Ferdinand De Soto The Discoverer of the Mississippi River

In Spain and all Europe, men were willing and eager to cross the western ocean to learn more about the lands Columbus had found. The early discoverers and explorers thought that these West Indian islands were the East Indies, off the coast of Asia. They wished to reach the mainland and get the gold, gems, spices, and silks which Polo had told them were to be found there. Wealth, even beyond their dreams, the Spaniards found. Seeking Cathay, they reached Mexico and Peru, rich in mines of gold and silver. Our famous American historian Prescott, tells the story of the conquest of Mexico by the Spaniards under Cortez and the conquest of Peru by the Spaniards under Pizarro. Like a fairy tale is the history of how a handful of men entered the unknown lands and made themselves masters of their wonderful treasures. It is a sad story too, of the greed and cruelty of the conquering white men, of the suffering and ruin of the gentle natives.

Some of the Spaniards, turning a little to the north, reached land on Easter Sunday which they call Pascua Florida, flowery Easter. In honor of the day the Spaniards gave to this land of flowers the name Florida, which was applied to all the country north of Mexico. All the flowers of that fair land, were not so charming to Spanish eyes as one ounce of gold, and for this they roamed the country far and wide. It was not gold, however, which Ponce de Leon sought. His hair was turning white and he listened with eager credulity to tales of a fountain whose waters would give perpetual youth. Landing on the coast of Florida in 1513, he wandered hither and thither in a vain search for this longed-for fountain. Instead of finding it, he received his death wound in a fight with Indians.

A few years later, Narvaez was made governor of Florida, and he came with a force of three hundred men to conquer it. His troops made their way through trackless swamps and forests and among hostile Indian tribes, across the peninsula to the Gulf. Here they constructed rude vessels in which to go to Cuba or Mexico. Through shipwreck, starvation, and disease, the four hundred were reduced to four men who after nine years of hardships and wanderings reached a Spanish settlement in Mexico. There one of them, De Vaca, met and talked with a young Spanish captain, Ferdinand De Soto.

Ferdinand, or Hernando, De Soto belonged to a Spanish family that was both poor and noble. As a youth, he attracted the attention of a gentleman of wealth who took charge of him and educated him. It was not, however, the patron’s wish that De Soto should marry his daughter; when he found that this was the young folks’ plan, in order to separate them he took De Soto on an expedition to the Isthmus of Darien. There De Soto distinguished himself by his courage and his daring coolness.

In 1528 he left the service of his patron and went on a journey of exploration, in search of the passage supposed to connect the ocean west of Spain with that east of Asia. Columbus, Cortez, and others had searched for this water-way which, as you and I know, does not exist. De Soto explored more than seven hundred miles of the coast of Guatemala and Yucatan. As he found no passage between the two oceans, he decided that there was none and gave up the search.

In 1532, De Soto with a band of horsemen joined Francisco Pizarro, the leader of the army which invaded and conquered Peru. He was nominally under the command of Pizarro but was really the master of his brave band of three hundred volunteer horsemen. Some historians say that the brave De Soto did more to secure victory than did the cruel Pizarro. At all events, the higher glory belongs to the young cavalry-man; he displayed more humanity in his dealings with the natives than any other Spanish leader and he endeavored to prevent the murder of the captive Inca, or emperor, of Peru.

The wealth wrested from the conquered Peruvians enriched the Spanish invaders. De Soto, who had landed in America with “nothing else of his own save his sword and shield” became master of a fortune of “an hundred and four score thousand ducats.” He returned to Spain and married Isabella, his patron’s daughter, from whom he had been separated about fifteen years. But he was not content to rest at home. The age’s spirit of adventure and love of wandering was in his veins. Remembering De Vaca’s tales about Florida, he persuaded the emperor Charles V. to appoint him governor of Cuba and to grant him the region of Florida to explore and conquer at his own expense. Adventurers flocked to join him, hoping that in the unexplored land of Florida they would find treasures to equal or surpass those of Mexico and Peru.

De Soto’s wife went with him as far as Cuba, and there he bade her farewell—a final farewell, as events proved—and in May, 1539, he set sail with five vessels for Florida. He landed at Tampa Bay on the west coast. From the first he encountered hardship and opposition. Florida was occupied by Indian tribes naturally fiercer and more warlike than the Mexicans and Peruvians; they had met with cruelty and outrage, the outrage and cruelty of the Spaniards under De Leon and Narvaez. Almost everywhere De Soto found ready-made foes, expert with war club and bow and arrow. For nearly four years he and his men wandered from place to place, through morasses and forests, seeking gold and treasure but finding them not. Disappointed in his search he grew bitter and merciless. “He was much given to the sport of slaying Indians,” says one old historian.

The exact route that De Soto followed is in many places hard to determine. He wandered through Florida and Georgia, probably into South Carolina and Tennessee, and perhaps as far as North Carolina,—then he turned southward and approached Mobile Bay. On this southward march was carried the Indian chief Tuscaloosa. At Mauvila, or Mabila, near Mobile Bay, a desperate battle took place in October, 1540, between Tuscaloosa’s warriors and the Spaniards. The Spaniards bought victory with the loss of eighty men and forty horses, which could ill be spared. They lost not only forces but hope.

From that time De Soto’s wanderings seem to have been animated by a dogged resolution not to return without honor and treasure. He learned that his men planned, as soon as they reached the Bay of Pensacola, then less than a hundred miles away, to give up the expedition. Swiftly he resolved that they should not reach Pensacola. Instead of going toward the coast and the ships containing supplies, he set his face to the wilderness and marched northward. “He determined to send no news of himself until he should have discovered a rich country,” says an old annalist.

“He was an inflexible man and dry of word,” wrote one who knew him, “who, although he liked to know what the others all thought and had to say, after he once said a thing he did not like to be opposed; and as he ever acted as he thought best, all bent to his will.... There was none who would say a thing to him after it became known that he had made up his mind.”

Traveling to the northwest, in May, 1541, he reached “a deep and very furious” river, so wide that “a man standing on the farther shore could not be told whether he was a man or not.” This was the Mississippi, the Father of Waters. The Spaniards made boats and crossed the river and continued their wanderings on the other side, going northward nearly to the Missouri River. Month after month they sought gold; at last they turned southward from the vain search. On the homeward journey, De Soto was taken ill. He faced death as fearlessly as he had met every foe before. He bade farewell to his men, thanked them for their loyalty and faith to him, and advised them as to the choice of a leader to take his place.

The Spaniards did not wish the Indians, to whom they had represented themselves as immortal, to know that death had overtaken their great captain. Therefore, in the dead of night they sunk his body in the Father of Waters, near the junction of the Mississippi and Red Rivers. After wandering about for several months, they constructed frail vessels and trusted themselves to the stream. They reached the mouth of the river and made their way along the coast until the remnant left by disease and warfare arrived at a Spanish settlement in Mexico.