The Mastiffs and Greyhounds were brought along to hunt, attack, kill, and eat Indians. Professor Hudson hints that DeSoto's men occasionally turned Indians loose simply for the sport of having their dogs track and kill them. But he was deadly serious when he observed; "the dreadful truth must be that there was little else for the dogs to eat but Indians" (Ibid., p. 85).
The extremely fecund pigs not only served as food, but also as larder. Numerous times many escaped into the countryside and undoubtedly contributed mightily to the diseases that wreaked havoc on the Indians. Swine "transmit anthrax, brucellosis leptospirosis, trichinosis, and tuberculosis" (1491, p. 112). Charles Hudson concludes "it is likely that the principal impact of the epidemics on the Indians of the Southeast was during the last quarter of the sixteenth century and the first quarter of the seventeenth century, and the mounting archeological evidence confirms this" (Hudson, p. 422).
Without all the illuminating detail that one finds in Knights of Spain, Warriors of the Sun -- which is a fascinating guide, not only to the probable path taken by the De Soto expedition, but also to the different Indian cultures that the invaders exploited and occasionally destroyed along the way - Charle C. Mann succinctly informs us that De Soto's expedition "wandered through what are now Florida, Georgia, North and South Carolina, Tennessee, Alabama, Mississippi, Arkansas, Texas, and Louisiana" (1491, p. 110).
The wandering was sparked by a lust for gold and silver, which they never found. But the wandering was driven by the intelligence provided by captured Indian chiefs, who could only, at best, give him hearsay about land rich with gold, or, at worst, deliberately lead him astray. Often, the wandering was diverted by the need to find corn and water and avert the frequent threat of starvation.
A particular pattern developed. If an Indian settlement was unaware of the approaching Spaniards, De Soto's men would surprise and capture the chief, interrogate him and hold him hostage, even after his men brought the demanded food. But, if news of the wicked Spaniards preceded their arrival at a given village, the chief usually would hide. In such cases, De Soto's men would capture a few of the village's Indians, cut off their noses and right hands and send them back to the village with the threat to treat all the villagers similarly until the chief agreed to meet with De Soto. As W. Fitzhugh Brundage informs us, in his book, Civilizing Torture: An American Tradition, Harvard, 2018, such "nose-cropping" was "a mark of extreme dishonor in early modern Spain" (p. 13).
In most cases, the chiefs would relent. On one occasion, when he was presented five captive Indians, De Soto queried the first one about the location of his chief. When he refused to answer, De Soto had him burned to death in front of the others. When they still refused to talk, De Soto had them burned as well. (Hudson, p. 171).
A few chiefs pretended to comply, only to set traps for De Soto and his men. Most notable was the ambush set by paramount chief Tascaluza, an imposing figure who was half a yard taller than the Spaniards. The ambush took place in the fortified village of Mabila (near modern day Selma, Alabama) on October 18, 1541. "The Indians quickly killed five of the Spaniards who were inside the palisade. All the others who were in the town, including De Soto, were wounded. De Soto fell to the ground two or three times while running for the gate, but those who were near him helped him to his feet" (Ibid., p. 239).
"Once outside the gate, the Indians immediately killed the horses that were still tethered there. Others led the chained Indian porters inside the palisade, removed their chains, and thrust bows and arrows into their hands" (Ibid).
De Soto's forces launched a counterattack that succeeded in burning Mabila to the ground. Thousands of Tascaluza's Indians were killed, but not their chief, who seems to have escaped. In doing so, however, the Spaniards also burned most of their own possessions and were left without food or clothing.
Mabila had the effect of convincing many of De Soto's men that "it would be impossible to subjugate such free and bellicose people" (Ibid., p. 248) It also sowed dissension in the ranks that led to a "near mutiny" (Ibid). The battle and near mutiny had a profound effect on De Soto. Thoughts of establishing a colony were dashed. "He may have seen death as the only acceptable outcome left for him, and he may have been willing to take everyone else down with him. He began to waste the lives of both the Indians and his own men" (Ibid). Foolishly, his men obeyed his order to travel north, away from the rendezvous point where Spanish men, ships, and relief awaited them - as well as an explicit admission of defeat.
After fruitless further wanderings, De Soto died on May 21, 1542, leaving his men "in a land in which they were lost" (Ibid., p. 349).
After more aimless wandering and killing under the leadership of Luis de Moscoso, the expedition finally conceded defeat and headed east and then south down the Mississippi River, with 322 Spaniards and 22 horses, to Panuco, Mexico, and Spanish civilization.
During De Soto's expedition, many Indians were captured to serve as slaves. Those who didn't die along the way suffered the pangs of forced relocations. But De Soto's were but a small portion of the massive number of Indians enslaved by the Spaniards. "In the sixteenth century at least 650,000 indigenous peoples were enslaved and forced to relocate to foreign lands throughout the inter-American and transatlantic Iberian world" (Blackhawk, p. 463).
The expedition was a disaster for both the Spaniards and the Indians, but especially for the Indians whose population not only suffered destruction and dislocations due to military defeats, but also unimaginable desolation due to disease. As a consequence, the Indians of the Southeast were compelled to coalesce into new social and cultural entities.
As Alan Taylor puts it, "The new confederations exemplified the widespread process of 'ethnogenesis' - the emergence of new ethnic groups and identities from the consolidation of many peoples disrupted by the invasion of European peoples, animals and microbes " In fact, after 1700 most North American Indian 'tribes' were relatively new composite groups formed by diverse refugees coping with massive epidemics and collective violence introduced by colonization" (p. 74)
Nevertheless, notwithstanding this ethnogenesis and notwithstanding my focus on the spread of dehumanized Christian White supremacy across North America, Pekka Hamalainen is certainly correct to remind us that it was "a world that remained overwhelmingly Indigenous well into the nineteenth century ". [R]ather than a 'colonial America,' we should speak of an Indigenous America that was only slowly and unevenly becoming colonial " (Pekka Hamalainen, Indigenous Continent: The Epic Contest for North America, Liveright, 2022, p. ix).
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