The Little People of the Northwestern US
An Unknown Crypto-Species of Diminutive Hominids…?
Every race and civilization has its tales of “Little People.”
Perhaps we are most familiar with the dwarves, elves, fairies, spriggans, trows, brownies, and assorted diminutive spirits and beings from European folklore. But they’re hardly alone—there’s a species of Little People in the myths and legends of every race, and things are no different with the Native American Indian tribes of the western United States.
Of course, the names of these beings are quite different in the western states than what we know from European stories. In many cases, they were known generically as “Stick Indians,” allegedly because they inhabited the forests. For their part, the Nez Percé of the lower Snake and Salmon River regions in western Idaho, northeastern Oregon, and southeastern Washington, called them Its′te-ya-ha.
Ella E. Clark, in her excellent book Indian Legends From the Northern Rockies (which I highly recommend to anyone interested in the native folklore and legends of this part of the country), recounts a number of these tales of little people. One such tale of the Its′te-ya-ha comes courtesy of Lucy Armstrong Isaac, who in 1954 described these beings based on information from her father and a very old neighbor.
The tale describes an encounter that Isaac’s father had with one of these creatures when still a small boy. He was camping with his aunt and uncle, when suddenly his uncle told him to cover himself in blankets and admonished him not to look, for a strange visitor had arrived. The boy’s curiosity got the better of him, and so quite naturally he looked—beholding “a little man with very small eyes and a wrinkled face.” The creature also had very long hair, and wore only a kind of deerskin loincloth.
The little man demanded food, which he was permitted to take, but Isaac’s father suffered a swollen face as punishment for his temerity.1
The Flathead Indians and Coeur d’Alênes had their own traditions of dwarfs, who were only about three feet tall and had very dark skins. Originally there was nothing overtly supernatural about these beings, but they eventually decamped to the high mountains, where they continue on as a kind of spirit—dead during the daytime, but arising at night to dance and cavort. These dwarfs were not, for the most part, malevolent; they were more often tricksters, though their folkloric attributes sometimes seem to converge with those of Bigfoot or Sasquatch—including knocking on tree trunks with sticks, and terrifying people with their eerie wailing in the night.
Clark also recounts a number of Shoshone and Bannock stories about the Little People, or “Ninnimbe,” and these are quite fascinating for the insight and detail they convey about these mysterious creatures, and their strange habits, in western Wyoming:
“A pioneer in the Wind River country, Wyoming, once came upon several ancient dwellings made of sticks and stones held together with mud, high up in the rocks near the sources of Muddy Creek. Talking about them with a number of old Indians, he was told that the structures had been made before the Indians came into the region. They were the homes of the Ninnimbe, the Little Demons or Little People.”2
Further information about the Ninnimbe is appended:
“The Little People were two or three feet high, strong and fearless. They wore clothing of goatskin and always carried a large quiver of arrows on their backs. They were stealthy stalkers, expert hunters, and good fighters, also, but they sometimes fell prey to eagles. Their poisoned arrows, shot with deadly aim, picked off many of the early Shoshonis. Their arrows were invisible.
[…]
“The Little People made the drawings on the rocks in the Wind River country. Sometimes these carvings talk at night. If you should look at the rock pictures, you would anger the Little People. To protect yourself from them, put on lots of paint, for the Little People are afraid of paint.”3
There are also some particularly nasty tales of the habits of these dwarfs in Idaho, which shows that these are far from your garden-variety tricksy elves and prankster fairies:
“In caves in certain parts of the Owyhee Range of Idaho and in the mountains of the Salmon River country, both the Shoshonis and Bannocks used to say, lived a race of cannibal dwarfs. Although only about two feet high, they could carry home on their backs the deer, elk, and mountain sheep they had killed with their bows and arrows…If these little ogres were near an Indian camp, a woman did not dare get out of sight of her baby. If she did, one of the dwarfs would seize the child and devour it. Then he would cry just like the baby, the mother would rush back, and the ogre would begin to eat her…When one of these ogres would see a group of children playing a little way from camp, he would conceal his tail by winding it around his body and then ask the children if he might play with them. Soon he would run off with one of them astride his tail. The child was never seen again.”4
It’s interesting that a tail is mentioned, as this particular anatomical feature of the Little People is missing in the other stories.
Moreover, the Shoshonis spoke of a species of cannibal Little People that lived in streams, called the Pahonah, or “water infants;” these creatures also ate children and women, just like their land-dwelling relatives.
Now one of the more interesting, and recent, stories of the Little People comes from the Nez Percé, and concerns the penchant these beings had for abducting humans—which is why they were often implicated in the strange disappearances that sometimes plague the mountain country of the western United States.
“One time when some people were huckleberrying near Mount Adams, they locked their baby in their car, for safety. No one else was in the car. While they were picking berries, they heard the baby cry. They went to the car and found that the baby was gone. Then they heard it cry from another direction. They went over there, and there they found it. The Little People had taken the baby out of a locked car.”5
This story recalls some of the strange cases compiled in researcher David Paulides’ seminal Missing 411 series of books about strange and unexplained disappearances in the country’s national parks and adjacent regions. For instance, in the volume covering the western United States and Canada, Paulides writes about the connection between these disappearances and berries or berry-picking:
“The fact that berries and berry bushes play a common role in many disappearances is quite intriguing. People disappear and are found in the middle of berry bushes; they go missing while picking berries; and some are found while eating berries. The connection between some disappearances and berries cannot be denied.”6
Furthermore, some of the Washington and Oregon cases in that book bear an uncanny resemblance to the story of the huckleberrying family near Mount Adams. This includes the stories of Daryl Webley, a two-year-old who went missing in 1949 near Colville, Washington, but was found alive the next day,7 and also Keith Parkins, another two-year-old who went missing near Ritter, Oregon, and was found alive the following day over twelve miles from where he was last seen.8
The story also bears points of comparison with some other disappearances of small children, this time with less happy outcomes, including that of little four-year-old Bobby Panknin near Northport, in northeastern Washington, back in 1963,9 or, a decade later, the abduction from a camper of two-year-old Jimmy Duffy near Lake Wenatchee.10
Verdict: Undoubtedly there are strange things in the mountain forests of the northwestern United States; Bigfoot may be the best known of these mysterious cryptids, but he’s almost certainly not alone.
The Nez Percé, the Shoshonis and Bannocks, the Arapahos and the Sioux and the Crow all have stories of frightful Little People, and recount dreadful tales of their penchant for absconding with human children and women. Are these merely the sort of children’s correctives that all races, the world over, use to prevent harm from befalling their youngsters, or is there a sinister kernel of truth buried in this mass of folklore?
I’ve only included a few of these tales in this article, but I’ll return to the subject in the future, for there’s a great deal more to say—including the stories of Little People in the Pryor Mountains of Montana, and many others recounted in Ella E. Clark’s book and elsewhere.
For the moment, however, I’ll only mention that some have drawn a connection between these stories of Little People, which are found all over the world, and the discovery nearly two decades ago of the fossils of a diminutive—and presumably now-extinct—species of hominids, called Homo floresiensis, in the jungle-clad islands of Indonesia.
If this was indeed a separate and distinct prehistoric species of human, who’s to say it was limited to Southeast Asia? There is undoubtedly much about the ancient world that we don’t know, and perhaps these small-bodied hominids had a much wider range—one that was maybe even coterminous with their larger brethren, Homo sapiens, extending from the dark forests of Western Europe and the British Isles, to the remote islands of Indonesia, to the lofty peaks and trackless woods of western North America.
It’s also worth mentioning that the people of Flores maintained a tradition of Little People, called ebu gogo, that were still living on the island until only a few centuries ago. As related by Gregory Forth, Professor of Anthropology at the University of Alberta, there is a folkloric tradition among the Florinese that these beings were finally exterminated when the humans could no longer tolerate their depredations and child-theft:
“I first encountered the term ebu gogo after starting ethnographic research in the Nage region of central Flores in 1984. People in the vicinity of Bo’a Wae (the main Nage village), and particularly people descended from inhabitants of the old village of ‘Ua (Rua), told me how, several generations before, their ancestors had exterminated a group of these hairy creatures inhabiting a cave called Lia Ula, located not far above old ‘Ua, on the northern slope of the volcano Ebu Lobo.
[…]
“…ancestors of the Nage, or more specifically the people of ‘Ua, exterminated the hairy hominoids several generations ago, after tiring of their stealing from Nage fields and their alleged abduction of children. Nage accomplished their extinction by trapping the ebu gogo inside a cave and setting fire to a quantity of palm fibre they had given them to use as clothing.”11
Now that’s an interesting story, especially since the Arapaho preserve a very similar one, as related by Clark:
“The Little People, old Arapahos say, were less than three feet high. They were dark-skinned, had big stomachs, and were powerfully built. They used the sign language, but not exactly as the Indians did. In deep canyons in the mountains they carved houses out of rocks. Some of their houses can still be seen there, and some of their skeletons have been found also.
“They were such swift runners that if one of them pursued an Arapaho, he had little chance of escaping. And they were so strong that one of them could carry an Indian home on his back. There they killed him and ate him, for the Little People were cannibals.
[…]
“[The Arapahos] lost so many of their people, however, that they decided to kill off the Little People. The dwarfs were difficult to get rid of, for wounds from arrows had little effect on them. The Indians surrounded the Little People in a deep gorge, through which ran a rushing stream, and then set fire to the brush on the canyon walls.”12
There follows a long passage in which the beleaguered Little People discuss and reject various plans to save themselves, before finally settling on the idea of climbing the tall trees to escape the flames. But they deliberated much too long, and
“…in the meantime, the fire had come down the canyon walls, burning the brush as it came. Then it burned the brush along the creek and roared up the canyon toward the trees. Soon it reached the tall trees and climbed up their trunks. It burned the trees and the nests and all the Little People in them.
“The men, too, had no way of escape. So all the Little People were destroyed. That is why there are no dwarfs to trouble us today.”13
Here we have nearly identical stories, of the Little People being exterminated through the expedient of trapping them in a cave or gorge, and setting them on fire.
So much for harmony between the races of mankind.
Now as to whether there really were species of diminutive and malevolent hominids, in the northwestern United States or anywhere else in the world, is an interesting but so far unanswered question; but where there’s so much smoke, so to speak, it seems likely there must have been some kind of fire…if you’ll pardon the rather insensitive expression.
For my part, I’m inclined to believe there were—or rather are—such creatures, whether or not they were merely another race, a separate species, or something altogether supernatural.
The real question, in that case, becomes something more than merely academic: did the Arapahos succeed in exterminating the Little People, or do they still wander the mountains of Wyoming, Idaho, and eastern Washington and Oregon?
Only the unlucky wayfarer who happens to stumble upon one of these creatures may answer that question…unfortunately, their fate is most likely to be counted among the many inexplicably missing in the western United States.
Ella E. Clark, Indian Legends From the Northern Rockies (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1966) pg. 50.
Ibid., pp. 180-1.
Ibid., pg. 181.
Ibid., pp. 182-3.
Ibid., pg. 51.
David Paulides, Missing 411: Western United States & Canada (North Charleston: CreateSpace, 2011), pg. xvi.
Ibid., pp. 15-16
Ibid., pp. 16-17
Ibid., pp. 20-23
Ibid., pp. 23-26
Forth, G. (2005), “Hominids, hairy hominoids and the science of humanity.” Anthropology Today, 21: 13-17
Clark, Indian Legends From the Northern Rockies, pp. 232-33.
Ibid., pp. 234-35.