In the opening prologue of the first installment of the mega movie trilogy, The Lord of the Rings entitled: The Fellowship of the Rings, there is a warning to all who accept conventional wisdom without question and without a sober second thought.
“History became legend,” it says, ”legend became myth, and some things that should not have been forgotten…were lost.”
Such seems to be the case in the historical search for a tribe of Natives encountered by early explorers and trappers as they penetrated the rapidly opening American west.
One of the first mentions of this odd looking and strange sounding tribe in the west of the United States, comes from American explorer and painter George Caitlin, considered the greatest Indian painter of the early American period. He lived with the Mandan Indians in Missouri in the early 1800s and reported that the Mandans, largely wiped out by a smallpox epidemic in 1837, actually spoke Welsh.
The story of the Welsh Prince Madoc, also spelled Madog, or Owain Gwynedd was, a Welsh prince who legend has it sailed to America in 1170.
Although highly skeptical, Thomas Jefferson actually believed it enough to send a letter to explorers Lewis and Clarke telling them to keep an eye out for the Welsh Indians.
(Reproduced here as written in old English)
“He has obtained from the Commandant passports in Spanish french & English to go on his journey … and whether he meets with the Welsh Madogians or not — he will receive on his return two or 3000 dollars from the Spanish government — I have heard many additional tales concerning what they call the Welsh Indians but as yet I have my doubts about them. I have conversed with the acting partner in the Missouri Co. He has been among more Indians than any other white man on this continent. He knows nothing of the Welsh language but by my conversing in Welsh — he could not recognize the words nor the idiom altogether among the Indians North of the Missouri — he thinks the Padoucas are out of the question. However I deliver’d him a Welsh Vocabulary & begg’d of him to give all the assistance he could to John Evans should he meet him. This man is to remain on the Missouri for three or four years to trade with the Indians. He has promised to write to me from time to time, and I do assure you it afforded me much pleasure to meet with a man of his disposition & information engaged in the Indian trade.
It is a confirmed fact that there are white Indians on the Missouri and in many places far west of the Mississippi. I have seen deer and buffalo skins with various other articles dressed by them in a most capital manner. A frenchman has lately been up the Missouri for fifteen hundred miles and by what he could judge of the stream & country, that river must be about 2,400 miles in length. I have seen a map likewise of the Mississipi by actual survey to its source. It is no more like the present Mississipi on paper, than a cow is to a snake. It forms an elbow and runs westward long before it meets the line appointed for the limits of the United States. Every part of this continent affords sufficient proofs of a more civilised people having existed here than the present Indians …”
Many historians dismiss the Madoc story calling it “an Elizabethan invention,” created to lay prior claim on the New World by saying that Madoc discovered America 300 years before Columbus.
Detractors would say the story started with the Tudors in Whales, who first made use of the legend of and his alleged voyage to America to help undermine Spain’s claims to North America.
But then there is a Shawnee “wisdom-keeper” named Ken Lonewolf, now in his 70s, if still with us, from the Pittsburgh area. He is on historical record making several direct links to the Welsh Indians.
“Our last Shawnee leader was named Chief White Madoc; this name must have been passed down for many generations,” says Lonewolf. “This was our chief who sold our village to white settlers in the late 1790s. This is not a figment of my imagination, but a matter of county court record dating to the late 1790’s or early 1800s.”
To date there has been insufficient evidence found to clear through the mist of myth, the legacy of legend and get to the facts of history of the “Welsh Indians.”
