Just a short while ago, in some newspaper or other, I read with passing interest and only partial engagement of my mind that early American explorers had been intrigued by their ability to understand quite a lot of the speech of the Mandan Indians, recognizing it as being essentially Welsh. And further, they were struck by large number of the members of that tribe who exhibited light complexions and grey or blue eyes. Recently, I became actively interested in my Welsh heritage and dredged the above from my memory to impell me to look through some books to try to fill out the story. First, in the "Atlas of the North American Indians", Waldman (Facts on File Publications, NY and Oxford): "Indians (Mandan) of the upper Missouri made bullboats, circular and cupshaped craft, similar to old world coracles..." Webster's says coracle is derived from the Welsh word, corwg. I had to look it up since I did not know what a coracle was. Then, in a volume on American Indian history (I won't take the time right now to look up the title), I found that an artist, George Catlin, had found the Mandans living on the great bend of the Missouri River in 1832. I have the second volume of Catlin's work, "Letters and notes on the manners, customs and conditions of the North American Indians" in paperback (Dover). Apparently, most of Catlin's correspondence and notes concerning the Mandans is in Volume I but at the end of Volume II he has an appendix which recounts the extinction of the Mandan Tribe shortly after his visit (mostly by smallpox, finally by by war) and his notes on the "Welsh Colony". Catlin advances the idea that the Mandans were the interbred outcasts of an Indian tribe that had by some means assimilated a Welsh colony which he supposes was established somewhere in the valley of the Ohio by Welshmen who had sailed from North Wales under the direction of Prince Madoc (Madawc) in the early part of the fourteenth century. Catlin goes on at length about the evidence he saw for believing so, citing complexion, eye color, hair color, the use of coracles, their pottery, the construction of their fortifications (which Catlin studied down river along the Missouri and up river along the Ohio most of the way across the state), their knowledge of manufacture of glass jewelry and the similarities to Welsh that he heard in Mandan language and no other Indian tongue. I think this is an interesting story. I wonder how modern scholarship has treated it. The extinction of the tribe makes it likely that no follow-up was possible but I hope some one can point out some other references as this surely has received some attention elsewhere.