Jim Bradshaw: Prankster played the long game with hoax

I don’t know who Mr. Janin was. All I know about him is that he lived in St. Martin Parish in the 1850s, was a practical joker and was a very patient man.
The evidence is in two newspaper reports.
On Oct. 4, 1895, the New Orleans Daily Picayune reported: “The petrified body of a full-grown man was discovered today in the woods within a few miles of Lafayette, on the banks of Bayou Vermilion. The remains are intact and in a perfect state of preservation, exciting the wonder of all who view them. As the hands are folded across the breast and the position of the limbs is natural, it seems certain that the deceased must have received decent interment.
“When found, the body was covered with two feet of earth, with one foot projecting from the embankment and exposed. Messrs. Alphonse Peck and Ralph Buhon were the first to discover the curiosity, and now have it on exhibition in town. A spring in the neighborhood ... has the property of petrifying objects thrown into it.”
However, about a week later, on Oct. 12, the Opelousas Courier reported: “What is said to look like the petrified body of a man was found on Bayou Vermilion in Lafayette Parish last week, and considerable curiosity was aroused thereby. Now comes a St. Martin man who says it was nothing but a statue made by a man named Janin 50 years ago and buried then in such a manner as to make its discovery likely some day, just in order to fool those who might find it. Others insist that it is surely the petrified body of a human being.”
Mr. Janin may have hit on the idea after a California newspaper published in 1858 a bogus letter claiming a prospector turned to stone after drinking a liquid from a hollow rock. Some other newspapers published stories of supposedly petrified people, and, suddenly, people began to find petrified men all across the United States.aq
Probably the best known of them is the Cardiff Giant that became one of the most famous hoaxes in U.S. history. It was a 10-foot-tall “petrified man” uncovered on Oct. 16, 1869, by workers digging a well behind a barn in Cardiff, New York.
The giant was the creation of a New York tobacconist named George Hull. He was an atheist who decided to create the giant after an argument over the biblical assertion that giants once lived on Earth. But Hull wasn’t as patient as our Mr. Janin, who was content to let his petrified man remain undisturbed on Bayou Vermilion until it was found bay chance.
A Chicago stonecutter secretly created the Cardiff statue, which Hull had buried on his cousin’s farm at Cardiff. Nearly a year later, the cousin, William Newell, hired two men ostensibly to dig a well, and they found the giant.
People came by the wagonload to see the thing, even though archaeologists and geologists pronounced the giant a fake. It drew such crowds that showman P. T. Barnum offered $50,000 (about a million in today’s money) for it. When the Cardiff owners refused the offer, the showman created a giant of his own. Barnum displayed his giant in New York, claiming that it was the real one, and the Cardiff Giant was a fake.
The Cardiff owners sued Barnum for calling their giant a fake, but the judge ruled that the giant itself had to swear to his own authenticity (which would be hard for him to do, his being petrified and all). The court wisely ruled that both giants were fakes.
Barnum was long gone and could not help perpetuate the hoax when the “Janin Man” was found on Bayou Vermilion, and it appears that its creator was also no longer around.
A Francis Janin is listed in the 1900 census living near Broussard with his wife Annette. But he was 41 years old in 1900, according to that report. That would make him about 10 years old at the time the petrified man was supposedly buried.
Was Francis’s daddy the patient joker? I find no record.
A collection of Jim Bradshaw’s columns, "Cajuns and Other Characters," is available from Pelican Publishing. You can contact him at jimbradshaw4321@gmail.com or P.O. Box 1121, Washington LA 70589.