ping
Living in Desoto county MS, I can only say he walked through my living room on the way to the Mississippi
What???
They found a 500 year old desoto in florida?
Does it run?
Interesting story! I believe it was De Soto’s contact with the Timucua Indians where De Soto described how the Indians would take the scalps of slain enemies as war trophies, putting to rest the false claim that the Indians learned it from the white man many years later.
Also, I had an old New Mexico history book that claimed when Coronado looked for Grand Quivara in Kansas he heard of whites to the South East and tried to make contact. He failed.
It also mentioned he left behind two priests at their behest to convert the Indians. They even built a chapel on the plains, but when they wanted to go and convert a neighboring enemy tribe, their own Indian converts killed them.
OK, I admit it...I clicked on this because I thought it was a car thread.
This kind of find just amazes me. Who knows what might be just below the surface, just under our feet? And sitting there for hundreds of years waiting to be rediscovered.
It’s pretty amazing that Spanish explorers had so much more trouble with the North American Indian tribes than with the sophisticated civilizations of the Mayans, Incans and Aztecs. Of course, North American Indians were fighting Uncle Sam two hundred and fifty years after the first English settlers set foot on Plymouth Rock, so it’s clear they were of hardy stock.