Why the Smithsonian Destroyed 40,000 Artifacts in 1900 — What They Were Hiding

The motto is carved into the institution itself for the increase and diffusion of knowledge. That’s the founding mandate of the Smithsonian Institution signed into law by President James K. Pulk on August the 10th, 1846. Funded entirely by the estate of a British scientist named James Smithson who never once set foot in America.

A man who left his entire fortune to a country he’d never visited so it could build a temple dedicated to one thing. Knowledge. The preservation of it. the sharing of it, the protection of it for all of humanity. I want you to hold that phrase in your mind, the increase and diffusion of knowledge, because everything I’m about to show you is a direct contradiction of those seven words.

I’ve spent the last several weeks following the trail I uncovered in my last investigation. The giant skeletons reported in newspapers across America throughout the 1800s. Hundreds of accounts, mainstream publications, credible sources, all describing the same thing. Bones of extraordinary size unearthed from mounds and burial sites from Ohio to California.

And every single account ends the same way. The remains were sent to the Smithsonian Institution for further study. That sentence, that exact sentence, it appears in report after report after report. And it’s always the last line, always. Because after the bones arrive in Washington, the story stops. No follow-up study published, no findings released, no display mounted, just silence.

So, I started asking a very simple question. What happened when the bones got there? And the answer I found is worse than anything I expected. Not because of what the Smithsonian did, but because of the system they built to make sure no one could ever prove it. Let me start with something most people don’t know.

The Smithsonian today holds over 157 million items in its collections. That number is real, verified, published on their own website. But here’s what they mention quietly and hope you don’t think about too carefully. Only about 1% of that collection is on display at any given time. 1%. That means over 105 million objects sit in storage facilities, vaults, climate controlled warehouses, and restricted archive rooms that the public has never seen and likely never will.

The largest of these is the museum support center in Sutland, Maryland. Five massive buildings they call pods, each roughly the size of a three-story football field. 435,000 square ft of storage containing 54 million items. The department of anthropology collections are housed there. The National Anthropological Archives are housed there.

The human studies film archives are housed there. It is not open to the public. Access to the biological anthropology collections requires a special human remains research approval form submitted at least 90 days in advance and subject to additional review and approvals beyond the standard process. Restricted access layered inside restricted access.

And here’s the detail that stopped me cold. The Smithsonian Institution is not subject to the Freedom of Information Act. It is technically classified as a trust instrumentality of the United States, not a federal agency. You cannot file a foyer request with the Smithsonian. They operate under their own internal disclosure policy, Smithsonian Directive 87, which means the Smithsonian decides what the Smithsonian releases.

They are the gatekeeper and the gate, the judge and the evidence locker. and they have been for nearly 180 years now. Let me take you back to January 24, 1865. A bitter cold afternoon in Washington. Joseph Henry, the first secretary of the Smithsonian, is working in his second floor office inside the iconic castle building on the National Mall.

He hears a crackling above his head. Within minutes, the building is engulfed. A stove pipe had been inserted into a wall cavity instead of a flu days earlier. Embers had been smoldering inside the walls undetected. When the fire finally broke through, it consumed the picture gallery, the apparatus room, the lecture hall, the regent’s room, and Henry’s entire office.

Destroyed in hours were over 200 irreplaceable oil paintings of Native American leaders by artist John Mick Stanley. All of James Smithson’s personal effects, his manuscripts, his minerals, his scientific notes gone. Nearly 100,000 letters and reports documenting the institution’s first two decades of research, every piece of founding correspondence, every early intake record, every collection log from 1846 to 1865, all of it ash.

The New York Times called it a national calamity. And I want you to understand why this matters for everything that comes next. When researchers today ask the Smithsonian to account for specific items received during those first 19 years, the answer is always the same. We have no records, not because they were never created, because they burned.

In a building dedicated to the preservation of knowledge, the foundational records of that knowledge were destroyed. And there is no independent way to verify what walked through those doors and what didn’t during the Smithsonian’s most formative years. But the real story begins in 1879 when Congress creates the Bureau of Ethnology within the Smithsonian and appoints a man named John Wesley Powell as its director.

Powell was a Civil War veteran who lost his right arm at the Battle of Shiloh. He was famous for leading the first expedition down the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon. He was brilliant, ambitious, politically connected, and he had a very specific vision of what American history was supposed to look like.

In 1882, Congress gave power 5,000 and a direct mandate. Investigate the mound builders. Thousands of massive earthwork structures stretched across the eastern United States from the Great Lakes to the Gulf of Mexico. Enormous burial mounds, some containing chambers, vaults, artifacts of copper and micica, and unknown alloys.

And inside many of them, bones. Bones that didn’t match anything in the established record. The American public was captivated. Who built these structures? What civilization existed here before? What happened to them? Pal’s answer was decided before the investigation began. He appointed a man named Cyrus Thomas to lead the division of mound exploration.

Thomas was an entomologist, a bug specialist, not an archaeologist, not an anthropologist, a man who studied insects, given authority over the most significant archaeological question in American history. Thomas spent 12 years on the project and published his conclusions in 1894. Over 700 pages that said exactly what Pal wanted them to say.

Native Americans built the mounds. No lost civilization. No anomalous remains. No further questions necessary. Case closed. But Powell didn’t just close the case on the mounds. He closed the door on an entire category of inquiry. He issued directives through the bureau declaring that no anthropological research should consider theories of lost tribes or pre-Colombian contact with other civilizations.

He wrote that any pictographic or artifactual evidence from before Columbus was, and this is his word, illegitimate for historical purposes. Think about what that means. The director of the Smithsonian’s anthropology division declared that evidence predating a specific date was inadmissible, not because it was examined and found lacking, because it was categorically excluded from consideration.

He didn’t investigate and find nothing. He decided what the conclusion would be and then constructed the investigation to confirm it. And the Bureau of Ethnology under his authority actively encouraged people across the country to send their mound discoveries to Washington. This was official Smithsonian policy. dig something up, ship it to us, we’ll study it.

” So they did. Farmers, railroad workers, construction crews, local historians, they boxed up bones and artifacts and sent them east. The Smithsonian’s own 1883 field team, led by professors Norris and Thomas, excavated 50 ms in West Virginia and documented in their own report a skeleton measuring 7 1/2 ft tall adorned with heavy copper bracelets.

They found a circle of 10 skeletons surrounding another oversized skeleton inside a burial chamber. They cataloged underground vaults containing copper ornaments, micer ceremonial objects. These details appear in the Bureau of Ethnologyy’s own annual reports, except here’s what I found when I compared early editions to later printings.

The size descriptions were edited. References to unusual dimensions were softened or removed entirely. The same report published by the same institution told a different story depending on when you read it. The early version documents something extraordinary. The later version makes it ordinary. Same data, different narrative.

Then in 1903, the Smithsonian hired the man who would become the most consequential gatekeeper in American archaeological history. Alles Hordicker, curator of physical anthropology, a position he would hold for nearly four decades until 1941. Herd licker’s institutional policy was absolute. There was no race of giants. There never had been.

Every report of oversized skeletal remains was the product of amateur error and public credility. His standard explanation was that untrained people measured thigh bones incorrectly, holding the femur against the outside of the leg without accounting for the hip socket, and therefore overestimated height by several inches. A reasonable critique in isolation.

But Herdlicker didn’t apply reasonable critique. He applied blanket dismissal. Hundreds of documented reports from dozens of states spanning half a century, all waved away with a single explanation. and the bones themselves already in the Smithsonian’s possession, already beyond public access, already filed in the restricted collections that Herlicker himself oversaw.

But here’s what makes this so much darker than simple academic stubbornness. In 2023, the Washington Post published a major investigation into Hoodlicker’s legacy. What they uncovered should disturb anyone who trusts the Smithsonian’s historical judgment. Hoodlicker was an active proponent of eugenics. He believed in the biological superiority of white Europeans.

Under his direction, the Smithsonian amassed over 30,700 human body parts, including 255 brains, most collected without the consent of the individuals or their families. He traveled repeatedly to Kodiak Island in Alaska, where he paid Aluti children 10 cents each to dig up human bones from indigenous graves. He shipped over thousand sets of remains from a single community back to Washington.

In August of 2023, Smithsonian Secretary Lonnie Bunch publicly apologized for what he called abhorrent and dehumanizing work carried out under the Smithsonian’s name. This is the man who decided which bones were real and which were mistakes. This is the man who determined what was anomalous and what was normal for four consecutive decades.

A man whose racial theories have been formally discredited, whose collection methods have been officially condemned, whose ethical standards were so bankrupt that his own institution had to issue a public apology over a century later. And yet his conclusions about anomalous skeletal remains, his blanket denial, his categorical dismissal of hundreds of documented findings that still stands as the Smithsonian’s official position.

No one has revisited it. No one has reopened the files. No one has pulled the bones from the restricted pods in Sutland and measured them again with modern equipment and unbiased eyes. I want to be honest about something here because credibility matters more than spectacle. In 2014, a satirical website published a fake article claiming the Smithsonian admitted to destroying thousands of giant skeletons and that the Supreme Court forced them to release classified documents.

It was fiction, complete fabrication from a site that publishes madeup stories for clicks. But it went viral. Millions of people shared it as fact. And it did something incredibly effective, whether intentionally or not. It poisoned the well. Now, anyone who raises legitimate questions about the Smithsonian’s handling of anomalous remains gets associated with a debunked internet hoax. The fake story became a shield.

You can’t ask real questions because someone once asked fake ones. And I’ll concede something else. 19th century newspapers exaggerated. Yellow journalism was rampant in the 1880s and 1890s. Not every giant skeleton report should be taken as gospel. Some were likely hoaxes. Some were misidentified animal bones.

Some were genuine measurement errors exactly as Herd Licker described. But that’s not the question. The question isn’t whether every single report was accurate. The question is why the Smithsonian’s own field teams documented unusual remains in official reports and then those descriptions were altered in subsequent publications.

The question is why prior to 1990 the Smithsonian collected over 18,000 Native American skeletal remains and still holds approximately 10,000 today stored in facilities the public cannot access. Cataloged under systems the public cannot search. gov earned by disclosure policies the public cannot challenge. The question is why the institution that holds the evidence also controls who examines the evidence under rules it writes and enforces itself.

Here’s the timeline that keeps me awake. 1879 Powell takes control of the Bureau of Ethnology. 1882 the Mound Survey begins with its conclusion already written. 1894 Cyrus Thomas publishes 700 pages confirming what Pal decided 12 years earlier. 1903 hard liquor takes over physical anthropology and institutes a policy of categorical denial.

By the 1920s newspaper reports of anomalous skeletal discovery stop entirely, not because the discovery stopped, because the reporting stopped, because the pipeline had been perfected. Bones flow in, silence flows out. Discoveries enter the institution and never emerge as published findings. The public loses interest because there’s nothing new to report.

And the collections grow quietly in climate controlled darkness curated by gatekeepers who answer to no external authority. The same decades, the same pattern I keep finding no matter which thread I pull. Maps redrawn, encyclopedias rewritten, physical evidence collected and locked away by an institution that was founded, literally carved in stone to increase and diffuse knowledge.

So where did the knowledge go? What’s in the 155 million items the public has never seen? What did Herd Licker’s team catalog and file in the anthropology collections that no independent researcher has examined since? What’s in the restricted pods in Sutland behind the 90-day approval process and the additional review requirements and the internal disclosure policies and the foyer exemption that makes the Smithsonian answerable to no one but itself.

I’m not claiming secret vaults of forbidden artifacts. I’m describing something worse. A system where the institution that controls the evidence also controls who sees it, who studies it, who publishes on it, and what conclusions are acceptable. That’s not conspiracy. That’s institutional architecture built over 80 years and maintained through bureaucratic inertia and professional gatekeeping.

And when you ask about it, when you point to the edited reports, the missing specimens, the restricted collections, the ethically disgraced curator whose conclusions still define the official record, the answer is always the same. Trust us, we’re the experts. Stop asking. The Smithsonian was built to increase and diffuse knowledge.

But somewhere between the founding and now, between the castle fire and the pods in Sutland, between Powell’s predetermined conclusions and Herdlicker’s blanket denials, the mission reversed. Knowledge flowed in. And it never flowed back out. The buildings remember, even if we don’t. And somewhere in Sutland, Maryland, in a climate control facility the size of three football fields, the bones remember, too.

They’re just not allowed to