[twigs]

There were some Irish monks who may have beat Leif by hundreds of years. We just don't know. Personally, I think America was visited sporatically by many over the millennia.

[An Old Marine]

"Personally, I think America was visited sporatically by many over the millennia."

There are many arguments for this but one of the most compelling is a note by the French explorer Sieur de La Salle in 1669 of an American Indian tribe on the north shore of Lake Huron. This tribe was uniformly light skinned, blue-eyed, and had red hair. Further intensifying the mystery La salle wrote that the red haired Indians had several words that he thought sounded Celtic. When La Salle returned to the region in 1672 the tribe had abandoned the area and were nowhere to be found.

This "lost tribe" pops up in comments by several other early explorers. The Jesuit Jacques Marquette was acting as a missionary among the Huron Indians in 1671 and met a red-headed captive of the Hurons that he initially mistook for a European. The Huron referred to the red-headed captive's people as the "fire haired people".

Pierre Esprit Radisson was a captive of the Iroquois and had a similar experience. Even Lewis and Clark refer to rumors of the light skinned people they heard when passing through what is now Yellowstone National Park.