report says that he then lived with the Doeg for several months preaching the Gospel in Welsh and then returned to the British Colonies where he recorded his adventure in 1686. The historian Gwyn A. Williams comments, "This is a complete farrago and may have been intended as a hoax". Folk tradition has long claimed that a site called "Devil's Backbone" at Rose Island, about fourteen miles upstream from Louisville, Kentucky, was once home to a colony of Welsh-speaking Indians. The eighteenth-century Missouri River explorer John Evans of Waunfawr in Wales took up his journey in part to find the Welsh-descended "Padoucas" or "Madogwys" tribes. In northwest Georgia, legends of the Welsh have become part of the myth surrounding the unknown origin of a mysterious rock formation on Fort Mountain. Historian, Gwyn A. Williams, author of Madoc: The Making of a Myth, suggests that Cherokee tradition concerning that ruin may have been influenced by contemporary European-American legends of the "Welsh Indians". A newspaper writer in Georgia, Walter Putnam, mentioned the Madoc legend in 2008. The story of Welsh explorers is one of several legends surrounding that site. In northeastern Alabama, there is a theory that the "Welsh Caves" in DeSoto State Park were built by Madoc's party, since local native tribes were not known to have ever practised such stonework or excavation as was found on the site. In 1810, John Sevier, the first governor of Tennessee, wrote to his friend Major Amos Stoddard about a conversation he had in 1782 with the old Cherokee chief Oconostota concerning ancient fortifications built along the Alabama River. The chief allegedly told him that the forts were built by a white people called "Welsh", as protection against the ancestors of the Cherokee, who eventually drove them from the region. Sevier had also written in 1799 of the alleged discovery of six skeletons in brass armour bearing the Welsh coat-of-arms. He claims that Madoc and the Welsh were first in Alabama. In 1824, Thomas S. Hinde wrote a letter to John S. Williams, editor of The American Pioneer, regarding the Madoc Tradition. In the letter, Hinde claimed to have gathered testimony from numerous sources that stated Welsh people under Owen Ap Zuinch had come to America in the twelfth century, over three hundred years before Christopher Columbus. Hinde claimed that in 1799, six soldiers had been dug up near Jeffersonville, Indiana, on the Ohio