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| The Search for Hernando De Soto By John C. Hall
Click images throughout this article to view .pdf version of the original pages. (Requires Adobe Reader to open) Click here to view .pdf version of entire original article. (Requires Adobe Reader to open) [Updates reflecting new scholarship appear only in the text version below.] |
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Two decades later, in 1560, another Spanish explorer, Tristán de Luna, landed in the Southeast and attempted to retrace De Soto's steps. Although he was accompanied by several survivors of the original expedition, Luna found only a short segment of De Soto's trail. Today, almost four hundred and fifty years after the De Soto entrada (march of conquest), the location of his route remains one of the foremost historical mysteries of the Southeastern United States. Hernando De Soto's entrada, perhaps more than other Spanish expeditions into this part of the world, has captured the imagination of scholars and the public alike for a number of reasons: First, several members of the De Soto expedition left chronicles of their journey. If accurately correlated to the landscape, these chronicles would provide a wealth of historical detail. Second, De Soto and his men were among the first Europeans to encounter the Mississippian, or Moundbuilder, Indian culture of the region, some aspects of which are described in the De Soto expedition chronicles. If De Soto's campsites and battlegrounds are ever found and excavated, archaeologists and historians, working with the chronicles, could piece together a picture of Southeastern aboriginal life hitherto unrecorded. Many believe that the discovery of the Mabila battlefield, where the Spanish engaged Chief Tascaluza (Tuscaloosa) and thousands of his men, would be the archaeological find of recent years in the Southeastern United States. Lastly, the public is attracted by the sheer romance of the expedition, its adventures, battles, and tragic end. Leading the current search for Mabila, as well as for the rest of De Soto's Alabama route, is the Alabama De Soto Commission [see box, page 22]. Appointed by Governor George C. Wallace in 1985, the commission is charged with directing "the efforts of researchers relating to early Spanish exploration and colonization of Alabama." With assistance from the Alabama State Museum of Natural History, the Alabama Historical Commission, and the Alabama Department of Archives and History, the centuries-old search for Hernando De Soto is, once again, underway. [Update 1] Back to Top
De Soto, like many of the conquistadors, was the second son of a minor Spanish hidalgo family. Like other second sons (who stood to inherit little or nothing if they remained at home), he saw the New World as his sole opportunity for fame and fortune. Long before he set foot on the North American continent, De Soto had established a reputation as an experienced and capable leader. He had been with Pedrarias de Ávila in the sack of Central America, and he had garnered great wealth as one of Pizarro's leading captains in Peru, where he was well known among his contemporaries for his impetuous bravery. Then he had returned to Spain. A sensible man might have stopped there, but like others from the conquistador mold, De Soto sought power and position. Noting the huge continent to the north, De Soto procured for himself, in 1537, the governorship of Cuba and the title adelantado—a royal appointment giving him the right to explore and exploit La Florida, the Spanish name for the southeastern portion of North America. Two years later, in 1539, De Soto's 700-man party stepped ashore near Tampa Bay. Extensively equipped, well armed and provisioned, the expedition included knights, foot soldiers, artisans, priests, scribes, boat-builders, packs of dogs, and, as a kind of ambulatory larder, a large herd of pigs. (These were the first swine in the Southeast, perhaps the original ancestors of the Southern razorback. Their durability in the landscape was to prove somewhat more lasting than De Soto's.) The expedition moved north through central Florida, wintering at a site known as Apalachee, probably located in the vicinity of present-day Tallahassee. [Update 2] In 1540 they traveled northward through Georgia and the Carolinas, turned westward toward the Appalachians, and then south again into Georgia and Alabama. After spending the night at the village of Tali, the expedition continued south to the important Indian town of Coosa. By now their search for riches had produced little more than a quantity of freshwater pearls given them by the Indians. The Spanish chronicles describe the wealth of the Coosa province in glowing terms—large villages, bountiful crops, rich soil, and a plentiful supply of wildlife. One of the De Soto chroniclers described the welcome the Spanish received from the cacique (chief) of Coosa: "The Cacique came out to receive him [De Soto] at the distance of two crossbow-shots from the town, borne in a litter on the shoulders of his principal men, seated on a cushion, and covered with a mantle of marten-skins, of the size and shape of a woman's shawl: on his head he wore a diadem of plumes, and he was surrounded by many attendants playing upon flutes and singing." The Coosa chief welcomed the Spaniards royally, gave them food, and invited them to stay, but De Soto and his men had other plans. Employing tactics that had served them well in Central and South America, they kidnapped the chief and held him hostage in hopes of enslaving the entire chiefdom. [Update 3] When the Indians attempted to escape, De Soto's forces captured them and put them in irons; the men became baggage bearers and the women were forced to entertain the Spaniards. Back to Top
Finding no gold in Coosa, De Soto turned southwest toward the province of Talisi in east Alabama. But the inhabitants of Talisi, aware of the Coosans' fate, had fled, and De Soto was met instead by a delegation from the next major chiefdom to the south. That region was dominated by chief Tascaluza, a physically imposing and intelligent leader who had learned of the Spaniards' tactics and who had laid a trap for the expedition at one of his tributary towns, Mabila. Luring the adelantado and his advance party into the stockaded town with promises of food, bearers, and hints of riches, Tascaluza sprang his trap on the morning of October 18, 1540. Hordes of heavily armed Indians poured from the houses surrounding the plaza and attacked De Soto's party. Many Spaniards were killed on the spot, and others were slaughtered as they attempted to escape. De Soto himself fell three times as he fought his way back to the gate, but his men picked him up each time and helped him flee. Once outside the stockade, the Spanish mounted their horses and regrouped, and when the main body of their army arrived, the full force attacked the town. Armed with swords, spears, axes, matchlock guns, and torches, the Spanish repeatedly assaulted the stockade, only to be repulsed each time by a hail of arrows. Eventually, after a furious battle, the Spanish breached the wall and burned the town. Except for Chief Tascaluza and other Indian leaders who had been urged by their men to escape, all of the defenders—perhaps as many as three thousand—lay dead. Spanish casualties were also heavy. Various chroniclers report from twenty-two to eighty-two dead. [Update 4] After Mabila, the Spanish reconsidered the expedition's progress to date. They had been wandering in the wilderness for a year and a half. They had been attacked and nearly defeated by thousands of angry Indians, and their pearls and much of their supplies had been either lost or destroyed. With no real prospects for an improvement in their situation, and with relief ships waiting only a week or so to the south at Achuse Bay (Pensacola)—a fact De Soto concealed from his men—De Soto, miraculously, talked his men into continuing the expedition. [Update 5] Because most of them had invested their entire fortunes in the venture, they may have found the dangerous and uncertain road ahead more appealing than the prospect of certain bankruptcy if they returned home. For whatever reasons, they decided to push on.
The expedition, now led by De Soto's lieutenant, Moscoso, struggled to survive. After an abortive attempt to pass overland across Texas to Mexico, the survivors built boats, and, hotly pursued by angry Indians, descended the Mississippi River, following the coast to safety at Tampico, a thousand miles away. Back to Top
Ironically, the gold De Soto sought was there—in Georgia, Alabama, and California—but the metallurgical technology needed to retrieve it had not yet spread northward from Mexico and Central America. The Indians simply had no idea what the Spanish sought. (In centuries of searching, archaeologists have found few gold Indian artifacts anywhere in North America.) Perhaps the expedition's fatal flaw can be found in the attitude of Her-nando De Soto and his lieutenants toward the Indians. The Spaniards' experiences in Central America and Peru had led them to believe that kidnapping and extortion were effective means of dealing with the natives, and, indeed, in the highly organized societies of that region, particularly in Peru, that brutal technique had worked. By kidnapping the local leader, one could extort from his subordinates all the food, slaves, and gold one desired. The policy did not work in La Florida. Instead of finding the rigidly stratified high Indian culture that he expected, De Soto found a loosely organized succession of tribes and chiefdoms whose members stayed in contact with each other. As long as the Spanish could count on the support of the Indians—even if that support were coerced—the expedition remained viable. But as word of the Spanish brutality spread from one chiefdom to the next, Indian resistance built up until it erupted in the battle at Mabila. From that point on, the Spanish found themselves engaged in open warfare with the Indians. Although the Spaniards were well provisioned, they were not prepared to maintain an isolated expedition adrift in a sea of hostility. If the Indians finally succeeded in expelling De Soto and his men from the region, the Spanish appear to have extracted an even more devastating toll on their reluctant hosts. Twenty years after the De Soto entrada, Tristán de Luna's expedition attempted to find Tascaluza's province as well as the lush province of Coosa, which had been described by one chronicler as "thickly settled in numerous and large towns." The Luna foragers, however, never did find Tascaluza's lands, and when they finally found Coosa, it was overgrown and almost completely deserted. Jorge Cerón, a member of the Luna party, described Coosa thus: It appears that [De Soto's] accounts of this land and these provinces were false and not true, judging by what has been seen in the province of Coosa, which was declared the most fertile, best disposed and provisioned part for Spaniards to live and settle in, whereas it seems to be quite the opposite, being of such an undesirable nature that everyone asserts that there is no place where one may remain or erect a town.
Why the native population in the Southeast declined rapidly in numbers during the Spanish entradas has long been a subject of interest to scholars. The primary cause, apparently, was the spread of European diseases to which the Indians were highly susceptible—diseases such as influenza, diphtheria, measles, and smallpox. Because the De Soto expedition was so large, lasted for so long, and penetrated so deeply into the Southeast, it seems likely that it was largely to blame for the depopulation of the area. The De Soto chronicles state, however, that epidemics (caused perhaps by contacts with Europeans along the east coast) were already making inroads into the native population when the De Soto expedition arrived. Back to Top
The first chronicle, unpublished until 1851, was written by Rodrigo Ranjel, De Soto's private secretary, who kept a diary during the expedition. The surviving portions of the diary trace the expedition from its beginnings at Tampa to its 1541 winter quarters in Mississippi. The second account, published in 1841, was written by Luys Hernando de Biedma in 1544 as a more or less "official" report of the expedition. It has the advantage of being written immediately after the event, but it is woefully brief. A third chronicle, written by an unknown Portuguese who signed himself "the Gentleman of Elvas," was published in 1557, just fourteen years after the entrada. Its strength is that it was compiled relatively soon after the events and seems to be uninfluenced by other accounts. The last of the chronicles was compiled by Garcilaso de la Vega in 1591. This volume includes the testimony of several participants, primarily Gonzalo Silvestre, a minor member of the expedition. It is the longest of the chronicles, but it is heavily romanticized and is primarily responsible for the popular legend of De Soto as a romantic hero. Written almost forty years after the expedition, the work is of doubtful accuracy, but it has been widely published in French and German since 1670. [Update 7] Given the conflicts, variations, and inconsistencies apparent in the chronicles themselves, it is not surprising that historians and other scholars have interpreted the chronicles—and the route of De Soto—in widely diverging ways. And if Luna found it difficult to locate De Soto's trail twenty years after the expedition, the task of retracing the route nearly four hundred and fifty years later, using documents shot through with unknown flaws, is also full of hazards. Serious efforts to locate the trail appear on Spanish maps as early as 1544. Notable nineteenth-century attempts to trace the Alabama portion of the journey were made by historians Albert J. Pickett and J. F. H. Claiborne in 1851 and 1880, respectively. The founding of the Alabama Anthropological Society in 1910 provided yet another boost to De Soto studies and to Alabama archaeology. That society's monthly report, "Arrowpoints," published several interpretations of possible De Soto routes, notably those by J. M. Andrews in 1916, and James Y. Brame in 1928. The major event in a long line of historical attempts to find the trail of the famed explorer, however, was the establishment of the United States De Soto Expedition Commission in 1936. Created by Franklin D. Roosevelt in anticipation of the 400th anniversary of De Soto's entrada, the commission was composed of seven representatives from the Southeastern United States. Led by Dr. John R. Swanton of the Smithsonian Institution, who had been studying the De Soto route since 1918, the commission published its findings in 1939. In that publication, Swanton, who seems to have been the report's sole author, treats the complicated subject of the different routes at some length. Using a chart of the Southeast, Swanton plotted a number of routes proposed by earlier scholars, creating what has come to be known as the "spaghetti map" (page 23). This map, with its confusing, overlapping lines, illustrates well the difficulties involved in reconciling the various hypotheses. Swanton also presented the commission's well-considered model for the route, which was based on a detailed analysis of the Spanish chronicles and which combined the best features of the hypotheses. The report recommended that Congress accept the commission's version as the official quadricentennial route. The commission also recommended that markers be set up along highways intersecting the De Soto Trail and that Congress appropriate $5,000,000 to cover celebrations in the various states and to underwrite additional research. Few of these requests ever bore fruit. The report was published and a few markers were placed by historical groups in various states, but no money for commemorative celebrations or additional research ever materialized. After the publication of the Swanton report in 1939, the controversy over the De Soto route slackened for many years. The report's authoritative tone gave many readers the impression that all questions regarding De Soto's travels in Alabama had been answered. People "knew" where Tali was, where Coosa was, where Mabila was. Unfortunately, much of what was "known" about the De Soto trail in 1939 has proven incorrect. In fairness to Swanton and the national commission, their report was not intended as the final word on the subject. Based primarily on historical records and not on original fieldwork, the report was intended as a scientific paradigm, a "model" which required testing. Over the years, however, the public has tended to accept the report as fact, especially when the route passed through their hometown.
De Soto studies have always been popular in Alabama, primarily because several of the most prominent events described in the De Soto chronicles are thought to have occurred in this state— the visit to the village of Tali, the stay at the important town of Coosa, and the battle at Mabila. The national commission located Tali on McKee Island in the Guntersville basin of the Tennessee River, largely because excavations there in 1938-1939 revealed a quantity of early trade items. But recent research, employing a better understanding of trade goods than was known in the late 1930s, indicates that this site is more than a century too recent for De Soto and contains no sixteenth-century materials at all. The story of Coosa also provides an example of how current research is changing traditional opinions about De Soto's travels in Alabama. The national commission placed Coosa on the Coosa River in Talladega County, near Childersburg. The name was right, and the site seemed promising: It was between two creeks, conforming to the description in the chronicles, and it was known to have been occupied by Indians for many years. The commission considered the Coosa site "one of the best identified points along De Soto's route." Under the direction of Alabama archaeologist David L. De Jarnette, Coosa was excavated in 1948, and the results were greeted with dismay: The site was found to be mostly of Creek Indian age, too recent to have been occupied when De Soto passed through in 1540. Recent work by anthropologist Charles Hudson and his colleagues at the University of Georgia places Coosa in northwest Georgia at a site known as Little Egypt near the town of Carters. This site has produced sixteenth-century Spanish artifacts and is located in the proper geographic relationship to other suspected De Soto contact sites in north Georgia and east Tennessee, one of which has produced Indian burials showing wounds apparently caused by iron-edged weapons. Most archaeologists, even many who disagree with the rest of Hudson & Company's proposed route, are in agreement with the placing of Coosa in northwest Georgia. Hudson maintains, however, that if his team has positioned Coosa correctly (some 100 miles northeast of where the commission placed it) then all proposed De Soto sites must be shifted accordingly, away from their traditional locations, some of which are vigorously championed by respected scholars. For example, the 1936 national commission placed the town of Mabila somewhere in southern Clarke County. However, because its position was reckoned from the now discredited sites in north Alabama, the Hudson team proposes shifting Mabila's likely location to a much more northerly site, perhaps just west of Selma. But at least one Alabama De Soto archaeologist, Caleb Curren (who, incidentally, agrees with Hudson on the Coosa locality) has made a good argument for a more southerly location for Mabila in Clarke County. The Alabama De Soto Commission is currently sponsoring archaeological test excavations on both sites. And so the search for Hernando De Soto continues. On May 30,1989, four hundred and fifty years will have passed since De Soto and his party stepped ashore near Tampa and began the first major European exploration of North America. They found no gold and left few physical traces, yet De Soto's expedition profoundly influenced the area and its inhabitants for centuries. They brought disease and disruption to—and perhaps caused the end of—one of the highest Indian cultures in North America; they established geographic place names that persist to this day and influenced European exploration and settlement of the area for generations. More than four centuries later, their adventures continue to intrigue and mystify us. Despite the efforts of generations of archaeologists and historians, despite the work of a national De Soto commission, even today, no person can go to a single spot in Alabama and say with confidence, "De Soto was here." Back to Top |
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The De Soto Commissions, 1936, 1985
In the intervening half-century, new evidence and new archaeological methods and testing procedures have disproved many of the hypotheses put forward in the national commission's report. Additionally, in recent years, portions of De Soto's route have been fixed with a reasonable amount of scientific confidence in Florida, east Tennessee, and north Georgia. As yet, no site in Alabama has been confirmed, but several look promising. Anticipating the four hundred and fiftieth anniversary of De Soto's entrada in 1990 and the five hundredth anniversary of Columbus' discovery of America in 1992, several Southern states, including Alabama, have renewed efforts to learn more about the region's Spanish heritage and to locate the De Soto trail. On September 13, 1985, Governor George C. Wallace established the Alabama De Soto Commission, the first commission of its kind in the Southeast. Dr. Douglas E. Jones, Director of the Alabama State Museum of Natural History, was appointed chairman, with four ex officio advisors, and sixteen Alabamians were appointed commissioners. During the next four years, the commission will "direct the efforts of researchers relating to the early Spanish exploration and colonization of Alabama," designate "sections of existing highways as the De Soto Trail," and plan an appropriate public commemoration of De Soto's entry into Alabama. Assisting the commission with technical staff and support will be the Alabama State Museum of Natural History, the Alabama Historical Commission, and the Alabama Department of Archives and History. Back to Top |
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| De Soto-era Archaeological Sites What will they look like?
New knowledge of sixteenth-century trade goods also allows archaeologists to reject sites that may have been incorrectly identified previously, such as Childersburg (once thought to be near the Indian town of Coosa) and McKee Island (once identified as the site of the village of Tali.) As the list of possible sites is narrowed, the De Soto chronicles are providing important information as to the geographical layout of a given De Soto locality. Based on the chronicles, many scholars now believe that the mound site at Little Egypt, Georgia, may be the long-sought Coosa. Recent excavations at Sylacauga's Hightower Village site, sponsored by the University of Alabama and the Sylacauga Museum, reveal evidence attributed to Tristán de Luna's exploration party near what may be the De Soto site of Talisi. Trade goods, however, are necessarily portable, and geographic and historical evidence can be equivocal. In order to be absolutely certain a locality is correctly identified, archaeologists must find authentic De Soto materials put in place by the expedition. The Alabama De Soto Commission, in consultation with leading De Soto scholars, has concluded that the Mabila battlefield is the state's most likely site for positive archaeological identification. If, in fact, archaeologists uncover in situ military artifacts (such as crossbow bolts or tips and arquebus balls), along with Spanish burials and remnants of destroyed Spanish supplies, Mabila would be the single most identifiable De Soto site on the entire route. Back to Top |
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| About the
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This page created 9/17/08