Nobody knows exactly when the Cherokee people came to inhabit the land that now makes up the southeastern United States. Some theorize that they were latecomers to southern Appalachia who migrated down from northern areas during prehistoric times. Others contend that they’d been there for thousands of years.
Wikimedia Commons Whatever the case, when they got to their homelands in southern Appalachia, it was already inhabited by a strange people that the Cherokee pushed out. These were the mysterious, ancient people known as the Moon Eyed People. But who were these strange people? Nobody really seems to know for sure, but a lot of theories abound. The American botanist and naturalist Benjamin Smith Barton mentions them in is 1797 book New Views of the Origin of the Tribes and Nations of America.
Roadside America He said that they were called “moon-eyed” because they saw better at night than during the daytime. Citing Colonel Leonard Marbury, a Revolutionary War officer and an early settler in Georgia, Barton wrote, “the Cheerake tell us, that when they first arrived in the country which they inhabit, they found it possessed by certain ‘moon-eyed-people,’ who could not see in the day-time. These wretches they expelled.” But where did these “wretches” come from? Many legends believe that they were the “Welsh-Indians” partially comprised from a Welsh expedition to the new world in the 1100’s.
Wikipedia Also from Wikipedia: In an 1810 letter, former Tennessee governor John Sevier wrote that the Cherokee leader Oconostota told him in 1783 that local mounds had been built by white people who were pushed from the area by the ascendant Cherokee. According to Sevier, Oconostota confirmed that these were Welsh from across the ocean. The story goes that a Welsh Prince (Madoc) and his brother (Rhirid) were the ones who made the inital voyage to America. From Wikipedia: _Madoc was disheartened by this family fighting, and that he and Rhirid set sail from Llandrillo (Rhos-on-Sea) in the cantref of Rhos to explore the western ocean with a number of ships. They discovered a distant and abundant land in 1170 where about one hundred men, women and children disembarked to form a colony.
Wikimedia Commons According to Humphrey Llwyd’s 1559 Cronica Walliae, Madoc and some others returned to Wales to recruit additional settlers. After gathering several ships of men, women and children, the Prince and his recruiters sailed west a second time to “that Westerne countrie” and ported in “Mexico”, never to return to Wales again. One interesting theory states that the people the Cherokee encountered were actually “Welsh Indians,” who came over to America almost 400 years before Christopher Colombus.
Wikipedia The Cherokee tradition may have been influenced by contemporary European-American legends of the “Welsh Indians”.[12] These legends attributed ancient ruins to a Welsh pre-Columbian voyage; some versions specifically connect this voyage to a prince named Madoc. In an 1810 letter, former Tennessee governor John Sevier wrote that the Cherokee leader Oconostota told him in 1783 that local mounds had been built by white people who were pushed from the area by the ascendant Cherokee. According to Sevier, Oconostota confirmed that these were Welsh from across the ocean. _
Lewis and Clark at Three Forks by Edgar Samuel Paxson - Wikimedia Commons So prevalent were these theories that at the beginning of the Lewis and Clark Expedition, Thomas Jefferson wrote to Meriweather Lewis instructing him to find the descendants of the Madoc Welsh Indians who were said to be “up the Missouri” River. Who do you think these strange inhabitants of the southeast were? H/T The Ancient Code
