The President's Vampire: Strange-But-True Tales of the United States of America

by Robert Schneck

  But where did Pedro come from, and where did he go? And if he was real, a real what?

  The Standard Version

  The most widely circulated version of the story goes like this: in 1932, two prospectors were looking for gold in the Pedro Mountains of Wyoming, when they set off dynamite and uncovered a cave. Inside they found a tiny mummy, sitting on a ledge. The mummy spent the next several years being displayed in sideshows, until a Casper businessman bought it and brought Pedro to various museums. Scientists agreed that he was real and probably the remains of an infant with a fatal birth defect. When Pedro’s owner died in 1951, the mummy disappeared, and it hasn’t been seen since. Then in 1979 an anthropologist at the University of Wyoming saw pictures of Pedro’s X-rays. He agreed with the earlier scientist’s interpretation and speculated that miniature mummies may be responsible for strongly held local beliefs in a race of pygmies. Others saw the mummy as proof that the pygmies were (or are) real.

  A researcher named Eugene Bashor listed twenty different sources of information related to the Pedro Mountain mummy. Most of these describe how he was found and what happened to him but there are other sources that suggest the story may be more complicated.

  The Prospectors

  Their names were Cecil Main and Frank Carr. Little is known about Carr, but Main was a very young man from Alliance, Nebraska, and the two of them were looking for gold in Wyoming’s Pedro Mountains when they found the mummy in October 1932. (In November 1936, Main produced a notarized deposition describing how it happened. According to this document the mummy was found in June 1934.) They were prospecting in the low mountains that fringe the southern edge of the Pathfinder Reservoir(8) near the town of Leo, in northern Carbon County.(9) (It’s believed they were working near the site of a mining road that leads up into the mountain called “Little Man Road.”) Main and Carr were “gophering”—making shallow holes in the rock, inserting dynamite, and setting it off—when an explosion exposed the mouth of a small, natural cave that had been tightly closed with stones.(10) It was around four feet high, three feet wide, and fifteen feet deep. When Main crawled inside, he went as far back as the narrowing walls allowed, and there he found Pedro sitting on a slight ledge.

  Carr does not seem to have had an interest in the mummy. It apparently belonged to Cecil Main, who brought it to the office of the state historian in Cheyenne, Mrs. Cyrus Beard, hoping that she might purchase it for the state of Wyoming. While in her possession, Pedro seems to have been examined by a doctor who believed the mummy was a premature child, possibly preserved in chemicals. Mrs. Beard declined Main’s offer because funds were not available (this was during the Great Depression) and ”there was a lack of authentic records in support of the location of the cave and of the actual discovery”(11) [my italics].

  Eugene Bashor, working from Main’s deposition, writes that by 1936 the mummy was “owned by Homer F. Sherrill and it was located in the Field Museum, Chicago, Ill.”(12)

  There are variations of these stories. Some accounts claim the cave was actually a hollow chamber enclosed in solid rock, suggesting that Pedro was found like a toad in a stone. There are also rumors that three little mummies were actually discovered, but that two of them deteriorated.(13)

  Main’s deposition raises important questions. First, why did he claim that it happened 21 months after they actually discovered it? The find was reported in the Casper papers in October 1932, so if this was intended to deceive anyone, it was not well done. Did he simply forget? Didn’t he save the newspaper clippings? Even if he was illiterate, this would be surprising. (Main could certainly sign his name—it’s on the deposition.)

  Secondly, why couldn’t he give the location of the cave? If the prospectors had found gold, would they have been able to file a claim if they didn’t know where it was? If selling the mummy depended on this information, why couldn’t Main provide it?

  Finally, Bashor could find no record of anyone named Sherrill who was associated with the Field Museum, and that institution has no record of the little mummy in their collections (though, they do have photographs). Again, these rumors are easily checked and they turn out to be false.

  Main’s account (as rendered by writer Frank Edwards) is the best-known version of the story, but his unreliability in reporting basic facts should be taken into account before accepting it as true.

  The Miners

  Robert Cardwell told a different version of how Pedro was found. He said it also happened in 1932, when his father Henry hired striking coal miners from Hanna, Wyoming, to help bring the hay in. The ranch is near the Pathfinder Reservoir and the miners spent their spare time exploring the local caves. Inside a cave four feet high and fifteen feet deep, they found the mummy sitting “on a small shelf two feet high.”(14)

  Spelunking is a thin man’s pastime and it was a miner named “Skinny” Rimmer who gave the mummy to Henry Cardwell. His wife, Winnie, refused to have it in the house, so Mr. Cardwell brought it to Casper, where he showed it to a doctor and a lawyer and left it with the funeral directors at Gay and Horstman. (“Cardwell, who was the only Republican amongst his friends, stated jokingly, ‘He must have been a Democrat, you can tell by the shape of his head.’”(15)) But did he simply abandon it? An article in Argosy later reported that ”Winnie Cadell [sic] of Alcova, Wyoming…loaned a ‘little demon mummy’ to a college professor. It was never returned.”(16)

  More Mummies

  Other pygmy mummies and the heads of pygmy mummies were allegedly found in the 1930s. A Mexican sheepherder named “Senor Martinez”(17) is said to have found a complete body and six heads near the Pathfinder Reservoir. After losing half his flock in a blizzard, however, he decided they were bad luck and buried the remains. Another version of Pedro’s discovery involves a sheepherder.

  “Some years ago, either in The True West Magazine or the Frontier Times, a man wrote an article on the San Pedro Mummy. He said a sheepherder trapper had found it in a very dry cave when he was trapping the wolves and coyotes that were killing the sheep. He took it to town when he got time off and showed it around and sold it for booze to a dentist (I think) for money to buy drink for a big drunk.”(18)

  A Casper attorney was said to have found a mummy near the Pathfinder Reservoir during a fishing trip, and a local orthopedist named Richard Phelps owned a pygmy head. The most improbable story is a “friend-of-a-friend” tale involving a man who found a cave near the reservoir containing 200 to 300 pygmy mummies. He brought one home but his wife made him put it back, and he spent eight hours burying the cave (entrance?). Since then, the cave is supposed to have been flooded several times.

  It was also in the 1930s that several pygmy heads turned up in an eagle’s nest! “There were supposedly five of them taken from an eagle’s nest in the 1930s or thereabouts.”(19) The University of Wyoming’s collection includes the pygmy head that once belonged to Richard Phelps,(20) which is actually made from “plant fiber (a little turnip or potato head).”(21) These carved vegetables might have been made to sell as authentic mummy heads, with the story about the eagle’s nest invented to give the impression that pygmies had been carried off and devoured by birds. This suggests the person who carved them was familiar with the local folklore about little people and eagles (see The Little People below).

  It might seem odd that all of Wyoming’s mummies should turn up in the 1930s. The idea that prospectors and miners could both find mummies in similar caves at the same time and in the same area is unlikely, but it is not impossible. 1932 was one of the worst years of the Great Depression. With one out of four workers unemployed, and hundreds of thousands wandering the country in search of jobs, people found themselves doing unexpected things to make money. Main and Carr might have taken up prospecting for lack of normal employment and found the mummy because they were looking in places more experienced prospectors ignored. (Harold Kirkemo wrote in “Prospecting for Gold in the United States” that “The lack of outstanding success in spite of the great increa
se in prospecting during the depression in the 1930s confirms the opinion of those most familiar with the occurrence of gold and the development of gold mining districts that the best chances of success lie in systematic studies of known productive areas rather than in efforts to discover gold in hitherto unproductive areas.”(22))

  Likewise, the miners might have been searching the caves for Indian artifacts they could sell. Perhaps Skinny Rimmer gave Mr. Cardwell the mummy because he thought it was interesting, but not easy to dispose of, like pottery or beads. (The manufacturing of mummy heads suggests there was a local market for them. Rimmer was from Hanna and may not have known this.) That Henry Cardwell left the mummy at the morticians suggests he did not think it was valuable either. If so, they both failed to see its money making potential.

  The Sideshow

  The thread of the story gets lost for a while, but someone owned and displayed Pedro. Several witnesses recall seeing him or a mummy like him. One in particular noted: “The first time was in 1938 or 1939 in Casper, WY. It was in a trailer house… A 4th of July celebration or maybe the annual Natrona County Fair was going on at the time. The line into the trailer was very long. As I remember, it took about a 1/2 hour to get up to the trailer. Admission was 25 [cents]. The mummy was sitting on a table in the trailer and there was a guard at each end of the table—both armed. The line moved right along and I didn’t have much time to look the mummy over.”(23)

  There are also rumors that Pedro toured colleges on the West Coast, being shown in a station wagon.(24) This stage of the mummy’s career seems to have ended in Meeteetse, in northwest Wyoming, when it came into the possession of drugstore owner Floyd Jones. He may have bought it from whomever was showing the mummy in the trailer, but like everything else associated with Pedro, there’s a story attached that “…two men had come into the bar or drugstore and offered to sell the little fellow. The druggist paid $2000.00 for the mummy and put it in a case on display in his store. The men blew the money on booze, food and women and didn’t have a dime left of it.”(25)

  Mr. Harvey Wilkins, of the Big Horn Historical Society, remembers seeing Pedro at this time: “He [Mr. Wilkins] played basketball in 1945 in high school in Burlington, Wyoming. One evening, when they were to play Meeteetse, Wyoming, about 25 miles away, the coach arranged something for the whole team to get to do. They got to see the strange little dried up man in the drugstore in Meeteetse. By the door in the store was a case with the little dried man. He was about 45 [sic] inches high, the skin was still on it and the features were very plain to see. Someone or something has bashed him over the head and killed him and the blood had run down over his face and dried there.”(26)

  According to Floyd Jones’ widow, Ida, Pedro was displayed in the drugstore and in Casper and Denver. Jones finally sold it for several thousand dollars in the mid-1940s, and its new owner, Ivan Goodman, made the mummy into more than a local curiosity.

  It’s Educational! It’s Scientific!

  Ivan P. Goodman was a natural born salesman, one of Casper’s most aggressive used car dealers,(27) a successful insurance agent, an unsuccessful candidate for mayor, and a collector. In addition to Pedro, he is said to have owned a pygmy head(28) and “a large ruby cut in a design said to be in vogue two centuries ago. Mr. Goodman believed this ruby to be one of the original crown jewels of France…”(29) Pedro and Goodman may have been fated to find each other.

  Not long after the mummy’s discovery in 1932, an article entitled “Origin of Mummy Remains a Mystery” appeared in The Casper Tribune Herald. Directly underneath it was another called “Cars Derailed on Union Pacific Line,” which informs us that “Ivan P. Goodman of Casper was an eyewitness to the crash. ‘It was a perfect train wreck if such a thing were possible…’”

  Goodman displayed the mummy in his office at the used-car lot. Lee Underbrink, a retired business man in Casper, still remembers that Al Tyler of Pittsburgh Paints and Glass made a glass case to display it,(30) but Pedro seems to have spent most of his time in a bell jar on the desk. Some of the most detailed and controversial descriptions of Pedro date from this period and now may be a good time to take a closer look at the mummy itself.

  He was 6 1/2 inches tall sitting cross-legged and would have stood between 14 and 16 inches in height. Caroline Crachami, the “Sicilian Fairy,” was one of the smallest people to ever live and stood just under 20 inches tall (she is believed to have been nine or ten years old when she died). Pedro’s weight was around 12 ounces. His skin is described as bronze-colored, having a bronze-like hue, or simply, brown, and it was very wrinkled. He sat tailor-fashion with the arms crossed across the legs and the hands resting on opposite knees. It is not a relaxed position.

  The top of Pedro’s head was flattened, uneven, and appeared injured (some have even described it as gelatinous looking), with several sources mentioning a fringe of grey hair that is difficult to make out in the photographs. The forehead was low, with a broad flat nose, and a wide mouth that tilted just enough to give him a slight smirk. What most impressed those who actually saw Pedro, however, was the eyes, which “seem to peer at you distinctly.” (The fact that the eyes survived drying out at all is surprising.)

  George Hebbert has fond memories of the Goodman family and remembers being shown the mummy. Fifty years later, he is still struck by the way the eyes “stared at you. It made you uncomfortable…that right eye would look at you in strange ways.” Mr. Hebbert also remembers the mummy having fingernails and toenails, but acknowledges that many years have gone by and won’t swear to all the details. (He flatly denies there being any blood on its face.) Ivan Goodman also showed him something surprising that happened when Pedro was held under a reading lamp; the little figure would begin to “sweat” a liquid that George Hebbert believes was some kind of preserving fluid.(31)

  The strangest description of the mummy comes from Robert E. David, who claimed that Pedro was “covered with a blonde fuzz” and had “canine teeth.” These “canine teeth” suggests a traditional sideshow attraction called the “Devil Baby,” which is a dried, infant-sized corpse, usually fake, with fangs, horns, and claws that is normally displayed inside a miniature coffin. There is a photograph of Mr. David holding a bell jar with what appears to be Pedro inside, so he probably had a close look, but no one else saw canine teeth (we will get back to this). The “blonde fuzz” is more complicated.

  There is no obvious fuzz on Pedro in the photographs, but the earliest newspaper reports mention a “form of hair over its body.”(32) The presence of body hair is key to the question of whether these were the remains of an infant or a mature man. (No mention is made of Pedro’s genitals but there must have been some evidence he was male.) If the mummy was once covered with fuzz, it raises another possibility: that one of his owners removed it from everywhere but the pubic area to make the mummy look like an adult. Marco Polo describes seeing something similar done on the island of Sumatra near the end of the thirteenth century, when artificial pygmies were manufactured for export.

  “You must know that in this island there is a kind of very small monkey with a face like a man’s. They take these monkeys and by means of a certain ointment, remove all their hairs except around their genitals…”

  Marco Polo describes the procedure in detail, ending: “Then they put these beasts out to dry, and shape them, daubing them with camphor and other things, until they look as if they had been men. But it is a great cheat…For such tiny men as these appear to be have never been in India or in any other more savage country.”(33)

  Also, as unlikely as blonde hair might seem, it will come up again.

  Whatever the details, Ivan Goodman was not content with simply owning the strangest paperweight in Wyoming and began taking Pedro to museums around the country.

  Little Mummy, Big City

  How exactly did a used-car salesman from Casper convince the Curator of the Department of Anthropology of the American Museum of Natural History in New York to become involved with a for
mer roadside attraction? Goodman knew about selling, but he was fortunate that Dr. Harry Lionel Shapiro was interested in the relationship between environment and human stature. If Pedro turned out to be a genuine North American pygmy, it would be important to his work.

  Detail of Pedro (Wyoming State Archive)

  The Museum of Natural History and Dr. Shapiro had the mummy for about one week, during which time the little figure was X-rayed and examined by a physician. From March 3 to March 8, 1950, listeners to the Sunoco “Three Star Extra” radio show could follow the mummy’s progress through these “cloistered laboratories” with commentary and interviews by host Ray Henley:

  “I have just talked with Dr. Shapiro. Is the creature real… or fake.[sic] To all outward appearances… it seems real… the skin is mummified in a realistic manner. The features of the legs and body look too real for comfort to the mind.

  “And when samples of the creature’s hair were tested—the report came back: Human hair!

  “Then the creature was placed under the X-ray machines–-and to the consternation of some persons… the X-rays showed that there was a skeleton inside.

  “But to the trained eye of Dr. Shapiro…these X-rays also revealed some contradictory evidence.

  “Some of the bone structure is anything but human in its arrangement. The eye sockets are not the type found in mummies [see “Anencephaly” section] The X-ray indicates there are no wrist bones between the one arm and hand which could be photographed.”(34)

  “So far, however, no examination has been made of the little man’s hide… to see if it is human skin… there’s been fear of damaging the specimen.”(35)