Giants are buried in the Ohio mounds. Seven or eight-foot skeletons poke from ancient log-lined graves like Abe Lincoln in a short Victorian bed. That is how the nineteenth-century scuttlebutt had it, the result of Buckeye hucksterism, misidentified mastodon bones, secret-society mysticism, and amateur inability to infer height from spread skeletal remains. â??Throw a coupleâ??a horse femurs in with a worn Indian cranium,â? says one of my farmer-neighbors, â??and youâ??d have yourself a boney-fide money-making giant!â? Itâ??s an old game in these swing-state hills, like extracting ludicrous promises from presidential candidates.
But Abe himself believed it, wrote about it, joked about being a possible descendant of the tallâ??uns, and in all probability, went in search of statuesque ancestors among the ancient earthworks by means of a steamboat journey up the Ohio River. I donâ??t think that Abraham Lincoln slew vampires, but did he sleuth out mound-builder behemoths? That is a question I set out to answer eight years ago, when I purchased the house in which Lincoln reputedly stayed on his quest.
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