W. Lynd), “all the tribes of Indians were formerly one, and all dwelt together on an island, or at least across a large water toward the east or sunrise.  They crossed this water in skin canoes, or by swimming; but they know not how long they were in crossing, or whether the water was salt or fresh.”  While the Dakotas, according to Major Lynd, who lived among them for nine years, possessed legends of “huge skiffs, in which the Dakotas of old floated for weeks, finally gaining dry land”—­a reminiscence of ships and long sea-voyages.

The Mandans celebrated their great religious festival above described in the season when the willow is first in leaf, and a dove is mixed up in the ceremonies; and they further relate a legend that “the world was once a great tortoise, borne on the waters, and covered with earth, and that when one day, in digging the soil, a tribe of white men, who had made holes in the earth to a great depth digging for badgers, at length pierced the shell of the tortoise, it sank, and the water covering it drowned all men with the exception of one, who saved himself in a boat; and when the earth re-emerged, sent out a dove, who returned with a branch of willow in its beak.”

The holes dug to find badgers were a savage’s recollection of mining operations; and when the great disaster came, and the island sunk in the sea amid volcanic convulsions, doubtless men said it was due to the deep mines, which had opened the way to the central fires.  But the recurrence of “white men” as the miners, and of a white man as “the last and only man,” and the presence of white blood in the veins of the people, all point to the same conclusion—­that the Mandans were colonists from Atlantis.

And here I might add that Catlin found the following singular resemblances between the Mandan tongue and the Welsh: 

+----------------------+--------------+------------+---

----------+
| English.             | Mandan.      | Welsh.     | Pronounced. |
+----------------------+--------------+------------+--------

-----+
| I                    | Me.          | Mi.        | Me.         |
+----------------------+--------------+------------+--------

-----+
| You.                 | Ne.          | Chwi.      | Chwe.       |
+----------------------+--------------+------------+--------

-----+
| He.                  | E.           | A.         | A.          |
+----------------------+--------------+------------+--------

-----+
| She.                 | Ea.          | E.         | A.          |
+----------------------+--------------+------------+--------

-----+
| It.                  | Ount.        | Hwynt.     | Hooynt.     |
+----------------------+--------------+------------+--------

-----+
| We.                  | Noo.         | Ni.        | Ne.         |
+----------------------+--------------+------------+--------

-----+
| They.                | Eonah.       | Hona, fem. | Hona.       |
+----------------------+--------------+------------+--------

-----+