ns generally
and at the fact that he actually saw some blue eyes and gray eyes among
them and some whitish hair. These circumstances seemed to him to point
clearly to an admixture of European blood. He wrote at a time when
fanciful theories about the native Americans were much in vogue. He
had read somewhere that a Welsh prince, Madoc, more than two hundred
years before the time of Columbus, sailed away from his country with
ten ships. By some unexplained process, he traced him to America.
Then he supposed him to ascend the Mississippi as far as the mouth of
the Ohio and there to found a colony. This, being entirely cut off
from communication with the mother country, was compelled to ally
itself with the nearest Indians and took wives among them. From these
unions sprang a mixed race, the Mandans, who eventually formed a {327}
separate tribe and were gradually driven up the Missouri to the point
where he found them.

There is not any doubt of the large admixture of European blood among
the Mandans, and it is easily accounted for. Catlin does not seem to
have known of any white visitors before Lewis and Clark. But we have
seen that the Verendryes reached these people a full hundred years
before Catlin's day. There is every reason for believing that, from
that time, white hunters and traders never ceased to visit them. These
Indians being, from the first, very hospitable and friendly, their
villages were favorite resorts for fur-traders, who took up their abode
among them for several years at a time and married there. One can
easily see that, in the course of a hundred years, there would be
several generations of mixed blood, and that, through inter-marriages,
there would probably be few families whose color would not be lighter
in consequence. The persons whose peculiar whitish hair Catlin
noticed, undoubtedly were albinos, a class of persons in whom the
natural coloring of the hair is wanting and the eyes are red or pink.

The Mandans probably are nothing more than an interesting tribe of
Indians who, through long intermingling with the white race, have
undergone considerable lightening of their original color.

A year after Catlin's visit his Mandan friends experienced a frightful
calamity. A trading steamboat brought the small-pox to them, and, as
happened in the case of many other tribes in the West, its ravages were
fearful. Not being protected by vaccination, and knowing nothing {328}
of the treatm