Only the broadest contours of Pastrana's early life are known. No birth certificate or baptism records have ever been found. She is believed to have been born in 1834 to a tribe of "Root Diggers" — a group of American Indians described as a kind of primate-caveman hybrid. They were diminutive, hairy, and naked. They lumbered around the caves of Sinaloa, taming monkeys and subsisting on bark, grass, and roots. "This singular HAIRY WOMAN is in some respects an exception to her tribe," said one pamphlet, which is now kept in a rare book and manuscript collection at Yale University. (As with other pamphlet writers of the era, Pastrana's had a fondness for capitalization.) "She is much larger, walks erect, and has no hair on her bosom, hands, or feet; and humanity seems to predominate."

Of course, there were no monkeys in the Sierra Madre. Nor were there Indians known as "Root Diggers," a catchall term whites used in the mid-19th century to refer to American Indians in parts of the Great Basin. Once merely ignorant, "digger" evolved into a "taxonomic stigma," as a linguistic history of the word put it — a kind of shorthand for a race of bloodthirsty savages.

Exaggeration and fabrication were typical features of freak show literature. As the sociologist Robert Bodgan points out in

, such pamphlets were designed by promoters and managers — and freaks themselves — not to offer honest biographical portraits, but to sell a product. "People who viewed exhibits were vulnerable to any tale a showman might tell about the origin of the strange creatures they paid to gawk at," Bodgan wrote. "Having never seen a giraffe or a very small person with a distorted head, one might very well believe that they were from the moon, or from the dark crevices of one of the mysterious landmasses not yet penetrated by Westerners."

The ethnologist Barraza tells me that if Pastrana was indigenous, she may have been Acaxee, one of several groups of so-called Sinaloa Indians who lived in the mountains outside Sinaloa de Leyva. Yet Pastrana's appearance was hardly common; she was unique and suffered from two rare physical afflictions that wouldn't be accurately diagnosed for more than a century.

During my visit with Anderson Barbata to the desperately poor, drug war–ravaged Sinaloan foothills, the mayor, his photographer, and a half-dozen officials decide to tag along from Sinaloa de Leyva. We rumble past girls selling sweet bread and men herding cattle in a caravan of several vehicles — including two police escorts — that look something like the mayor of New York City's. At one point, after I ask about local indigenous groups, Rubio Valenzuela reaches for the sliding door of our van. With the vehicle still in motion, he throws it open and points at several ordinary-looking women trudging along the side of the road. "Look!" he shouts. "Indígenas!"

Eventually, we arrive in Ocoroni, a largely indigenous village not far from where Pastrana's family is believed to have lived. In the mid-1800s, the community would have been little more than a few ranches. These days, it has a couple of paved roads, a Pemex station, and a central plaza ringed by cracked pavement and overgrown grass.

I talked to several people whose families had lived there for generations and who grew up hearing about the "wolf woman," as Pedro Velez, the mayor's photographer, described her. For Velez, she was pure myth: a scary story that he had heard from his grandparents and that he repeated to his friends in school. "People would say my grandparents were crazy," Velez says. According to lore passed down from great-great-grandparents, a dwarf was found in a cave a dozen or so miles from Ocoroni, in an area that has since been scarred by mining operations. She was a brought to a ranch, where she lived until a Spaniard took her to a circus. Then, says Cruz Valenzuela Ruiz, a young health department worker, "She disappeared."

The Sinaloan historian Ricardo Mimiaga tells me that other oral histories from the area suggest that Pastrana was treated like a monster at home. According to these accounts, she was not allowed to use mirrors, and after her mother died when she was young, her uncle sold her to a traveling circus.

These stories correspond somewhat with the freak show literature. The Yale pamphlet states she was not found near Ocoroni, but 280 miles south, near another small mountain town, Copala. This version weaves a tale of a Mexican woman — "Mrs. Espinosa" — being captured and held hostage by cave-dwelling Indians. When Espinosa was rescued by local ranchers, she took a young Indian child with her. "Mrs. Espinosa took her home, had her christened, gave her the name of Julia Pastrana and made her husband godfather," the pamphlet said.

Pastrana is believed to have been taken in by the governor of Sinaloa, Pedro Sanchez, who treated her as both a trophy — a curiosity to show off to dinner guests — and a child to be cared for: She was taught to read and write by Sanchez's staff of private teachers. The pamphlet suggests that she was "ill used," however, so she fled for the mountains; along the way, she met a man named "M. Rates" who, with the help of a friend, "F. Sepulveda," "induced her to go to the United States with him for exhibition."

A couple of years ago, Mimiaga uncovered a much darker story line in the writings of Ireneo Paz — the grandfather of the great Mexican writer and Nobel laureate Octavio Paz — that suggests Pastrana was not a willing participant in her departure.

Ireneo was a journalist, author, high-ranking government official, and contemporary of Pastrana who wrote about a "bear woman," as he called her, in the first volume of his memoirs, published in the 1880s. In his telling, "F. Sepulveda" was Francisco Sepulveda, a notoriously corrupt customs administrator from Mazatlán, the lush coastal city that was, at that time, the capitol of Sinaloa. Mazatlán was also a cosmopolitan hub, and Sepulveda had devised a profitable kickback scheme with well-to-do Europeans who had settled there. Sepulveda had become wealthy enough to buy lands south of Mazatlán, yet he decided that purchasing Pastrana and exhibiting her in New York would be a better investment. So he sold his real estate and made an offer. It is unclear how much she was sold for, but by the winter of 1854, Pastrana had landed in New York City.