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Introduction
Part I
De
Soto Comes To Carolina
In the moonlight the scene seemed something from
a fantasy. The long deserted town gave the impression that its inhabitants
had just departed for some unearthly realm, leaving the city intact.
But the weeds growing in the streets and the cold and tumbledown hearths,
the night noises and the lonesome howls of distant wolves closed in
about the group of Conquistadors huddled around the roaring fire at
the city’s edge. At the furthest reach of the fire's light sat, on white
bear skins, resplendent with colored feathers, the Lady of Cofitachequi
surrounded by her attendants. Across from her sat the red faced and
bearded Adelanto Hernando De Soto, his hand resting on his huge jeweled
sword, stuck in the ground of this place in the New World
like a cross. Behind him crowded his Knights, gentlemen of Spain and
Portugal to be sure, but mostly second or third sons of aristocrats.
They were here in the New World seeking adventure and fortune, most
here at their own expense. In this entourage stood a man whose
name is lost to history, a man that would write one of the four surviving
accounts of De Soto's journey, a Portuguese Knight known to us as The
Gentleman of Elvas.
This intent little group watched as a copper colored
man, almost naked, dressed only in a loin cloth made of deerskin, traced
his stick on a sand pallet meticulously laid in the dancing light of
the fire. Eagerly they watched as the Pathfinder performed the sacred
magic of showing one where a place was located, and, more importantly,
how to get there. His nimble hands shaped mountains far away, and his
stick drew the course of great rivers. He pulled well worn, colorful
stones from his pouch and placed them carefully, each with a showy chant,
to represent the cities and fords and forests of this imaginary world
he was creating. The translators chanted on, in an almost intelligible
fashion, winding out the mystery of the shaman’s map to the Spaniards.
But the Spaniards were no strangers to maps, and they knew without translation
what the Pathfinder showed them. They didn’t know that the pathfinder
left a few of the colored stones in his pouch that evening. Those stones
were representatives of the vassal states of Cofitachequi that extended up the Catawba River.
During his exploration of the tombs of the ancestors
of Cofitachequi here in this forgotten town, once the main
city of Cofitachequi
but deserted in De Soto's time, the Adelanto had discovered an unusual
axe or hatchet with a metallic head. It had lain mixed among the other
weapons of war placed there to honor the dead, mostly wooden maces with
bone or stone warheads. Although the treasures he had hoped to find;
emeralds, rubies and sapphires; were absent, he had found a wealth of
large, fresh water pearls buried with the dead. But now this strange
warhead consumed him, and he had his best chemist inspect this small,
crude piece of metal. The chemist, feeling the softness and observing
the natural luster and sheen of the un-worked material knew it was native
copper, however, knowing what the Adelanto desired he announced that
it might well contain some small percentage of gold mixed in.
This was music to De Soto’s ears. So far in his
year long march across La Florida
the results had been disappointing. They had heard rumors of great riches
and wonderful kingdoms like those he had seen in Peru
with Pizzaro, but the reality always seemed
just over the horizon. In stead of riches his men had often found hardship
and extreme hunger. Across the swamps and forests of modern
Florida from Tampa
Bay or possibly points south
they had come marching, finding little along the way. They had fought
a vicious war with an unrelenting aboriginal foe, the Apalachee, during
their stop for the winter at a point that would one day be Tallahassee.
They were all too glad to leave those environs with the first signs
of spring, and they had wandered across the land that would become south
Georgia, eventually turning toward the east seeking the supposed treasures
of Cofitachequi.
On the way they had become lost in a howling wilderness, the wilderness
of Ocute they called it, where by design of their crafty guides
or by accident the army lost its trail. This coincides with the Savannah
River Valley,
an area archeologically known to have been deserted in the 1540s, possibly
in the midst of an extended drought or due to extended warfare. In typical
fit of rage Soto threw most of his guides to his dogs, who tore them
limb from limb, and then he sent his most trusted captains out in each
of the four cardinal directions seeking signs of human habitation.
This army was something never before seen on the
continent (although another like it was at the same time wandering across
the Southwest under Coranado). Soto had with
him a mounted band of Knights and adventurers 300 strong, all decked
out in medieval armor, their horses draped in chain mail and decorated
with bells and bright banners. Alongside marched about 300 footmen.
Veterans of the wars of Europe and many of the
conquests of the Inca and Aztecs these men were rough in character and
often cruel in spirit. Armed with crude muskets and lighted matchcords marched some, while others carried the more conventional
crossbow of the times. An assortment of slaves and servants, and some
number of wives and prostitutes accompanied the army, as did a pack
of “war” dogs and about 300 pigs and their drivers.
From point to point the army enlisted, usually by
force or threat of force, a large number of porters, or tamarines.
These were in actuality nothing but unfortunate slaves extorted from
the populations through which they passed. These poor wretched souls
carried the food taken by the army from the towns through which they
passed, and marched clankily along chained at the neck to one another. If one
was to collapse under the load it is said that the keepers would cut
off the unfortunate’s head to release him from the chain, rather than
stop the sad procession to unlock him. The army also enlisted a number
of young native girls, torn from their homes and families, to satisfy
their carnal lust. These sad beings would be discarded at trailside
as the army saw fit. De Soto had been ordered to make friends and
convert the Indians he found, but he had also been given the authority
to punish those who resisted subservience to the King of Spain. De Soto's
Expedition was a 4 year traverse of the Southern United States; from
Florida to the Carolinas and Tennessee, then across Alabama, Mississippi
and Arkansas before his men finally floated the "Father of Waters"
through Louisiana and on to Texas and Mexico. It was a journey which
he wouldn't survive. On his way he did a lot more "punishing"
than proseletsizing, and the brutality and greed of his army have become
legendary, and are a blight on the history of man. In his path he left
a legacy of European diseases, Smallpox, Measles and Syphilis and more,
plauges to which the natives had no resistance. Thousands upon thousands
died in the years following, and those great civilizations through which
he marched dwindled and fell apart in the century and a half before
the English and French settlers and explorers began to find their way
into those same areas.
De Soto and his army practiced terrorism, rape,
murder, and even genocide and germ warfare on a continental scale.
But history is what it is. We remember the horrors of Ghengis
Khan, the transgressions of the Persians against the Greeks, the Roman
"Rape" of Carthage and the terrible exploits of the Conquistadores
in the New World not to glorify the deeds, but instead only because
they occurred, and in occurring they changed what we are today. Had
the Southern Civilizations of Native America remained strong would the
American Revolution turned out the way it did? Would we ever have developed
our so called Manifest Destiny that carried the United States to the
Pacific Coast? Had the accounts of De Soto not been published in the
17th century describing those distant lands would so many settlers have
flooded into the New World? And were it not for these explorers accounts,
even though they be destroyers as well, we might now have no link to
the peoples of that distant world except for the weathered mounds and
broken pottery they left scattered across the landscape.
The shortage of food in the wilderness of Ocute
had caused Soto to release his porters and send them back down his path
starving, and the army had subsisted for weeks on the butcher of pigs
from the herd. The horses however, who couldn’t eat the pork, nor graze
on the hard April grasses were suffering, and many were dying. The situation
had become desperate by the time one of his captains returned with two
frightened women he had discovered looking for roots in the forests
to the south. They told Soto of their village in that direction,
and of the path from there eastward to Cofitachequi.
Within hours the army was on the move in that direction. A few days
later the army’s point men finally discovered a major village
of Cofitachequi,
probably a site on the Wateree
River south of Camden,
SC. It was at night when they emerged
on the banks of a wide river and could smell the cooking fires and hear
the voices of women and children across the stream in the dark. By morning,
when Soto and his vanguard arrived, the Spaniard’s presence was known
in Cofitachequi and a delegation had been sent across the river
to greet them.
The Lady of Cofitachequi
was carried across the river as regally as a new world Cleopatra, robed
in white fur and feather, she was ferried into
De Soto’s presence by a
fleet of huge canoes. She told De Soto
she was the niece of the Queen of Cofitachequi, and that she was in this city to see to the
Queen’s business there. She offered food be ordered over to his starving
men and to see to the bringing of enough boats to ferry De
Soto and his army over the river. She seemed
strangely unimpressed with the horses, weapons and armor of these strange
men who had suddenly appeared on her country’s doorstep.
De Soto
would discover later that the people of Cofitachequi
had met the Spaniards before. While there he would see rosaries and
beads given the Indians in trade, and other items salvaged from the
ill fated settlement of De Allyon on the South
Carolina Coast 12 years before. De Allyon
had only been on the coast for a few months before his men revolted
and he died of disease. His men promptly began a feud for power and
killed one another, while the Indians watched on in horror at their
behavior. Finally a mere handful had built crude ships and sailed away.
They left a cruel legacy with the people of Cofitachequi.
The lady told De Soto her
people had been dying of a strange disease for many years, depopulating
much of the southern lands of their realm. In fact, she related, in
some deserted towns bodies were stacked unburied, like cordwood. Such
a city was their one time capital city where the great mounds contained
the tombs of shier ancestors.
The visit of De Soto’s
army in late April and early May 1540 at Cofitachequi
was often tenuous and downright unfriendly; the Lady escaped into the
woods at one point and De Soto
had to have his Knights search her out. Guides sent to lead his men
to the Lady committed suicide rather than betray her. After De
Soto threatened harm to her subjects she returned.
When the town ran out of food and the Lady offered his men another town’s
supply, claiming that she owned that particular cache. The town, Ilsala,
50 miles away! She was disappointed when De Soto
sent much of his army on, but remained behind with his Knights and a
large force to continue his visit. In desperation she offered him the
tombs of her ancestors, that silent “city of the dead” a dozen miles
up river, and with that bait he finally departed. However, probably
not to her surprise, he forced the Lady to go with him.
Now, that night in the firelight, De
Soto sat surrounded by the knee deep loot ransacked
from the tombs. Most of the treasures of this great race, this most
legendary of the rich kingdoms of La Florida
were of little or no value to De Soto.
The ornate wooden war clubs, shell headdresses, feather shields and
painted furs, the most sacred and treasured relics of generations of
this land were treated with more contempt than common trash and refuse.
The bones of revered ancestors were kicked around and fed to the dogs.
Most of the pearls found, and there were thousands upon thousands, had
been bored by fire and discolored, made worthless to a European. Only
a small number were truly Gems, and many of those were in the personal
possessions of the Lady, and she was sworn to protect them with her
life. De Soto let that be
for the time being, but she and her retainers were never allowed out
of his clutches.
And then there was that axe head. We’ll never know the origin of the
idea, it was so perfect in affect that it may have come from the Lady,
or her behind the scenes counselors. It may have been just the simple
truth. But when he asked about the source of the metal for the relic,
he was told that it had come from the Chiscas. He was told that those in that land traded in such
metals and had an abundance of it in their homeland far to the north
over the mountains. I’m sure you could see it in the Conquistador’s
eyes at that moment that he would go there. And so the Lady called in
her best Path Finders and traders, advisors that knew the northern trails,
and that night with great fanfare they answered De
Soto’s queries as to how to get to the Chiscas.
They told him there were two routes to the Chiscas. The first was direct, and followed up the course
of the great river that flowed by Cofitachequi.
They told him however that in crossing the mountains beyond the confines
of their lands and vassal states there were mountains that his horses
couldn’t cross. The second route was less direct, but it crossed the
mountains at a low gap, and then would take him to the land
of Chiaha.
They described Chiaha as a kingdom rich in
corn, and subject to the great King of Coosa. In this land he could
find all the corn he desired, and then could travel up the valleys he
found there for easy access to the Chiscas.
De Soto determined the second
was the best, for his horses and men were still struggling with hunger
in the early spring famine.
The Lady and all of Cofitachequi
must have breathed a sigh of relief, for they had neglected to tell
De Soto that the first and
most direct route would take him through the very heart of Cofitachequi’s
breadbasket, the rich and settled lands of the Catawba
River Valley.
Instead, after sending word to Gallegoes and
the main part of his army to depart from Isala
and proceed to meet him on the trail, he departed northwestward on May
12, 1540 on route to the Chiscas
via Chiaha. With him he took the Lady, her
retainers and her pearls as hostages to the truth of the tale told him
in Cofitachequi.
The Gentleman of Elvas, years after the event,
relates “[At Cofitachequi] we saw some copper hatchets which they said
had a mixture of gold. However, the land was thinly populated as far
as that region and they said that there were mountain ridges, which
the horses could not cross. On that account, the governor did not wish
to go [ to Chiscas] by direct road from Cofitachequi". The Gentleman
probably never knew it, but 25 years later a fellow soldier in De Soto's
army, Sergeant Juan Pardo, would return with his own expedition to Cofitachequi.
He would take that "direct route" to the Chiscas twice, once
in 1566 and again in 1567, and he would find it to be anything but "thinly
populated. Pardo found it a land rich in corn and heavily populated.
Archeological evidence confirms that in De Soto's time it was the same.
Those who told De Soto the direct route was "thinly populated"
were telling a tale, though their description of the mountains along
that route was closer to the truth.
I am still working on the next
section so this will take you on to
Henderson Co NC on May 27, 1540, 12 days later.
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