Little People of the Pryor Mountains

The Little People are beings of Crow (Apsáalooke) tradition who are said to live in the caves, cliffs and canyons of the Pryor Mountains, a range that straddles the Montana–Wyoming line south of Billings. In Crow they are called Awakkulé, a name one recent news feature renders as “keepers of the earth.” This is not a cryptid story in the usual sense: for many Crow people it is a living part of their relationship to a sacred landscape, and it deserves to be read that way.

Descriptions vary from knee-high to about the size of a young boy, with big heads, short limbs and remarkable strength. In the older stories they can be dangerous – they are said to take food, tobacco or even children – but they are also givers of power, visions and protection. Tradition credits them with making the stone arrowheads the Crow used, and with owning the Sun Dance lodge. Travelers through Pryor Gap have long left gifts such as arrows, beads, cloth, tobacco or something shiny to secure safe passage.

The best-known account concerns Plenty Coups, the last traditional chief of the Crow. As a boy he was said to have been visited in dreams by the chief of the Little People, who foretold his leadership and promised help; the story was recorded by Frank Linderman in the 1930s. The site of Plenty Coups’s home is now a Montana state park.

Modern retellings include affectionate trickster stories – a family leaving a meal that was later found with the bowls stacked, or a Crow-country tale blaming the Little People when trains on the old Burlington line ran late because the railroad cut through sacred ground. Outsiders sometimes pair the tradition with reports of tiny mummified bodies from the region, but that is a separate, much later story.

In Crow tradition: beings about 18 inches to roughly knee-high or boy-sized, with large heads, short limbs, great strength and sharp teeth. Some accounts describe them as mischievous and humorous; others as fierce. They are usually unseen and often met in dreams or visions.

Caves, crags and canyons of the Pryor Mountains and Pryor Gap in south-central Montana and northern Wyoming, a landscape the Crow regard as sacred.

The Pryors hold petroglyphs, vision-quest sites and offering places that the Crow still visit, and the range lies within and beside the Crow Reservation. Chief Plenty Coups State Park in Pryor, Montana, preserves the leader’s home and tells his story. Visitors to the Pryor Mountains should treat offerings, rock piles and rock art as sacred and leave them undisturbed.