Colonial Prehistories of Indigenous North America

One of the most common inquiries received by Filson Historical Society librarians concerns the myth of Prince Madoc and the Welsh Indians. Of the myth's many versions, the one most familiar to Ohio Valley History readers goes like this: Madoc, a Welsh prince escaping an internecine conflict over political rule at home, supposedly sailed to North America in the twelfth century. His force either landed at the Falls of the Ohio or made it there after landing further south and being driven north by hostile locals, possibly Cherokee people. Madoc and his contingent intermixed with Indigenous populations, whose fair-haired, blue-eyed, Welsh-speaking descendants are said to have resettled at Devil's Backbone, a bluff overlooking the Ohio River on which, legend has it, they built a stone earthwork. Later, many were supposedly slaughtered by local Native people, possibly at Sand Island. The survivors retreated down the Ohio River and up the Mississippi River, joining local Indigenous populations, possibly the Mandan people.

Pre-1900 searches for the "prehistory" of North America, which ranged from flawed archaeological and ethnological projects to outright fabrications and frauds, produced a range of mythologies about the North American continent's peoples, flora, fauna, lands, and waterways. This process gained steam in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries with the elaboration of prehistories such as the Madoc myth, versions of which can be found in works such John Filson's The Discovery, Settlement and Present State of Kentucke (1784) and Robert Southey's epic poem, Madoc (1805). In such works, the myth stands as a justification for white colonial projects in North America, figuring Native peoples as savages and European settlers as civilized utopians on a freedom mission, escaping from the strife of war back home. This freedom, one might observe, relies on the subjugation of Indigenous people by white colonial oppressors.

The power of the Madoc myth lies, in part, in its uncritical retelling. This iterative, ongoing settler-colonial process forever defers its narrative ending, the discovery of Madoc's descendants. This unending deferral, combined with the always already lost evidence on which believers stake their claims for the truth of the myth, forever warrants the search. One just has to keep looking, keep digging, keep objectifying Indigenous bodies, keep occupying Indigenous lands, until one finds proof. Until then, the myth's uncritical telling and retelling perpetuates colonialist desire for the search.

Two recent works address the history and ramifications of such storytelling by seventeenth-, eighteenth-, and nineteenth-century Euro-Americans: Jason Colavito's The Mound Builder Myth: Fake History and the Hunt for a "Lost White Race" and Elizabeth Fenton's Old Canaan in a New World: Native Americans and the Lost Tribes of Israel. Both books take up the scientific, religious, political, economic, and social motivations for developing and deploying mythologies like that of Madoc and the Welsh Indians.

Colavito's book focuses on Anglo-American mythologies about the origins of Native American earthworks, colloquially known as "Indian mounds," and, relatedly, the origins of North American Indigenous peoples themselves. Written as a public-facing academic work, Colavito's book is deeply informed by careful primary source work. He brackets his study with canonical works of American historiography, works that credited Native peoples as the builders of their moundworks. On one end stands eighteenth-century works of natural history such as Thomas Jefferson's Notes on the State of Virginia (1785–87), and on the other end stands late-nineteenth-century and early-twentieth-century works such as Frederick Jackson Turner's The Frontier in American History (1920). Colavito's main focus, however, is those works written during the century-plus period between these bookends. Key figures and contexts addressed include late-eighteenth writers such as Filson and J. Hector St. John de Crèvecœur; nineteenth-century politicians such as William Henry Harrison and Andrew Jackson, who used racist "mound builder" myths to justify violence and removal; contributions to nineteenth-century scientific discourses such as Caleb Atwater's, Constantine Samuel Rafinesque's, Henry Schoolcraft's, and Joseph Priest's deeply problematic studies of American "prehistory"; and uses of...