A little-known cave system built by man in Northeast Alabama links a medieval legend, a colonial expedition, and the greatest cataclysm in human history.

The year was 1170 CE, and all was not well in what would later become the United Kingdom’s sovereign nation of Wales.

Owain ap Gruffydd, the last of the great kings to rule over the medieval Welsh territory of Gwynedd, had just died, leaving behind a monumental legacy. Owain sat more than three decades on the throne, expanding his territory through bloody conquest until he controlled most of modern Wales. Approaching the twilight of his reign, his military forces had become so powerful that they successfully held off King Henry II and the historically superior English in 1157 and again in 1165.

Following Owain’s death, his heir and eldest living son Hywel was almost immediately driven from power in a classic case of palace intrigue. Aided by their mother, two of his brothers attempted a deadly coup that sent Hywel on the run to Ireland. Gwynedd and greater Wales was quickly thrown into civil war, battles raging across multiple fronts.

Revolted by the violence, Prince Madoc, said to be one of Owain’s youngest sons, decided to flee the territory by sea. He cobbled together a crew and readied a ship.

Legend tells that Madoc sailed west into the unknown, heading toward a land that colonial explorers would one day call the “New World.”

Hidden in the Cliff

Appalachia is filled with its folklores. Growing up in the foothills of Northeast Alabama, I heard plenty of them: stories of ghosts, buried treasure, lost ruins in the wilderness. The one, however, I found most compelling wasn’t some fantastical tall tale but rather a place I had seen – a hidden network of caves carved into the cliff at Lookout Mountain’s DeSoto State Park near the small town of Mentone.

Including the locals, few are aware of their existence and even fewer know how to reach them.

Only accessible by a narrow, unmarked trail that clings to a steep rock face, the cave system features three chambers.* The outer room could easily be mistaken for a natural overhang if it weren’t for the vaguely identifiable manmade column near the back wall. Behind it, as if disguised, is a small hole that leads to an almost equally cramped passageway.

Hidden in a cliff at the end of an unmarked trail, the manmade Welsh Caves at DeSoto State Park in Alabama are one of Appalachia’s most enigmatic places. Click the icon in the bottom right corner of the player to expand the video.

As my above video shows, the chute quickly ends at the larger interior chamber. There are two more columns along the mostly open outer wall, the first being more prominent than the second. The low yet spacious room also has a large rock outcropping that’s exterior to the caves’ shelter. Walking out to the edge of the platform, you can see the top of the tree canopy below and faintly hear the distant roar of the park’s 104-feet-tall DeSoto Falls.

One doesn’t have to be an archaeologist to determine that these caves were built by man for a defensive purpose. The chisel marks from hand tools are still visible in the sedimentary rock mixture that makes up this section of the Cumberland Plateau. The design of the structure is also instructive. While the outer chamber is hard enough to reach, the inner room would be virtually impregnable for an invading force unless the easily guarded narrow passage is breached.

Looking at what we know of the pre-Columbian history of this portion of the American South, the reasons for the caves’ protective architecture are obvious. Indigenous peoples, especially those belonging to Mississippian cultures, lived in the modern-day tristate area of Alabama, Georgia, and Tennessee. Armed conflict between them over land and resources almost assuredly occurred. There were also threats of the nonhuman kind patrolling the forest. Prior to their gradual extirpation over the centuries, bears and panthers would have been numerous in DeSoto State Park at the time of the caves’ construction.

Outside of these deductions, the chambers are mostly a confounding mystery. Hardly any academic research has been published, and the little that’s available isn’t conclusive regarding who specifically built them.

There are two other important notes, one being a fact and the other a near certainty. Firstly, the structure in the cliff is known locally as the Welsh Caves. Secondly, sometime in the 16th century, an unfathomable horror likely descended upon its inhabitants.

* A local rumor states that two more cave chambers exist beyond the three that I have explored. Due to perhaps centuries of erosion, they are only reachable via rappelling.

The Destroyer of Worlds

A serpentine three-hour drive to the east from the Welsh Caves, there’s yet another DeSoto Falls. This waterfall, located in North Georgia’s Chattahoochee National Forest, has its own link to a historical mystery – the undetermined path of Spanish conquistador Hernando de Soto’s expedition through the American South in the mid-1500s.

Local legend, one I heard myself growing up, says that a plate of Spanish armor was found near the base of the falls in the 19th century. While there’s no proof to validate the claim, de Soto and his men likely wandered close to both waterfalls in Georgia and Alabama bearing his name. According to the National Park Service (NPS), he cut a winding, destructive path through states like Florida, Georgia, the Carolinas, Tennessee, Alabama, and Mississippi before dying of fever on the western side of the Mississippi River in 1542.

Often and erroneously lionized in the retelling of European exploration of the Americas, it’s crucially important to underline the utter depravity of Age of Discovery adventurers like de Soto. History has few characters so vile and self-interested. Sailing with blessing from their churches and with sanction from their monarchs, men like de Soto murdered, raped, enslaved, pillaged, and plundered their way through the ancient Indigenous lands of the “New World.”

A true hero and intrepid explorer, indeed.

While it’s appalling that landmarks on former Indigenous ground carry his name, records from de Soto’s expedition are vital in terms of having any understanding of native life in the American South prior to contact with Europeans. During the Spaniards’ meandering and ultimately fruitless quest for gold, many of the Indigenous were displaced after their villages were stripped of resources and essentially made unlivable. Much worse, however, were the biological time bombs left in the conquerors’ wake.

To quote the words of the Hindu god Vishnu in the scripture Bhagavadgita, de Soto and his men had “become Death, the destroyer of worlds.”*

* American nuclear physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer used this same line after witnessing the first test of the atomic bomb near the end of World War II. In a different context and a larger scale, de Soto and his men were themselves weapons of mass destruction.

The Rise of England

Not long after de Soto was buried in the Mississippi River, the empires of Spain and its Iberian ally Portugal began showing signs of decline. The tandem of maritime superpowers had been perched atop the world order for over a century, during which they developed a planetary-scale system of conquest never seen in human history. As I overviewed in my previous feature “Lisbon: A Warning to the Free World,” the Spanish and Portuguese facilitated the virulent spread of colonialism when they agreed to the Treaty of Tordesillas in 1494.

The accord was designed to prevent conflict between the two allies as they used their sea power to carve up much of the world. Marking Africa’s Cape Verde as the longitudinal dividing line, Spain took lands to the west while Portugal sent its expeditionary forces east. The ensuing decades made both countries lavishly rich as claims were staked and resources were siphoned.

It wasn’t long, though, before ascendant empires rose to challenge the Spanish and Portuguese’s place at the summit of colonial influence. Continental rivals France and the Netherlands proved to be thorns in Spain’s side for centuries, even after it consolidated power with Portugal in 1580 via annexation. It was the English, however, that would prove to be the true threat to their global dominance.

Four hundred years after the zenith of Owain’s rule in Wales, one of history’s most consequential rulers took over the throne in neighboring England in 1558. Queen Elizabeth I’s coronation marked the dawn of the British Empire, a colonial and imperialist goliath that eventually wrapped itself around the globe.

Before it could take over much of the world, the fledgling empire needed a unifying leader, one that would stand up to the Spanish and solidify the nation’s transcendent trajectory. Elizabeth was the perfect persona for her country’s moment.

She was brazen, ordering privateers like Sir Francis Drake to pirate homebound Spanish ships laden with precious cargo from the Americas. She was also bold, standing with her troops at Essex as the Spanish Armada spread across the horizon in 1588, invasion imminent. Her speech that day, indicative of her extraordinary leadership ability, is widely considered one of the greatest wartime addresses ever delivered.

“I know I have the body of a weak, feeble woman; but I have the heart and stomach of a king, and of a king of England too,” Elizabeth is quoted as saying during the most pivotal confrontation of the Anglo-Spanish War, “and think foul scorn that Parma and Spain, or any prince of Europe, should dare to invade the borders of my realm; to which rather than any dishonor shall grow by me, I myself will take up arms, I myself will be your general, judge and rewarder of every one of your virtues in the field.”

Largely due to poor weather, the powerful Spanish Armada was ultimately and stunningly turned back, but the reasons for Spain’s retreat were insignificant to an exuberant English populace. A crucial battle over the once undisputed world power had been won, and, although the conflict with Spain persisted for years to come, England’s time had symbolically arrived.

Its colonial efforts began to accelerate, but the English wouldn’t successfully establish a permanent settlement in America until four years after Elizabeth’s death.* Nevertheless, the queen sought an alternative means of laying claim to “New World” lands – proof of medieval discovery by British Isles explorers that predated Spain’s arrival to the North American continent. Of particular interest to her was the tale of a Welsh prince from the 12th century who, according to multiple historical accounts published during her reign, reached America over 300 years before Spanish captain Christopher Columbus’s seminal voyage in 1492.

His name was Madoc.

* Before her death in 1603, Elizabeth attempted to create a permanent settlement in North America. However, the Roanoke Colony in present-day Virginia disappeared soon after its founding in the 1580s, leaving behind one of the most famous unsolved mysteries of the colonial era. Shortly afterward in 1607, the British settled Jamestown.

The Myth of Madoc

There’s a plaque in the Gulf Coast city of Mobile, Alabama, that attributes the discovery of America to Prince Madoc. I haven’t seen it myself, but a quick Google search for images turns up several photos. The sign, painted green with the flag of Wales near the top, passes the eye test as an official historical marker. It even goes so far as to cite alleged academic sources, one of which is Richard Hakluyt.

The English Hakluyt wrote what is now an obscure historical publication entitled The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques and Discoveries of the English Nation in 1582. The 16-volume work is an exhaustive compendium of English seafaring exploration leading up to Elizabeth’s time on the throne. Thanks to the outstanding work by Project Gutenberg, which has digitized thousands of books like Hakluyt’s, the public can still read his volumes today.

“Madoc another of Owen Guyneth his sonnes left the land in contention betwixt his brethren, and prepared certaine ships, with men and munition, and sought aduentures by Seas, sailing West,” Hakluyt writes in his era’s dialect. He continued, “Of the voyage and returne of this Madoc there be many fables fiiined, as the common people doe use in distance of place and length of time rather then to diminish: but sure it is there he was.”

In short, this section of Hakluyt’s history places Madoc and his crew in America in 1170, hundreds of years prior to the Spanish. He wasn’t the only English historical author of his time to proclaim the Welsh prince as the actual discoverer of the “New World,” either. Cronica Walliae, finished in 1559 by English Member of Parliament Humphrey Llwyd, and The Historie of Cambria, written by Church of England cleric David Powel, are other publications from the years of Elizabethan reign crediting Madoc as well.

A master politician and aggressive advancer of English interests, Elizabeth seized on the Madoc chronicle, using it – or perhaps more accurately selling it – as credence that her nation was the rightful owner of Spanish-claimed North American lands. Largely due to her promotion, the tale of Welsh exploration in America spread to proceeding generations, eventually echoing into the present day. The plaque in Mobile and the Welsh Caves near Mentone are two testaments to how well the queen sold her story to the English people; British colonists and their American descendants have carried forward the legend for 450 years.

But is there any basis in fact regarding the account of Madoc and his wonderous voyage? Reading further into Hakluyt’s digitized volumes, a footnote in a later edit made by American historian Jeremiah Belknap in the 18th century provides clarity.

“If Madoc ever existed, it seemt more probable that the land he discovered was Madeira or the Azores,” Belknap wrote in 1774, referring to islands in the Atlantic Ocean that are hundreds of miles to the south of Wales.

The truth is Madoc was most likely just a machination of myth, a fabrication of fable, one that was used as a clever ruse by a royal trying to expand her country’s power. And if he was real, he surely never set foot in the Americas.

The Deafening Silence

Even on a sunny summer day with birds singing and distant DeSoto Falls crashing into the gorge, walking through the Welsh Caves is haunting. The ancient nature of the structure is as much a feeling as a fact; many Indigenous generations from long ago crept through the narrow passageway, made their way through the inner chamber, and stood on the outer platform overlooking the forest.

The small amount of academic research I have been able to find over the years confirms natives built the caves. While the specific people who served as their architects will probably forever be in question, their design was either the work of the more recent Mississippian cultures or the much older Hopewell peoples. More granular information has been tragically lost to time, and folklores like the one about Prince Madoc are partly to blame. The crushing weight of colonialism’s legends have leaned heavily on the caves and the greater park for centuries, warping and obliterating historical details both big and small.

It wasn’t all the colonizers’ fault, though. As fate would have it, Mother Nature played the central role, wiping out a countless number of Indigenous in the greatest catastrophe to ever befall humanity.

This wasn’t a disaster confined just to the American South; millions of natives in North, South, and Central America with no immunity to “Old World” diseases died unimaginably cruel deaths when Europeans brought new pathogens across the Atlantic. The inhabitants living in and around the caves in DeSoto State Park were not spared. While Hopewell cultures disappeared from the archaeological record in 400 CE, the Mississippians’ historical end was somewhere around 1600.

It’s no coincidence that the date follows soon after de Soto and his men tramped through the Southern States.

If only the cave walls could talk, they would tell us an incredibly rich story of Indigenous culture, adding an invaluable volume to the human record. The final chapter, however, would have surely described a cataclysm, and the knowledge of the sorrowful cries and agonizing screams that likely echoed through the hollow chambers make its present silence strangely deafening.

Starting with Columbus’s arrival near the turn of the 16th century, deadly illnesses like measles, typhus, and cholera were transmitted in waves to native populations in the Americas. Worst of all, though, was smallpox. Here’s a passage from Douglas Preston’s book The Lost City of the Monkey God, an extraordinary account of true modern discovery in the Honduran jungle, describing the effects of the most lethal virus to ever strike our species:

“It usually starts like the flu, with headache, fever, and body aches; and then it breaks out as a sore throat that soon spreads into a body rash. As the disease develops over the subsequent week, the victim often experiences frightful hallucinatory dreams and is racked by a mysterious sensation of existential horror.”

The suffering often doesn’t stop there, either. Like with other viruses, smallpox has different strains. In its most deadly form, the skin literally separates from the body, and the host dies bleeding from everywhere.

Folks, this is how the colonizers conquered the Americas – it wasn’t some swashbuckling act of bravery by conquistadors and their valiant compatriots but rather the largest mass die-off in human history that cleared the way through the “New World.”

Two decades prior to de Soto’s expedition through the American South, another famous Spanish conquistador named Hernán Cortés was nearly routed by the Aztecs in modern Mexico during the summer of 1520. Retreating to recover and regroup, he and his small contingent of troops launched an assault on the capital city of Tenochtitlán a few months later.* They should have been severely outnumbered, but Cortés and his men strode virtually unimpeded through the city. Bodies lay everywhere, either dead or dying from smallpox.

A similar scenario played out along de Soto’s path. The particulars, however, are more mysterious than the fall of the Aztec Empire. As Preston writes, the tristate area surrounding the Welsh Caves was part of “powerful and flourishing chiefdom called Coosa” at the beginning of the 16th century. Twenty years after de Soto, another expedition made its way through Alabama, Georgia, and Tennessee.

Coosa had become a virtually uninhabited wilderness.

While European colonizers cannot be blamed for the spread of disease through the Americas, they along with imperialists are guilty of acting in unison with pathogens in the most heinous of all transgressions – cultural annihilation. The effort to total up the carnage is ongoing.

* Mexico City is built over the ruins of the former Aztec capital city of Tenochtitlán.

Bones of the Children

Ground-penetrating radar scans the earth, searching for unmarked graves. No one is certain how many children are buried, but the number is likely in the thousands.

Just last month, Pope Francis visited First Nations Indigenous peoples in Alberta to survey the incalculable damage done by his church. Working in confederation with the Canadian government during the 19th and 20th centuries, Roman Catholics operated schools across the country to carry out a policy of forced assimilation for approximately 150,000 Indigenous children. Students were physically and sexually abused by Christian staff, beaten if they spoke in their native tongue.*

Many disappeared, thrown into holes dug in their ancestors’ soil. Search parties are still looking for all their remains. After the schools were shuttered in the 1970s, the horrid scope of what had occurred became clear – to use terms from Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, this was “cultural genocide.”

The Pope issued an egregiously long overdue apology while among the First Nations, but I found his continuing remarks to be insightful into the Christian enablement of awful events like the one in Canada. Almost assigning tiers of culpability for colonial and imperialist atrocities committed by European empires in league with Christian faiths, he said past operatives of his church were only following policies mandated by the “colonizing mentality of the powers.”

How many Christian officials over the centuries, both Catholic and Protestant, either readily went along with or spinelessly conceded support for European lust for wealth and power in the Americas?** As I mentioned in the opening feature of this series “Jamaica: The Road to Redemption,” the Christian faith isn’t just washed in the blood of their Lamb, it’s literally swimming in a sea of red from butchered natives and African slaves.

In a heartbreaking moment during the Pope’s meeting with Cree leaders, an Indigenous woman in the audience suddenly stood and began singing the Canadian anthem in her native language. Her appearance striking in ceremonial dress, she wailed the words in complete anguish, tears streaming down her face. Several survivors of the Canadian assimilation schools were in her midst.

“Do we celebrate?” one of the schools’ former students told Reuters. “It was powerful to hear the leader of the Catholic Church ask us… to forgive him. At the same time, you can’t forget all the spirits that are not at rest.”

In Northeast Alabama, a ghostly breeze whisps through the hollow chambers of the Welsh Caves, rustling the tree canopy below.

* The National Institute of Health draws a straight line from the cause of colonialism to the effect of the epidemics of drug and alcohol abuse on today’s Indigenous reservations.
** The Anglo-Spanish War fought between Queen Elizabeth I’s England and King Philip II’s Spain was essentially a conflict over Christianity. Philip, a Roman Catholic, did not like that Elizabeth and England were Protestant.

Empty Holes

When it comes to the tragic story involving the Indigenous peoples of the Americas and their European conquerors, there are no happy endings. This is a centuries-long epic of infinite sorrow and immeasurable loss, permeating every corner of former and present native lands.

There are so many what-ifs baked into the narrative. For example, what if gold-hungry and bloodthirsty conquistadors like de Soto and Cortés did more exploring and less marauding? The eventual spread of disease and death among the Indigenous was an inevitability; after all, the “Old World” and “New World” were destined to one day meet. However, if expeditionary forces from colonial empires had built a healthy relationship with native cultures upon first contact, much less would be left to historical mystery.

And what if irresponsible myths like the one about Madoc had not been spread by influential leaders like Elizabeth? Would American settlers have had felt less misplaced ownership and more rightful reverence for sites like the Welsh Caves? The summary of the structure on the Alabama State Parks website says stone walls once stood in the caves, but they were carried off by homesteaders to construct walkways and chimneys. If more respect was paid to the site, we could have perhaps learned much more of the Coosa, the Mississippians, and maybe the ancient Hopewell.

Even before partitions in the Welsh Caves were completely dismantled, Indigenous peoples who settled in the tristate area following the disappearance of Coosa were forced to relocate to western reservations, traveling against their will along the infamous Trail of Tears. It’s out in the American West that I will conclude with the description of a scene from the award-winning film Wind River. Set in modern times on Wyoming’s Wind River Reservation, the movie is directed and written by North Texas rancher Taylor Sheridan, who has spent much time among native communities in the U.S.

At the film’s ending, an Indigenous man is shown seated with weapon in hand, seemingly preparing to end his life. With his face painted, he stares off despondently into his ancestral land. His family has been torn to shreds. His only daughter was gang raped by neo-imperialist oil workers, and she died of exposure while fleeing in the aftermath through the freezing terrain. His wife is inconsolable.

The archetype of the cowboy arrives, eventually telling him that his daughter has been avenged, all her assailants killed. Before that, though, he asks what the Indigenous man was doing. He admits that he was going to commit suicide but couldn’t remember how to properly paint his “death face.” No one was left to teach the tradition, once handed down since time immemorial.

The film soon cuts to credits against a solid black screen, the only hue that fits a microcosmic reenactment of the saddest of all stories ever told. It’s the same color emitted from the chasmic empty holes in history dug by the colonialists and imperialists that conquered the Americas.

Related Content
– Click to read my feature article “Peruvian Andes: The Violent Reckoning of Pax Americana,” which is the final installment of this series on the high and enduring costs of colonialism and imperialism in the Americas.
– Click to read my feature article “Haunted South: Beyond the Grave” for a collection of my favorite ghost stories from the South.
– Click to view my high-resolution photo collection featuring images from DeSoto State Park in Northeast Alabama.