Iroquois Supernatural: Talking Animals and Medicine People

by Michael Bastine

  The Genesee Valley had many sites and monuments that were special to ancient societies. The only ones we can write about are those the Seneca described for the first whites, if those whites went on to list them in the histories. Wherever these sites are, they are magnets for psychic folklore.

  The Genesee River flows through Rochester, New York. Three of its waterfalls are within the city limits. General mystery spots to the Senecas, these falls were special to the Little People. We don’t expect to learn much about them beyond that.

  A bit further upriver and south of Rochester is another waterfall in Letchworth State Park, also associated with the Little People. When the beams of sun hit just right, the merry spume makes earthy rainbows, tossing light and color. The Little People were fond of natural psychedelia everywhere. It’s no wonder that this was one of their places.

  John Billington was the manager of Beaver Island State Park on Grand Island in the Niagara—longtime Seneca country. Billington was not a talkative fellow, at least around his white colleagues. Those who told us about him were not sure of his nation, but it’s a good bet that he was Iroquois. He used to point out a certain patch of ground in the park that his workers were never to disturb. He was so emphatic about this that more than one of them got interested in the reason. All he would ever say of it was that it was “because of the Little People.” The man we interviewed remembered it as a curious area, a little mound in the grass in a natural clearing, before a unique-looking tree.

  Though upstate New York is historic Iroquois territory, there were settlements here of the Algonquin, the big northern alliance that was the Confederacy’s age-old rival. The Algonquin word for the magic force is manitou.

  Manitou Road in Parma, west of Rochester, seems haunted by some frisky demon that could surely be one of the manifestations of the Little People. Something scratches at the glass on moving cars, pecks on farmhouse windows, and rushes at observers.

  Late Rochester historian and author Shirley Cox Husted (1931–2004) recalled waking to the sound of scratching on the bedroom window of her brother’s Manitou Road farmhouse. Something ugly rushed at her and disappeared at the moment it would have struck the glass. She screamed, and the household came running. She’d imagined it, her brother and sister-in-law said, as they said years later when a child was spooked by the same freaky image. Yet when Husted’s sister-inlaw passed away, her brother, living alone in the house, never raised the shades after dark. Maybe he didn’t want to look out the windows. Maybe those who named the street knew something.

  The Tonawanda Reservation has a couple of haunted lanes. One that comes up in Little People folklore is Sandhill Road, a roughly north–south stretch that changes its name a couple of times. North of Bloomingdale Road, Sandhill is called Meadville. South of there, it takes turns as Hopkins. Many of the folkloric roads in New York have this configuration: cutoffs, with funky name changes.

  One of the area’s first sawmills was here on Sandhill proper, and the famous Seneca Ely Parker—grandfather of Arthur C. Parker—was born in a Sandhill Road cabin overlooking the Big Falls of the Tonawanda Creek, doubtless a Little People place. It may be worth pointing out that Sandhill Road on the rez is a corpse path, connecting a cemetery and the Tonawanda Baptist.

  The Onondaga didn’t expect to see the Little People often but were grateful to them for the work they did. They had their own special site associated with the Little People, a ravine west of Onondaga Valley not far from their traditional capitol near Syracuse.

  Gistweahna, “Little Men Valley,” is one Onondaga name for the place. We have no certainty where it was. There are rumors that it may have been east of Syracuse by Indian Hill in Pompey. William Beuchamp suggests that it may have been the area of a series of ravines west of Onondaga Valley. By the road passing through it two hundred years, almost surely today’s Route 20, is a slick, steep bank of boulder clay—an ice age clay deposit decked in places with big stones. The Little People were said to have worn this smooth in the sled-pinball event of their metaphysical X-games. They liked the bounce the big stones gave them.

  Between Utica and Albany is Palatine Bridge. Between Palatine Bridge and the nearby village of Mohawk is an area that members of the community of Stone Throwers were thought to frequent. “These little men could appear and disappear whenever they wished,” it was said.

  Onondaga minister La Fort saw one here around 1869 as he was on his way to Albany. The little fellow sat on the top of a hill above the road, doubtless today’s Route 5, and just watched the reverend as he passed.

  Homage to the Little People

  On the western shore of Lake Champlain is a certain beach that the Mohawk considered special to Stone Throwers. (The Flint People called them Yahkonenusyoks.)

  It was reported in the Jesuit Relations of 1668 that, as three French fathers traveled on a trail along the lake, a solemn mood came over their Native escorts. A little north of Ticonderoga, they found a beach littered with shards of the flinty material the Native Americans of the Northeast preferred for tools and weapons. A remarkable quantity of this raw stone was ready for use as projectile points, knives, and gunflints.

  Without a word or ceremony, the Mohawks started gathering pieces of this flint. Their moods were not those of toolmakers, but of people working a holy duty, even receiving gifts from the other world. Used to rituals of their own, the Jesuits just watched.

  When the journey resumed, their escorts explained that, whenever they were near this spot, they stopped and paid respects to the village of invisible Little People under the water. They had made these flints ready for use, and they’d do so as long as the humans gave them tobacco in their ceremonies. If the nation used a lot of tobacco, they got back a lot of these flints.

  These little water men, they told the Jesuits, travel on the lake in canoes. When the leader arrives, dives into the water, and leads the troop to his palace, it makes a shocking noise.

  The Mohawks named Lake Champlain after a white man they called Corlaer. He ridiculed Mohawk customs about the Little People and ended up drowning in the lake.

  In a way it may be silly to list Little People sites at all, at least specific ones. Who knows how many landscape features could have been credited to them by the Iroquois who lived here so long? A little runoff down a slate cliff giving the appearance of a staircase. A tiny pool in the forest clearing, never empty even in times of drought. A crack in a cliff that looks like a tiny door. A special tree.

  A young Cayuga friend of ours recalls a spot in a creek near Delevan in a campground his family used to visit. A big flat stone had a missing piece, a rectangle as neatly incised and removed as if twentieth-century tools had been used. Leading down through it was a slender, spiraling chute like an umbilicus to a watery underworld. No one knew where it went. The children and other bathers used to play with it, and it was rumored to be special to the Little People, a place where they could be seen frolicking in the moonlight on tender nights. They vanished if they knew they were being watched. The children got into the habit of being quiet as they came to this part of the creek at night.

  THE DJOGAO SKULL

  One prominent American curiosity is the well-photographed mini-mummy from Casper, Wyoming. In October 1932, a dynamite blast opened a small natural cave in granite, and when the smoke cleared, a humanlike figure, seated with arms folded, came into view. The leathery imp was fourteen inches tall and, according to X-rays, had adult development. What this—and his entombment in natural rock—says about the Little People is anyone’s guess. The little fellow has not been seen in public since the 1970s and no one is certain where he is.

  There are tales, even current ones, about rare shamans keeping mementos of these elusive and magical folk as concrete as the Casper mummy. Though Michael Bastine has learned never to completely discount any Native American belief, he never thought he would see one of these.

  Once when he was helping Mad Bear move from his trailer to his new house, Mike noticed a small, pu
rple, plastic box on a closet shelf. “Open it up and take a look,” said the shaman. Wrapped inside it was a tiny human skull, perfect down to the complete set of teeth. The cranium was the size of a ping-pong ball. Mike knew bone when he saw it and was in no doubt that this object was made of it. “It scared the hell out of me,” he says. Mad Bear never showed him the skull again.

  Mike badgered him constantly for an explanation of the wonder. All Mad Bear would ever say about it was that a cache containing the skull and other tiny bones and artifacts had been found in the 1820s during the digging of the Erie Canal near Syracuse. It drove a couple of dozen men—possibly all Irish—to run like mad from the spot and flee the business of upstate excavating for good. The collection made its way into the hands of the Onondaga and the skull ended up with Mad Bear a couple of generations later.

  FAIRY TREES

  Everywhere in the world, human folkloric tradition has associated certain natural features and regions with supernatural beings. In Iroquois country, the Little People are the most prominent sacred supernaturals, and the rocks, groves, springs, and waterfalls once linked to them are impossible to list. Had the people who maintained tradition about them not been displaced, it’s certain that many more of them would be remembered. The larger sites and zones are usually the ones that stand out still, but sometimes a scrap of information about even the smallest of them can be found. Sometimes it’s even a single object, like a tree.

  The Fairy Tree

  Late Tuscarora healer Ted Williams told me a story about a fairy tree on the Tuscarora Reservation.

  One day when his father Eleazar was a boy, there was no one to watch him but his own father. He, however, was on his way to dangerous work felling trees. Afraid that his venturesome boy would get hurt at the lumbering, he dropped him off one morning at the special tree. “Just wait by the tree till I’m out of sight,” he said. “You’ll have playmates all day.”

  The future healer was completely alone for the first time in his life. As the horse and carriage pulled out of sight, tiny human beings came out, first one, then others, from around the tree, as if they had a door behind it. The band of them played with Eleazar the whole day. It was magical and delightful. The wildlife, the trees, even the passage of the sun and its changing moods were more fascinating than they had ever been before. The little folk taught him to understand the talk of the birds. It was the brightest day in his memory. What a wonder was this world around us! He made many friends. One special one was at his side every moment.

  Sunset found them back by the original tree. As the clops of horses’ hooves and the clacks of the carriage harness came into hearing, Eleazar’s playmates bid him bright farewells, and one by one disappeared behind the tree. By the time the carriage was in sight, even his special friend, waving to the last, was gone. Ted’s father never saw them again, but he always said that the story was true.

  When he first heard the story in the 1940s, young Ted wasn’t so sure. “Were the Easter bunny and the tooth fairy there, too?” But Ted never forgot the fabled tree, and it was standing forty years later when three illumined Iroquois walked by it.

  The Double-Stemmed Oak Tree

  In March 2006, Michael Bastine took a documentary TV film crew to the Tuscarora Reservation to meet some of his friends, including the elders Jay Claus and Norton Rickard. I was along. We visited the graves of Mad Bear Anderson and Ted Williams. Mike had a moment by himself at Ted’s grave. I think it was his first visit to it since the November service. When he was ready to talk again, he came up to us, and our little procession got walking.

  Jay is a pony-tailed, wide-chested, fiftyish man of middle height. “You know, Ted Williams’s father was a medicine man,” he said to the whites.

  “A great one,” said the sixtiesh Norton with a nod. Norton had a short haircut, but he was built a lot like Jay.

  They led us on a dirt road through some woods and came to a curious double-stemmed oak on a slope, the fairy tree of Eleazar’s boyhood. Michael Bastine recalled a more recent story about it.

  In 1975 three illuminated Iroquois—Ted, Mad Bear, and the Seneca Beeman Logan (1919–1979)—were walking by the very tree. The two Tuscarora, Ted and Mad Bear, let us say, did not need metaphysical bodyguards when they walked at night, and Beeman Logan was a celebrated mystic. Logan was, however, a Seneca, and not of this reservation. He shouldn’t have known much about its lesser curiosities. At one point after they had passed the tree, Ted and Mad Bear noticed that they were now a duo. A hundred yards back, their companion was studying the tree and the ground around it as intently as if looking for a lost ring.

  Mad Bear and Ted came back to him and asked what was up. “I think the Little People live here,” Logan said. “I could swear they’ve been around here.”

  Winter stayed late in 2005, and Easter came so early that part of western New York was still covered in white on the holy Sunday. In midafternoon, I went for a long ski tour in the hilly country south of Buffalo. Usually I like to keep a pace on fast tracks at a park or touring center, but a couple of times a winter, I go for tours like this.

  Five minutes after I started, I was on an old logging road. To my right was a creek, on my left a short, steep slope. Something low to my left caught my eye: a perfect wheel of wet snow, a foot across, like the stone hoops high on the walls of the Mayan ball courts, and perpendicular like they were to the course of human activity. This one was at the base of a steep, white bank, twenty feet high. Its symmetry was remarkable, its sides five inches thick, the same as the hole through which passed its axle of air. I could have flicked it with my pole from the center of the road. I came back to study it.

  It was the oddest natural thing I had ever seen in the woods. It seemed spun by wind or magic. A four-foot groove ran from it up the white slope. If nature had made it, it was most likely that something had fallen from the tree above it and rolled itself into this snow wheel. Still, it looked improbable. Human artists could only have made it with a mold. It should have collapsed under its own weight. And the snow that held it was so old, it was moist and gray at the edges. The night before had been turbulent. How had it lasted?

  Curious works of nature or ones cleverly wrought, particularly into the shapes of circles, were thought works of the Little People by old cultures on both sides of the Atlantic. I could envision the fairy children at play, scooping into the white and rolling themselves a snow wheel, casting their baby spells to hold its form, fixing it like a marker or a monument to bemuse passing humans.

  The Thursday before had been a full moon, and Michael Bastine and I had been storytelling in East Aurora. Maybe the fairy children had been working even then and heard themselves called. Almost expecting to see the prints of tiny hands and feet beside the snow wheel, I looked up from the groove to the tree from which it came.

  The chief of the bank, this maple was strange in itself. It stood like a champion, bigger and bolder than its line of neighbors, a king to the whippy bushes that huddled at its roots. Its bare fellows were smooth barked and full-set on top of the bank. This one’s truculent roots showed like a maw of tangled teeth where the bank had worn away, either that or a gate to a world behind it. Pockets in its surface looked like little mouths or caves. Knots and gnarls in the bark above were the features of merry gnomes. What were they like at midnight! Did they grin, and move, and laugh with other trees! Did their squinty eyes glow! A thought came to me, something that Michael would probably say if he saw it: This tree was of the Little People.

  I started skiing again, wondering if a bit of Mike’s intuition had rubbed off on me. That snow hoop had seemed like a gate or an arch marking the entry to another realm.

  The skiing was surprisingly fast for so warm a day. The top inch was soft, but March’s freezes and thaws had left a hard, heavy base. In wooded areas, it could feel like full winter again. Still, connecting patches were thin, and rain was counted on for that night. This would be the last day anyone could ski this loop, surely the last long
tour of the year in these parts. The thin sun alone might settle it that afternoon. Ah well, that tour was a good one for good-bye; I’d said farewell to other winters on that course. I thought about the seasons.

  It’s rare for one to turn so dramatically, I thought, to be so clearly winter full of natural skiing and then snap to climatic spring overnight. A clean cut was better, I thought, one last ceremony of good skiing, than weeks of to and fro.

  The winding, wooded trail opened on a bare hillside facing north. The city was there, as bright as where I was, but warmer and snowless. The streets were full of people coming and going from churches and gatherings, the women in their flowers and pastels, maybe hoping through their imagery to encourage the April to come. They’d had enough of snow—as had the world.

  It was after equinox, and the whole continent hurled itself away from winter. I had skied back into it as if for a breath of time, a point of stasis in which things might fall clear, as if to catch back some important thought or mood whose only chance to be understood was to feel within it, while it could still be imaginatively held. Maybe this gesture into the natural cycles was what my life as a writer is about, to bring back things that should not be lost and hold them until people learn from them.