America Discovered by the Welsh in 1170 A.D.

by Benjamin Franklin Bowen

CHAPTER XI. THE MANDAN INDIANS: WHO ARE THEY?

During the present century various travellers have called the attention of the civilized world to a small body of Indians inhabiting the banks of the Upper Missouri, called Mandans. They, with the Minatarees and Crows, are classed with the Dacotahs or Sioux, although it is known that their language bears no affinity whatever with the latter people. The Mandans are very light-colored.

George Catlin, the well-known student of Indian life, character, language, and manners, was, without any doubt, more intimately acquainted with this people than any others who preceded him or have followed him.

Mr. Catlin was born in Wyoming, Pennsylvania, and was for some years a practising lawyer. He removed to Philadelphia, and, upon meeting with a delegation of Indians, resolved to employ his talents as a painter in the best school, by painting man in the simplicity of his nature. Accordingly, he made arrangements to spend the most of his time among the Indian tribes of the Western country. His enthusiasm in his work arose to the height of an intense passion. He studied every phase of Indian life, nothing seeming to have escaped his attention. Withal, he was an ardent admirer of the Indian character; and he says, "No Indian ever struck me, betrayed me, or stole from me a shilling's worth of my property, that I am aware of." In another place he says, with a touching pathos, "They are fast travelling to the shades of their fathers, towards the setting sun." In his "Notes on the American Indians" he has portrayed a complete picture of the Mandans, giving the minutest details, so that the reader can study them as well from his two volumes as if he were daily living among them,—indeed, better than if he wished to visit them at present, they have been of late years so much reduced by the ravages of that fearful scourge, smallpox. After Mr. Catlin visited them, this disease was introduced by one of the steamers of the Fur Company, which had two cases aboard.

One reason assigned why so many perished was, that the Mandan villages were surrounded by the hostile Sioux. Many destroyed themselves with knives and guns, while others dashed their brains out against rocks, by leaping from the ledges. When the disease was at its greatest height, there was one incessant crying to the Great Spirit. The bodies lay in loathsome piles in their wigwams, and there remained to decay or be devoured by dogs. Some became crazed, and plunged into the coldest water when the fever was raging, and died before they could get out.

Mat-to-toh-pa, "Four Bears," great chief of the Mandans, watched his tribe, wives, and children die about him, then starved himself, dying on the ninth day, his body prostrate over the remains of his kinsmen. Their numbers are now so reduced that the last statistics give them four hundred only.

When Mr. Catlin made his first entrance into this nation, numbering several thousands, he was struck with their appearance, and at once concluded that they belonged to an amalgam of native and white. He was at a loss for some time how to account for this; and it was only after the most careful study that he reached the conviction that the Mandans were a branch of the descendants of Madoc's colony. He believed that the ten ships of Madoc, or at least a part of them, either entered the Balize at the mouth of the Mississippi, or the colonists landed on the Florida coast and made their way inward. They began agriculture, but were attacked and driven to erect those immense earthen fortifications, and subsequently were driven still farther and farther inward. Mandans was a corruption of Madawgwys, a name applied by Cambrians to the followers of Madoc.

The following brief summary, arranged by the writer of these pages, may be taken as Mr. Catlin's principal reasons why he thought the Mandans were Welsh:

(1.) Their physical appearance.

They were of medium height, and stout. They did not share that high, stalwart physical frame which is so usual with Indians of the forest before they have become degraded by the vices of civilization.

Their complexions were very light-colored, but not uniform in shade.

Their hair was of all colors found in civilized societies. The hair of the unmixed Indian is a straight black. They wore beards,—which Indians do not have. They must have been the people who were called the Bearded Indians. They had different-colored eyes,—hazel, gray, and blue.

(2.) Form of Mandan villages. Here it may be remarked that the Minatarees construct their villages upon the same plan. They sink holes in the ground to the depth of two feet and having a diameter of forty feet, of a circular form, for the foundation of their wigwams, which are built of substantial materials and display more skill than is found among the other Indians.

(3.) Mandan remains. The method of sinking down into the earth for the purpose of obtaining a foundation has, singularly enough, offered a clue as to the authors of all those remains along the Ohio, at the confluence of the Mississippi and Ohio, and along up the Missouri to the present abode of the Mandans. Their earthen works and huts, built in Druidic circles, are exact counterparts of those along the paths of their migrations. Of course the larger works have no modern counterparts, for those were erected when they were more numerous and able to cope with their foes.

The villages of the dead are uniformly built in circles.

(4.) Their social and domestic customs.

They exhibit great skill in the manufacture of pottery, and the specimens found in the earthen remains of the Ohio Valley, many of them at present in the museum at Cincinnati, correspond with many of the products of the Mandans. The Mandan women mould vases, cups, pitchers, and pots out of the black clay, and bake them in little kilns in the sides of the hill, or under the bank of the river. They possess secrets of manufacturing known only to themselves. They have the extraordinary art of making a very beautiful and lasting kind of blue glass beads, which they wear on their necks in great abundance. This must be the nation, or at least a portion of it, which Captains Lewis and Clarke saw, and whom they declared to be light-colored, and whose manufacture of beads and glass articles they described thirty years before Mr. Catlin.

Their canoes are the exact shape of the Welsh coracle, made of raw hides,—skins of buffaloes,—stretched underneath a frame made of willows or other boughs, and shaped nearly round like a tub, which the women carry on their heads. The Welsh coracle, a boat which has been used by fishermen from time immemorial, is made in the same way by covering a wicker frame with leather or oil-cloth, and is carried on the head or with straps from the shoulders.

In their social and domestic habits generally they are different from other Indians.

(5.) Their religious belief and ceremonies.

There is something reaching the marvellous connected with their religion. Their traditional belief one would imagine was nothing less than a corrupted epitome of the Christian belief.

(a.) The account of the transgression of mother Eve, involving the doctrine of the temptation, is quite explicit. The Evil Spirit, who was a black fellow, came and sat down by a woman and told her to take a piece out of his side, which she did, and ate it, which proving to be buffalo fat, she became enceinte.

(b.) The traditions of the Deluge are far more rational, and could more easily be believed, than many which have been entertained by other nations.

(c.) The most important religious ceremony among the Mandans is a representation of the death and sacrifice of Jesus Christ. It takes place annually, as soon as the willow is in full leaf; for, they say, "the twig which the bird brought in was a willow bough, and had full-grown leaves upon it." The spectacle presented in the crucifixion of the Saviour by the young men of the Mandan nation might not accord with our civilized tastes and notions of propriety, yet it is wonderfully impressive, and calculated to turn the spectator's thoughts to the tragedy of Calvary. The finest-looking young man is selected as the central figure, and others surround him, when they are stuck full of skewers, and suspended on beams around their rude temple where they worship.

(6.) The Mandan language.

In their own language they call themselves See-pohs-ka-mi-mah-ka-kee (the people of the pheasants), which Mr. Catlin thinks they would not do if they had not lived where pheasants abounded, as in Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Indiana, for there are none on the prairies until within six or seven hundred miles of the Rocky Mountains.

The most convincing proof, probably, to the mind of Mr. Catlin, and to all others who have studied the possible identification of the Mandans with Madoc's colony, is found in their language. The resemblance in form and sound is so very marked that it cannot escape the eye and ear of any individual, much less those of a Welshman. It is expected that he would catch the soonest any similarity in the two languages,—the Mandan and the Welsh. And fortunately there are too many instances of this similarity to admit for a moment the idea of chance or coincidence.

That the reader may see that this is the case, his attention is called to the subjoined table of words selected from the English, Mandan, and Welsh, and their pronunciations:

English.	Mandan.	Welsh.	Pronounced.
I	Me	Mi	Me.
You	Ne	Chwi	Chwe.
He	E	A	A.
She	Ea	E	A.
It	Ount	Hwynt	Hooynt.
We	Eonah	Huna, masc.	Hoona.
		Hona, fem.	Hona.
Those ones	....	....	Yrhai Hyna.
No, or there is not	Megosh	Nagoes	Nagosh.
		{Nage
No	Meg	{Nag
		{Na
Head	Pan	Pen	Pen.
The Great Spirit	Maho peneta	Mawr penaethir	Maoor penaethir
		Ysprid mawr	Usprid maoor.
Father	Tautah	Tadwys	Tadoos.
Foh! Ugh!	Paeechah	Pah	Pah.
Hammock	Caupan	Gaban	Gaban.
To call	Eenah	Enwi	Enwah.

Many other words might be given, but the above is sufficient to show the remarkable similarity of form, and that where they do not agree as to certain letters the resemblance is preserved in the pronunciation. Every language has its own individuality in respect to that. The Welsh is noted for its deep gutturals, and, to the ear unaccustomed to hear it, it seems very harsh. Travellers have observed this guttural pronunciation very extensively among the American Indians. Lossing says that the language of the Uchees, the remnant of a once powerful nation who were seated in Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, and farther west, was exceedingly harsh, and unlike that of any other nation. Mr. Baldwin, in his recent work on "Ancient America," in his endeavors to determine the origin of the Natches Indians, says, "they differed in language, customs, and condition from all other Indians in the country." He then attempts to affix their traditions with the people of Mexico. It may be remembered that elsewhere it is stated that it was right in the midst of the territory occupied by the Natches that Mr. Willin, a rich Quaker, had among his settlers a number of Welshmen, who conversed in their native tongue with the Indians. Also, that Mr. Burnell and his son, Cradog, were part of a company who purchased forty millions of acres from the Natches and Yazous, and that both father and son, particularly the latter, understanding the Welsh language, could converse with the Indians. Is it not altogether likely, then, that the Uchees and Natches, being known to be so very different from the surrounding nations in language, spoke the same as the Mandans, and that the language of the three did not differ much from the Welsh?

Dr. Morse, in the report of his tour (printed in New Haven in 1822) among the Western Indians, performed in the behalf of the Government, in 1820, mentions, upon the information furnished by Father Reichard, of Detroit, a report that prevailed at Fort Chartres, among the old people, in 1781, that Mandan Indians had visited that post and could converse intelligibly with some Welsh soldiers then in the British army. Dr. Morse suggested the information as a hint to any person who might have an opportunity of ascertaining whether there was any affinity between the two languages. By a guidance more than human, Mr. Catlin was led into the midst of that people, and he has shown that such an affinity does exist, and has performed a service of permanent value by his contributions to the literature of a question which was thought to be a bold imposture foisted upon a credulous age by an equally credulous but more ignorant rabble. But time is making things more equal, and the sturdy defenders of Madoc's voyages and American colony are having his claims ratified in a most astonishing manner. It is very fortunate that more recent researches have brought to light the language of a people so rapidly melting away, and thus supplied an answer to the question as to how the many Welshmen who came in contact with them could understand and converse with these Welsh Bearded Indians.

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