Gila County – Mighty Feet
MEN OF MIGHTY FEET.
If Not Giants, They Were at Least Uncommonly Large.
Was the great west inhabited by a race of giants in prehistoric days? R. B. Laird, who was in Kansas City recently, claims to have new evidence that it was, says the Kansas City Journal. He is a New England geologist who has spent many months making investigations in the canyons, tablelands, and gorges of Arizona. He left for the east with his evidence in the shape of a voluminous typewritten manuscript carefully put away in a handbag. He declined to make public the full purport of the document.
Mr. Laird makes no boast of having had a hand in the investigation but says the discoveries were made by a guide who has been a resident of Williams, A.T., for many years and who has been in every nook and cranny of the mountains in that district. The claim that there existed in prehistoric times a race of giants is old, but proofs are not found every day. In this case, they were found in the shape of immense footprints, which have become hardened in the limestone formations of the district.
To substantiate his statements, Mr. Laird carries with him several photographs showing, by comparison with the foot of a miner, the relative size of the giant’s foot. Some idea of its great size can be gained when it is seen that the depression in the rock strata caused by the great toe is more than twice as large as the miner’s foot. The fact that animals in prehistoric periods were of such immense size is advanced as an argument that man was also abnormally large. Laird is a firm believer in this theory.
- The Western outlook. [volume], January 27, 1900, Image 4