Prince Madoc and the Welsh Indians
In the harbor at Middle Bay, Alabama, the Daughters of the American Revolution have erected a plaque in honor of a Welshman who, legends claim, preceded the arrival of Columbus in the America’s by more than three centuries. The plaque reads, “In memory of Prince Madoc, a Welsh explorer who landed on the shores of Mobile in 1170 and left behind, with the Indians, the knowledge of the Welsh language.”
When George Gwyneth, King of North Wales, died in 1170, violent civil war rent the country apart. Rather than battle in the bloody fray, Gwyneth’s son, Prince Madoc, left on a sailing ship with 120 men. Madoc landed in Mobile, left a handful of men behind to begin building and returned to Wales where he provisioned for a full colonization; loading ten boats with men, women, and livestock.
A tribe of Welsh Indians were rumored to have been the original mound builders of Illinois. They were said to have constructed a series of forts around Chattanooga and Lookout Mountain. John Sevier, the founder of Tennessee, claimed to have heard native traditions that the Welsh were the first explorers to reach Alabama, preceding the French and Spanish, but the Chickasaw drove them out. Over the years more than 13 tribes were nominated to be the descendants of Prince Madoc; including the Cheyenne, Pawnee, Delaware, Conastoga, and the eventual favorite the Mandan.
In 1699 the Reverend Morgan Jones was traveling through the Carolinas when he met up with a tribe of Tuscorarans called the Doeg. Jones claimed that the Doeg were able to understand Welsh and that he lived among them for many months preaching the gospel. In 1760, Irishman Charles Beatty was also traveling through the Carolinas when he was captured by Indians. When Beatty overheard his captors speaking Gaelic he answered them in kind and they released him. Famous frontiersman Daniel Boone once said that he had seen the moccasin prints of Welsh Indians on the mountain paths.
English writers of the time were quick to jump on the Madoc myth as a way to legitimize British claims to North American lands. Many historians believe the entire tale was fabricated as a piece of political propaganda intended to refute to discoveries of Columbus. Nevertheless, it was a very popular topic in the British Isles and the subject of many bestsellers, including one by a white American named William Bowles who pretended to be a red man — a Welsh red man. Bowles made a highly celebrated trip to London where he lectured in front of large audiences before he was denounced as a fraud.
In 1795, Welsh patriots funded the expedition of John Evans to search for Prince Madoc’s people. Evans believed that Prince Madoc’s tribe had intermarried with the surrounding tribes but still might be identified by their pale skins and perhaps beards. He had heard stories that the original colonists had lost their livestock and resorted to the barbaric ways of their neighbors. Evans, a clergyman, expected the need to re-Christianize the Welsh Indian but also expected to be aided by the tribe’s most revered possession; Prince Madoc’s personal (and pre-Gutenberg) Bible. Evans spent a winter with the Mandan in the Dakotas. The 25 year old clergyman wrote a report to his financial backers, “From the intercourse I have had with Indians from the latitude of 35 degrees and 49 degrees I think you may safely inform my friends that they have no existence.” Evans character was immediately slandered and he was denounced by those who believed in Prince Madoc.
When Thomas Jefferson sent Lewis and Clark westward like canoe borne astronauts he instructed them to settle the Welsh Indian question once and for all. George Rogers Clark, early American frontiersman and relative to William Clark, of the Lewis and Clark expedition believed that the ruins of the mysterious ancient fortifications at Kaskaskia had been the work of the ancient Welsh. A fellow army officer, Amos Stoddard, author of Historical Sketches of Louisiana believed that Lewis and Clark had missed the Welsh Indians because they had taken the wrong river west. Prince Madoc’s kingdom, Stoddard asserted, was astride the Rio Buenaventura; the fabled northwest passage across the continent.
Eventually, the Native Americans known as the Mandan were the tribe most frequently associated with the Welsh legend. The Mandan were the only sedentary farming culture living among the nomads of the Great Plains. They were a river people, using a type of small boat which was exactly like the Welsh watercraft — the coracle. The Mandans were the only Native Americans who used this type of boat. It was said that Mandan girls giggled sweetly when embraced, just like Welsh girls do.
One of the most famous advocates of the Mandan as lost Welsh Indians was the artist George Catlin. Catlin painted the Mandan in 1832 and commented, “There are a great many of these people whose complexions appear as light as half breeds; and amongst the women particularly, there are many whose skins are almost white, with the most pleasing symmetry and proportion of feature with hazel, with gray, with blue eyes…” Catlin went on to write, “And I recall what Governor (William) Clark told me before I started for the place, that I would find the Mandan a strange people and half white.”
As time went on the tales grew more elaborate. Some began to claim that proof of the Welsh explorer’s voyages could be found in the Aztec legends of Quetzacoatl. The god Quetzacoatl was white and even his name sounded like a word in the Welsh language. In 1805, the romantic era poet Robert Southey wrote the epic ballad “Madoc.” In this version of the tale, Madoc and his nephew Lewellyn sail a fleet into the Gulf of Mexico to meddle in Aztec politics. Prince Madoc and his warriors become entangled with mythical tribes such as the Aztlan, Tlalala, and the Zezozonos. The last eight lines of Southey’s poem give a feel for the colorful tale:
Madoc was left sole Lord, and far away
Yuhudthiton led forth the Aztecas
To spread in other land. Mexitilia’s name,
And rear a mightier empire, and set up
Again their foul idolatry, till Heaven,
Making blind zeal and bloody avarice
It’s ministers of vengeance, sent among them
The heroic Spaniards unrelenting swords.
Today the tales of Prince Madoc are taught as fables, not history but who is to say where the pendulum of political correctness will swing in the future. Bernard De Voto, who touches on the Madoc myth in his historical book Course of Empire has a footnote which states in his high school textbooks (dating to 1895) the story of the Welsh Indians was taught as fact not legend. Fact or fable, we may never know for certain whether the Mandans held small strains of Welsh blood mixed in with the rest of the tribe. The Mandan were destroyed by a most unusual historical tragedy.
The Mandan villages are unique in the history of global history as being the only cities on the historical record destroyed by a dragon. In 1821, the Stephen D. Long expedition journeyed along the Missouri River to the distant and remote Mandan villages. The Long expedition intended to follow up the Lewis and Clark explorations by navigating up the Missouri River with a paddle wheel steamboat. A large Viking style dragon head was placed on the front of the steamboat. The dragon’s nostrils were hooked up to the engine so the mechanical beast could whistle and vent steam. No one recorded whether or not the Indians were impressed. We do know that the Mandan nation was unintentionally afflicted with smallpox from infected blankets within the trade goods. By the time Catlin began to paint the Mandan they were disappearing from the earth, devastated by the steam and virus erupting from the nostrils of a steamboat dragon, a messenger of the plumed serpent Quetzacoatl taking his revenge on Prince Madoc’s tribe of Welsh Indians.
