The Hernando De Soto Expedition

1993 Choice Outstanding Academic Book, sponsored by Choice Magazine. The De Soto expedition was the first major encounter of Europeans with North American Indians in the eastern half of the United States. De Soto and his army of over 600 men, including 200 cavalry, spent four years traveling through what is now Florida, Georgia, Alabama, North and South Carolina, Tennessee, Mississippi, Louisiana, Arkansas, and Texas. For anthropologists, archaeologists, and historians the surviving De Soto chronicles are valued for the unique ethnological information they contain. These documents, available here in a two volume set, are the only detailed eyewitness records of the most advanced native civilization in North America—the Mississippian culture—a culture that vanished in the wake of European contact.

From 1539 to 1542 Hernando de Soto and several hundred armed men cut a path of destruction and disease across the Southeast from Florida to the Mississippi River. The eighteen contributors to this volume?anthropologists, ethnohistorians, and literary critics?investigate broad cultural and literary aspects of the resulting social and demographic collapse or radical transformation of many Native societies and the gradual opening of the Southeast to European colonization.

In 1536, De Soto became rich when he helped lead the Spanish conquest of the Inca empire in South America. He continued his explorations through what is today the southern United States, seeking gold and glory. He and his men wandered through a large area

In the 1500s, Hernando de Soto traveled throughout Central America and Peru, as well as the southeastern areas of the United States, in search of treasures and land for Spain. Although he may have had Spain’s best interests at heart, de Soto and his expedition left a deadly trail of disease in their wake. De Soto would never find the rumored riches he sought. But he did discover the Mississippi River. Labeled the most brash of all conquistadors by the time he was only thirty-six years old, readers will relish the adventures of the Spanish-born explorer on his quests.

Originally published in hardcover in 1997 by The University of Georgia Press; published with additional material in 2018 by The University of Georgia Press.