been accumulated demonstrating that many of the Great Basin Native American Indian groups painted themselves while alive, and also painted their dead, with red ochre.
Red ochre is a mineral paint which colors anything a reddish-brown or orangish-brown shade. The significance of red ochre is that as a mineral it will not disintegrate, if placed on a body prior to burial, when the soft tissues deteriorate. If the body becomes fully skeletalized, the red ochre will then stain the bones after the soft tissues have gone. Red ochre also will color hair, changing black hair into a reddish or rusty-brown shade.
Also after burial, either during the drying out of the soft tissues of the body, or during their disintegration, these tissues release various fluids, which will dye or stain hair if it is preserved. One component of these fluids is ammonia, which dyes black hair a reddish or orangish shade.
Either one or both of these methods of staining preserved hair could have affected the mummies in the Reid Collection, and also those collected hy Loud and Harrington (1929) from Lovelock Cave. This reddish or rusty-brown coloring for the hair of mummies is not unusual in regions where the natural aridity of the climate has preserved the bodies and the hair as natural mummies."
The explanations sound reasonable. Ochre has been used by humans and other hominins over hundreds of thousands of years, and natural processes can change the color of hair. There has been speculation about readheaded Amerindians (see this post, and this post), and mythical redheaded creatures among Native Americans, like the Trauco or the Corupira) but no tangible archaeological proof of their existence.
The 1984 article concludes that "The archaeological materials associated with the burials removed by Loud and Harrington are of types expected to occur in that area of the Great Basin at that prehistoric time period. There is no substantiation that a group of people with a differing culture pattern, who might fit the description in the stories of Redheaded Giants, lived in Lovelock Cave, Pyramid Lake, or Humboldt Sink during the prehistoric period. Nor is there any evidence of death by violence observed on the skeletons of the Reid Collection, and the description of the burials found by Loud and Harrington indicates that they originally had been carefully prepared for burial".
My next post, the third in this series will follow an article by Dorothy Dansie, published in 1975, with more sources on John Reid and the redheaded giants.
Patagonian Monsters - Cryptozoology, Myths & legends in Patagonia Copyright 2009-2026 by Austin Whittall ©
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