464 THE GEORGE CATLIN INDIAN GALLERY. 



Missouri River to the place where they have been known for many years past by the 

 name of Mandans, a corruption or abbreviation, perhaps, of Madawgwys, the name 

 applied by the Welsh to the followers of Madawc. 



If this be a startling theory for the world, they will be the more sure to read the 

 following brief reasons which I briug in support of my opinion ; and if they do not 

 support me they will at least be worth knowing, and may, at the same time, be the 

 means of eliciting further and more successful inquiry. 



As I have said, on page 415 and in other places, the marks of the Mandan villages 

 are known by the excavations of 2 feet or more in depth, and 30 or 40 feet in diame- 

 ter, of a circular form, made in the ground for the foundations of their wigwams, 

 which leave a decided remain for centuries, and one that is easily detected the 

 moment that it is met with. After leaving the Mandan village, I found the marks of 

 their former residence about 60 miles below where they were then living, and from 

 which they removed (from their own account) about sixty or eighty years since ; and 

 from the appearance of tho number of their lodges, I should think that at that re- 

 cent date there must have been three times the number that were living when I was 

 amongst them. Near the mouth of the Big Shienne River, 200 miles below their last 

 location, I found still more ancient remains, and in as many as six or seven other 

 places between that and the mouth of the Ohio; and each one, as I visited them, ap- 

 pearing more and more ancient, convincing me that these people, wherever they 

 might have come from, have gradually made their moves up the banks of the Missouri 

 to the place where I visited them. 



For the most part of this distance they have been in the heart of the great Sioux 

 country, and being looked upon by the Sioux as trespassers have been continually 

 warred upon by this numerous tribe, who have endeavored to extinguish them, as 

 they have been endeavoring to do ever since our first acquaintance with them, but 

 who, being always fortified by a strong picquet, or stockade, have successfully with- 

 stood the assaults of their enemies and preserved the remnant of their tribe. Through 

 this sort of gauntlet they have run, in passing through the countries of these war- 

 like and hostile tribes. 



It may be objected to this, perhaps, that the Riccarees and Minatarees build their 

 Avigwams in the same way, but this proves nothing, for the Minatarees are Crows, 

 from the northwest, and, by their own showing, fled to the Mandans for protection, 

 and forming their villages by the side of them built their wigwams in the same 

 manner. 



The Riccarees have been a very small tribe, far inferior to the Mandans; and by 

 the traditions of the Mandans, as well as from the evidence of the first explorers, 

 Lewis and Clarke, and others, have lived, until quite lately, on terms of intimacy 

 with the Mandans, whoso villages they have successively occupied as the Mandans 

 have moved and vacated them, as they now are doing, since disease has swept the 

 whole of the Mandans away. 



Whether my derivation of the word Mandan from Ufadaivgwys be correct or not, I 

 will pass it over to the world at present merely as presumptive proof, for want of 

 better, which, perhaps, this inquiry may elicit ; and, at the same time, I offer the 

 Welsh word Mandon (the woodroof, a species of madder used as a red dye) as the 

 name that might possibly have been applied by the Welsh neighbors to these people, 

 on account of their very ingenious mode of giving the beautiful red and other dyes to 

 the porcupine quills with which they garnish their dresses. In their own language 

 they called themselves See-polis-lca-nu mah-lca-kee (the people of the pheasants), which 

 was probably the name of the primitive stock, before they were mixed with any 

 other people ; and to have got such a name it is natural to suppose that they must 

 have come from a country where pheasants existed, which cannot be found short of 

 reaching the timbered country at the base of tho Rocky Mountains, some six or eight 

 hundred miles west of the Mandaus, or the forests of Indiana and Ohio ? some hundreds 

 of miles to the south and east of where they last lived. 



