The Mysterious Pedro Mountain Mummy

 Casper, Wyo., resident Bob David holding the Pedro Mountain mummy in a glass display jar, in this undated photo.

 

A celebrity might have a brief career, or be famous for decades, even living on in public memory after death. But has an infant ever achieved this status?

The Pedro Mountain Mummy was discovered in June 1934 by two gold prospectors in the Pedro Mountains approximately 60 miles southwest of Casper, Wyo. Contrary to the mythology of the nearly eight decades that have passed since its discovery, the mummy was almost certainly a human baby, not a tiny adult from the Pliocene Epoch or from the race of Little People of American Indian lore.

Photographs and a signed affidavit leave little doubt that the discovery itself was real. The affidavit, dated Nov. 13, 1936 and signed by Cecil Main, one of the prospectors, states that the mummy was "found in a sealed cave, on a rock ledge about two and one half feet from the ground…there was nothing else in the cave." The affidavit further states that the mummy was "now owned by Homer F. Sherrill, and located in the Field Museum in Chicago, Illinois." The affidavit was sworn in Scotts Bluff County, Neb., and subsequently recorded in Hot Springs County, Wyo., on Aug. 16, 1943.

From the time of its discovery until it was lost in 1950, the mummy traveled a path that will probably never be possible to document fully. An article by Penelope Purdy in the Casper Star-Tribune dated July 21, 1979, states that the two prospectors "took the mummy back to Casper with them as a curiosity. Although they were ridiculed for perpetrating a hoax, the body made the rounds of local sideshows in a glass bottle. . . ."

Lou Musser wrote in a March 30, 1950, article for the Casper Tribune-Herald that the mummy for years “has been the center of much controversy locally." Musser notes that before it was purchased by Ivan Goodman, a Casper businessman, it was displayed by a prior owner in the Jones Drugstore in Meeteetse, Wyo. Although Musser does not name either the Meeteetse owner's name nor the price Goodman paid, Purdy mentions a selling price of "several thousand dollars." In a related article dated July 24, 1979, Purdy names the Meeteetse owner, Floyd Jones.

If the affidavit was dated in the same year as the discovery, both Purdy's July 21 article, as well as Musser's, have errors. Purdy states that the mummy was found in October 1932, according to "local legend." Musser reports that a sheepherder discovered it, naming no date.

To further confuse matters, an Oct. 21, 1977 newspaper article, "McAuley's Wyoming," also from the Casper Star-Tribune and obviously written somewhat tongue-in-cheek, claims, "Goodman…said he bought the Pedro Mountain Man from the sheepherder." This article also mentions that the sheepherder discovered it. This mythical sheepherder is not named in any of the articles that refer to him.

Even the sworn claim that the mummy was at the Field Museum is open to question. Archivist Armand Esai notes that the Field Museum has no record of the mummy's presence during that time. The item still could have been there on loan or for identification, but because it was not part of the museum's official collection, the mummy was not listed in the records.

Thus, facts discovered after the recording of the affidavit are sketchy, but Ivan Goodman's ownership by 1950 is certain. This was confirmed by his son Dixon Goodman of Casper. The elder Goodman took the mummy to Dr. Harry Shapiro, curator of biological anthropology at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City. Shapiro examined it, took X-rays and sent the films around that time to George Gill, then professor of biological anthropology at the University of Wyoming.

Gill has confirmed that he received those X-rays and that he and Shapiro agreed that the mummy was almost certainly a human baby, either stillborn or dead shortly after birth. This child probably died of anencephaly, the congenital absence of a large part of the brain.

Later in 1950, when Goodman traveled to New York a second time, he took the mummy to a man named in three articles as Leonard Wadler: Purdy's July 24, 1979 article, mentioned above, plus another by her dated Oct. 9, 1990 and one by John Bonar in the 62nd Annual Wyoming Chronicle, dated March 23, 1980. Bonar adds that a Casper librarian "claims that…Wadler…acquired…[the mummy] for study…" All three articles state that shortly after taking the mummy to Wadler, Goodman was taken ill and died. The mummy was never returned to Goodman's family, and has not been seen again.

This absence of 63 years has not daunted mummy-seekers nor believers in little people or in human pygmy lore. Well before 1950, the sensational press had begun, exemplified by an Aug. 17, 1941, Milwaukee Journal article, "Did a Race of Pygmies Once Live in America?" According to this account, the mummy was a tiny man, 65 years old at the time of death. This seems to have been the consensus before the findings of Shapiro and Gill.

The Milwaukee Journal stated, "discernible by X-ray is the food in the stomach, which appears to have been raw meat. The teeth in the front of the mouth are pointed and of the flesh-eating variety." More compelling yet is the groan of despair supposedly uttered by one of the gold prospectors, upon finding the mummy: "'The curse of the Pedro Chain is upon us!!...Looks like our number is up. . . .'"

Like the child's game where everyone sits in a circle and whispers into his neighbor's ear the words he thought he heard whispered into his own ear, the story continued to change and grow. For example, In "Wyoming's Mystery Mummy," a chapter in Stranger Than Science, published in 1959, author Frank Edwards observes that the mummy's "twisted lips [were] set in a sardonic half grin." This author also repeats the incorrect discovery date of October 1932.

Wyoming history enthusiast Robert David, in a March 11, 1962 Casper Tribune-Herald and Star article, also reports the find date as October 1932. David cites the Pedro Mountain Mummy as a source of "present knowledge of…little people," recounting several legends told by old Shoshone and Arapaho chiefs. One legend states that "…a large mob of pygmies…attacked us viciously, and threatened to kill us all."

An Internet article, "Little People and the Pedro Mountain Mummy," explains that many believe little people are legends, names the Pedro Mountain Mummy and refers to Shoshone legends that contain the belief that little people attack "with tiny bows and poisoned arrows."

The mummy, if it ever turns up again, would be subject to the Native American Graves and Repatriation Act as it is almost certainly the body of an American Indian child taken from a grave. NAGPRA, as the act is called, provides a process for the return of certain American Indian cultural items, including human remains and funerary objects, to the lineal descendants or culturally affiliated tribes whenever possible, and particularly when the items were found unexpectedly on federal land, as is most likely the case here.

In the early 1990s, interest in the mummy remained strong. A popular episode of the television series, Unsolved Mysteries, filmed in 1994, featured the story and included an interview with Dr. Gill. As a result, a Wyoming rancher brought him another mummy, which was found in 1929 or thereabouts in the Pedro Mountain area. Gill sent it to the Denver Children's Hospital and also examined it himself, obtaining X-rays, a DNA sample and a radiocarbon date. These results, Gill said, "confirmed everything that I had ever thought” about the Pedro Mountain Mummy, including the diagnosis of anencephaly.

Is the Pedro Mountain Mummy gone for good? It seems likely, and with no immediate prospect of testing and study, those carried away by myths and speculation will continue in the spirit of Irish poet William Allingham's The Fairies:


Up the airy mountain,
Down the rushy glen,
We daren’t go a-hunting
For fear of little men.

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More on the Hidden Race Of Little People In America

Meet Chiquita: A tiny, blonde, 500-year-old Wyoming mummy

 Chiquita, a 500-year-old mummified infant found in Wyoming, was born with anencephaly, a condition in which a fetus’ brain and skull do not develop fully. George Gill and Maxine Miller, of the University of Wyoming, examined Chiquita in the 1990s and determined that she was Native American and born around the year 1500. Measuring only inches in height, Chiquita was purchased from a sheepherder around 1929 and bears similarities to the Pedro Mountain mummy, an anencephalic infant discovered south of Casper in the 1930s.
 

George Gill, University of Wyoming anthropology professor emeritus, examined and analyzed Chiquita, a 500-year-old mummified infant found in Wyoming that bears similarity to the long-lost Pedro Mountain mummy.

 

 



George Gill hands over the never-published photos of the infant he calls Chiquita.

Her fine blond hair arches over her wrinkled, leathery skin. Her arms are wrapped around her, a tiny mouth frozen in an “O.”

If she once had another name, Gill wouldn’t know it. After all, Chiquita has been dead for hundreds of years.

She is one of only a handful of known infant mummies in existence with a particular birth defect. Two such mummies, Chiquita and one known as the Pedro Mountain mummy, were found in Wyoming.

They both hold tantalizing clues about those who inhabited Wyoming’s past and what sort of lives they had. Both likely didn’t survive birth.

But clues are just that, and the mummies raise more questions than anyone can answer.

Gill has studied hundreds of human remains. For the noted anthropologist at the University of Wyoming, it’s his job and his passion.

But despite all his time excavating, protecting and curating human remains elsewhere and in Wyoming, he’s never come across remains like these.

“We never get preservation like that from any time, from any population,” he said. “Even war chiefs and very special burials are not preserved like these little people.”

But there’s a problem. Both are again lost and gone.

The first find

Chiquita came to light only because decades before, two prospectors were looking for gold and found something they didn't expect.

It was the early 1930s. Using dynamite, Cecil Main and Frank Carr blew open the entrance to a cave on the slope of a peak in the Pedro Mountains, about 65 miles southwest of Casper.

Inside they found not a streak of gold but what looked like a tiny, dead old man with leathery skin, his arms crossed and legs folded under him as he sat on a ledge in the cave.

It was a mummy.

It was about 6 to 7 inches tall sitting down. It weighed about a pound. Main and Carr might not have known it, but they were holding a treasure.

They swore to their story of finding the mummy. Not long after, the mummy was spotted in a drugstore window in Meeteeste, bringing in cash from postcards sold of its likeness.

It was displayed for viewing in Greeley, Colorado, and elsewhere, accompanied by fantastic tales about what it was.

“A mummified pygmy, believed by scientists to be a progenitor of the present human race, was exhibited in Lusk recently,” one news story ran.

It was a sideshow attraction. Another member of the weird carnival.

Soon the mummy belonged to Ivan Goodman, a Casper car dealer. He showed off the mummy, by now seated atop a wooden base topped by a tall glass jar.

A poster of the mummy bearing Goodman’s name blared the hype: “It’s Educational! It’s Scientific! It will amaze and thrill you. It’s a pygmy preserved as it actually lived!”

The poster featured photos of the mummy and X-rays of it from the side and front. This prehistoric pygmy was 65 years old when it died, the poster claimed, and predated the human race. All lies. But they made for a fascinating story -- one that could sell.

Also, one that could be stolen.

Goodman lost the mummy in 1950 while in New York, likely at the hands of a con artist. The mummy was gone. The only one of its kind found in Wyoming. A singular loss.

A 1994 television show republicized the story of the mummy. The show featured Gill in its coverage of the story.

In Cheyenne, a family watched, and remembered. They saw as the University of Wyoming anthropologist told interviewers the story of a tiny mummy, found in a Wyoming cave decades before, displayed as a curiosity, examined, stolen and gone.

The family knew something the man, Gill, had only suspected: The Pedro Mountain mummy wasn’t alone.

There was another, near at hand.

Only from Egypt

For one U.S. infant in 4,859 every year, something goes wrong in the womb during the first month of pregnancy.

Even before a woman knows she's pregnant, something is triggered that nearly guarantees her child will be born dead.

It’s called anencephaly.

The baby’s brain and skull don’t develop correctly, which often results in the child being born without crucial portions used to think and coordinate. Other parts of the brain are left unprotected as the skull develops.

Scientists still don’t know exactly what causes the birth defect. There’s a strong indication it’s caused by a diet with little folic acid, a B vitamin that helps the body make new cells.

When Gill saw details of the Pedro Mountain mummy, he thought of the birth defect.

“I was pretty certain the Pedro Mountain one was an anencephalic infant,” he said.

A previous analysis of the mummy by a team led by anthropologist Harry Shapiro at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City had come to the same conclusion. The mummy was an anencephalic infant, not an ancient 65-year-old pygmy.

But there was another problem: It was nearly impossible to compare the lost mummy to anything else in the world.

Anencephalic infants are rare enough in the present day. They’re even rarer in the archaeological record.

Scientists have uncovered and studied precisely one ancient infant mummy that appears to have anencephaly. The mummy was discovered in Hermopolis, Egypt, in the early 1800s, preserved alongside sacred baboons.

Another, about 2,000 years old, was thought to have been discovered in the Dakhlah oasis in 2003. But later examination showed it wasn't anencephalic.

The X-rays of the Pedro Mountain mummy are lost, and without the mummy, scientists can’t examine it further. Chiquita is also gone, although Gill got a chance to learn a little about her -- before she disappeared for good.

The small set of tantalizing clues he gained raised even more questions.

If only he could spend more time with Chiquita.

Chiquita

The family carried her to Gill in their hands.

She was stiff, mummified. She felt like “a rock or something,” he said later.

For decades, Chiquita lay in a trunk in the Cheyenne family’s attic, a relic purchased by their grandfather from a sheepherder in approximately 1929. But in 1994, six decades later, she was going to change hands.

Despite his decades of interest, Gill never got to examine the lost Pedro Mountain mummy. Now he had Chiquita. Gill wasn’t going to let her get away. He asked the family for permission to examine her. They agreed but set tight terms.

“They would come in each day and take it. I don't think we ever had it on an overnight,” he said. “By each evening (I mean) we would meet each evening and I would get it back to them."

In the end, they would allow him access to Chiquita only three times. Gill made the days count. He examined the mummy and arranged for tests at Children’s Hospital in Denver.

The exams told a tale of a tragedy: a baby born with anencephaly. Gill had seen much the same telltale signs in the Pedro Mountain mummy. The two infants were born without the capacity to survive.

Yet they were both buried in such a way that they were preserved from the elements, left undisturbed to mummify naturally in Wyoming’s arid climate. Both were left forever with their legs tucked under them, their arms wrapped around themselves. Upright.

“Nowhere else in Wyoming do we have burial sitting up like that. Never sitting up with legs crossed and arms folded across their chest,” Gill said. “There's a clear connection between the two of them, besides being in the same region."

The tests raised plenty of other questions for Gill. Chiquita, a name given to the mummy by Gill and fellow researcher Maxine Miller, was dated to about 1500.

Chiquita's DNA indicated that she was Native American -- something of a surprise, since she had blond hair. Gill still doesn’t know what to make of that. He thinks more could be discovered if the mummies were subjected to the latest and best tests.

“Maybe we could even do more now,” he said. “It's been a few years, and they're always progressing in the sampling and testing in the radioactive carbon dating and DNA, so we might be able to use less of a sample and DNA and get a definitive result."

But Gill no longer has the mummy. After the handful of precious days, the family took the mummy away for good. Gill won't say their names.

All he has now are photos, test results and a desire to know more about the tiny infants -- residents of Wyoming long before ancestors of many of the state’s residents arrived on foot, horseback or train and heard tales of “little people” in the hills told by Indian tribes.

Nobody can truly answer the biggest question of all: Is Chiquita the only other? Or could Wyoming caves or attics contain more mummies scarcely found anywhere else?

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