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, purple, 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 onemorning 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
