Dwarf Encounters in Southern Ontario

Iroquoian Dwarf Legends from Southern Ontario

All across Canada, there are native legends, settler folktales, and modern sightings of mysterious little people endowed with preternatural abilities. The region with the greatest concentration of such tales seems to be the province of Ontario. In previous pieces, we have explored Ojibwa, Cree, and Algonquin legends about hair-covered water sprites called memegwesewak, which are said to dwell inside the cliffs that fringe the lakes and rivers of Northern Ontario’s Canadian Shield. In this piece, we will delve into Iroquoian legends from the Ontario Peninsula, a populous region in Southern Ontario bounded by Lakes Ontario, Erie, and Huron; the setting of old pixie stories once told by Cornish immigrants, and the site at which some of my most intriguing subscriber encounters with little people took place.

Huron Legends

At the eastern edge of the Ontario Peninsula, from the northwestern shores of Lake Ontario, through Lake Simcoe, to Lake Huron’s Georgian Bay, lies the historic territory of the Huron, an Iroquoian people who once fought alongside the French during the Beaver Wars of the 17th Century. In the mid-1600s, these people were virtually wiped out by their traditional enemies, the Haudenosaunee or Iroquois Confederacy, a warlike alliance of five nations who lived in the forests of upstate New York, composed of the Seneca, Cayuga, Onondaga, Oneida, and Mohawk.
To the Huron, little people were powerful, prophetic spirits who foretold the fate of warriors in impending battles. In his 1969 book The Huron Farmers of the North, Canadian archaeologist Bruce Trigger wrote that the preternatural beings of Huron mythology “appeared in human form in dreams and visions. Ondoutaehte, the god of war, manifested himself as either an ugly male dwarf, or as a woman.”
American historian Elizabeth Tooker briefly elaborated on this diminutive demi-deity in her 1964 ethnology on the Huron Indians, writing, “a sort of war god, a little dwarf, appeared to many before going to war. If he caressed them, it was a sign that they would return victorious; if he struck them on the forehead, they could go to war without losing their lives.” Tooker drew this information from Volume 10 of the Jesuit Relations, the latter being reports written by French-Jesuit missionaries to their superiors in Rome throughout the 17th and early 18th Centuries. Her description of the entity is nearly a verbatim translation of a French passage written in 1636 by Father Paul LeJeune, Superior of the Jesuits in Canada, although it contains one crucial mistake. The Jesuit wrote that those whom the dwarf struck on the forehead in their dreams “can truly say that they will not go to war without losing their lives.”

Petun Legends

West of traditional Huron territory, on the southern shores of Georgian Bay, lies the ancestral domain of the Petun or Tobacco Indians, members of an Iroquoian people closely related to the Huron, who would follow the latter into the graveyard of conquered nations, driven by the tomahawks and war clubs of their Haudenosaunee enemies.
In his 1914 book on the supernatural beings which inhabit the folklore of this vanished people, Canadian ethnographer Marius Barbeau wrote that the Petun believed in two varieties of dwarves, namely the Tike’a and the Kahino’a. The Tike’a are supposed to have assisted the Petun creator, Tse’tsa, in a primeval war against his brother and an army of giants, afterwards retreating to “the world of souls in the west” – possibly the Blue Mountains south of Georgian Bay.

Wyandot Legends

In the spring of 1648, a thousand Iroquois braves, armed with arquebuses, or matchlock muskets, which they had acquired their Dutch trading partners, left their villages in the forests of upstate New York to terrorize their native enemies in the Ontario Peninsula. In 1649, they launched a devastating offensive against the Huron, razing entire villages and carrying hundreds of captives back to their own country for either adoption or ritual torture and execution. The ragged remains of the Huron nation either sheltered among their Petun cousins, or fled east to the protection of their French allies.
Later that year, the Iroquois turned their ravenous gaze on the Petun and summarily annihilated them, bringing survivors of their devastating raids southeast into the Laurentian Northwoods for absorption or destruction. A motley assortment of Huron and Petun who managed to escape the carnage fled northwest to the Upper Great Lakes, forming a hybrid nation that would come to be known as the Wyandot.
In the early 1700s, this roving people resettled in what is now southern Michigan. Throughout the 18th and 19th Centuries, they gradually migrated further southwest, first taking up residence in Ohio, and finally relocating to Kansas under pressure from the U.S. government.
Over the centuries, the Wyandot developed their own unique folklore – a product of their turbulent history and their Huron and Petun roots. In his 1899 work on this cosmology, American historian William Elsey Connelley – not to be confused with his homophonous namesake, who currently teaches political theory at Johns Hopkins University – described an old Wyandot legend about little people distinct from the mythological warriors of Petun tradition and the Morphean omen of Huron myth.
“The Tah-the-keh-ah, or The Little People,” Connelley wrote, “occupy an important place on Wyandot mythology. Their name signifies ‘The Twins.’ They are very diminutive in size, but they possess marvelous supernatural powers. They lived (and they are supposed to yet live) in stone caves in the bowels of the earth… In these caves are forests, streams, game, night and day, heat and cold, as on the surface of the earth. These Little People are represented as living precisely like the ancient Wyandot, and that it is their task, duty and pleasure to preserve in all their primeval purity the ancient laws, customs, social organization, and political and religious institutions for the use of the Wyandots after death, for this is the land to which the Wyandots go when they leave this world… I have no space here to enumerate the many achievements of the Little People.”
Connelley did have space to expound on these adventures in his other book on the Wyandot, also published in 1899, and apparently intended for public rather than scholarly consumption. He claimed that the Wyandot called their mysterious diminutive neighbours ‘The Twins’ because they were the only other creatures created by their mythological progenitor, Tsehstah, and because “they were born in pairs or twins only. They never operated singly in the accomplishment of any enterprise; and only in very rare instances were more than two of them required for the performance of any task or purpose, however great or severe.”
Connelley went on to relate several mythological accomplishments of the Little People, including the expulsion of ‘Witch Buffaloes’ from what is now Big Bone Lick State Park in Boone County, Kentucky, where the fossils of mammoths, mastodons, and other Pleistocene giants can be found embedded in an ancient salt lick. Legend has it that the imprints of their tiny bows and arrows can still be seen in the area, embedded in the solid rock.
After explaining how the Little People were believed to protect the Wyandot from preternatural enemies, like the dreaded Flying Head of Iroquoian and Algonkian legend, Connelly elaborated on their supposed abilities, which are eerily consistent with those of other legendary little people that populate indigenous folktales across Canada. “They have the power to enter and pass through solid rock,” he wrote, “and they always pass through ‘living rock’ in returning to their subterranean home; and this home is pictured as one of ideal beauty, according to the Indian standard, but no one in all the realms of Indian imagination, natural or supernatural, ever has or ever can see this beautiful country except the Little People, until after death, when it is to be also the abode of the Wyandot.”

The Iroquois in Canada

In 1665, King Louis XIV of France dispatched the battle-hardened regiment of Carignan-Salieres to New France to put an end to the Iroquois threat. The French regulars, who had seen action in the Thirty Years’ and Austro-Turkish Wars, marched into Iroquois territory and razed several abandoned Mohawk villages, whose fearful inhabitants had fled into the woods. After bearing the brunt of three brutal campaigns, the Iroquois Confederacy sued for peace.
The following year, the Haudenasaunee began to establish their own villages in the territories of the native nations they had destroyed, eventually forming seven settlements along the northern shores of Lake Ontario, which the French called the ‘Iroquois du Nord’ villages. Simultaneously, a band of Mohawk established the village of Caughnawaga on the southern shores of the St. Lawrence just southwest of Montreal. These people would uniquely remain friendly with the French throughout the remainder of their tenure in Canada.
Relations between the French and the Iroquois Confederacy soured in 1687, and fighting once again resumed in the Laurentian Valley and the forests of upstate New York. This final stage of the Beaver Wars came to a conclusion in 1701 with the signing of the Great Peace of Montreal, which stipulated that the nations of the Iroquois Confederacy confine their haunts to their ancestral lands south of the St. Lawrence River and Lake Ontario.
Some Iroquois returned to Canadian territory in 1760 after the British conquest of Canada, following their English allies north into the old domain of the French. This exodus accelerated during the American Revolution, when the Continental Army drove many Iroquois bands that had chosen to remain in upstate New York north into British territory.
Throughout the ensuing decades, displaced Iroquois firmly inserted themselves into the fabric of Canadian society, becoming prolific voyageurs for the North West Company and its rival, the Hudson’s Bay Company, and fighting alongside the Canadian militia during the War of 1812.
The Pygmies of Onondaga Legend
In addition to their labour, wilderness savvy, and martial prowess, the Iroquois imported their traditional legends to the Great White North, among which were tales of little people.
American ethnologist Erminnie Adele Smith included some of these stories in her 1883 book Myths of the Iroquois, drawing heavily from informants of Onandaga extraction. “Another creation of the fertile Indian fancy,” she wrote, “consists of the race of pigmies, Lilliputian in size, but mighty in skill and deed. They carved out the beauties of rock, cliff, and cave, but also… they were endowed with the mightier power of destroying the monster animals which endangered the life of man.”
She went on to relate an old Iroquois story bearing remarkable resemblance to the Wyandot legend of the Little People who drove the Witch Buffalo from Kentucky’s Big Bone Lick. According to this story, an Iroquois war party once travelled south to raid the settlements of the Cherokee in the swamps of Florida. On the homeward journey, the chief of this raiding party fell ill, and was left to die on the banks of a river in the Allegheny Mountains of West Virginia.
“During the night,” Smith wrote, “the sick chief lying on the bank heard the soft sounds of a canoe’s approach, and saw three male pigmies landing hurriedly. Finding him, they bade him to lie there until they returned, as they were going to a neighboring ‘salt-lick’ where many strange animals watered, and where they were to watch for some of them to come up out of the earth.
“Reaching the place, the pigmies found that the animals had not come out of the ground. They hid themselves and soon saw a male buffalo approach. The beast looked around and began to drink, and immediately two buffalo cows arose out of the lick.
“The three animals, after quenching their thirst, lay down upon the bank.
“The pigmies, seeing that the animals were becoming restless and uneasy, concluded wisely to shoot them, and succeeded in killing the two buffalo cows.”
That accomplished, the little people returned to the dying war chief and restored him to health. He returned home to his people, and punished the warriors who had left him to die.
“From a strong desire to see the ‘lick’,” Smith continued, “a large party searched for it and found it surrounded with bones of various large animals killed by the pygmies.”

Seneca Legends

The Seneca are another Iroquois nation with traditional tales of little people. In her book, Erminnie Smith included one such story from one of the two Seneca Reservations in upstate New York, told to her by an elder who knew the persons involved. One day, a band member named Mr. Johnson and a handful of hunters set out into a distant forest in search of game. They killed so many animals during their hunting trip that they were obliged to leave the bulk of the meat to rot, opting to carry the more lucrative skins instead.
Before embarking on their return journey, the hunters decided to make one last push into the wilderness to see if any more game was to be found. The forest proved to be unnaturally deserted, however, and soon the hunters began to starve.
No sooner had they begun to despair than the hunters were approached by a pygmy, who told them that they were being punished for their greed and wastefulness. The little man gave them an ultimatum, telling them that they could either relinquish the skins they had harvested, or starve to death. He agreed to give them time to consider his proposal, and informed them that they could summon him or one of his diminutive kinsmen by tapping on a certain rock in the woods.
After some deliberation, the hunters decided to negotiate for a better deal. They tapped on the rock, and agreed to concede to the pygmies’ demands on the condition that they were given sufficient food for their return journey, and guided home. The little ambassador who responded to their summons proceeded to take the hunters to a spacious cave, where they were to wait until his fellow dwarves came to a consensus regarding their fate.
The following day, the ambassador returned to the cavern and informed the hunters that their transgressions had been forgiven, and that they would be allowed to keep their furs. He asked them to remain in the cave one more night, and promised to call on them before dawn.
“About midnight,” Smith wrote, “they were awakened and found themselves in their first camping ground. The Senecas were informed that they were brought there by their ever-vigilant pigmy friends.”

Ja-ga-oh

In her posthumous 1908 book Myths and Legends of the New York State Iroquois, which she co-authored with Seneca anthropologist Arthur Caswell Parker, American historian Harriet Maxwell Converse elaborated on the Seneca conception of the pygmies supposed to haunt the Laurentian Northwoods.
“Among the fable folk of the Iroquois, the Ja-ga-oh, or invisible little people, are beings empowered to serve nature with the same authority as the greater spirits.
“These little people are divided into three tribes, the Ga-oh-ga of the rocks and rivers, the Gan-da-yah of the fruits and grains, and the Oh-dan-was of the underearth shadows.
“The Ga-hon-ga, guardians of streams, dwell in rock caves beside the waters, and though dwarf in being, are gigantic in strength. They can uproot the largest tree by a twist of the hand, and hurl massive rocks into the rivers to lift the waters when floods threaten. They have frequently visited Indians in awake dreams and led them to their dwelling places and then challenged them to feats of strength, such as playing ball with the rocks, often hurling them high out of sight in the air. Because of this fondness, the Indians often call them ‘Stone Throwers.’”
The editor of Converse’s book elaborated on the concept of these rock-tossing pygmies in a footnote, writing, “The Stone Throwers are a band of elves who are fond of playing harmless pranks. Should one offend them, however, the prank may cease to be harmless. An Indian who discovered that he has been punished by them at once holds a proper ceremony for their propitiation. Mr. M.R. Harrington who questioned the Oneidas regarding their belief in the Jo-ga-oh was told that when a good round stone was needed for a hammer or corn crusher, then an Indian would go down to a creek and place an offering of tobacco beneath a flat stone, and returning the next day find within the radius of a man’s length a stone just suitable for his purposes.”
Converse went on to explain how, in times of drought, Indians went into the forest and searched along mountain streams until they found the signs of the Ga-hon-ga – little cup-shaped hollows in the soft earth that fringes streams. Natives would scoop up the mud from these depressions and smear it on sheets of bark, which they would then dry in the sun. These so-called ‘dew cup charms’ would then be placed inside the longhouse in the hope that they would attract Gan-da-yah, who would make the surrounding gardens fertile.
“In their province of watchfulness,” she wrote, “they instruct the fish, directing their movements and giving them shelter in their deep water caves if pursued by merciless fishermen or confused in the whirl of the flood. They know the twists of every trap, and will loosen them to release the captive fish, when they deem it wise to do so. They can command a fruitful or barren season, and unless propitiated frequently, punish negligence with famine.”
Converse went on to relate an old Seneca legend about an orphan boy who was approached by a Ga-hon-ga canoe while playing by the side of the river. The little people invited the boy to join them in their tiny canoe, and after some hesitation, the boy consented. The tiny paddlers proceeded to launch the canoe through the air and into the side of a rock cliff, landing in a cave where other little people were congregated.
After teaching the boy their occult knowledge over what seemed to him to be a period of several days, the pygmies restored the boy to his people. Upon his return, the boy discovered that he had become a very large man, and that forty years had elapsed since he stepped into the little people’s canoe.

The Dark Dance

One arcane rite which the boy learned from his tiny hosts was a ritual called the Dark Dance, by which the Iroquois could solicit the assistance of the little people. Canadian-American anthropologist Anthony F.C. Wallace briefly alluded to this ceremony his article for the 1958 issue of the American Anthropologist, writing that the Iroquois of the 17th Century believed that the daytime visions of dwarf spirits to which Converse earlier alluded “indicated a need for the ‘dark dance’ of the Little People’s Society.”
American author John Bierhorst elaborated on this ritual in his 1998 book The Deetkatoo: Native American Stories about Little People, which he said was practiced by Seneca singers and dancers who met indoors after nightfall. “It is said that the ‘little folk’ themselves enter the darked room and join in the singing,” he wrote, “bringing with them the power to cure sickness.”
Later in his book, Bierhorst included an alternate version of the Seneca story purporting to explain the origin of the Dark Dance. In this tale, a hunter was captured by the little people and taught the intricacies of the procedure – a nighttime ceremony performed in the dark, involving singing, drumming, and the serving of strawberry soup.

A Seneca Rip Van Winkle Story

Bierhorst appears to have drawn this story from Arthur Caswell Parker’s 1923 book Seneca Myths and Folk Tales – a tale evoking Washington Irving’s 1819 short story Rip Van Winkle, which is clearly related to Harriet Maxwell Converse’s tale of the orphan boy. In Parker’s version of this legend, a young man named Snow, who lived with his parents on a riverbank, set out one day to hunt cedar waxwings. He followed the birds as they flew to escape him, inadvertently stumbling into a dark steep gorge filled with rushing water. Unable to escape this chasm, he sat down on a rock and began to mope.
“Suddenly,” Parker wrote, “he heard a stone strike the ground at his feet. He looked about in the gloom and then heard another strike. The next time, the stone struck him on the forehead between the eyes, and Snow fell over like a dead person.”
While he lay paralyzed, Snow heard voices speaking all around him, accompanied by the patter of what sounded like very tine feet. Mustering his courage, Snow opened his eyes and looked about. All around him were pygmies – dwarf people dressed like Indians, whom Parker called Djogeon. “There was a shout when he opened his eyes,” the anthropologist wrote, “and he was told to rise and be seated. He could now see clearly by the aid of a fire on the slaty bottom of the creek.
“At length, one of the little people spoke, asking him if he had tobacco. Snow searched through his hunting pouch and found a small quantity, which he gave the chief. This caused an expression of great pleasure.
“The chief of the little people now spoke. ‘You have come to our home,’ said he. ‘We sent for you in order that we might teach you our ways. You are to stay here until you have learned our customs.’
“Snow lived with the little people and became verses in all their arts. He was told that when the Djogeon were in need of tobacco, they would be heard singing, and then the Indians must throw tobacco into the gulches where the sound emanated. Sometimes drumming would be heard instead of singing, and this also indicated the need of tobacco.”
When they deemed his education complete, the little people returned Snow to his people, who were all much older than he remembered them. “They scarcely knew him because of his long absence,” Parker wrote, “which seemed to him only a few days.
“Snow now called together his friends and taught them the ceremonies and songs of the little people, and these ceremonies have come down to this day. They must be performed in the dark.”

A Mohawk Story

Bierhorst’s book also contains a reproduction of a story from the Mohawk tribe, the easternmost of the Haudenosaunee nations. This tale appears to be a derivative of a story originally told by Mohawk elder Josephine Horne, published in November 1976, in Bulletin 427 of the New York State Museum.
In this story, a girl named Gathering Flowers once fell asleep on the riverbank and awoke to the sound of strange voices. “Sitting up,” Horne said, “she saw a family of little people, a little man, his tiny wife, and three wee children; the baby was on a wee little papoose board. Gathering Flowers’ mother had often told the children stories about the little people, and said, ‘If you ever see them, don’t be frightened. Talk to them, be nice to them, and they will bring you luck.’ She remembered this when she saw the little people, so she was not too alarmed.”
Gathering Flowers invited the little people to sit with her, and shared her lunch with them – a meal of cornbread and apples. In return, the little people invited the girl to accompany them to their home.
“They came to a small rock,” Horne continued, “and the little man spit on his hands and rubbed the rock with them. Suddenly, the rock split open, and his little family went through it into their home.”
When Gathering Flowers protested that she couldn’t fit through the tiny opening, her host rubbed his saliva into her hair, effectively shrinking her to the same size as himself. She then followed the little man into the rock.
After sharing a meal of soup with the little family, drawn from a pot that never emptied, Gathering Flowers was led out of the lithic lair and restored to her regular size. Her host swore her to tell nobody about his family and their home, and invited her to come visit them as often as she liked.
Gathering Flowers took the little man up on his offer and saw his family frequently, never telling a soul where she disappeared to on her riverside escapades. When her own family declared their intention to relocate to another seasonal village, she paid the little people a farewell visit. Out of gratitude for her friendship and confidentiality, the little people gifted her with their magic soup pot, and granted her the wisdom to lead a harmonious life.
These stories, passed down through oral tradition and preserved in ethnographic records, reveal a deeply-rooted Iroquoian belief in preternatural beings who inhabit the edges of the civilized world – mysterious, diminutive figures who serve as guardians, teachers, and tricksters. Whether born from waking visions or secret encounters the banks of wild streams, tales of these little people of Iroquoian legend hint at the possibility that the wilderness of the Ontario Peninsula might still hold mysteries beyond our understanding.

Sources

The Huron Farmers of the North (1969), by Bruce G. Trigger
An Ethnography of the Huron Indians, 1615-1649 (1964), by Elizabeth Tooker
Notes on the Folk-Lore of the Wyandots (1899), by William E. Connelly
Supernatural Beings of the Huron and Wyandot (1914), by C.M. Barbeau
Wyandot Folk-Lore (1899), by William Elsey Connelley
Myths of the Iroquois (1883), by Erminnie Adele Platt Smith
Myths and Legends of the New York State Iroquois (1908), by Harriet Maxwell Converse and Arthur Caswell Parker
“Dreams and Wishes of the Soul: A Type of Psychanalytic Theory Amont the Seventeenth Century Iroquois,” by Anthony F.C. Wallace in Volume 60 of the American Anthropologist (1958)
The Deetkatoo: Native American Stories About Little People (1998), by John Bierhorst
Seneca Fiction, Legends, and Myths (1918), by Jeremiah Curtin and John Napoleon Brinton Hewitt
Seneca Myths and Folk Tales (1923), by Arthur Caswell Parker
“The Legend of the Little People,” by Josephine Horne, published in Bulletin 427 of the New York State Museum (November 1976)