University of Virginia Library

REMARKS.

In contemplating so many striking peculiarities in an extinguished
tribe, the mind reluctantly leaves so interesting a subject
without raising the question as to the origin of the people; and in
this feeling, though not within the original intention of this work, it is
difficult for me to leave the subject without advancing my belief, and
furnishing some part of my reasons for it, that many of the modes of
these people were purely Welsh, and that the personal appearance
and customs of the Mandans had been affected by the proximity or
admixture of some wandering colony of Welsh who had been thrown
at an early period somewhere upon the American coast.

I am here, perhaps, advancing a startling problem, which demands
at my hands some striking proofs, which I will in a few
words endeavour to produce.

The annual religious ceremony which has been described certainly
cannot be attributed to the Welsh, nor am I able to compare it to

any civilized custom, and I leave it for the world to decide whether
it bears a resemblance to any known customs of savage or civilized
races in other parts of the world.

It is very strange, as I have before said, that those people should
have been instructed how to hold those ceremonies by a white man,
and that they should be commenced and the Medicine Lodge opened
by a white man, and that the "big canoe" should have been built
with edged tools, if they be solely of native origin; and it would be
equally or more strange if the Jesuit missionaries, who, it would
seem, were the only civilized teachers we can well suppose to have
reached these people, had instructed them in modes like those,
though it is easy to believe that their teaching might have been the
cause of the last singular tradition mentioned, certainly bearing a
visible but very imperfect parallel to the Christian Advent.

Many of the customs and traditions of the western tribes convince
us that those indefatigable preachers penetrated much further into
the American wildernesses than history has followed them, and in this
singular tribe we find the extraordinary custom which has been described,
and others to which I shall take a few moments to allude,
neither of which can with any propriety be attributed to the teaching
of those venerable missionaries.

On my arrival in their village, my first glance amongst the Mandans
forced me, from their peculiar features and complexions, the colour
of their eyes and hair, the singular mode of building and furnishing
their wigwams, etc., to believe that they were an amalgam of some
foreign with an American aboriginal stock, and every day that I
dwelt amongst them furnished me additional convictions of this fact,
and of course called on my part for greater endeavours to account for
these singularities. And the information I gathered amongst them
confirmed me in the opinion I have advanced,—that many of their
peculiarities and customs were Welsh, and therefore that there existed
amongst them the remains of some Welsh colony, however difficult
it might be to account for their having got there.

The following, I believe, will be received as interesting and important
facts, and if they fail to establish my theory, they may nevertheless
revive the inquiry as to the direction and fate of the expedition
which "sailed in ten ships, under the direction of Prince
Madoc, from North Wales, in the early part of the fourteenth century,"
and which it has been pretty clearly shown, I believe, landed
somewhere on the coast of Florida or about the mouth of the Mississippi,
and, according to the history and poetry of their own country,
"settled somewhere in the interior of America, where they are yet
remaining, intermixed with some of the Indian tribes."

I have not met in any other tribe anything in personal appearance
or customs that would seem to account for the direction of this
colony, but in several of the customs of this tribe which I have
already described, as well as in others which I shall name, there
appeared to exist striking proofs of the arrival and settlement of that
colony in the western regions of America.

The Mandan mode of constructing their wigwams, already described,
was almost precisely that of the rude mode of building their
cabins amongst the peasantry of the mountains of Wales, and, as I
am told, in some districts they are building them at the present day.

The pottery made by the Mandans, to the time of their destruction,
was strikingly similar to that manufactured in parts of Wales
at the present time, and exactly similar to that found in the tumuli
on the banks of the Ohio and Muskingum rivers; strongly suggesting
the probable fact that those people formerly inhabited the banks
of those rivers, and by a great number of moves up the Missouri had
arrived at the place where I found them.

A peculiar and very beautiful sort of blue beads were also manufactured
by the Mandans, and of which they were certainly the only
known manufacturers in America; and since publishing my large
work on the North American Indians, in which I gave some account
of this curious manufacture, I have received several letters from

Welsh gentlemen of science, one of whom enclosed me drawings
from, and another the beads themselves, found in tumuli, and also in
the present progress of manufacture in Wales, precisely the same in
character, in shape, and in colour and composition, as those in my
collection brought from the Mandans.

The manufacture of these blue beads by the Mandans was
guarded as a profound secret until the time of their destruction,
although the Fur Company had made them repeated and liberal
offers if they would divulge it, as the Mandan beads commanded a
much higher price amongst the Mandans and the neighbouring tribes
to whom they bartered them, than the beads introduced by the fur
traders.

The canoes or boats of the Mandans, differing from those of all
other tribes in America, were precisely the Welsh coracle, made of a
bull's hide stretched over a frame of willow rods, bent and interlocked,
and pulled over the water by the paddle, in the same manner
as the coracle is pulled, by reaching forward with the paddle instead
of passing it by the side of the boat, which is nearly round, and the
paddler seated or kneeling in its front.

From the translation of their name, already mentioned, Nu-mah-ká-kee
(pheasants), an important inference may be drawn in support
of the probability of their having formerly lived much farther to the
south, as that bird does not exist on the prairies of the Upper
Missouri, and is not to be met with short of the heavy forests of
Ohio and Indiana, one thousand eight hundred miles south of the
last residence of the Mandans.

And in their familiar name of Mandan, which is not an Indian
word, there are equally singular and important features. In the
first place, that they knew nothing of the name or how they got it;
and next, that the word Mandan in the Welsh language (it being
purely a Welsh word) means red dye, of which further mention will
be made.

In the brief vocabulary of Mandan words which I published in
the Appendix to my large work on the North American Indians, it
has been discovered by several Welsh scholars that there exist the
following most striking resemblances, which it would be difficult to
account for in any other way than that which I am now attempting.

                         

English.	Mandan.	Welsh.
I	me	me
you	ne	chwe
he	e	a
she	ea	ea
it	ount	hwynt
we	noo	ne
		hwna (masculine)
they	eonah
		hona (feminine)
no	negosh	nagosh
head	pan	pen
The Great Spirit	Maho-Peneta	Mawr-Penaethir

From the above evidences, and others which might be produced,
I fully believe, what perhaps will for ever remain impossible (positively)
to prove, that the ten ships commanded by the brother of
Prince Madoc, or some portion of them, entered the mouth of the
Mississippi, and advanced up that noble river to the mouth of the
Ohio, which could easily have been navigated by vessels of that date,
and, advancing up that river, which they would naturally have
chosen, as the broadest and most gentle stream, as far as their vessels
could go, the adventurers planted themselves as agriculturists on its
rich and fertile banks, where they lived and flourished and increased
in numbers, until they were attacked, and at last besieged, by the
numerous hordes of savages who were jealous of their growing condition;
and as a protection against the Indian assaults built those
civilized fortifications, the remains of which are so numerous on the
banks of the Ohio and Muskingum Rivers.

In these defences, I believe, they were at length all destroyed

by the overpowering numbers of the savage hordes, excepting those
few families who had intermarried with the Indians, and whose offsprings,
being half-castes, were in such a manner allied to them that
their lives were spared.

Those, as is generally the case with the half-castes, I believe had
formed a separate village in the vicinity of the whites, supporting
themselves by their embroidery with porcupine quills, to which they
gave the beautiful dyes for which the Mandans have been peculiarly
famous, and were called by their Welsh neighbours, and in the
Welsh language, the Mandans (or red dyers).

These half-castes, having formed themselves into a separate
community, probably took up their residence, after the destruction
of the whites, on the banks of the Missouri, on which, for the want
of a permanent location and right to the soil, being on the lands and
the hunting-grounds of their more powerful enemies, they were
obliged repeatedly to move, as the numerous marks of their ancient
residences show; and continuing their moves up the river, in time
migrated to the place where I saw them, and where they terminated
their existence.

Thus much of and for the character and modes of a peculiar
people, who were proverbially intelligent, hospitable, and kind;
who, with their language, have suddenly ceased to exist; whose
character, history, modes, and personal appearance, almost solely
existing in my collections, I have considered essentially interesting
and important to Ethnology, and some of the most remarkable of
which (as I have said) I am here, from a sense of duty, emphatically
recording for the information of those who are to study Man and his
modes after I shall be gone.

Geo. Catlin.

EST. PERPET.