On a September morning in 1877, a work crew breaking ground on a hillside near the settlement of Beulah, in the Wet Mountain Valley southwest of Pueblo, reported striking something solid at a depth of several feet. What they uncovered, according to their immediate account and the accounts of those who arrived shortly after, was the form of a man—or something shaped like one—measuring between seven and seven and a half feet from crown to heel, lying on its side in the hardened clay as though it had been placed there, or had simply stopped.
The skin appeared fossilized. The musculature, witnesses said, was defined in a way inconsistent with collapse or decay. Root tendrils from nearby scrub growth had threaded through what appeared to be gaps in the figure’s torso—evidence, some concluded, of substantial age. The earth directly surrounding the figure was compacted into a natural mold, as though whatever process had transformed the body had also fused it to the ground over a very long period of time.
Word reached Pueblo within days. The figure was carefully extracted, transported into town, and put on display. The exhibit drew considerable crowds. Local papers covered it in terms typically reserved for events of civic significance. Within weeks, the story had traveled east, and newspapers in New York, Chicago, and St. Louis were printing accounts of Colorado’s remarkable discovery.
The Exhibit and Its Reception
The figure was given a name before its origins were established: the Solid Muldoon, taken from a popular song of the period—a joke about a man so constitutionally indestructible that nothing could finish him. The name fit the spectacle better than any description of what the figure actually was, which remained, for the duration of its public run, genuinely unclear.
Examination by various parties produced contradictory results. Several physicians who inspected the figure in Pueblo concluded that the anatomical proportions were too accurate to have been fabricated without access to a real human form. One account noted the visible presence of what appeared to be a spine beneath the surface of the stone. Another described a faint impression of a navel. A third reported that the texture of the skin, when examined under a hand lens, showed a grain inconsistent with anything cast from a mold.
Skeptics, with equal confidence, pointed out that the material of which the figure was composed showed no sign of the mineralization process that produces genuine petrification in organic tissue—a process that operates over geological time, not human history. The figure looked old, but geological old and artistic old are not the same thing, and the difference between them can be difficult to establish without destructive testing, which the figure’s owners declined to permit.
The crowds were not troubled by the technical dispute. They paid to see it, and they saw it, and most of them left without a firm opinion either way, which is perhaps the appropriate response to something that cannot yet be explained.
The Exposure
The man behind the Solid Muldoon was George Hull of Binghamton, New York—a cigar manufacturer and occasional entrepreneur of the kind common to the era, who had discovered eight years earlier that the American public would pay to see a large and inexplicable body pulled from the ground. Hull had been the architect of the Cardiff Giant, a ten-foot gypsum figure buried in upstate New York in 1869, exhumed on schedule in 1869, and exhibited to national attention before being exposed as a fabrication. The Cardiff Giant earned Hull more money after its exposure than before it, because P.T. Barnum paid handsomely to display a copy, and the public came to see both the original fraud and the copy of the fraud with equal enthusiasm.
Hull applied the same basic logic to Colorado. He commissioned the Solid Muldoon from a Chicago sculptor named Edward Burghardt, specifying the dimensions, the posture, and the material: a composite of mortar, rock dust, ground bone, and clay, finished with acids and other treatments intended to produce the appearance of age. The finished figure was transported west and buried on the Beulah hillside sometime before the September “discovery.” The excavation was staged. The work crew who found it were not in on the arrangement—or at least, the ones who spoke publicly afterward claimed not to have been.
O.C. Marsh, the Yale paleontologist who had already exposed the Cardiff Giant as a fraud, examined the Solid Muldoon and came to the same conclusion: artificial, recent, constructed. His report was detailed and his credentials were not in dispute. The exhibition continued briefly after Marsh’s findings were published—notoriety being its own form of advertisement—then closed. Hull moved on. The Solid Muldoon passed through several owners and eventually out of the public record.
The case, by any official measure, was closed.
The Measurements
What was not resolved in the course of the exposure was a set of specific dimensional discrepancies in the figure’s recorded measurements, noted by three separate observers between September and December of 1877 and not subsequently explained by any account of the fabrication process.
Hull and Burghardt, in later statements, described a figure produced to consistent specifications. The sculptor’s notes, partially recovered, indicate a finished length of seven feet two inches and a shoulder width of twenty-six inches. These figures are consistent with the measurements recorded at the Pueblo exhibition by the physician Henry Carver, who examined the figure on October 4th and noted its dimensions in a letter to a colleague in Denver.
They are not consistent with measurements recorded three weeks earlier, at the time of excavation, by two men who were present at the site and whose accounts were published independently and without apparent coordination.
| Dimension | At Excavation (Sept. 1877) | At Exhibition (Oct. 1877) | Sculptor’s Record |
|---|---|---|---|
| Overall length | 7 ft. 5 in. | 7 ft. 2 in. | 7 ft. 2 in. |
| Shoulder width | 29 in. | 26 in. | 26 in. |
| Foot length | Not recorded | 14 in. | 13.5 in. |
| Weight (estimated) | “Near five hundred pounds” | “Between three and four hundred” | Not recorded |
The three-inch discrepancy in length and the three-inch discrepancy in shoulder width are large enough to suggest either a significant error in one set of measurements, or the possibility that the figure examined at excavation and the figure displayed in Pueblo were not identical. No explanation was offered at the time. The exposure focused on the question of whether the figure was genuine, not on whether the figure was the same figure throughout.
This question was never formally investigated.
Field Examination Notes — Recovered Fragment
The following examination notes were located in the Obscura archive collection under the classification heading Muldoon — Physical Record — Status Disputed. They are reproduced here without editorial amendment. Their provenance has not been fully established.