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DeSoto's path is noted by a marker on a highway not very far from where I grew up in Alabama . There were huge Indian settlements in the Southeast at the time . At Mavila , in Alabama , DeSoto fought Chief Tuscaloosa's warriors in the battle that produced the largest amount of Indian casualties in the entire history of the USA . About 5,000 of Tuscaloosa's are estimated to have been killed .

Darn, we did so many very, very bad things to our Native American citizens.

I'm noticing something in this and other chats that have to do with similar subjects. I'll need to check it out with a teacher-acquaintance who's half-Cherokee and doing a Master's thesis on forced dispersions. Not to fall into the issue of political correctness, calling the first settlers of North and South America as Native American seems more appropriate than the original term, Indian, that Columbus mistakenly used. (I've been stuck once when conversing with a true Indian from Asia and having to quickly switch to another term when referring to the North American people.) There was an intermediate Amerindian term that I'm seeing less and is a bit of a tongue-twister. In focusing on DeSoto's path, I came across the term First Nations which I don't know if it's just for the Five Civilized Tribes.

as I remember that the village ofTuscaloosa's was nomre village but was fortified and very large. i also think that desoto ws the first european to see th Mississuppee river crosing it and leading his expedition all the way to Arkansas. wasn't there a time when his men were starving and very vulnerable? i have wondred why ar that time th local tribes did not take the advantage and destroy the Spaniards?

view link

"16th-Century de Soto Expedition Offers Scholars a Look at
Earliest Encounters Between 2 Civilizations" (a pdf file)
by Ellen K. Coughlin

Historians and archaeologists track Spanish explorer's contacts
with native societies of Southeast
From Florida, the expedition moved north through what is now
Georgia and the Carolinas, west into Tennessee, back down through
northwestern Georgia, and into Alabama where, at a town called
Mabila, de Soto's army and local Indians engaged in a fierce
battle in which some 2,500 natives perished. From there, de
Soto's party headed northwest into Mississippi and Arkansas.

The only mention of the crew starving was one year after de Soto died.

There is a good map of desoto's various explorations here: view link
All of the above comes from "The Chronicle of Higher Education".

The Spanish Invasion view link

The fighting in the Southeast had been incredibly ferocious. Everywhere De Soto went he demanded food, clothing, and women for his sex-starved men. When threats and diplomacy didn't work, he went on hair-raising killing sprees. But the Indians fought back with suicidal determination; they weren't the supplicants in Powell's paintings.

In the walled city of Mavila, in present-day Alabama, Atahachi women fought side by side with their men in what was one of the bloodiest encounters in five centuries of warfare between Europeans and Indians. Soto's invasion, and the diseases his men left in its wake, led to the destruction of most of what was left of Mississippian culture.



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heidi - Derby, UK