Photo: Charles Hudson's new book has, for the first time, tied de Soto's route to recent archaeological discoveries. Photo by Rick O'Quinn.
Photo: Charles Hudson's new book has, for the first time, tied de Soto's route to recent archaeological discoveries. Photo by Rick O'Quinn.
By Phil Williams
Spanish explorer Hernando de Soto was looking for gold and glory when he landed at Tampa Bay in May of 1539. For three years, he blazed a path through the American South.
When de Soto died of illness on May 21, 1542, on the western banks of the Mississippi River, his dreams of finding a great kingdom like that of the Incas or Aztecs had been shattered. But his journey opened America for exploration--a result at once marvelous for Europeans and devastating for the Indians.
Now, a new book tracing the de Soto expedition has for the first time tied the explorer's route to recent archaeological discov-eries. The result is far and away the most accurate map ever drawn for the still mysterious journey of de Soto into the heart of an American darkness.
"I have different levels of confidence in different parts of the route, but for most of it, I feel that we are close to the mark," says Charles Hudson, the UGA anthropologist who spent 16 years researching the route. His book on the expedition, Knights of Spain, Warriors of the Sun, was published this summer by the University of Georgia Press.
The exact route of de Soto and his troops has been the subject of often rancorous argument among historians and archaeologists for more than century. The problem is that the Indian chiefdoms named by the contemporary chroniclers of the expedition vanished long before anyone could determine their exact locations. Thus, researchers were left with a set of assumptions but little hard evidence about where the group might have gone.
As early as 1584, a map of the Southeast included place names derived from the chronicles of the expedition, but the first attempt to reconstruct the journey came in a French map of 1718.
In 1935, the U.S. Congress approved the appointment of the De Soto Expedition Commission, chaired by John Swanton. The route devised by that group was generally adopted.
"Swanton did the best he could with what he had," says Hudson. "He got the general area of the landing at Tampa Bay right, and he also correctly identified the general location of the first winter quarters in what is now downtown Tallahassee. But almost everything else he had was pretty far off."
Hudson, author of the influential book The Southeastern Indians, became intrigued by the de Soto route when he spent a year as a senior fellow at the prestigious Center for the History of the American Indian at the Newberry Library in Chicago. Archaeologists had begun to unravel the great chiefdoms of the Southeast of centuries ago. The pace of archeological discovery had been dazzling.
Hudson decided to see how this new scientific work matched the proposals Swanton had made in the thirties. The answer was soon clear: not very well at all.
Hudson and his students and other collaborators roughed out a new de Soto route and, in 1984, he and his wife drove the entire route, stopping to see how well the land matched the new route.
"It was simply a thrilling experience," says Hudson, "the single most enjoyable thing I have done in my entire academic career. It was a particular pleasure meeting and getting to know the archaeologists who had worked on sites along the route."
Hudson soon found there was anything but consensus about the path of the de Soto expedition. Some researchers had their own theories. Towns that had accepted the Swanton version of the route were unhappy to find that a revised map might leave them many miles off the path taken by the Spanish explorers.
The route Hudson has published, based on archaeological discoveries made after Swanton's work, places some native towns at "possible"--rather than definite--locations. "The location of the 1540-1541 winter camp in Mississippi is still uncertain," he says, "and the same is true of the town of Mabila, where de Soto's troops were attacked by Indians in a disastrous battle that claimed the lives of more than two thousand Indians."
He knows that, in some quarters, his version of the route will be controversial. But he is convinced that it is close--and that historical archaeology will eventually nail down the precise route along its entire distance.
