SANTA CLARA — One little-known bit of local history interweaves the legend of a 12th century voyage to North America by Prince Madoc of Wales, supposed settlements of light-skinned, brown-haired Indians in the American West and the efforts of early church missionaries from Southern Utah to discover the mythical Welsh Indians. 

The story begins with Prince Madoc, son of King Owain Gwynedd of Wales. According to the legend, he purportedly sailed to North America in 1170, over three centuries before Christopher Columbus’ voyage.

Madoc is said to have returned to Wales to lead a fleet of ships carrying 120 men, women and children to “that Westerne Countrie” where they established settlements.

Just where these settlements were supposed to have been built remains a mystery.

Over time, as the boundaries of North America expanded, landowners from Canada to Mexico have claimed to have discovered remnants of the Welsh settlers. 

Until the Elizabethan Age, the legend was a colorful myth used to sustain Welsh national pride. During the 16th century, the story grew as English writers used the tale to assert England’s claims to the New World over those from Spain.

Gradually the legend took root in the Americas with the discovery of a mysterious rock formation on Fort Mountain in Georgia. Welsh Caves in DeSoto State Park, Alabama, and “ancient fortifications” beside a river in Tennessee are thought to have been built by the Welsh Indians.

Thomas Jefferson knew of the legend and in 1804 wrote a letter to Meriwether Lewis asking him to be on the lookout for descendants of the Welsh Indians during his Voyage of Discovery.

Despite the dearth of evidence to lend legitimacy to the legend, it persisted well into the late 19th century. As new settlers pushed further west, the legend of the Welsh Indians traveled with them.

The tales reached Utah in 1847 with the arrival of Church of Jesus Christ Latter-day Saints pioneers. Soon after their arrival, church leaders heard rumors of light-skinned, brown-haired Indians in Northern Arizona whose language included Welsh words.

From Ute and Mexican traders they learned that these Indians “owned sheep and cattle, raised grain, and lived in adobe houses, some of which are three or four stories high.” The Spanish called them Moquis. We now know them as Hopis. Could these be the Welsh Indians of legend, the early pioneers wondered?

The church’s interest in Native Americans was already high, as they were believed to be descendants of the Lamanites written about in the Book of Mormon. In 1854, Brigham Young called Jacob Hamblin to establish an Indian Mission in Southern Utah, which he did on the banks of the Santa Clara River.

From that fragile base he and other missionaries sought converts from among the Southern Paiutes. Brigham Young also knew of the Prince Madoc legend. In 1858, he called on Hamblin to lead an expedition to northern Arizona to look for new lands to settle and to see if the Hopi Indians might indeed be the legendary Welsh Indians.

Among those joining Hamblin were fellow Indian missionaries Dudley Leavitt and a young man named Ammon Tenney, who spoke Spanish and several Native American dialects.

A young Welsh convert from Salt Lake City named James Davis was also among the party. His assignment was to tune his ear to the Hopi language, listening for any signs of a Welsh influence or accent with its sing-song lilt and rolling R’s. 

Ten days out on the voyage from Santa Clara, the expedition pushed their horses through the Colorado River at the Crossing of the Fathers and into northern Arizona. Three days later they reached a pasture where sheep had grazed and where they found a carefully tended garden watered from a nearby spring.

A short time later they reached a village perched on a mesa with finely built, multi-storied adobe homes. To their relief they received a friendly greeting from native inhabitants they thought could be the legendary Welsh Indians.

The village was Oraibi Pueblo and the missionaries spent the next several days preaching sermons, singing hymns and learning what they could of the Pueblo-dwelling people. With the permission of Hopi leaders, four men from the expedition stayed behind for a few weeks longer while the rest of the expedition made the long trek back to Santa Clara.

During the expedition’s stay with the Hopi, James Davis found enough similarities between the Welsh and Hopi languages to keep interest in the legends alive, but not quite enough to celebrate victory in the search for Welsh Indians.

Hamblin thought northern Arizona was ripe for new settlements and interest in the area remained high.

In anticipation of possible settlement, and to aid communication with the Hopi, attention now shifted to teaching the locals the newly created Deseret Alphabet. Created by church officials, Young hoped it might replace the traditional Latin alphabet with what he called a more phonetically accurate alphabet in the English language.

It was a short-lived experiment, primarily used to help non-English speaking arrivals to Utah communicate with one another. Young also sent two Indian missionaries to Oraibi Pueblo to use the Deseret Alphabet to “reduce their dialect to a written language” and teach it to the Hopi so they could read the Book of Mormon in their own tongue. 

The two missionaries, Marion Shelton and Thales Haskell, were enthusiastic about the Deseret Alphabet’s potential and spent several months among the Hopi at Oraibi.

“Those to whom I have given lessons,” Shelton wrote to his leaders back home, “have taken right hold to the alphabet … and we can hear them hollowing the sounds throughout the village.”

His optimism was premature and after a few months it became clear that the Hopi had little interest in learning the Deseret Alphabet.

“[We] have tried in vain to learn the Indians the mysteries of the Deseret Alphabet,” Haskell reported that winter.

To make matters worse, they found the Hopis to be shrewd traders who drove a hard bargain.

“We have cut up our bed tick and are trying to trade it for beans, meal and dried peaches,” Haskell reported. “They are the hardest customers to trade with I ever saw. They often want a shirt for a quart of beans.”

By the spring of 1860, Shelton and Haskell returned to their homes in the north. An artifact of their work at Oraibi from that winter is an English-Hopi dictionary in the Deseret Alphabet which is still in print today.

Feeding on the slim hope offered by James Davis’ earlier visit to Oraibi Pueblo, the myth of the Welsh Indians endured, and in the fall of 1862 another expedition led by Hamblin embarked for Arizona.

Once again, their assignment was to find places for new church settlements and to further explore the Welsh Indian legend. Llewellyn Harris, a Welsh convert living in Kanarraville, was among those called.

Harris knew the legend of Prince Madoc, was fluent in Welsh, and welcomed the opportunity to find out for himself if there might indeed be Welsh Indians in the northern Arizona desert. 

When the expedition reached Oraibi, they were once again warmly greeted. From what happened next, Harris apparently heard something closely resembling Welsh to keep the Madoc legend alive.

At Hamblins urging, three members of the Hopi tribe returned to Utah to meet with Latter-day Saints leaders in Salt Lake City.

In February 1863, the Deseret News reported that the Hopi delegation met with experts in the Welsh language who concluded that the Hopis vocalized “the near impossible sound of certain Gaelic gutturals without difficulty.”

Church leaders were so impressed with these reports that they later told the Superintendent of Indian Affairs for Arizona that the Hopis “could pronounce any word in the Welsh language with facility, but not the dialect now in use.” 

Despite tantalizing clues, the myth of the Welsh Indians among the Pueblo people eventually died out. Missionary work among the Navajos and Hopis in northern Arizona continued, but the thought of Welsh Indians in northern Arizona was soon consigned to the dustbin of history.

While few people today know of this footnote in Church of Jesus Christ Latter-day Saints history, the legend of Prince Madoc of Wales endures on both sides of the Atlantic both in literature and geography.

The township of Madoc, Ontario and the nearby village of Madocare, are both named in Prince Madoc’s memory, as are the Welsh town of Porthmadog (Madoc’s Port in English) and the village of Tremadog (Madoc’s Town).

Additionally, several pubs in North America and the United Kingdom are named in the Prince’s honor, as is a University of Wales research ship, the “Prince Madog.” 

Closer to home, there is a plaque at Fort Morgan, Alabama showing where Prince Madoc is supposed to have landed in 1170, and another at Fort Mountain State Park in Georgia that repeats the tale that the Cherokees believed “a people called Welsh” had built a fort on the mountain long ago to repel Indian attacks.

Given all this, perhaps a plaque is needed near the Jacob Hamblin home in Santa Clara to memorialize Utah’s brief flirtation with the legend of Prince Madoc and the Welsh Indians.

Editor’s note: Sources for this article include “The Hopis and the Mormons: 1858-1873,” by Charles S. Peterson in the Spring 1971 issue of Utah Historical Quarterly. “A Frontier Life: Jacob Hamblin, Explorer and Indian Missionary,” by Todd Compton. “Mormons in Arizona: A Record of Peaceful Conquest of the Desert,” by James H. McClintock. And family memories published on FamilySearch.org.

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