NEWS for North Dakotans
Agriculture Communication, North Dakota State University
7 Morrill Hall, Fargo, ND 58105-5665

May 13, 1999

Plains Folk: Much Ado about Madoc

Tom Isern, Professor of History
North Dakota State University

©1998 Plains Folk

If anyone reading the past few columns has taken offense from my likening the strange beliefs about the Great Plains held by Jefferson, Lewis, Clark and company to the weird plots of the "X-Files," then just wait. Have you heard the one about the Welsh Indians?

Jefferson and Lewis, talking over the mission of the Corps of Discovery, shared the beliefs of many eastern Americans that at least some of the Indians of North America had familiar origins. Some said that once the languages and religious practices of remote tribes were examined, they would prove kinship to a lost tribe of Israel. Still others declared just as fervently that way out there in the continental interior lived the descendants of a band of Welsh colonists who had come to North America in the year 1170.

The story goes like this. There was a civil war in Wales following the death of a great king, Owen Gwyneth, and one of his sons, Prince Madoc, weary of fighting, set sail for peace and new land. He brought 120 followers to Mobile Bay, on the Gulf Coast, and possibly made a second trip with reinforcements.

After that the story gets vague, but the gist of it is that the Welsh made their way inland over the centuries, teaching benighted natives how to make burial mounds and fortifications, and intermarrying to found a race of light-skinned, sometimes blond-haired Indians. The general direction of their migration was northwest. By the time of the Lewis and Clark expedition, they were supposed to be somewhere on the upper Missouri River.

Lewis was a little disappointed, then, when he met the Mandan, because he detected no traces of the Welsh language among them. Perhaps he also was hoping to encounter some of those fair-haired Welsh Mandan women said to babble bewitchingly in male embrace. (I am not making any of this up.) Lewis did think he detected guttural Welsh syllables among the Salish of the Bitterroot valley, but his vocabulary collection among them was halfhearted.

The search for the lost Welsh did not cease with Lewis and Clark, however, for the painter George Catlin wrote of his 1832 visit to the Mandan villages: "I was so struck with the peculiarity of their appearance, that I was under the instant conviction that they were an amalgam of a native, with some civilized race"and he soon concluded the "civilized race" was indeed Prince Madoc's Welsh. He compiled and published a comparative Welsh-Mandan vocabulary that was thoroughly inconclusive.

The story continues. In the 1920s amateur archeologists in Kansas floated the theory that not the Mandan, but the Wichita (or Quiviran) Indians visited by Coronado were, in fact, the lost Welsh folk. Editor Paul Jones of Lyons, Kan., was not so partisan in his claims, but he did insist that certain 7-foot skeletons found in stone burial works in Kansas were left by the ponderous Welsh passing through on their way to North Dakota.

Popular Welsh historians still reiterate the story of Madoc. This really ticked off our century's greatest historian of exploration, Samuel Eliot Morison. His refutation of the Madoc legend in "The European Discovery of America" is absolutely authoritative, and damning, and futile. You cannot kill a story like this.

So when some assertive Welshman backs you into a corner, just nod your head and smile. If you argue with him, he's likely to ask you some probing questions about your chain mail from the Coronado expedition, or your Norse runes, or your Viking mooring stones. If you don't believe his stories, why should he believe yours?

The truth, they say, is out there somewhere.

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Source: Tom Isern (701) 231-8339

Editor: Dean Hulse (701) 231-6136