What The Corps Found
Lewis and Clark had planned to travel quickly along this stretch of the Missouri, stop briefly for information at the Knife River Villages, and make for the headwaters of the Missouri before winter set in. But by late October, they were far from their goal and it had already begun to snow. The captains decided they needed to find a place to winter and so they traveled quickly up the Missouri.
Finding the Madogwys
As the Corps of Discovery traveled up the Missouri, their journals record sightings of abandoned villages along the way. Clark's journal records an especially interesting village.
"I saw an old remains of a village covering 6 or 8 acres, on the side of a hill which the chief with Tooné tells me that nation [the legendary Welsh Indians] lived in. Two villages, one on each side of the river, and the troublesome Sioux caused them to move about 40 miles higher up, where they remain a few years and moved to the place they now live." --- Captain Clark, 20 October 1804
Lewis and Clark mistook the Mandan for the legendary Madogwys or "Welsh Indians.” Purportedly a tribe of blue-eyed, light skinned Indians who spoke an unknown language, the Welsh Indians were thought to be descendents of a party of Welsh settlers led by Prince Madoc who is purported to have come to America in the twelfth century.
The villages were, in fact, abandoned by the Mandan and Hidatsa. Decimated by disease and threatened by war raids from the Arikara and Teton Sioux, the Mandan and Hidatsa were drawing together for protection into larger communities north along the Missouri and abandoning their earthlodge villages in the southern part of the state.
Near Bismarck, today's travelers will find a reconstruction of the On A Slant Indian Village Lewis and Clark described .
What The Corps Found