How Green Was My Prairie

Every now and again, someone will come to me and say "now this is the strangest thing you have ever heard". They are always wrong. The strangest thing I have ever heard is "Santa Claus is coming to town" as performed by Joseph Spence of the Bahamas.

One of Joseph's closest rivals is the history of the European reception of pre-Colombian architecture in what is now the United States and Canada. European explorers in the early eighteenth century found a variety of structures, including cities, forts and ceremonial and burial sites, many of them large and sophisticated. But the local natives often denied all knowledge of their purpose and origin.

The interesting thing is that many of these structures were at that time very recent. Historians today speculate that the civilisations responsible for them had been destroyed by European diseases which had travelled into the North American interior faster than the Europeans themselves. But the newcomers were convinced that native Americans could not be responsible for them, and speculated as to other possible origins.

The great city at Cahokia, Illinoia (the population of which may have reached 40,000, greater than any American city at independence) was attributed to the Vikings. Other sites were taken as evidence that North America had been settled before the fifteenth century, indeed as early as 1170, by settlers from Wales.

John Sevier, the first governor of Tennessee, claimed in the early 1800s that a Cherokee elder had told him that the pre-Colombian fort at Fort Mountain, Georgia, had been built by Welsh-speakers. Indeed, a Welshman named John Evans, of Waun Fawr, had already set off in search of Welsh-speaking Indians in the Mississippi valley. Evans produced some important maps before dying in New Orleans, in the palace of the governor of New Spain, in 1799.

Apart from his early death and failure to find the Welsh-speaking Indians, the great tragedy of John Evans's life is that the governor in whose palace he died was not Dublin-born Field Marshal Alejandro O'Reilly, who had himself died in 1794, at the age of 72, leading his troops against the French in the Pyrenees.

The above information is derived from "Ecological Imperialism" by Alfred W. Crosby, Prys Morgan's essay "The Hunt for the Welsh Past in the Romantic Period", and the world wide interweb. It may or may not now become my aim to make this site a leading provider of trustworthy information on John Evans of Waun Fawr, Welsh-speaking Indians and/or Field Marshal Alejandro O'Reilly.