More Tales of the Little People of the Northern Rockies
Mysterious Mummies, Cannibal Dwarves, and "Pedro"…
There’s something especially fascinating about stories of the “Little People” (to me, at least).
The American West is full of strange creatures—it has its Sasquatches, its phantom platypuses, its lake monsters, its prehistoric survivals, and even the occasional alien or two. But the Little People are something different altogether, and they seem to speak to an older and perhaps more sinister stratum of folklore.
To speak of the Little People is to conjure up images of a race of human creatures, possibly supernatural, or possibly just a forgotten relict of a forgotten world—an evolutionary tag-end, so to speak, left over in some out-of-the-way part of the world.
And the idea that these beings are both intelligent and perhaps resentful of the larger-bodied humans who have supplanted them, and are capable of pursuing a furtive existence while also sometimes abducting or even murdering wayward humans and wanderers—like something out of a John Buchan tale—is just too much for a committed paranormalist and collector of weirdness like myself to resist.
In an earlier article, I talked at some length about the Little People of Wyoming and Idaho, ferocious and sometimes cannibal dwarves who haunt the mountainous regions of those states. The Nez Percé call them Its′te-ya-ha, the Shoshone and Bannock call them Ninnimbe, and all agree that they are very small, very fierce humanlike beings, which may participate as much in the supernatural as in the natural realms.
The Crow also have their legends of Little People, which they call Nirumbee or Awwakkulé (Awa-Kulay)—very diminutive humanoids (some say they are scarcely eighteen inches tall) with pot bellies, great heads supported by scarcely any neck to speak of, and sharp teeth.
The Nirumbee were said to be particularly numerous in the Pryor Mountains of southern Montana, which are very near to the Wyoming-Montana line; the Crow call these mountains “Baahpuuo Awaxaawé,” the “Arrow Shot Into Rock” mountains, and would leave the Little People propitiatory gifts to ensure the tribe’s safe passage through Pryor Gap and across the mountains.
A similar ceremony was performed at Medicine Rocks, in southeastern Montana, where the Crow were wont to deposit placatory offerings to forfend them from the easily-aroused ire of the Nirumbee, who were said to dwell within subterraneous warrens and caves beneath the Rocks.
Even today, those who are often in the Pryor Mountains claim to discover, from time to time, the occasional artifact or vestige that points to the late presence of the Little People—tiny, makeshift stone benches, for instance, arranged around little fire rings, where we must presume that the Nirumbee or Awwakkulé hold their miniature rendezvous in the lonely mountain glades of moonless, starlit nights.
Verdict: Tales of mischievous, pranksterish, and even sinister Little People are common to all cultures of the world.
This is no less the case in North America than anywhere else, with virtually every tribe relating its own stories of these diminutive and quasi-supernatural beings, all of them with a different name. We’ve already spoken of the Its′te-ya-ha, the Ninnimbe, Nirumbee, and Awwakkulé; but there are also the Nimerigar, the Nunnupi, Akbaakaatdutche, Hecesiiteihii, Vo’estanehesono, Teihiihan, Gada’zhe, Ni’kashinga Man’tanaha, Mialuka, Mi’a-gthu-shka, pukwudgies, Bokwjimen, Apa’iins or Pahiins, Mikumwesuk, Paissa, and many others too numerous to list here.1
So what does it all mean? Are these merely legends and fairy tales—or is there a kernel of truth lurking behind these stories? The mystery of the Little People of North America only deepened with the discovery in 1932 of “Pedro,” a miniature mummy, by two gold prospectors—Cecil Mayne and Frank Carr—in the San Pedro Mountains of Wyoming.
In the process of exploring a promising vein of gold, the prospectors dynamited the walls of a gulch and thereby opened up a small cave or “room” wherein Pedro sat in his peculiar, upright fashion, hands folded upon his lap. The mummy appeared to be that of an adult, with a low forehead, a wide mouth, and a height of only fourteen inches.
All the indications were that Pedro belonged to that diminutive species of humans that undoubtedly gave rise to the stories of the Ninnimbe and Nirumbee, and the mummy was consequently exhibited in sideshows for a number of years, before passing through the hands of several wealthy collectors and eventually disappearing altogether. One of its owners, Ivan T. Goodman, even had the remains X-rayed, and this proved crucial to identifying Pedro’s true nature.
“Shortly before Goodman’s death in 1950, the mummy was stolen and never found again. Interest in it, however, continued nationwide. Almost 30 years later pictures of Dr. Shapiro’s X-rays were given to Dr. George Gill, professor of anthropology at the University of Wyoming. The withered little body, he concluded, was that of an infant or a fetus, possibly of an unknown tribe of prehistoric Indians. He believed that the infant had been afflicted with anencephaly, a congenital abnormality that would account for the adult proportions of its skeleton. Discoveries of mummified remains are not uncommon in Wyoming, which has an arid climate. As Dr. Gill pointed out, the Indians may have found other mummies of similarly diseased infants and quite naturally assumed that they were the remains of small adults. This in turn would tend to support the legend of a ‘little people.’”2
Fair enough. Dr. Gill’s euhemeristic explanation is simple, rational, and thoroughly credible, and as such is both satisfying and elegant. But does the prehistoric discovery of mummified infants with birth defects really explain all the tales of the Little People in North America, and the American West in particular?
The stories, after all, continue to this day; and, as we saw in a previous article on this topic, the Arapahos claim to have wiped out the cannibal dwarves in their own neighborhood in a relatively recent period in their history. There’s certainly food for thought here, and it does make one wonder what’s really behind these tales of the Little People.
Perhaps, as I mused in that same article, the Native American tribes preserve a kind of folk-memory of an ancient, diminutive species of autochthonous hominin that inhabited the continent long before Homo sapiens arrived. Perhaps this species was something like the small-bodied Homo floresiensis that dwelt upon the Indonesian islands less than a million years ago; perhaps, and this is sheerest speculation, these hominins, or something akin to them, were much more widespread than we have guessed, and their prevalence around the globe has given rise to those universal stories of fairies and gnomes and goblins the world over.
Or maybe we’ve got it all wrong. Maybe they weren’t the lingering remnants of a primitive human species at all; maybe they were the exact opposite. The Theosophists, after all, claim that the so-called “primitive peoples” are really the tag-ends of once-great civilizations, like Atlantis and Lemuria; the Traditionalists, for their part, make a very similar claim, holding that these races are the degenerating relicts of forgotten civilizations from anterior cycles of time.
Could be there’s something in these notions. Maybe the “Little People” of North America—hell, of the entire world—were really the pygmy descendants of a vast, world-spanning civilization the nature and extent of which is entirely unsuspected by modern archaeologists and historians. Wouldn’t that be something?
For that matter, the Crow did often say that the Nirumbee were extremely intelligent, and possessed the skills and science of manufacturing stone arrowheads—something the Crow themselves were incapable of.
Who knows? Perhaps there’s something to Welsh writer Arthur Machen’s tales of a strange, sub-human, and sinister race of diminutive beings beneath the earth after all…
Cf. the well-known “list of spirits and fairies” from The Denham Tracts:
“What a happiness this must have been seventy or eighty years ago and upwards, to those chosen few who had the good luck to be born on the eve of this festival of all festivals; when the whole earth was so overrun with ghosts, boggles, bloody-bones, spirits, demons, ignis fatui, brownies, bugbears, black dogs, specters, shellycoats, scarecrows, witches, wizards, barguests, Robin-Goodfellows, hags, night-bats, scrags, breaknecks, fantasms, hobgoblins, hobhoulards, boggy-boes, dobbies, hob-thrusts, fetches, kelpies, warlocks, mock-beggars, mum-pokers, Jemmy-burties, urchins, satyrs, pans, fauns, sirens, tritons, centaurs, calcars, nymphs, imps, incubuses, spoorns, men-in-the-oak, hell-wains, fire-drakes, kit-a-can-sticks, Tom-tumblers, melch-dicks, larrs, kitty-witches, hobby-lanthorns, Dick-a-Tuesdays, Elf-fires, Gyl-burnt-tales, knockers, elves, rawheads, Meg-with-the-wads, old-shocks, ouphs, pad-foots, pixies, pictrees, giants, dwarfs, Tom-pokers, tutgots, snapdragons, sprets, spunks, conjurers, thurses, spurns, tantarrabobs, swaithes, tints, tod-lowries, Jack-in-the-Wads, mormos, changelings, redcaps, yeth-hounds, colt-pixies, Tom-thumbs, black-bugs, boggarts, scar-bugs, shag-foals, hodge-pochers, hob-thrushes, bugs, bull-beggars, bygorns, bolls, caddies, bomen, brags, wraiths, waffs, flay-boggarts, fiends, gallytrots, imps, gytrashes, patches, hob-and-lanthorns, gringes, boguests, bonelesses, Peg-powlers, pucks, fays, kidnappers, gallybeggars, hudskins, nickers, madcaps, trolls, robinets, friars' lanthorns, silkies, cauld-lads, death-hearses, goblins, hob-headlesses, bugaboos, kows, or cowes, nickies, nacks [necks], waiths, miffies, buckies, ghouls, sylphs, guests, swarths, freiths, freits, gy-carlins [Gyre-carling], pigmies, chittifaces, nixies, Jinny-burnt-tails, dudmen, hell-hounds, dopple-gangers, boggleboes, bogies, redmen, portunes, grants, hobbits, hobgoblins, brown-men, cowies, dunnies, wirrikows, alholdes, mannikins, follets, korreds, lubberkins, cluricauns, kobolds, leprechauns, kors, mares, korreds, puckles korigans, sylvans, succubuses, blackmen, shadows, banshees, lian-hanshees, clabbernappers, Gabriel-hounds, mawkins, doubles, corpse lights or candles, scrats, mahounds, trows, gnomes, sprites, fates, fiends, sibyls, nicknevins, whitewomen, fairies, thrummy-caps, cutties, and nisses, and apparitions of every shape, make, form, fashion, kind and description, that there was not a village in England that had not its own peculiar ghost. Nay, every lone tenement, castle, or mansion-house, which could boast of any antiquity had its bogle, its specter, or its knocker. The churches, churchyards, and crossroads were all haunted. Every green lane had its boulder-stone on which an apparition kept watch at night. Every common had its circle of fairies belonging to it. And there was scarcely a shepherd to be met with who had not seen a spirit!” (The Denham Tracts, ed. James Hardy [London: Folklore Society, 1895], vol. 2, pp. 76-80)
Mysteries of the Unexplained (Pleasantville, New York/Montreal: The Reader’s Digest Association, Inc., 1982), pp. 40-1.