De Soto Commissioned to Conquer and Govern Florida: Chickasa and Mississippi

The news of his ships that were doubtless laden with clothing and provisions gave De Soto joy; but his spirits were soon clouded by a conspiracy which had been formed among some of his followers, to abandon him and sail in the ships from Pensacola to Spain or Peru. This discovery changed his plans. He resolved to turn his back upon his ships and go deeper into the wilderness. This determination was announced on the 18th of November, 1540. The order to march northward fell upon the ears of the discontented ones like a clap of thunder. It was made potential by a threat to put to death the first man who should speak of the ships.

Northward the Spaniards marched, and on reaching the waters of the Black Warrior River, they were met by a large force of Indians in battle array, who longed to avenge the destruction of their friends at Manbila. The news of that tragedy had spread over a vast region, and kindled the fiercest hatred of the Spaniards in the hearts of the natives. Hundreds of opposing warriors were swelled to thousands, and De Soto was compelled to fight his way inch by inch through the land of the Choctaws. At length, after passing over the uplands of Mississippi--a beautiful, fertile and populous region--he reached the upper tributaries of the Yazoo River in Yalobusha county, and encamped in front of the town of Chickasa, the capital of the Chickasa nation. It was now December. Ice and even snow appeared and chilled the troops, and De Soto resolved to pass the winter there in a sheltered camp. The chief of the Chickasas feigned friendship for the Spaniards. It might have been real had the latter been wise and just. But they were not. Cruelty and wrong, as before, marked their dealings with the natives. When March came and De Soto thought of marching forward, he demanded of the Chickasa chief two hundred men as burden-bearers. The cacique answered the demand by a furious attack upon the Spanish camp on a dark night, during a wild gale from the north. The assailants came in four columns, with horrid yells and the hideous sounds of wooden drums and blasts on conch-shells. Before the sleeping Spaniards were fairly roused from their slumbers, their huts, made of cane and straw, were in flames, fired by arrows bearing torches. Blinded by the smoke, they ran out of the houses half-dressed, some leaving their weapons behind them. Horses in stables perished, and many swine, in roofed pens, were burned to death. The conflict that ensued was terrible. The Spaniards fought valiantly as best they might, and finally drove their dusky assailants into the forests. But the disaster to the Europeans was greater than that which befel them at Manbila. They had lost forty of their diminished number. The only Spanish woman in the camp--the wife of a soldier--was burned to ashes. Fifty horses had perished, and most of the men saved nothing excepting what they had on their backs or in their hands.

The remainder of the inclement season was passed by the Spaniards in great wretchedness. Cold and hunger, and grievous wounds tortured them; and the Indians fell upon them night after night like fierce tigers. At length, the warm sun of April alleviated their sufferings, and De Soto moved on in a northwesterly direction, in search of the land of gold about which he had dreamed so long. The exasperated savages assailed him everywhere, and at a town called Alibamo, he had another desperate encounter with them. Then he moved on, and in May he stood upon the banks of the Mississippi River, in Tunica county, near the lower Chickasa Bluffs, above the mouth of the St. Francis River. The mighty Mississippi, then full to the brim, filled De Soto with admiration. He had not found gold, but he was the first European who found the great river upon whose bosom floats, annually, wealth a thousandfold greater than the mines of Mexico or Peru ever yielded. He was not the conqueror of a country teeming with a weak people; but he had achieved a conquest far more glorious than Cortez or Pizarro had done, and had secured immortality for his name and deeds.

Still thirsting for gold, and expecting to find the Pacific Ocean not far off, De Soto crossed the Mississippi River; traversed the lagoons of Arkansas; climbed over the great Ozark hills, and penetrated the country west-ward almost to the eastern slopes of the Rocky Mountains. For a year he wandered in those wild regions; wintered far up the Arkansas River, and in the month of May, 1542, returned to the Mississippi at a point a little north of the mouth of the Arkansas. He now gave up gold-seeking; and on the eastern bank of the great river, in Bolivar county, Mississippi, he selected a site for a colony among a tribe of savage sun-worshippers. They showed intense hostility to the Spaniards; and when De Soto, in an address to them demanding their submission to his arms, called himself a child of the Sun, they ridiculed him. "If you are a child of the Sun," they haughtily replied, "return to him, dry up the Mississippi, and we will submit to you."