They Were Feared as Man-Eaters: The Little People of Wyoming Known as the Nunumbi

They Were Feared as Man-Eaters: The Little People of Wyoming Known as the Nunumbi In 1932 two gold prospectors blasted open a hidden chamber in Wyoming's San Pedro Mountains and found a fully formed figure the size of a doll sitting on a ledge. For generations the Eastern Shoshone had spoken of the Nunumbi, waist-high beings of the Wind River high country, and now one seemed to be sitting on a drugstore shelf. This is the full account, told with names and dates intact. It runs from the ravines trappers refused to cross and the short, thin arrows found in the dead, through Elias Hood's 1837 journal and the cursed-canyon story of a party that walked in and did not walk out whole, to the burial cairns built to a smaller measure across the Wind River and Sweetwater country. The San Pedro mummy reached the American Museum of Natural History, where X-rays and later DNA testing revealed not a tiny race but an infant with anencephaly, a fatal birth defect. The deeper story is how a Shoshone tradition of small mountain guardians was heard, misheard, and sold back by trappers and sideshow men as poison-arrow cannibals. Grief over lost children, disease, and bones no frontiersman could read did the rest. A second, smaller mummy vanished through carnival hands and has never been found, and on the Wind River Reservation the little people are still spoken of today.