The de Soto expedition
The only eyewitness account — and the reason it was the last
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Hernando de Soto led a Spanish expedition that between 1539 and 1543 marched through what are now the south-eastern United States. The expedition's four accounts are the only description we have of the Mississippian world functioning, and are therefore indispensable — while the expedition itself is a prime suspect in the collapse whose prelude it documented. The herd of pigs they drove along is a likely vector. This is why later English colonists met a thinly peopled landscape and drew the conclusion that it had always been empty.
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A Spanish expedition of six hundred men wandered for four years through what is now the south-eastern United States, hunting for gold they never found. They saw large, populous towns. The pigs and diseases they brought spread onward, and when the next European arrived a century later, the towns were gone.
Sources
- Hudson, Knights of Spain, Warriors of the Sun (1997)
- Clayton, Knight & Moore (red.), The De Soto Chronicles (1993)
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