Was there a giant red-haired race in North America?

Question

The other day, I saw a show on the History channel about "giant skeletons" being found in North America. It also said that, for some reason, these findings have been hidden from people, maybe due to them being hoaxes or something else.

According to the new illuminati blog they have found 12ft (3.65m) skeletons. A lot of these skeletons have been found in Nevada. There is another documented case in Texas.

Other sources state that there's been a finding with several bodies together:

The Ooparts Collection: There Were Giants in Those Days:

A mound near Toledo, Ohio, held 20 skeletons, seated and facing east with jaws and teeth "twice as large as those of present day people," and besides each was a large bowl with "curiously wrought hieroglyphic figures." (Chicago Record, Oct. 24, 1895; cited by Ron G. Dobbins, NEARA Journal, v13, fall 1978)

and Urban Titan: 5 Most Mysterious Ancient Discoveries:

In 1895 in Toledo, Ohio 20 giant skeletons were found seated with jaws and teeth twice as large as a normal skeleton’s. Yet another giant skeleton was unearthed in 1928 by a farmer in Louisiana. This skeleton was 9 feet 11 inches. Many claims have been made about these abnormal skeletons, the majority of people claiming they belong to the mysterious Sasquatch.

Finally ArticleSafari: Who were the red-haired giants of early North America? says that real encounters were logged by Magellan.

Although there seems to be a lot of information out there, unfortunately none of the sites that I found has references. So I'm not sure how reliable the information is. Was there a giant red-haired race in North America?

Answer 1

As is often the case, No, but with a grain of truth.

There was a tribe which was described in legend as "red-headed cannibals" by the oral history of the Paiute tribe: the Si-Te-Cah. According to their legend, as documented in Fossil Legends of the First Americans (2005) and Sarah Winnemucca of the Paiute tribe in her autobiography (1883), the Paiute fought them and killed them all, possibly by sealing the survivors into Lovelock Cave.

However, there is no original source for these cannibals being giants - Winnemucca doesn't even hint at that in her book.

From the other end, there were skeletons discovered in Lovelock Cave, and Wikipedia cites one of the original miners' archeological reports saying he found the "body of a man six feet six inches tall.". This is certainly tall but not a giant by modern standards, but could have been in prehistoric times. Additionally, human bones which appeared to have been split for marrow were found, which supports the cannibal legend. However, a lot of the remains are no longer around, due to the lack of care taken with archeological remains in the early 20th century. (One source I found said that one of the skeletons was taken to be ground up for a local lodge's "initiation ritual", for example.)

The aforementioned Fossil Legends book suggests that the story of giants

was started by entrepreneurs setting up tourist displays and that the skeletons themselves were of normal size. However, about a hundred miles north of Lovelock there are plentiful fossils of mammoths and cave bears, and their large limb bones could easily be thought to be those of giants by an untrained observer.