Chapter One

From the Ashes of the Entrada

Hernando de Soto craved gold, glory, and gore in quantities that made even his fellow conquistadors quake. When only twenty, he quit the impoverished confines of western Spain to find his fortune in the New World. In the succeeding sixteen years, the hawk-nosed young Spaniard enjoyed dizzying success slaughtering and pillaging indigenous peoples, first in Central America and later in Peru. De Soto returned to Spain wealthy and celebrated. He won the favor of King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella, who appointed him governor of Cuba, with the expectation he would also colonize and plunder La Florida, as the Spanish then called North America.

Before de Soto could rightfully claim La Florida, he had to raise an army and conquer the strange country from its shadowy Native inhabitants. A less ambitious man might have been content to retire with his wealth as master of a settled island domain. But not de Soto. Vague rumors of vast gold deposits resting in the shadow of a dazzling mountain of diamond somewhere in modern South Carolina propelled de Soto onward.

De Soto had no difficulty finding Spanish adventurers to join him. In May 1539 he sailed from Havana for the west coast of what is today Florida, in seven ships with an army of six hundred men and a contingent of a hundred wives, female camp followers, black slaves, craftsmen, and priests. Crammed aboard the rocking galleons, caravels, and brigantines were 220 cavalry horses calculated to overawe the foot-bound natives; several packs of fierce hounds to track down and mangle those who fled; an ample supply of handcuffs, chains, and neck collars with which to enslave the natives; and a huge herd of hogs to supplement provisions pilfered from them.

Well-disciplined but also ruggedly individualistic, de Soto’s conquistadors were a colorful lot, uniformed as befitted their tastes and means. Their basic outfit consisted of a long-sleeved shirt; a short, close-fitting padded jacket (doublet); and pants, breeches, or hose. The cavalry found boots and leather gloves essential, but infantrymen made do with simple sandals. Few could afford full body armor; most wore quilted cotton or leather jackets strong enough to withstand arrows fired from short bows. Affluent conquistadors also sported sleeveless chain-mail vests. Nearly all wore helmets.

De Soto made landfall near present-day Tampa Bay. European diseases—principally smallpox—preceded him. Twelve years earlier, the first Spaniards to explore La Florida had landed nearby and then passed along the Gulf Coast. In their wake the intruders and their pathogens left agony and desolation. With little remaining to despoil, de Soto plodded north toward the fabled land of riches.

Moving inland, the conquistadors met greater American Indian resistance, a natural consequence of de Soto’s brutality. He burned villages that refused him slave laborers and female chattels and tossed natives who displeased him to his man-mauling hounds. In South Carolina, de Soto found neither gold nor the expected mountain of diamond, but he did meet a lovely young Indian queen who beguiled the Spaniard for a season.

Beauty, however, proved no substitute for riches, and in early 1540 de Soto marched into modern North Carolina. There he met large, palisaded villages, from which he demanded food, supply porters, and women. With every mile the avaricious Spaniards traversed, their relations with the inhabitants deteriorated.

No mere savages, the natives of what was to become the American South possessed the richest culture of any indigenous peoples north of Mexico. Owing their immediate allegiance to culturally similar but politically diverse and sometimes warring chiefdoms, the inhabitants belonged to the Mississippian tradition, so named because the culture—if not the people themselves—apparently originated on the banks of the Mississippi River between AD 700 and 900. These residents of what is today Alabama and Georgia spoke predominantly the Muscogean family of languages.

The most salient characteristic of the Mississippian tradition was flat-topped, pyramidal mounds that served as foundations for temples, mortuaries, the homes of chiefs, and other important public edifices. The villages erected around the mounds were formidable, surrounded by deep, water-filled ditches and wooden palisades with defensive towers placed at regular intervals. Larger villages sometimes had interior walls for a second line of defense.

Native weapons gave thoughtful conquistadors pause. Strung with deer sinew, Indian bows were long, elastic, and exceptionally strong. The arrows, fashioned from young cane hardened in flames, had dagger-sharp flint heads. In close combat, warriors wielded short war clubs.

As they entered what would become the Lower Creek country (central and western Georgia), the conquistadors met with markedly improved clay dwellings, similar to, and probably more hygienic than, the abodes of poor rural Spaniards. Native men and women wore shawls “after the manner of the Gypsies,” fashioned from tree bark or grass treated to the consistency of flax. The Indians made moccasins for both sexes and loin coverings (breechclouts) for men from deerskin dressed to “such perfection” that it equaled the finest European broadcloth.

De Soto, however, had come in search of wealth and glory, not to admire the Native culture. In July 1540, his expedition entered the territory of Coosa, the paramount chiefdom of the region, centered on the upper Coosa River in what is today northwest Georgia. Borne on a litter to great fanfare and accompanied by several hundred painted and plumed warriors, at the gates of its northernmost town the principal chief of Coosa greeted de Soto and his men as guests. Ancestors of the Upper Creeks, the people of Coosa were brutal slaveholders, their Native chattel laboring with severed Achilles tendons to prevent their escape. The Spaniards saw vast cultivated fields but no evidence of gold or other mineral riches. Impatient to press on, de Soto repaid the pliant Coosa chief’s hospitality by putting him and several of his headmen in iron collars and chains and forcing them to serve as porters.

De Soto continued south along the Coosa River into present-day Alabama. At each village, he demanded more porters and women and pillaged the few communities that dared to defy him. All went deceptively well for de Soto.

In early October, he bade a ravaged Coosa farewell and entered the central Alabama domain of Chief Tascalusa, an esteemed Native leader. At the town of Atahachi the Spaniards met him, seated regally on cushions atop a mound in the plaza, a lavish feather cape extending to his feet. Towering a foot above the tallest conquistador, Tascalusa impressed a Portuguese officer as “full of dignity; tall of person, muscular, lean, and symmetrical, the suzerain of many territories, and of numerous people, being equally feared by his vassals and the neighboring nations.”

De Soto and Tascalusa paid not the slightest deference to each other. As de Soto climbed the ceremonial mound to confront Tascalusa, the chief sat fixed and unimpressed. De Soto surrounded him with lance-wielding cavalrymen, placed him under arrest, and demanded four hundred male porters and one hundred women. Tascalusa took his detention in stride. He gave de Soto the porters—fine Atahachi warriors all—but told the Spaniard he would have to wait until they reached the town of Mabila, the Atahachi capital, located somewhere between the lower Alabama and the Tombigbee Rivers, before de Soto could have the women. Tascalusa tantalized de Soto with a promise of the loveliest females of Mabila. Perhaps de Soto saw in the haughty chief a kindred spirit because he acceded to Tascalusa’s condition, and the entourage headed west along the bank of the Alabama River toward Mabila.

De Soto expected an easy march across a compliant country. Tascalusa, however, was scarcely the passive prisoner he seemed. Unknown to de Soto, he dispatched a messenger to Mabila summoning all the warriors of his chiefdom to assemble there. De Soto’s scouts cautioned their commander that the people ahead “were evilly disposed.” Perhaps the expedition had best camp in the open outside the gates of Mabila rather than alongside the house that Tascalusa offered de Soto? Recklessly certain of his own invincibility, de Soto dismissed their warnings. Accompanied by a small escort of cavalry, he spurred ahead to Mabila with Tascalusa while the remainder of his command followed at a leisurely pace.

When de Soto neared the town’s fifteen-foot-high beam-and-mud-daub outer walls on the cool and clear morning of October 18, 1540, the local cacique and four hundred cheering Indians festooned with ceremonial feathers and body paint sallied forth, ostensibly to welcome him. Once inside the town of eighty large houses, de Soto and his attendants settled in to enjoy an exotic and stimulating welcome in the town plaza. Fermented drinks circulated freely, and scantily clad, “marvelously beautiful women” danced for the Spaniards. While the bare-breasted dancers swirled and dipped before the mesmerized conquistadors, Tascalusa slipped away into a nearby house. Refusing de Soto’s order to return to the plaza, he instead issued the Spaniards an ultimatum. They must leave immediately or suffer the consequences. Drawing his sword in response, a Spanish officer cleaved off the arm of an Indian headman. In an instant, three thousand warriors poured into the streets shouting war cries and brandishing clubs and bows and arrows. Somehow de Soto and most of his escort slashed their way out of town just as the first soldiers of the Spanish main body appeared on the open plain outside Mabila. Still in the saddle and hacking wildly with his sword, de Soto bristled with nearly two dozen...