“We don’t want to scare them,” said the one in back. “I’ll do it. I’m the best looking.” He turned to the humans and grinned as if posing for his picture. His face was narrow and streamlined like that of a fish. The stone canoe submerged smoothly, taking the little man and his grin with it.
“He was real ugly,” said Bruchac with a grin.
NINETEENTH-CENTURY LITTLE PEOPLE
Little People were seen often in the old days, reported Onondaga Wesleyan minister Thomas La Fort in the early 1900s. Often they were at work helping the Iroquois, he said, but they had virtually disappeared since the coming of Christianity. White author William M. Beauchamp asked his old friend what he made of that and did not record for us the answer.
M. R. Harrington (1882–1971) found few nineteenth-century Oneidas who doubted the existence of the Little People. When they wanted little favors from the fairy folk—say, a good round stone for a hammer or a corn crusher—they placed offerings of sacred tobacco under flat stones by creeks. The next day they went back to the spot of the gift and often found whatever they had asked for a few feet away.
Arthur Parker interviewed Seneca adults who reported sightings of the Little People as very rare. Hearing some of the sounds they made, such as the “water tomtom,” was far more common. When an initiate of the Pygmy Society hears these distinctive drumming sounds, he knows the Little People are calling a council. He heads back to the village and gets his crew together for rites of their own.
Parker found many Iroquois children who reported seeing these Little People as they played in the woods. They were about a foot high, and moved so fast that it was hard to be sure what they wore. Some dressed normally for Native Americans of the day.
Author David Boyle informs us that the Little People most often reported in Canada were about three feet high and pale yellow in color. They were fully clothed even in the hot weather. This made them quite different from the summer-clad fays of the Iroquois.
White New Yorkers who report seeing Little People do not find the dress remarkable. They either fail to notice clothing or describe it as “a little old-timey.” It’s as if the Little People’s dress is a couple of generations back in time of the society of the observer. This pattern was fairly common in the British Isles during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The Little People are always out of style. They have better things to worry about.
Dealers of Fortune
(Traditional)
La Fort remembered stories about the Little People from his boyhood. He told Beauchamp an old tale about a poor Onondaga man hunting deer, hungry and miserable at his post in the woods. He had to keep at it. Times were hard, and his wife and children were in need. He prayed to the powers of the sky and forest to help his family. He had been still for hours when he noticed a tiny old woman standing right in front of him. How had she come upon him so suddenly? How had she found him?
She said she could make him happy. She offered him his choice of rewards: gold, silver, or successful hunting. He took the hunting. If she was surprised, she didn’t show it. “Enjoy your venison,” was all she said. He took a deer shortly after she left and was a fine hunter for the rest of his life.
Why the Girl Looked Back
In 1899, La Fort told Beauchamp a story his grandmother had told him. One morning when her grandmother was a girl she was out walking with one of her own grandmothers. A strange-looking tiny woman appeared out of nowhere and spoke. “You’ve been a good woman your whole life. Now you’re unhappy because you can’t walk like you used to. You can be young again if you do what I tell you. Have your grandchild keep walking straight ahead, and don’t let her look back till I give the word.”
The grandmother sent the little girl ahead. The fairy woman took a bonecomb out of her coat and said, “Comb your hair with this as far out as your hands can reach.” The old woman did so and found her hair getting longer and darker. Even her skin changed color and tone the more she combed. A year turned back with every stroke. She stood straight for the first time in decades. She must have laughed.
Maybe that’s why the girl looked back. The fairy comb powdered into dust in her grandmother’s hand, and in a breath or two, her joints were stiff again. “My dear child, you have destroyed me!” she cried, raising her arms to her head, suddenly gray again. She dropped dead on the spot.
The Largesse of the Little People
A Seneca family recounted a strange happenstance to Edmund Wilson about one of its late uncles, probably from the early 1900s. As a boy of ten, he’d disappeared into the Allegany woods for about four weeks. When he came back to his family, he had no recollection of where he had been or how the month had been spent. He was pretty well cared for, for a kid who’d been in the woods that long. His clothes were clean. His hair was even combed. Everyone presumed he’d been taken by the Little People in order to save him, as they were thought to do, from some illness or danger. To the end of his life, the matter remained a mystery.
Little People to the Rescue
Seneca author and storyteller Leo Cooper (1909–1976), known as Hayendohnees, tells of an instance from his twentieth-century boyhood in his book Seneca Indian Stories. One of his neighbors took a shortcut home after a night of drinking. On the railroad tracks, he ran into a couple of gents with whom he was not on good terms and came out the worse
