This account is a reproduction of the original "official" report by the secretary of the De Soto Expedition, Rodrigo Rangel. Rangel is presumed to have used a diary he kept throughout the trip as a basis for his report.

The original manuscript of the report by Rangel to the Spanish Authorities has been lost to time and his account remains only in a reproduction created from the original found in a vast compilation of the History of the Indies written by Gonzalo Fernandez de Oviedo, a Spanish official in Havana, Cuba. Although not published until many years later the original manuscript of Oviedo's work survives, and this section probably dates to around 1749. Controversy surrounds how closely Oveido followed the original text, but most scholars believe this to be the most reliable of all the known accounts.

These reproductions are taken from pages 281 and 282
THE DE SOTO CHRONICLES
by Clayton, Knight and Moore