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
