by Bob Curran
After his startling discovery, he spent his days keeping inquisitive strangers from finding the entrance to the strange underground place, but he died before he could reveal its exact location to Al Greer. The latter searched the Pico Blanco region for many years afterward to see if he could find the entrance that Uncle Al had spoken of, but without any success.
The 19th century and the early- to mid-20th century showed a slightly renewed interest in the ancient vampiric plant-gods of the Native Californians. Perhaps this was due to the explorations in South America and the alleged finds of both exotic and dangerous plant species there. Some of these may have been tall tales from the southern continent, but they served to fire the public imagination in no uncertain terms. Thrilling stories of adventurers fighting through the Amazonian rain forests and fighting off huge carnivorous plants, whether simply fiction or supposedly true, appealed to readers everywhere, and it soon became an accepted fact that such things lurked deep in the jungle gloom, devouring or drinking the blood of those who came within their reach. There were stories of gigantic, prehistoric mushroom-like growths found in isolated clearings that enveloped adventurers who ventured too close to them.
Public imagination on this topic was also fired by stories of a giant man-eating “tree,” which was allegedly found in Madagascar. This was supposedly a plant that not only ate its victims, but also drew both the blood and vital fluids from them. The actual origins of this story may lie in the nepenthes rajah plant, which is actually found in Borneo and Malaysia, and is a distant relative of the plants that are found in the Mount Roriama area. This plant, while it does not eat humans, can certainly eat larger birds.
In the jungles of Madagascar, a German explored named Carl Liche supposedly witnessed a frightful ceremony carried out by the Mkodo people of the area. He claimed he witnessed a human sacrifice to a great tree-like thing, which lived in the jungle and partly resembled a giant pineapple hung about with great tendrils. A woman of the Mkodo tribe was offered to the plant which sucked and pulled at her, crushing her and then digesting her. Liche’s account, which was published in the South Australian Register (one of the first Colonial newspapers in South Australia), is so full of exaggerated and purple prose that it might have come from the pages of H.P. Lovecraft. However, it’s probable that the whole thing was just a fantasy or a joke, because this is the only piece of writing, either fictional or geographical, that Liche penned. In fact, there are questions as to whether he ever existed, and if the whole account was written by a prankster. No further reference to the Mkodo people has been found, and no other tribe in Madagascar has ever heard of them, which is astonishing. Liche claimed to have “discovered” these people and they allowed him to witness their most secret rites; one would have to think that, given such unprecedented access to a relatively unknown people, he could have flooded anthropological journals with valuable material. But no—after news of the “discovery” of the tribe, Liche becomes immediately silent and writes nothing more.
The idea of a man-eating vampiric tree gained widespread currency in the popular imagination and, in 1924, Chase Osborn, governor of Michigan, wrote a book entitled Madagascar, Land of the Man-Eating Tree. The work was a mish-mash of fantastic and dubious tales. Osborn claimed that all the tribes on the island knew about the tree, as did the missionaries who came there, but they kept it a secret. The governor’s account was accepted as true, and a number of readers drew parallels between this horror and that which was mentioned by the Spanish priests in early California. Could this be the same sort of hideous growth?
In 1955, however, the respected American-German science writer Willy Ley suggested in a book entitled Salamanders and Other Wonders, that the whole thing had been an elaborate hoax and that the Mkodo people, Carl Liche, and the vampire man-eating tree itself were all fictitious. Nevertheless, a number of people refused to accept this, and the terrible growth remained part of popular legend. And moreover, it was believed that perhaps such plants also lay within the American hinterland, perhaps in places such as California. Believers pointed to yet another work written in 1887 by the hugely prolific American author James William Buel. Buel had written on a number of subjects, but is best known for his works on ape men (of the Tarzan variety) and savage lands. In his book, which dealt with alleged natural curiosities before and since the Deluge (the great Flood), Buel mentioned the Ya-te-veo (“Now I see you”) plant, which was supposed to bear some resemblance to the vampiric, man-eating Madagascar tree. He argued that the plant was to be found in areas of both Central and South America, with perhaps variants of it to be found on the North American continent. These plants usually captured birds and small animals, drank their blood, and ate them, but they might attack humans as well. These things had, according to Buel, existed since long before the Deluge and were incredibly deadly. A number of writers have subsequently pointed out that these prehistoric plant-things may not have existed anywhere outside Buel’s own imagination. Nonetheless, this didn’t stop some people asserting that they truly dwelt somewhere on the Western American coast—probably in California.
The stories still exist today, and there are still some people who believe that somewhere in the dark depths of some underground world—maybe even somewhere near Monterey—such a vampiric growth may exist. Nowadays, however, they are not classed as supernatural gods, but as cryptids, some strange form of life that exists somewhere outside regular natural orders that remains more or less hidden from general human observation. And, despite this slightly more scientific classification, such plants are often still seen as being inimical toward humankind.
And the idea mentioned earlier of a huge vampiric fungus also hadn’t gone away. In the natural world, some of the predatory fungi actually captured, exsanguinated, and then devoured their victims.
Tales of monstrous growths have been with us for almost as long as we can remember. Some of them are deadly, some of them are allegedly blood-drinking. Although gigantic vampiric growths are yet to be found, who knows what lies out there in some subterranean cavern in Western America, or waits rustling in the darkened forests there?
WYOMING
Although we tend of think of Wyoming as part of “the Wild West,” the state is perhaps one of the most mysterious, and yet, the least explored, areas in America. Despite its size, it is the second least-densely populated state of all the 50 states. The name of the state allegedly came from a Delaware Indian word meaning “land of alternating mountains and valleys,” and this does indeed describe the geographical landscape. Two thirds of the state is covered by mountains and is bordered by South Dakota, Montana, and Colorado. In spite of this wild terrain, there is evidence that there have been people living in the region for thousands of years. In the Big Horn Mountains, there is a large medicine wheel that dates back for almost 1,000 years. Various Indian tribes have controlled these lands, such as the Arapaho, the Bannock, Shoshone, Ute, Blackfeet, Crow, Kiowa, Gros Ventre, Nez Perce, Sioux, and Cheyenne.
The region was also known to Spanish explorers, though only in legend. Leading an expedition into what is now Alabama in the mid 1540s, the conquistador Hernando de Soto heard old Indian tales of a land made up of canyons and mountains where strange beings lived in caves, deep gullies, and just below ground level. The creatures were cannibalistic in nature, supposedly eating flesh and drinking blood. They were the descendants of an ancient race that had once lived on earth before Man. Some descriptions said they were some sort of giant, others that they were “little people,” and others that they were of the same height as ordinary people. They were counted as extremely savage and were fond of the dark, hunting only at night. De Soto listened to these stories but largely dismissed them as old Indian fancies. He didn’t bother to investigate, but his expedition passed into what is now northern Alabama and onto Arkansas and Georgia. However, the stories continued, and other Spanish explorers through the region, such as Francisco Vasquez de Coronado, also heard of these strange cave-dwelling people in a land
of canyons and peaks.
In April 1803, the United States purchased a massive tract of land (828,000 square miles) that was known as “Louisiana Territory” from France—the famous Louisiana Purchase. Great areas of the Purchase were largely unknown, and had never been properly explored by either the French or the Spanish before them. President Jefferson therefore requested $2,500 from Congress in order to finance an expedition into this mysterious region and to provide a detailed account of what was there. To lead such an expedition, he picked two army officers, Captain Meriwether Lewis and Lieutenant William Clark.
The “Corps of Discovery Expedition” (better known as the Lewis and Clark Expedition) was the first transcontinental expedition of the United States and comprised more than 33 military men. The purpose of the expedition was two-fold, both scientific and commercial. They were to study the Indian tribes, flora, and fauna of the area and to find a direct water route to the west coast, which could be used for trading purposes. The Expedition formally began on May 21st, 1804, when the men marched out of their camp in St. Louis, Missouri, and began to follow the route of the Missouri River. Their trek would take them through Montana and Idaho, and eventually into Oregon. The Expedition lasted from 1804 to 1806, and although it was a reasonable success, Meriwether Lewis did not survive long afterward and died in 1809.
One of the members of the Expedition was John Colter. Like both Lewis and Clark, Colter hailed from Virginia. Although famous as a member of the Lewis and Clark Expedition, Colter is also famous for conducting his own expeditions between 1807 and 1808 into the area that is now Wyoming. He is said to have been the first white man to see the Yellowstone thermal springs and the famous geysers, although his accounts were dismissed as mere fiction by most people. However, his accounts of the strange, broken landscape, which he claimed to have encountered, inspired other explorers such as Robert Stuart to investigate the region. Stuart was a partner of John Jacob Astor, who headed the American Fur Company and had been instrumental in the founding of the Fort Astoria trading station in Oregon Territory. In 1812, he led a party of five men into South Pass in the Rocky Mountains and into southwest Wyoming. This would form the basis of what became known as the Oregon Trail and also the California and Mormon Trails. Although Stuart had kept a meticulous diary, which he presented to Astor and also to President James Madison, the trail into Wyoming was not used for many years and trappers and traders followed a more northerly and more difficult route, which led through the Bitterroot Mountains in Montana.
It was not until the legendary mountain man Jedediah Smith—“Old ‘diah”—along with Thomas Fitzpatrick began the famous coast-to-coast trek in 1824 that the South Pass was “rediscovered” and became used as a route. In 1832, a French military officer named Captain Benjamin de Bonneville took a caravan of 20 wagons and 110 men over the pass. This was the first of the wagon trains to cross the mountains down to the Sweetwater River in Wyoming Territory. In 1850, another mountain man, Jim Bridger began to explore the region, traveling as far as Yellowstone and discovering what became known as the Bridger Pass through the mountains. This would later become a route for the Union Pacific Railroad in 1868.
One of things that had been discovered in the mountains prior to the 1860s were veins of precious metals, including small quantities of gold. The big resource found in the area, however, was coal. The Homestead Act of 1862 brought a number of farmers and ranchers to the region, and began to establish a pattern of settlement on what had been once open land. Settlers from everywhere flooded into Wyoming and established themselves in communities that were isolated but developing. Unlike some other States and regions, Wyoming did not have an underlying core of settlement by the European powers, but usually relied on immigrants from elsewhere in America. The folklore of the region, while certainly containing European elements, was also tinged with the old Indian beliefs from earlier times.
Once again, there were stories resurfacing among the new settlers that de Soto and the other conquistadors had heard as they passed by the area. The geographical features of the landscape gave a sinister color to such tales. This was a region of deep caves and gullies, of remote and hidden valleys and of twisting canyons where anything could shelter. There were hills that appeared to be honeycombed with caverns and tunnels, which seemed to lead down to unknown realms and sinister lairs where all manner of things were said to lurk.
Chief among these traditions was the idea of malignant dwarves who lived in the bowels of the earth. It is thought that they had lived among the caverns and gullies of Wyoming for at least 9,000 years. The Nez Perce called them Its’te-ya-ha, while the Arapaho and the Umatilla of Oregon referred to them as “Stick Indians.” There was also a legend that they were another form of man, or that they had once been men but had died and become something else. They were said to be incredibly belligerent, and, according to ancient Spanish tales, both devoured flesh and drank blood when the mood was upon them. The common expression among many of the Native American peoples was, “Beware of the little folk!”
Apart from legends that reached the ears of the Spanish expeditions further south, stories of these deadly dwarves were related in 1804 to the Lewis and Clark expedition. Meriweather Lewis had led a party of 10 men along the Vermillion River in what is now South Dakota to negotiate with a tribe of Wichiyena Sioux. During the course of these negotiations, he was told of a curious mountain nearby, which was infested with the dangerous little people who lived in caves and tunnels and killed anyone who came near them and drank their blood. They offered to take Lewis with them to show them the mountain where these dwarves lived and the explorer went with them. Lewis would later write that these little people were “deavils” (devils) with large round heads and very alert to intrusions into their territory. They were also said to live in caves and in the dark, hence, their eyes were very big. They carried very long spears or arrows, which they could aim over long distances, and kill anyone who approached their hill or mound. It’s unclear as to whether Lewis saw a mountain, a hill, or perhaps an artificial mound.
Although the little people were extremely fierce and vampiric, they were also extremely old and could impart great wisdom if they so chose. The Crow, who referred to them as the Nirumbee or the Awwakkule, claimed that they were an old race who had lived in the world for thousands of years and had accumulated great knowledge in the process, which they passed on to certain individuals, usually communicating with them in dreams. They were, said Crow folklore, great magicians and had ways of healing and poisoning that were unknown to humans. They were also vampiric, using blood in their potions and magical rituals. They had, to some extent, shaped the Crow Nation through communicating with a legendary Crow chieftain known as Plenty Coups, originally known as “Buffalo Facing the Wind.” Plenty Coups was not only a chieftain, but a great medicine man, subject to spells and visions. It was he who, as chief of the Mountain Crow, allied the Crow tribes with the white man in order to take vengeance on their traditional enemies: the Lakota, the Sioux, and the Cheyenne. He was the youngest of all the chieftains of the Mountain Crow, elected at the age of 28. Not only was he a fearsome warrior, having between 50 and 100 feathers on his coup stick (a stick with which a warrior touches his enemies as a sign of courage), but he was also a skilled negotiator, representing the Crow nation at talks in Washington D.C. when U.S. senators tried to take away their lands. He was also the only representative of the Native American peoples to officiate at the dedication of the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier and the only Native American allowed to speak at the ceremony. However, much of his valor and wisdom was said to come from the little people who, rather than attacking him, had taken to him and shared their wisdom with the chief.
Plenty Coups had first encountered the little people when he was nine years old at his initiation ceremony as a warrior. After the traditional sweat baths, he went into some hills in order to experience a vision. In this vision, the chieftain of the little people came to him and took him to their lodge where h
e showed Plenty Coups the future and many of the great exploits that he would achieve. The chieftain told him that he was especially favored among the little people, and that they were an ancient race that had once lived on the Great Plains long before the coming of the Red Man. He also told Plenty Coups that they were blood drinkers and to summon them, he must spill blood. When the vision passed, Plenty Coups returned to his own people.
At 11 years old, he experienced a second vision concerning the little people. At this time, his tribe was living in the Beartooth Mountains in northwestern Wyoming. Young men were driven out into the wild to experience visions that would make them great warriors. Plenty Coups and his friends journeyed as far as the Crazy Mountains in Montana where his companions left him to experience his vision. But no vision came, even though Plenty Coups waited for three days. Then, remembering the words of the chieftain of the little people, Plenty Coups cut his index finger and allowed the blood to fall onto the ground. That night, he experienced a vision of the little people again. This time, the chieftain metamorphosed into the semblance of an old man with a buffalo face, who led him into a system of underground tunnels that stretched toward the Pryor Mountains and contained a number of great caverns that were filled with buffalo, which emerged from a great hole in the ground and then disappeared. Plenty Coups then had a vision of himself as an old man living near the Medicine Rocks in the middle of a great and empty plain. Only one bird—a chickadee—moved in this emptiness. The buffalo-man told Plenty Coups that the time of the Native Americans was coming to an end, and, that, in the future, the white man would cover the plains as thickly as buffalo. All would be eventually swept away by the white man, but the chickadee survived because it was a good listener and was able to adapt. The Crow people would also adapt if they listened with their ears and their minds to the words of the white man and were able to adapt to them. Using this vision, the Crow people were able to retain much of their lands in Wyoming and around the Pryor Mountains in Montana. In fact, the Crow are said to have survived the critical events that beset many Native American tribes toward the end of the 19th century because of the intervention and wisdom of the little people. The place where Chief Plenty Coups emerged from the underground world of the little folk is now found within Chief Plenty Coups State Park in Montana
