History holds many oddities that we may never fully understand, either through incomplete documentation, disinterest at the time, or simply a big question mark that hangs over all. Among these are mysterious lost tribes of people that have been encountered and confronted in all corners of the globe, often vanishing before we really understand them or only known from sparse accounts, and leaving us perplexed at just who they were or where their origins lie. Here we will look at mysterious lost tribes of ape-men, blue-eyed Indians, mystical tribes with telepathic powers, and more.
The remote jungles of South America have long been the source of tales of strange creatures and legends, and among these are numerous sightings of a tribe of large, ape-like beings living in the wilderness. The descriptions of these creatures often vary, with sizes ranging from a diminutive 3 feet tall all the way up to hulking, 12-foot-tall hairy giants, and are often claimed by the natives of the region and witnesses to live in villages of their own, to use tools and primitive bows and arrows, and to have a language of grunts and whistles. Although regional names may vary, they are now mostly filed under the blanket name Maricoxi, and they are for the most part more or less a complete enigma.
Perhaps one of the most well-documented and harrowing encounters with these mysterious creatures was detailed by the famed British explorer Colonel Percival H. Fawcett, more often called Percy Fawcett, who vanished into the jungle during an ill-fated expedition to find a mysterious lost city he called simply Z. Fawcett was known to write extensive journals of his travels, many of which would later be compiled into books by his son Brian Fawcett. In one of these books, called Lost Trails, Lost Cities, there is to be found within its pages a rather curious and spectacular tale of encountering the Maricoxi.
Percy Fawcett
The encounter supposedly happened in 1914, as Fawcett was on an expedition to map out the uncharted southwestern region of an area called Matto Grosso. From Bolivia they penetrated the dark jungle up the Guapore River, and already they had become well acquainted by local tribes with the bizarre stories of hairy man-beasts said to dwell out there in that sea of trees, and although it seemed rather fantastical it was enough to keep them wary of their surroundings and what they would find out there on their journey. Ivan Sanderson wrote of the stories Fawcett heard in his 1967 book Things, in which he writes:
“These creatures were apparently called Maricoxis by the Maxubis. They dwelt to their northeast. Due east there were said to be another group of short, black people, covered with hair, who were truly cannibalistic and hunted humans for food, cooking the bodies over a fire on a bamboo spit and tearing off the meat. These the Maxubis regarded as merely loathsome and lowly people. On a later trip, Colonel Fawcett was told of an "ape-people" who lived in holes in the ground, were also covered with dark hair, and were nocturnal, so that they were known in surrounding areas as the Morcegos or Bat-People. These types are called Cabelludos or "Hairy People" by the Spanish-speaking, and Tatus, or armadillos, by several Amerindian groups because they live in holes like those animals. Fawcett also records forest Amerinds as telling him that the Morcegos have an incredibly well-developed sense of smell which prompts even these acute hunters to suggest that they have some "sixth sense.”"
They nevertheless bravely ventured out along the river, coming across some oddities along the way. The first interesting discovery was a previously unknown Amerindian tribe, who identified themselves as the Maxubis and displayed some curious traits, such as their religion of worshiping the Sun and demonstrating an inexplicable knowledge of the planets of the solar system, which they could draw out with rather shocking accuracy. This would have been interesting to have studied further, but Fawcett and company were not there to do anthropological work, and after staying with the tribe for a few days they headed back out into the mist-shrouded jungle once more, leaving these fascinating people behind to the mist of history and crossing over into a region that was completely unseen by outsiders and ws so remote and alien it may as well have been the surface of some alien planet.
After several days of dealing with the numerous perils of this untamed land, the expedition found themselves faced with a mysterious trail out there in the middle of nowhere, which they presumed to be one used by the Natives of the region. As they stood there deciding whether to follow the trail or not and which way to go, Fawcett writes that they saw two figures moving about 100 yards away, apparently chattering away in some unknown language and carrying bows and arrows. Although they were at first presumed to be from a local tribe, closer inspection showed them to be decidedly odder, and Fawcett described them:
“We could not see them clearly for the shadows dappling their bodies, but it seemed to me they were large, hairy men, with exceptionally long arms, and with foreheads sloping back from pronounced eye ridges, men of a very primitive kind, in fact, and stark naked. Suddenly they turned and made off into the undergrowth, and we, knowing it was useless to follow, started up the north leg of the trail.”
It seems quite obvious by this point that Fawcett did not regard what he had glimpsed as completely human beings. This was perhaps all odd enough as it was, but it got even more bizarre that evening at dusk when the forest suddenly came alive with the sound of what seemed to be braying horns from out in the distant dark. The expedition members were immediately on alert, as they instinctively knew that this was an aggressive sound issued forth with the promise of threat. Fawcett would write of these horns and what followed:
“In the subdued light of evening, beneath the high vault of branches in this forest untrodden by civilized man, the sound was as eerie as the opening notes of some fantastic opera. We knew the savages made it, and that those savages were now on our trail. Soon we could hear shouts and jabbering to the accompaniment of the rough horn calls--a barbarous, merciless din, in marked contrast to the stealth of the ordinary savage.
Darkness, still distant above the treetops, was settling rapidly down here in the depths of the wood, so we looked about us for a camping site which offered some measure of safety from attack, and finally took refuge in a tacuara thicket. Here the naked savages would not dare to follow because of the wicked, inch-long thorns. As we slung our hammocks inside the natural stockade we could hear the savages jabbering excitedly all around, but not daring to enter. Then, as the last light went, they left us, and we heard no more of them.”
It is an eerie image to be sure, this solitary camp of bedraggled explorers terrified by the sight of hairy men and now harassed by these mysterious horns in the night, punctuated by the chattering of some rough, alien language, and it was still not over for them. The next morning the team warily checked their surroundings and could find no sign of any of the “savages” having intruded into the vicinity. They continued along one of the well-delineated trails they were finding and camped once again that evening without incident. The next morning, they struck out from the camp and within just about a mile stumbled across what seemed to have been the actual village of the strange tribe, populated by creatures who were obviously not exactly human. Fawcett rather spectacularly describes what happened:
“In the morning we went on, and within a quarter of a mile came to a sort of palm-leaf sentry-box, then another. Then all of a sudden we reached open forest. The undergrowth fell away, disclosing between the tree boles a village of primitive shelters, where squatted some of the most villainous savages I have ever seen. Some were engaged in making arrows, others just idled--great apelike brutes who looked as if they had scarcely evolved beyond the level of beasts.
I whistled, and an enormous creature, hairy as a dog, leapt to his feet in the nearest shelter, fitted an arrow to his bow in a flash, and came up dancing from one leg to the other till he was only four yards away. Emitting grunts that sounded like 'Eugh! Eugh! Eugh!' he remained there dancing, and suddenly the whole forest around us was alive with these hideous ape-men, all grunting 'Eugh! Eugh! Eugh!' and dancing from leg to leg in the same way as they strung arrows to their bows. It looked like a very delicate situation for us, and I wondered if it was the end. I made friendly overtures in Maxubi, but they paid no attention. It was as though human speech were beyond their powers of comprehension.
The creature in front of me ceased his dance, stood for a moment perfectly still, and then drew his bowstring back till it was level with his ear, at the same time raising the barbed point of the six-foot arrow to the height of my chest. I looked straight into the pig-like eyes half hidden under the overhanging brows, and knew that he was not going to loose that arrow yet. As deliberately as he had raised it, he now lowered the bow, and commenced once more the slow dance, and the 'Eugh! Eugh! Eugh!’"
This brutish ape-man allegedly continued to do this several more times, aiming the bow only to continue with his odd, disjointed dance and then aim it again. However, Fawcett seemed to know that at any point that arrow could unleash, and his hand was firmly kept upon the butt of his pistol as he took in the whole outlandish scene. At some point Fawcett says he began to seriously fear for his life and decided to try scaring it off with his sidearm, shooting off a round that pinged the earth by the beast’s feet and sent a thunderous boom echoing through the jungle. He says of this sequence of events:
“I drew out a Mauser pistol I had on my hip. It was a big, clumsy thing, of a caliber unsuitable to forest use, but I had brought it because by clipping the wooden holster to the pistol-butt it became a carbine, and was lighter to carry than a true rifle. It used .38 black powder shells, which made a din out of all proportion to their size. I never raised it; I just pulled the trigger and banged it off into the ground at the ape-man's feet.
The effect was instantaneous. A look of complete amazement came into the hideous face, and the little eyes opened wide. He dropped his bow and arrow and sprang away as quickly as a cat to vanish behind a tree. Then the arrows began to fly. We shot off a few rounds into the branches, hoping the noise would scare the savages into a more receptive frame of mind, but they seemed in no way disposed to accept us, and before anyone was hurt we gave it up as hopeless and retreated down the trail till the camp was out of sight. We were not followed, but the clamor in the village continued for a long time as we struck off northwards, and we fancied we still heard the 'Eugh! Eugh! Eugh!' of the enraged braves.”
This account may seem to be completely sensational to the point that it might be easy for the more skeptical-minded to dismiss it out of hand, but there are a few reasons why it has warrant and deserves consideration, the first being that this was likely not some fictional story Fawcett was telling. It was part of his very serious and typically meticulous notes on his expedition and sitting right there amongst more mundane observations of the wildlife and region’s various peoples. He was a consummate professional and member of the Royal Geographical Society, as well as a very respected, experienced explorer and surveyor, and there is no rational reason at all for why he should want to concoct such a story to drop in the middle of his otherwise meticulous journal. Why would he do that and risk his reputation? To what ends? It also means he would not likely have made misidentifications of local tribes or wildlife, as he was as familiar with these jungles as one could possibly be in the era.
Fawcett has also been accused of having perhaps exaggerated his dealings with the Natives and in this case, made them out to be hairy brutes out of some racist agenda, but if that were the case then why are there other records of his dealings with locals that are completely accurate in their depiction of their appearances and behavior? It is somewhat true that Fawcett was known to have some strong opinions on the more primitive tribes, but he seems to have never let it compromise the matter-of-fact way in which he recorded the people themselves. Sanderson has much to say about this aspect of the journal entries, writing:
“He (Fawcett) was not an ethnologist, anthropologist, or archaeologist but it was with these disciplines that he clashed, and it was towards the protagonists of the first that he most often expressed himself as feeling most bitter. In his extensive travels through hitherto unexplored territories he discovered many groups of people for the first time, lived with them, often acquired not a little of their language, recorded what of their customs he could, and attempted some classification of their origins. Much of all of this conflicted with established beliefs among ethnologists, and Fawcett's historical theories were at complete variance with what was then, and still is, accepted. Yet, while those theories were strongly criticized, the veracity of the facts he collected were never questioned. It was his assessment of them that was considered invalid.
This puts his account of the hairy Maricoxis in an entirely different light, quite apart from the fact that his word was never doubted, that he had two reliable witnesses, and that what he saw was both before and afterwards confirmed by others, in that reports relayed to him by several people described exactly what he had seen without the relaters knowing anything of what he did see. We are therefore compelled to accept this report in toto; and this means simply that, in the year 1914, there were living to the northeast of the Parecis Range in the Matto Grosso, what were apparently tribal groups of fully-haired hominids of grossly primitive aspect, and in no possible way descended from or related to the Amerindian aborigines of the Americas.”
While Sanderson may seem perhaps too quick to buy the whole tale, it certainly is an account that stands out among Fawcett’s writings, and which ultimately leaves more questions than answers. What did Fawcett and his fellow expedition members encounter out there in that jungle? Were these indeed the legendary Maricoxi or something else? It is truly unfortunate that considering that Fawcett was not particularly interested in following up on it, and seems to have considered it mostly an obstacle and oddity, he never did make any effort to find out what they were, and the creatures of his account just sort of fade into the background to remain perplexing enigmas. Did this tribe of hairy ape-men really exist the way Fawcett described them, and if so what were they and how did they fit into the Maricoxi legend? The answer may forever remain hidden out there in that forbidden jungle lair.
Besides tribes of man-like apes, one persistent legend that has been around since 16th-century Spanish missionaries came to the Amazon region is that of tribes of tall, fair-skinned, blonde, blue-eyed, decidedly Caucasian-looking natives living out in the most remote and inaccessible areas of the jungle. One of the earlier accounts of encountering these mysterious people was made by the Spanish Dominican missionary Gaspar de Carvajal, who wrote in 1542 of coming across a group of very tall, very white, European-looking tribal women who wore their long, light hair braided and wound about their heads. The account was included in his book Account of the Recent Discovery of the Famous Grand River.
Supposed photo of "white natives" taken in the Amazon
Another popular account of these white Amazonians comes from the American explorer Alexander Hamilton Rice, Jr., who journeyed into the Amazon for a 1924-1925 expedition. Upon returning from the perilous expedition, Rice told of one of the expedition members, a Lieutenant Hinton, who had spied a tribe of white Indians while making a flight over the headwaters of the Parima River. Intrigued, Rice organized a trip by canoe up the river in order to try and find out where the mysterious white natives came from. Eventually, they located a hut that was believed to belong to the white Indians, and they then heard a series of shrieking yells which scared some of the expedition members off and put the remaining group on edge, reaching for their weapons. It was then that two of the white natives came out of the forest, apparently in peace.
These white-skinned natives were described as having pigment painted across their faces that obscured their features, but they were said to be “undeniably white.” The two were said to look undersized and undernourished, wore no clothing, and carried with them bows with poison-tipped arrows. They spoke in a unique language not known to be spoken by any other tribe, which made communication difficult. When the expedition members offered beads and handkerchiefs as gifts, the two tribesmen reportedly called out into the jungle, which brought more of the fair-skinned natives out of hiding.
These odd, white tribespeople were offered food, but it was declined, and it seemed that they preferred to eat plantains which had curiously been garnished with cocaine, although it was unclear where they had acquired the drug. Throughout the encounter, the strange tribe showed no particular interest in or awe of the Westerners’ clothes, equipment, guns, or hydroplane. The expedition made further efforts to try and communicate with the tribe, but the language barrier made it difficult, and after a while the white Indians melted away back into the forest, moving “between the trees like jaguars without making a sound or causing a rustle of the leaves.”
The 1920s were indeed a period of many sightings of these white-skinned natives, and feature heavily in accounts from the explorer Percy Fawcett, who was convinced that these people were denizens of a mystical lost city deep in the jungle, which he called simply “Z.” So convinced was he that this mystical city and its people existed that they would inevitably lead him to obsession and lure him to his final, ill-fated expedition in search of the city of Z in 1925. Fawcett would journey out into uncharted jungle in search of his fabled city and seemingly step off the face of the earth. No trace of him or his expedition was ever found.
Accounts and sightings of the white natives continued sporadically into the 1940s, and in 1945 the British Journalist Harold T. Wilkins took it upon himself to compile a variety of reports stretching back to the 16th century in his book Mysteries of Ancient South America. Even in modern times, there have been accounts of coming across these enigmatic people. In 1977 one joint British/ Brazilian expedition reported being surrounded by a tribe of uncommonly tall, blonde natives with blue eyes and strikingly white pigmentation, some of who had thick beards and all of who were naked. The strange white tribesmen allegedly spoke a dialect that no expert had ever heard before. These people were called the Acurinis and were again encountered by another expedition to the same region in 1979. In this case, the mysterious tribesmen were seen only briefly before vanishing into the underbrush.
Theories abound over what could be behind these accounts. One is that they are the descendants of shipwrecked sailors, Vikings, lost explorers, or even missionaries or other Westerners who willingly left civilization behind to live amongst the natives, where they invariably intermingled. Indeed there are theories that Percy Fawcett himself did this and that the descendants of both him and his expedition members may be behind some of these encounters with fair-skinned natives. In recent years there has been one tribe called the Aché, who are known for having light skin, hair, eye color, and thick beards, and although it has been shown that they show no genetic evidence of having ever mixed with Europeans, their unique appearance could make it possible that they might be the source of at least some of the accounts. It is unlikely we will ever know for sure the precise origins of these stories.
One very odd account that comes from the Amazon wilds is that of an intrepid explorer who came here looking for mysteries and would soon get more than he bargained for, embarking on a quest that would include lost, uncontacted tribes and strange powers of the mind. Loren McIntyre was a seasoned explorer, photojournalist, and writer for such esteemed publications as National Geographic, Time, Life, Smithsonian, GEO, Audubon, and South American Explorer, and was in many ways a sort of real-life Indiana Jones figure, spending much of his life doggedly exploring the forbidding, uncharted, and most impenetrable reaches of the Amazon rainforest of South America. Indeed, it was he who would be the first one to discover the source of the mighty Amazon River, when he made an expedition in search of it in 1971. He would make history when he found that the largest, longest, and most powerful river in the world began with a runoff of snow at a mountain in the Andes called Mismi, some 6,400 kilometers from the Atlantic Ocean, which trickled down to pond now called Laguna McIntyre, which in turn emptied into a brook named Carhuasanta, in Peru, after which it began its inexorable growth and meandering journey through some of the most remote wilds on earth. Yet, although this is McIntyre’s most famous discovery it certainly wasn’t his only one, and he would have a very mysterious encounter out in those jungles that he would keep to himself for years.
In 1969, McIntyre embarked on an excursion into the unexplored depths of the Amazon jungle of Brazil. His target was the little-known Mayoruna tribe, also called the Matsés, who were so elusive that they had never been successfully contacted by outsiders and were known as “The Cat People,” due to the arrays of imposing spikes that they wore implanted into their faces. Next to nothing was known about this enigmatic tribe, and they were only ever fleetingly glimpsed. They were like ghosts, and McIntyre had little to go on when he was dumped off on the shores of the Amazon River in a place called the Javari valley, on the border between Brazil and Peru, and left to continue on his own, penetrating dense jungle that no outsider had ever set eyes on in an attempt to find these mysterious people. Little did he know that it would be they who found him.
As the brave, seasoned explorer made his way through a mosquito-infested jungle he got perhaps too focused on finding the lost tribe, and soon realized that he was hopelessly lost. His journey then turned into aimlessly wandering through the perilous wilderness, and it became obvious that he was not going to be in time for his scheduled pick-up at the point where he had been dropped off. He began to resign himself to the fact that he just might end up another mysterious lost explorer, like his childhood idol Percy Fawcett before him, a fellow explorer who had mysteriously vanished while looking for his mythical city “Z.” Making this trek more ominous was when at some point McIntyre would stumble across a clearing littered with the bodies of what appeared to be four lumberjacks, half devoured by ants and with arrows sticking out from their silent corpses.
This grim discovery had the explorer watching the trees carefully as he aimlessly wandered around half expecting death to come for him at any moment through the shadows, and more sure than ever that he would not see civilization again. It was as he was in this fog of panic and fear that some figures crept out of the forest before him, spikes embedded into their faces, necklaces made of bones, possibly human, around their necks, and looking upon him with a mixture of apprehension and surprise, but not aggressiveness. These were the Mayoruna, and this was the closest any outsider had ever gotten to them. At least any who were still alive.
The frightened explorer immediately and very slowly pulled out some gifts that he had brought in the event that he actually made contact. From his bag, he produced some cloth and mirrors, which he dropped before the tribesmen as they looked on with inscrutable expressions on their pierced faces. They stepped closer to accept the gifts and then seemed to beckon for him to follow them as they began to melt back into the forest. The weary McIntyre stumbled after them, barely able to keep up with their nimble navigation of the jungle, and so would begin the next chapter of his strange adventure.
They arrived at what seemed to be a makeshift camp full of other members of the tribe, and they seemed to show a strange mixture of curiosity and aggression toward him. Upon examining his tennis shoes they went about burning them to ashes, and his watch they found fascinating, but they destroyed that too. Indeed, most of his possessions would be either stolen from him or destroyed, and even his camera, which they oddly showed no interest in, was broken when a monkey descended from the trees to take it from him. Although there was no outright aggression against him, there were some grim reminders that he was very much in danger. He would claim that they possessed trinkets made of human bone and that they drank out of hollowed-out skulls. They were also very well armed and never far from their bows, and one tribesman with red face paint, who he called “Red Cheeks,” took to menacing him and scowling at him.
McIntyre would end up staying with this lost tribe for two months, and during this time made many observations. He noticed that they were constantly on the move, perpetually moving to a new camp, sometimes suddenly and without warning, and they clearly had a hunter-gatherer lifestyle. They also seemed to have no concept of individual possessions, freely sharing everything with each other and taking or using whatever they liked without repercussions. Even odder still, he noticed that these people often moved quite bizarrely in sync, knowing what the others would do or acting in precise tandem without speaking to each other. For some time, he pondered this anomaly, but he would soon learn that the explanation was far odder than anything that he had ever guessed at.
One day he was approached by the one he took to be the chief of the tribe, an ancient-looking, sinewy and grizzled tree trunk of a man, covered in warty growths that would earn him McIntyre’s nickname “Barnacle.” When the chief approached he spoke to McIntyre, and the explorer found that bizarrely, after weeks of being unable to understand anything any of them had said, he clearly comprehended what Barnacle had to say. This utterly perplexed him, but he soon realized that this chief was not moving his mouth when he spoke, and that he was talking directly into his mind, using a sort of telepathy that McIntyre would later call “beaming,” and which Barnacle called “the other language.”
Barnacle explained that the tribe existed as a sort of hive mind consciousness and that their thoughts were all linked to each other, although only the tribal elders were proficient at focusing this telepathic power and truly using it to its full potential. Here he learned that there was no real “self” as Westerners would think of it and that to them the concept of an individual “self” made little sense. The chief also telepathically explained that they were under constant threat from loggers and other outsiders and that the reason the tribe moved so often was that they were on a spiritual journey to what he called “The Beginning,” or the literal beginning of time, where they hoped to be beyond the reach of the intruding outside world. Indeed, the tribe seemed to have a very strange grasp of how time worked that was rather alien to anything the explorer was familiar with. A 1991 article in The Los Angeles Times about McIntyre’s bizarre experience explains the tribe’s philosophy on time as follows:
“The main feature of time, by western definition, is its passage. But for the Mayoruna, time is at once mobile and static. It moved with man, stopped with him, advanced and retreated with him. It is not the implacable judge, condemning man to a tragically brief life. Time is a shelter, an escape into safety and regeneration, a repository whose chief function is not piling up the past, intact yet dead, but rather keeping it alive and available. And, in the face of violent encroachment on their land by white settlers, that past assisted them with an alternative to a menacing present.”
The chief invited McIntyre to come along with them on their journey to “The Beginning,” and for the next few weeks he followed them on their mystical quest and engaged in their rituals, often taking psychoactive jungle concoctions that warped his perceptions. He found that if he concentrated he could pick up on a sort of static fuzz that contained the interlinked thoughts of all of the tribe members, through processes he could never hope to fathom. However, he knew at some point he would have to part ways with them and try to leave this land of jungle, telepathy, and time travel behind him to get back to the civilization that was no doubt convinced he had vanished. The only problem was that he had no idea where he was, and on top of this, although he had been invited and was not physically threatened by the Mayoruna in any way, he had no illusions that he was anything other than their prisoner and wondered what they would do if he tried to flee. However, in the end, the decision was made for him, a flood swept through during a torrential rain, and McIntyre was whisked away as he clung to a balsa raft, emptied into the river and incredibly found the next day by a pilot flying over.
Upon getting back to civilization, McIntyre would keep what had happened to him a secret for years, and it is quite likely that the whole fantastical tale would have died with him in 2003 if it hadn’t been for a Romanian-American writer, director and movie producer, by the name of Petru Popescu. In 1987 Popescu met McIntyre by chance while on a riverboat trip up the Amazon River. The two men hit it off, and for some reason McIntyre confided to him about what had happened all of those years ago with the mysterious Mayoruna tribe. It was all rather amazing, and when Popescu asked why he had never told anyone about it, McIntyre said that he didn’t think anyone would ever believe him, and he had been worried about maintaining his reputation as a respected explorer, writer, and photographer. He would say of this:
“I’m pretty reluctant to voice very much about the beaming experience because I didn’t want my friends to think I’d gone around the bend. ‘What is this? The guy’s hallucinating?’”
Popescu would finally manage to convince McIntyre to let him write a book on his adventures, and in 1991 released The Encounter: Amazon Beaming. The explorer would claim that in his dealings with dozens of other tribes in the same region he had never before or since experienced anything like he did during his time with the Mayoruna, and he did not know what became of them. We are left to wonder just how much of this account is true, and if it is just what was going on with these elusive people of the jungle. The tribe itself has sort of disappeared, they have never been formally studied, and since McIntyre passed away in 2003, we are left only with Popescu’s book as a window into this strange tribe and their world and ways. One wonders if they are still out there, or if they managed to make that journey to “The Beginning,” finally at peace and forevermore out of our reach.
The Amazon is not the only place for such stories, and one tale of a mysterious lost race comes to us from the Appalachian Mountains of the United States, it tells of a strange race of albino, sun-fearing pygmies who supposedly roamed this land long before even the Natives arrived. In the untamed wildernesses along the Southern Appalachian Mountains of the United States, the Native Cherokee people have long told of a strange race of beings they call “The Moon-Eyed People.” This mysterious tribe was supposedly smaller than average humans, almost dwarfish in nature, very pale skinned, like pure white alabaster, with shocking white hair, generous beards and body hair, and inhumanly large blue eyes, sensitive to light to the point that they were said to be unable to see in the daytime, hence their name. These Moon-Eyed people were purportedly completely nocturnal, hiding in dank caves and underground caverns during the day only to come out at night when the sun had retreated, and indeed sunlight was said to be enough to kill them if they ever got caught out in the open during daylight hours.
These strange, diminutive nocturnal denizens of the land were said to have been here long before the first Native peoples had settled the area, and according to most legends, they were eventually expelled by local Natives, although what form this expulsion takes varies from tradition to tradition. In some tales, it was the Creek people from the south who cast them out, whereas in others it was the Cherokees themselves who waged a relentless campaign and full-out war against these pale-skinned creatures to drive them to other lands. The American botanist, naturalist, and physician, Benjamin Smith Barton, wrote of these people and their downfall back in 1797, in his book New Views of the Origin of the Tribes and Nations of America, thus:
“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.”
Whatever happened to this enigmatic race, their legacy has supposedly remained behind in the ancient rock structures and mysterious pre-Columbian mounds and ruins that dot the landscape along the Appalachians from North Carolina all the way down through Georgia and Alabama, all said to have been erected by the Moon-Eyed People. Perhaps the most famous of these is an 850-foot-long stone wall dated to 400 - 500 C.E., which meanders through Fort Mountain State Park, just over the North Carolina border in Georgia, and is said to be a vestige of the bloody war between the mysterious Moon-Eyed People and the native Cherokee. There are countless other crude rock structures, walls, mounds and forts scattered throughout the Appalachians, as well as anomalous carvings, figurines, and a soapstone carving of conjoined figures now on display at the Cherokee County Historical Museum, said to be of these strange people, and no one really knows who made any of them except for the Cherokee themselves, who say it was the work of the Moon-Eyed People.
Whoever built such structures has long remained a mystery, and when Europeans first came to the region the Natives, who were not known for making such fort-like structures themselves, claimed that they had always been there, saying that they were constructions of the Moon-Eyed People. Interestingly, while Cherokee folklore has many tales of supernatural beings and various spirits, the Moon-Eyed People are never spoken of in such a manner, rather being described matter-of-factly as physically another race inhabiting the same lands.
Of course, with such an oddity as a cryptic tribe of bizarre dwarf subterranean albino people, almost like vampires in their intolerance for sunlight, and who predated the native peoples and constructed their mysterious mounds and forts, there is bound to be theorizing as to who or what they may have been. One of the most popular ideas is that they are evidence of Native contact with European explorers who had made it to the New World long before history says they did, possibly connected to the legend of the “Welsh Speaking Indians.”
The story of white-skinned, Welsh-speaking Indians in the New World originates with a 16th-century manuscript published by Welsh antiquarian Humphrey Llwyd, in which he writes of Welsh settlers coming to these shores in the 12th century, in particular a Prince Madoc, who along with his followers was said to have emigrated to America from Wales in about 1170, landing somewhere in the vicinity of Mobile Bay, Alabama. Madoc would supposedly end up shipping over hundreds of his followers to the New World, where they would disappear into the wilderness, never to return. In the following centuries, there were many stories of fair-skinned, blue-eyed natives who spoke a form of Welsh from the area, and these have been speculated to have been the descendants of these settlers.
Another idea put forth by Benjamin Smith Barton is that they were out-of-place descendants of members of the Guna people of Panama, who have such an uncommonly high rate of albinism that they were once referred to as the “White Indians,” and who were also reportedly able to see better at night. Another theory is that, rather than go to war, the Natives of the land actually integrated with the Moon-Eyed People and absorbed them. Still other more far-out theories are that these were some other species of human, a new race, or even ancient astronauts from another world.
It is still unclear who or what the Moon-Eyed people may have been, and they remain a distinctly enigmatic lost civilization if they ever even existed at all. Who were these albino, sun-fearing people? Were they some lost race, descendants of pre-Columbian explorers, or even a new species or alien interlopers? Or were these just a figment of folklore and myth? The answers to such questions remain obscure, but the tales of the Moon-Eyed People have persisted for over a millennium, and the idea that such a race of lost humanoids has been lost to history captures the imagination.
Another such “blue-eyed tribe” appeared to explorers as something quite European in nature, although their ways and beginnings have always been cloaked in shadows. Known mostly from historical accounts, their origins remain murky, their lineage uncertain, and they are a historical curiosity we may never fully understand. During the era of early European contact, the native peoples of North America held many curiosities for explorers and settlers coming to this new, wild land. These tribes were numerous and displayed rich variety between different cultures, as well as myriad languages, customs, and traditions that inspired awe, wonder, curiosity, bafflement, and even fear in the European adventurers who bravely delved into this uncharted new world and tried to tame it. Yet as fascinating as these new peoples were, perhaps the most interesting was an alleged tribe of natives who were said to look decidedly Caucasian in nature.
The first reports of what would come to be known as the Mandan tribe began to trickle out from French explorers in the region of the Missouri River in present-day North and South Dakota in the early 1700s. These natives were said to have rather fair skin and to have red or blonde hair and blue or grey eyes, and indeed especially the women were purportedly so Nordic in appearance that if it were not for their clothing they were said to be nearly indistinguishable from whites. In 1738, the French Canadian trader Sieur de la Verendrye made the first official outside contact with the Mandan and described them as living in 9 villages at a tributary of the Missouri River called the Heart River, and noted that they also exhibited customs that were decidedly more European than the neighboring tribes.
By 1784 the word had gotten out on this mysterious tribe of blue-eyed Indians, and they were featured in the media, with the August 24, 1784 edition of the Pennsylvania Packet and Daily Advertiser proclaiming that a new tribe of white people had been discovered and that they were “acquainted with the principles of the Christian religion" and "extremely courteous and civilized.” Perhaps one of the more famous of the explorers to come across the Mandan was none other than Lewis and Clark, who visited the tribe in 1804 and described them as “half-white,” as well as peaceful, civilized, courteous, and polite. They also noted that the tribe’s numbers had dwindled significantly due to the frequent smallpox epidemics that terrorized them, as well as attacks against them by neighboring tribes, namely the Assiniboine, Lakota, Arikara and the Sioux.
Of course, this all led to intense speculation as to what the origins were of this bizarre tribe, and one of the earliest ideas put forward was that they were the descendants of pre-Columbian explorers to the New World. For instance, there were many legends from various regions of the present-day United States of Welsh-speaking natives, perhaps descended from Welsh settlers coming to these shores in the 12th century, in particular a Prince Madoc, who along with his followers was said to have emigrated to America from Wales in about 1170. One Welsh explorer by the name of John Evans became so convinced that this was the case with the Mandan that he launched an expedition up the Missouri River in 1796 to search for them and prove that their language was derived from Welsh and contained Welsh vocabulary. Evans would trek up the river in the winter of 1796 and he could find no evidence whatsoever of the Welsh influence he had been so sure he would find, forcing him to concede that this was not where the Mandan origins lay. Indeed, he became extremely skeptical that there were any of these legendary “Welsh Indians” at all, saying in a letter to Dr. Samuel Jones:
“Thus having explored and charted the Missurie for 1,800 miles and by my Communications with the Indians this side of the Pacific Ocean from 35 to 49 degrees of Latitude, I am able to inform you that there is no such People as the Welsh Indians.”
Mandan tribe members
Another explorer who believed that the Mandan had European roots, perhaps even Welsh, was the frontiersman and pictorial historian George Catlin, who spent several months with the tribe in North Dakota, living amongst and drawing and painting them in 1832. One of the things that first struck him about these mysterious people was just how European they looked, describing that many of them were nearly white and had light hair and blue eyes, and he also noticed that they had more advanced techniques for manufacturing goods and dwellings, customs, traditions, town layouts, and language vastly different from neighboring tribes. Caitlin would say of the Mandan:
“They are a very interesting and pleasing people in their personal appearance and manners, differing in many respects, both in looks and customs, from all the other tribes I have seen. So forcibly have I been struck with the peculiar ease and elegance of these people, together with their diversity of complexions, the various colours of their hair and eyes; the singularity of their language, and their peculiar and unaccountable customs, that I am fully convinced that they have sprung from some other origin than that of the other North American Tribes, or that they are an amalgam of natives with some civilized race.”
Even some of the legends of the Mandan people themselves expressly mentioned that they had been descended from a strange white man who had appeared to them aboard a canoe in ancient times after an enormous flood had wiped out everything in sight. They claimed that this stranger had taught them about medicine and had influenced their religion, which oddly featured many of the same beats as Christianity, such as a great flood, a virgin birth, and a child born who could work magical miracles, among others. This was noticed by other later expeditions as well, such as an 1833-34 expedition led by German naturalist A.P. Maximilian, who felt that the similarities between Christianity and the Mandan religion were too close to be mere coincidence. Caitlin would write of this:
“It would seem that these people must have had some proximity to some part of the civilized world; or that missionaries or others have been formerly among them, inculcating the Christian religion and the Mosaic account of the Flood.”
Another idea on the Mandan origins is that they came from pre-Columbian visitations by Viking explorers. The first official European to ever officially make contact with the Mandan tribe, Sieur de la Verendrye, claimed that at the time he had found a strange runestone with Nordic inscriptions on a riverside near the village. The stone was allegedly sent to France to be studied but it is unclear what happened to the “Verendrye Runestone” after that, and indeed it is uncertain if it ever really existed at all. Unless the stone ever turns up again it remains just as mysterious as the Mandan.
The idea of Vikings in the New World before the days of Columbus has been talked about for some time, with one prevalent and somewhat controversial theory having to do with Eric Thorwaldsson, also more famously known as "The Red," who established two colonies on the coast of Greenland in 986. The story goes that Eric The Red then abandoned these outposts when the wild, rugged land proved to be too cold and forbidding, and made his way to North America along with the colonists. The theory then claims that the King of Norway is then said to have sent an expedition to the New World to find out what had happened to them, and that this expedition made their way up the rivers to end up in the Dakotas and other areas, after which they became stranded and then assimilated into the native tribes, giving them their Nordic genes.
However, there is very little evidence to prove that Vikings ever actually reached North America. The Verendrye Runestone vanished without a trace and then there is the hotly debated Kensington Runestone, which was a giant slab covered in runes allegedly found by Swedish immigrant Olof Ohman in Minnesota in 1898. In this case, the inscriptions claimed that the runes had been created by 14th-century Scandinavian explorers, and although the authenticity of the runestone is still debated it has mostly been classified as a hoax by the scientific community.
Regardless of where the Mandan really came from, the fact is that we will probably never know for sure. In 1838 the tribe was hit by a devastating smallpox epidemic, and although this was a specter they had been haunted by for centuries, this time it was absolutely catastrophic, wiping them out at such a rate that after only a few months there were only an estimated 30 to 140 of them left. With the Mandan teetering on the edge of extinction, enemy tribes swept in and took them as slaves, after which they were assimilated and absorbed. Consequent intermarriage and interbreeding meant that any unique genetic heritage they may have had was quickly erased, and the last known full-blooded Mandan was Mattie Grinnell, who died in 1971. Since there are no more full-blooded Mandan left and only an estimated 8 speakers of its language left today, it is difficult to get a grip on their heritage, even with our advanced DNA testing techniques, and their origins and history will likely forever remain shrouded in mystery, leaving us to merely speculate and debate on it.
It is somewhat sad that this tribe disappeared before we were ever able to really comprehend who they were. In all of the cases we have looked at here, all we are left with is the tales and accounts from explorers, but other than that their legacies have evaporated into the tides of history. They are seemingly vanished peoples who sowed bafflement and wonder, but ultimately left numerous questions swirling about them, doomed to a limbo of superstition, speculation, and rumor. Who were these people? Why did they look and act so differently, and what was the meaning behind their strange ways? To the alien explorers just starting to penetrate this wilderness at the time they may have seemed to be baffling anomalies, and interestingly they still are.
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