De Soto
da so'to, Ferdinand, a Spanish soldier and explorer. He was born about 1496. He accompanied Pizarro in his conquest of Peru. Being deceived by reports as to the wealth of Florida, he was eager to explore that country. Charles I made him governor of Cuba and Florida. In 1538 De Soto sailed for Cuba with ten ships, 600 men in armor, and a complement of sailors. Leaving his wife to govern Cuba, he landed at Tampa Bay, Florida, June 10, 1539. He sent most of his ships back to Cuba and started westward with his army in search of gold. He began the march with a number of horses. He brought also a flock of swine, which he purposed to drive along for food in case provisions should become scarce. Many of these are said to have escaped into the forest, and to have been the ancestors of the half wild razor-back hogs formerly characteristic of the Southern States.
The first winter was spent on the banks of the Flint River in Georgia. The command subsisted largely on corn and game obtained from the natives. In the following spring De Soto and his men, burdened with heavy armor, toiled painfully over the Appalachians into the country of the Cherokees. Here they spent several months, wandering up and down the valleys of the Alabama in search of gold. In a battle with the Choctaws a score of his men were killed and two hundred were wounded. One Spanish chronicler of vivid imagination avers that 70 Spaniards and 11,000 Indians fell in the conflict. The second winter was passed on the banks of the Yazoo River among the Chickasaws. In May, 1541, De Soto discovered and crossed the Mississippi River somewhere not far from the present site, it is believed, of Memphis. In the presence of a body of natives, stated at 20,000 although there may not have been more than a dozen, De Soto erected a huge cross made from the trunk of a pine tree, and took possession of the Mississippi in the name of the king of Spain. After resting a few days the adventurers went up the western shore, it is thought, as far as New Madrid, Mo. The ensuing summer and winter they spent, still searching for gold, in the wilderness drained by the head waters of the Arkansas in a vain endeavor to reach the Spanish coasts in Mexico. In the spring of 1542 they returned to the Mississippi. De Soto contracted a fever and died. His soldiers buried him at first in a trench near an Indian village; but fearing either that the Indians might discover and mutilate the body, or else that the savages might discover that the great captain was dead and thus be emboldened to attack the now weakened and dispirited army, they hollowed out the trunk of an evergreen oak, placed the body of De Soto in it, weighted the rude coffin with armor, and sank it in the bosom of the "Father of Waters."
This expedition was in many respects the greatest and most remarkable expedition of exploration ever undertaken in the New World. It is to be regretted that those who lived to tell the story were not content with the statement of the plain facts.