Hernando De Soto

Preface

AMONG all pioneers in the exploitation of the New World, whether Spaniard or Frenchman or Briton, Hernando De Soto has left his impress upon the annals of more of its countries than anyother who could be named.

Cortez is connected solely with the story of Mexico ; Pizarro is famed only for his venturesome deeds in Darien and Peru; the name of La Salle is never mentioned save in connection with the exploration of the Mississippi Valley.

De Soto is known, like Pizarro, in the history of Darien, or modern Panama. Like Pizarro, also, he is known prominently in connection with the Conquest of Peru. And the Peru of his day included not only Peru as we know it now, but also Ecuador, Bolivia and Chili — in fact, nearly all of the western portion of the South American continent.

But, unlike Pizarro, his exploits do not end there. He is inseparably connected also with the history of the settlements of Nicaragua and Guatemala, and with the earliest explorations of Yucatan.

At still another time he was Governor of Cuba, and as such he will live in her annals.

After Ponce de Leon and Narvaez, he became the explorer of Florida. So far as we know, he was the first white man to traverse the States of Georgia,

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Tennessee, Alabama, Mississippi, Arkansas, Oklahoma, and Missouri. To these we may add, with great likelihood, North Carolina. It may be that Cabeza de Vaca preceded him in Louisiana, but this is quite doubtful. If, indeed, Ayllon's men had first trod the soil of South Carolina, it was left to De Soto's men to discover their bones, and bring back the story of their fate.

Not only was he the discoverer of the Mississippi, but of the Chattahoochee, the Tennessee, the Alabama, the Tombigbee, the White, the Arkansas, the St. Francis, and the Red rivers, besides a multitude of smaller streams.

He it was who, first of Caucasians, set eyes on the Appalachian and the Ozark ranges, which include all the highlands of importance in the United States east of the Rocky Mountains. All these discoveries he had made forty-five years before Raleigh sent his colonists to Roanoke Island, sixty-five years before the settlement at Jamestown, and seventy-eight years before the Pilgrims disembarked at Plymouth Rock.

One peculiarity of the history of the Southern and South Central States of the Mississippi Valley consists in the fact that though it begins with De Soto, it also ends with him for the time being, to be resumed only after a great hiatus of nearly three hundred years.

Barring the establishment of a few towns near the seacoast, like New Orleans, and the accomplishment of a few expeditions like that of La Salle, those annals, from the discovery of the Mississippi to the early years of the Nineteenth Century, are well-nigh a blank.

On the spot where the Spaniard first beheld the

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waters of the Great River, is now a city of nearly two hundred thousand souls; but ninety years ago that city had no existence. The history of Oklahoma begins with De Soto ; but Oklahoma was only opened to the civilization of the white man yesterday.

On reading the chronicles of De Soto's expedition, we learn the most intimate facts regarding the peoples inhabiting the South in his era. Their virtues, their faults, their eccentricities, are set out in exact detail. The features of the country are described with such an accurate hand that pioneers yet surviving declare that the picture is a faithful portrayal of the same region in their youthful days. Even trivial details regarding the weather are given, almost with the exactness of an official report, so that we know whether this day or that was rainy, or bright and cheerful.

Then follows a period of unillumined darkness, without a history, and well-nigh without a tradition.

Looking back to De Soto's time, we are as one who stands upon the foreland of a continent, gazing over the waters at night to a brilliant light on an island far in the distance. The light has illuminated the rock upon which it burns; we can see the billows breaking at the foot of the rock; we can distinguish human beings treading the sands that fringe the narrow isle; but between us and the light itself is a great gulf of darkness, mysterious and profound.

Through this explorer, the history of the Mississippi Valley is connected with the golden years of the Renaissance.

On that memorable day in May, 1541, when De Soto first stood upon the Chickasaw bluffs overlooking the Great Stream, Michelangelo, still persistent and untiring at the labors of his art, was putting the viii Preface

finishing touches to his Last Judgment; he was not to cease his earthly toils till twenty-three years later, in 1564, that illustrious year which also witnessed the birth of Shakespeare, of Christopher Marlowe, and Galileo. Titian was then in the meridian glory of his genius: Martin Luther had five more years to live: Camoens, a youth of seventeen, was not to give his Lusiad to the world until more than three decades had passed. Elizabeth, the British Semiramis, was then a light-hearted child of only eight years. Mary Stuart was born the next year, and Henry IV of France twelve years thereafter. Francis Drake — that Robin Hood of the seas, destined to destroy Spanish naval supremacy forever, — was only a prattling infant in his mother's arms. Writers like Spenser and Tasso and Cervantes, philosophers like Bacon, painters like Rubens, explorers like Raleigh, were not to flourish till the next generation. At that time English literature — since attained to such greatness — was adorned by only one star of the first magnitude — Geoffrey Chaucer.

Those great regions at the foot of the Ozarks which to-day, for the first time, the Caucasian is claiming as his own, but which De Soto explored nearly four hundred years ago — those great regions through him find their connecting link between this, the Twentieth Century, and the Sixteenth — between the age just preceding that of Bacon and Galileo, and the era of Marconi and Edison.

It is interesting to note the many points of similarity between these two ages, — probably the two greatest the world has ever seen, — that of De Soto and our own. The years that closed the Fifteenth Century and opened the Sixteenth were brilliant and poetic:

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those that closed the Nineteenth and opened the Twentieth seem less romantic and attractive, but their noble achievements are often along the same high planes of endeavor whereon were attained the greatest triumphs of the Renaissance.

That elder age is supreme in the fine arts, the younger in science. But beyond this divergence we find their efforts paralleling each other. And indeed we find the scientific discoveries of Copernicus and Leonardo Da Vinci in that earlier period more important, probably, than those of Bell and Edison in our own day.

We may call one the time of religious upheaval. But if that epoch had its Luther, the other had its Darwin.

We may say that one was emphatically an era of discovery, of exploration and colonization. But with equal emphasis the same assertion may be made of the other. The discovery of America by Columbus has its complement to-day in the discovery of the north and south pole. If one cycle can boast that the route to India was opened in its own day by Vasco Da Gama's circumnavigation of the Cape of Good Hope, the other, with equal pride, can claim that it shortened the same passage by digging the Suez Canal. If the ships of Magellan first doubled Cape Horn in the one, the Isthmus of Panama is first traversed by fleets in the other.

If the first age discovered the Amazon and the Mississippi, it was the privilege of the later to uncover the secret sources of the Congo and the Nile.

If in those early years Spain and Portugal were each struggling for mastery in the western world, seeking through colonization to extend the bounds

Pref ace of their great American dominions, to-day we find England and France and Germany, and Italy and Belgium as well, colonizing and exploring Africa with a view to divide the whole continent between themselves.

The Spaniard has often been accused of an inordinate thirst for gold as an incentive to his great explorations. But has not this same desire for gold, in our own time, been the impulse which led to the settlement and development of California, of Australia, of South Africa and Alaska? Who can distinguish here between the motives of the Iberian and the Anglo- Saxon?

But the striving after gold, a selfish and debasing thing in itself, has often been the means by which men have achieved higher and better things. How insignificant is the value of all the gold annually mined by California, when compared with the plenteous gifts of her farms, her gardens and her orchards! The gold fields of Australia, — what a trifle is their entire output when matched against the vast wealth arising from the flocks of sheep, the herds of cattle and the fields of grain of that southern continent !

Yet that search for gold was the primary cause leading to the development of those great regions, and it is the primary cause which in the future will make of Alaska and South Africa empires which else had never existed, even in dreams.

These modern adventurers, seeking for apples of gold, have found in the gardens of Hesperides other and more goodly trees, loaded with fruits far sweeter and more satisfying.

De Soto's own career was the first to prove this. He failed in the search for precious metals, but opened

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to the world a region whose thousandfold sources of fruitfulness make mean and insignificant those barren wastes that stingily yield their little tribute of silver and gold. The cotton alone, produced in those States which he first traversed, is worth each year more than the entire annual yield of gold by the whole world.

Florida, which claims De Soto as one of her pioneers, is to-day making greater strides than in all the other centuries since his time. Oklahoma, which, as we have already seen, beheld him as the first of white men, has to-day, for the first time, been opened to his race, and in such a marvelous onrush of immigration as the world was a stranger to before.

De Soto's age was in truth like our own, and De Soto was himself a type of the American of to-day, — one ever striding onward, heedless of difficulties, and despairing of nothing as impossible. His one effort is to rear an empire in the wilderness, or failing in the attempt, to leave the work to his successors, who may accomplish the task with less effort, since he has gone before and eased the way.

The dangers, the hardships and the sufferings encountered two hundred and fifty or three hundred years later by pioneers like Daniel Boone and David Crockett, were but repetitions, on a smaller scale, of the fearful difficulties which De Soto met in his day.

Famine, fire, and flood opposed him; every marsh reeked with malaria; every day's journey brought a new scene of warfare; every forest was the seat of an ambuscade; treachery lurked on his right hand and on his left; massacre of his comrades was momently expected, and continually becoming a reality.

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The inconveniences and privations endured by Lewis and Clark and their companions on the overland march to Oregon, were but as pastime in comparison with those suffered by the intrepid Spaniard and his followers.

Much has been written concerning the hardships to which the gold-hunters of California and the Klondike were subjected. Their pioneer spirit has been made the theme of many a song and story. But their trials seem insignificant when matched against the multitudinous afflictions and obstructions which were encountered by De Soto.

The expedition of Baker, the travels of Livingstone, and the later marches of Stanley through the wilds of Africa, appear like pleasure excursions when contrasted with the achievements of the discoverer of the Mississippi.

In personal character we find De Soto easily superior to the other great Spanish conquerors. He was more humane than Balboa, and when we reflect upon the atrocities of Cortez, the Pizarros, Pedrarias, or Narvaez, we wonder at the magnanimity not rarely displayed by De Soto.

It is true that he was often imperious: it is true that his measures were often severe. But if we estimate him by the era in which destiny placed him, we will again and again be gratified at instances of uprightness and generosity most unusual among his peers.

Let it not be forgotten, besides, that he who deals with savages is often provoked to act savagely himself. Should the white man seek to deal kindly with an

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inferior race, he learns soon enough that his leniency is construed as an evidence of weakness. Every act of clemency on his part calls for more exorbitant demands upon his patience.

In making way for the march of civilization, the barbarian must necessarily suffer. Enlightenment comes not with peace, but a sword.

De Soto was not more stern in dealing with the Indian than were the Colonists of Virginia or New England. Nor were the excesses of his soldiers more condemnable than those of some of the allies in China a decade ago. This language of Prescott in The Conquest of Peru, written nearly seventy years ago, describes a condition existent in much more recent times :

"There is something in the possession of superior strength most dangerous, in a moral view, to its possessor. Brought in contact with the semi-civilized man, the European, with his endowments and effective force so immeasurably superior, holds him as little higher than the brute, and as born equally for his service. He feels that he has a natural right, as it were, to his obedience, and that this obedience is to be measured, not by the powers of the barbarian, but by the will of his conqueror. Resistance becomes a crime to be washed out only in the blood of the victim. The tale of such atrocities is not confined to the Spaniard. Wherever the civilized man and the savage have come in contact, in the East or in the West, the story has been too often written in blood."

I have called De Soto, I think justly, the King of Pioneers. The story of his life is an Epic of Civilization.

True, it undeniably is, that if he had his infirmities, xiv Preface

all other idols, ancient or modern, have had feet of clay. All popular heroes have been mythologized : their shortcomings have been concealed or condoned or denied. Beneath the adulations of countless multitudes, their earthly connections have been obliterated, like the feet of that Roman statue, which, though wrought of bronze, through century after century have melted away under myriadfold kisses from the lips of the faithful.

One hindrance experienced in an attempt to place before a reader the surroundings of De Soto in his adventurous career consists in the fact that the world wherein his part was played is a world that has wellnigh passed away.

Few travelers would detect in the sordid and commonplace environments of modern Panama any traces of that virgin paradise which the early Spaniards beheld in bygone Darien. The wayfarer in Peru would search uselessly to-day for any adequate memorial of the unique and picturesque civilization of the Incas.

If we pause to realize the changes that have taken place in the aspects of those regions of our own country over which De Soto wandered, we shall be not less startled at the transformation. Not only has the white race supplanted the red: not only has there arisen a new language and a new religion; but the very expression of nature itself has changed. The sublime primeval forest has well-nigh become only a memory. The region immediately south of the point where De Soto discovered the Great River was in his day a land of running waters. To-day in that

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whole tract there is hardly a stream which runs throughout the year. Forests and watercourses have passed away together.

The vast herds of bison which roamed the prairies west of the Mississippi in legions more multitudinous than the numberless hosts of Xerxes, have dwindled to scanty groups of stragglers whose very existence is momentarily threatened, and whose extinction to-morrow would be a certainty save for rigid protection of the strictest laws.

The immense flocks of wild pigeons, whose innumerable flying cloud-squadrons darkened the sun for hours in passing, are remembered by but a few old men and women whose final summons has only been delayed through some caprice of fate. The great throngs of Carolina parrots which laid waste the Indian's cornfields, and which the pioneer farmer sought to exterminate like so many swarms of locusts, are only to be seen in little remnants, and then but rarely, in the remotest and most inaccessible swamps of Florida, and possibly of Louisiana.

So far as the features of Nature herself are considered, the England of Chaucer is the England of to-day. Barring changes among men themselves, the France of Villon is the France of the Twentieth Century. But he who would know the America of De Soto's pathway must seek it only in the realms of historical memory.

And let no one overlook the fact that a study of the great and varied aspects of Nature in the lands conquered or explored by De Soto is essential to a true understanding of his career. References to them are not merely agreeable diversions: a consideration of them consitutes no digression from the chronicle xvi Preface

itself. In describing them, a writer is not luring his reader into a by-path ; he is guiding him into the veryfootsteps of De Soto himself.

As the sands of the Sahara and the currents of the Niger blended with the lives of Caillie and Mungo Park; as the miasma of the mid- African jungle became a part of the life-breath of Livingstone; as the polar snow and ice mingled into the very existence of Arctic explorers like Greely or Peary, — so the terrors, the beauties, the fascinations and deadly dangers of the untrodden American wilderness are interwoven for all time with the story of Hernando De Soto.

Strange it is, that while so many epics, so many lyrics, so many romances, have been written concerning the strife of man with his fellow-man, his more constant and more trying conflict with the common antagonist of all humanity — Nature — has only been lightly touched upon in prose or verse. Yet in that conflict his greatest battles have been fought, his most heartbreaking defeats have been encountered, and his noblest victories have been achieved.

Bards and historians alike have celebrated loudly the triumphs of Hannibal and Napoleon over men like themselves. Their conquest of the Alps is reserved for pseans less exultant. Yet we know that the great Corsican, before whom the Russian battalions could not stand, was himself driven in hopeless defeat before the rigors of the Russian winter.

And the contest with Nature is one which all must face; it is inevitable; it is unavoidable; it is one that, from the cradle to the coffin, ceases not. We may live in peace with our neighbors; or we may contend with them, grow weary of strife, and agree to an armistice. But with Nature we can never negotiate

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a truce; between us there can be no cessation of hostilities.

While in civilized life we may be dimly conscious of this great conflict going on around us, to the pioneer who nakedly must confront Nature as a foe armed with all the barbaric power of an unshorn Samson, the struggle is far more imminent and appalling.

And so in the life of a pioneer like De Soto, the fight against Nature is no mere episode, no passing phase of his mission. It is the beginning, the middle and the end of all his labors.

If his fate leads him, like the gold-seeker of Alaska, into Arctic realms, the nine-months winter is an enemy to be reckoned with, though the scowls of unfriendly Esquimaux he may overlook or despise. If he is a wayfarer through the desert, he learns to dread the sirocco and the sand- whirl wind more than the Bedouin horde.

If his path, like that of De Soto, lies through the tropical forest, he will encounter in the earthquake, the volcano, the hurricane, the tangled swamp, the raging flood, the serpent and wild beast, pestilence and famine, adversaries more terrible than savage bands. This the life of the discoverer of the Great River has demonstrated. For he who overcame the barbarian in an hundred hand-to-hand conflicts, sank as a martyr at last before the more insidious agencies of death that swarmed unseen on the tainted air of the vast marshes of the Mississippi.

The changes in the face of Nature herself, already adverted to, are not more remarkable than the changes in the human tribes encountered by De Soto on his marches.

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He whose idea of those people is fashioned after the Indian depicted on some cheap vaudeville stage, — a stolid, sullen, blanketed creature, coarse and repulsive, croaking only in monosyllables, — is imagining a race at the very opposite pole from those impulsive beings whose eloquence in expression and heroism in action are so vividly portrayed by the chroniclers of De Soto's last expedition.

And even to judge those people by living savages of the western plains, roaming two thousand miles away, four hundred years afterward, when those savages, dispirited from uncounted defeats, are, we may say, not even themselves any longer, — is not this like judging the Egyptian in his prime by the Egyptian of to-day?

The Portuguese Gentleman, whose narrative, veracious to a painstaking degree, is evidently based upon memoranda made from day to day, records, verbatim, numerous graceful and spirited addresses of the native chiefs to the Spanish leader. He and the other chroniclers, personal witnesses to the facts, in numberless instances show that these natives, instead of being the taciturn and sluggish-minded churls of popular fancy, were open-hearted and emotional to a degree unknown among races more pretentious. The barbaric eloquence of chiefs like Logan was no rarity among the chiefs of De Soto's time.

Many travelers like Bartram, who roved among those Indians in later centuries, while conceding their fierceness when aroused, never fail to yield tribute to their virtues on brighter occasions, — the generous and lofty nobility of the men, the sweet and gentle delicacy of the women.

Besides this, Bartram brings many convincing

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proofs to show that these tribes had approached much nearer to civilization in other centuries than his own, — the Eighteenth. In this opinion he is corroborated through most abundant evidence adduced by that scholarly Georgian, Charles C. Jones, whose researches, among those of all Southern archaeologists, have been the most thoughtful and careful.

I am wide awake, of course, to the fact that the present era is considered an unpropitious one for all forms of verse. I am likewise thoroughly aroused to the popular belief that at this time an attempt to construct a poem of any length is an exhibition of temerity.

But the mere passing foibles and fashions of a day need not be seriously considered by any one who writes with the slightest degree of earnestness. It is inconceivable that forms of literary expression which have been esteemed for over three thousand years could be outlawed by the volatile caprice of a moment. That which has been in favor heretofore will be in favor hereafter. The whole matter can be expressed in a single sentence: Whatever has been once will be again.

If this work should meet with the approbation of the few whose judgment I really esteem, I would be content. And contentment is happiness without wings.

W. M.

Book I

Hernando De Soto, and his cavaliers, having arrived in the kingdom of the Chickasaws, pitch their camp for the winter — The snow storm — The Spanish camp and its fortifications — De Soto's tent — The Chief of the Chickasaws visits De Soto — De Soto's officers — Lulla, the daughter of the Chief — The Chief's narrative, and the history of his tribe — The boundaries of the Chickasaws — Chactas and Chicsa — The sacred pole and the dog — Arrival at the Mississippi, where the dog is drowned — The white giants, and the great beasts they enslaved — Battles between the giants — The making of the prairies — Destruction of the giants and their beasts by the Great Spirit — Disappearance of the last and mightiest of the brutes beyond the Mississippi.

THE snows were thickly falling. Hills and plains, Woods, brakes and fields, were garmented in white.

From leaden skies great flakes came fluttering down, Till Earth seemed lost in fleeting clouds of heaven; Through shivering branches of the haggard trees They curved and quivered in ecstatic swirls, Snatching the dead leaves from their blackened stems And driving them in derision through the sky. The brook below the hill was hid : the path That ran beside it seemed a vanished dream. The forest in the distance first grew dim, Then was concealed in misty veils of white. Men's eyes were blinded by the pelting flakes; Their breath was stifled by the freezing blast.

Yet as in mockery of dead summer days, Earth seemed to swarm with spotless butterflies ; From withered arms of vulgar wayside weeds Hung pallid clusters of aerial blooms; And thorn- trees, bristling like the porcupine, Grew downy as the bosom of a swan.

Two days before, at noon, the storm began: Without surcease, till dusk it raged. Keen winds Whistled more keenly as the twilight fell, And all men hoped that the relentless blast, Sweeping the heavens, would leave unclouded stars. Throughout that night thin fell the flakes and rare, But morning brought new clouds and heavier snows. All day the white wings flitted through the air In whirling spirals, round and round above, Resting awhile, then whirling on again, Like ghostly doves from tomblands of the dead. All night the winds and silent snowflakes wove A shroud to fold the corpse-like earth. At last This day had come — but come with no relief! The third night now was falling ; yet on high The barbarous tempest swept in fury still, And everywhere was nothing seen but snow.

Here in the country of the Chickasaws De Soto lingered, * exiled, far from home, Defeated, baffled, bound he knew not where, Yet in his lone heart ever cherishing The dark, deserted nest, whence, long ago, Had flitted all his darling hopes and dreams. Now at the advent of this eventide, Threading with painful steps the drifted fields To gain his tent, and rest beside its fires,

Book I 5

Backward he turned, and saw keen-pointed lights

From wigwams in the little Indian town,

Twinkling through falling snows. Deeply he sighed,

For never might he glimpse on earth again

The welcome lights of home ! Instead, he gazed

On alien wilds, in desolation such

As fills the wanderer's bosom with despair.

That morning through the Indian town his feet

Had sauntered aimlessly. There had he seen

A hoary patriarch of the savages,

Who, shivering as he hugged a scanty fire,

Fretfully muttered, "Though my head is bowed

From ninety snow-moons — grayest of the gray

Among our elders, — never have I known

A winter half so bleak. " 2 His ancient squaw,

Wringing her bony hands above the flames,

Mumbled, "No, no; nor shalt thou see its like,

Though twice as many winters yet are yours."

O, what a sequel to his golden dreams ;

To what a climax had his drama come!

Where now the palms of Cuba? Where, where,

The fruits and flowers of tropic Darien?

Where now the gold and silver of Peru,

The mellow dusk of Cuzco's gilded halls?

Where now the Andalusian orange groves,

The dear gray towers of Cadiz? Where had fled

The glamour and romance, the chivalry,

The pomp and splendor of the court of Spain?

All, all had vanished! Had he been content,

Love, gold and glory still had been his own.

Now he was seeking El Dorado ! Where,

And when, when, should that dear dream come true?

When should he see that kingdom of delight,

Its gardens, green with everlasting spring,

And crowned with palace-domes of glittering gold?

His locks were frosted now with gray; his eye,

Clear as the falcon's once, was growing dim.

What had he reaped in all his hard career

But curses of the savages, whose realms

Had paid him tribute of enslaved or slain?

He looked around him, and the answer came, —

His hopes lay shrouded in this land of snow.

Around the Spanish tents, a barricade

Of earthworks and of heavy logs arose,

Surmounted by the brushy limbs of trees,

And girded by a flooded moat. At north,

South, east and west, four lofty towers arose,

Where, night and day, on watch four sentries stood,

Alert for every danger. From the walls,

Like eyes of basilisks whose glance is death,

An hundred loopholes glared : through these, the troops,

Hidden themselves, with ease might spy their foes,

And sweep them with a murderous fire. A bridge

Of three stout beams before the fortress gate

Spanned the wide moat by day; but every night

The beams were drawn within. Of massive oak