The only site linked with certainty to De Soto is _Anhaica_, once the
principal town of the Apalachee Indians.
This numerous and powerful people resisted the Spaniards’ intrusion
into their country in autumn 1539, harassing the march and burning
villages to deny food to the army. At _Anhaica_ De Soto found an
abandoned town of “250 large and good houses.” The Spaniards settled
in and spent five months here. They scoured the countryside for
provisions, seizing quantities of maize, pumpkins, beans, and dried
persimmons. The Indians raided the town twice and set fires. When the
army departed in spring, they carried enough maize to last them across
200 miles of wilderness.
[Illustration: Artifacts from the Tallahassee site: bits of chain
mail (top), an arrow point (above); a copper coin minted in Spain
between 1505-17; the metal tip of a cross bow dart.]
[Illustration: Digging also turned up fragments of olive jars of the
type shown at left. The chain mail shirt at right above shows the
type of body armor worn by Spaniards in the first decades of the New
World conquest. The jar and shirt were not found at the site.]
The exact site of _Anhaica_ lay unknown for 450 years. It was discovered
by accident in 1987 by archeologist Calvin Jones while searching in
downtown Tallahassee, Florida, for a 17th-century Spanish mission.
Digging on land planned for development, he and others recovered many
16th-century Spanish artifacts (iron, coins, olive jar fragments, beads,
the mandible of a pig) in context with Apalachee pottery. Analysis left
no doubt that this was the site of De Soto’s first winter camp.
[Illustration: The female cacique of Cofitachequi, apparently a
woman of considerable authority, greeted De Soto’s army with
ceremony and gifts of food and clothing. Though she had befriended
the expedition, she was seized as a hostage and guide but eventually
escaped. Artist Louis S. Glanzman illustrates the cacique as she may
have appeared at the time of the encounter.]
She gave De Soto strands of freshwater pearls and let the men take more
from tombs located in mounds raised above the ground. They were not very
good pearls and had been discolored by being bored with redhot copper
spindles. But they were the closest things to treasure the men had found
so far, and De Soto filled a cane chest with 350 pounds of them.
Won by the pearls, the lush countryside, and the navigability of the
Wateree-Santee Rivers, which drained southeast into the Atlantic, the
men wanted to found a colony there. De Soto refused. There was not
enough food at Cofitachequi for the army. Moreover, he was still hoping,
in the words of the Gentleman of Elvas, for another windfall “like that
of Atabalipa [Atahualpa] of Peru.”
The place to investigate, he heard, was off across the Appalachian
Mountains to the northwest. Seizing the cacique who had befriended him,
he forced her to enlist a portion of her subjects as porters and
domestics for the disgruntled men. They moved rapidly through South
Carolina into western North Carolina. By trails that had never before
seen a horse, let alone a herd of pigs, they crossed the mountains into
the tumbled region of the French Broad and Pigeon Rivers. There the
cacique of the pearls managed to escape. As usual, there was no gold.
Hoping, presumably, to meet the ships coming from Havana with supplies
and reinforcements, De Soto at last turned south through the land that
Creek Indians later occupied in northern Alabama. As they traveled down
the Coosa River, they entered a new chiefdom and there laid hold of a
tall, disdainful leader named Tascaluza. De Soto demanded women and
slaves. With pretended meekness Tascaluza provided the army with a
hundred porters and then secretly sent word ahead to his warriors in the
stockaded town of Mabila, from which today’s Mobile takes its name, to
prepare an ambush. When the town came into sight, De Soto carelessly let
the main part of the hungry army disperse to forage. Leaving the
fettered bearers outside the entrance, the general and a handful of
aides entered the village with Tascaluza. Hot words soon broke out, and
the Indians hurled themselves at the enemy. The Spaniards clustered
around their leader. Although five were killed and De Soto was knocked
down a time or two, they managed to fight their way back outside. During
the uproar the porters picked up the food, armaments, and other baggage
they had been carrying and rushed inside the stockade with it, to join
Tascaluza’s people.
Assembling his soldiers, De Soto launched attacks against all sides of
the barricaded town. With axes and fire the yelling Spaniards smashed
through the palisades. While the battle raged from house to house, the
tinder-box town went up in flames. Realizing they were being defeated,
some of the Indians threw themselves into the fire rather than
surrender. The last survivor hanged himself with his bowstring. Reports
of Spanish losses range from 18 to 22 killed and 148 wounded, including
De Soto. Somewhere between 7 and 12 irreplaceable horses perished and 28
were injured. Indian losses were estimated by a chronicler at 2,500.
Since landing at Tampa Bay, the Spaniards had lost 102 men from all
causes. The chest of pearls De Soto had hoped to send to Cuba as a lure
for replacements had disappeared in the fire, along with most of the
army’s spare clothing, weapons, and food. Yet when the interpreter, Juan
Ortiz, told De Soto of Indian reports of ships in Mobile Bay a few days
away, he ordered him to stay silent. He knew the men would desert if
they thought they could reach the ships, and his pride could not
tolerate that. Go home empty-handed, beaten, and disgraced? Never.
He rallied the army. For 28 days the healthy doctored the wounded with,
said Garcilaso de la Vega, unguents made from the fat of dead Indians.
Their commander moved among them, bolstering their spirits, so that when
he ordered them to face north again, they obeyed, though they all knew
that ships from Havana had been scheduled to meet them somewhere.
They followed the Tombigbee River into northeastern Mississippi to
Chicaza, where they wintered (1540-41) among the Chickasaw Indians. When
they made their usual request for porters, women, clothing, and food for
the spring march, the Chickasaws responded one day at dawn by setting
fire to the section of the town in which the invaders were bivouacked.
The confusion was total—and perhaps a salvation for the Spaniards.
Several terrified horses broke loose and stampeded wildly. Their squeals
and the pounding of their hooves, and the sight of De Soto and a few
others who had managed to get mounted bearing down on them with lances
(before De Soto’s saddle turned and he fell heavily) frightened the
Indians into flight.