by Tony Horwitz
I headed for a hamlet called De Soto and found more of the same. The town’s name derived from a local legend that the Spanish had camped nearby. But it was better known as home to the “De Soto Nut House,” renowned for its pecan logs and other nutty confections. Sadly, the nut house had closed, its premises now occupied by an evangelical church. A sign in front bore a biblical proverb that De Soto would have done well to heed: “How Much Better It Is to Get Wisdom Than Gold!”
In central Georgia, the landscape shifted, from swampy plain to gently rolling hills and stately antebellum towns, their streets lined with historic plaques telling of Sherman’s March in 1864. Part of the Union general’s route through Georgia paralleled De Soto’s, as did Sherman’s scorched-earth tactics. Both men led invading armies that lived off the land and terrorized natives. Few Georgians, though, were aware of the Spanish precedent. The Civil War loomed so large in Southern memory that the region’s history had been telescoped into the four long years between Fort Sumter and Appomattox.
“De Soto did a lot more damage than Sherman,” Charles Hudson told me, “but he wasn’t a Yankee so no one here cares.” We were sitting at a café in Athens, beside the University of Georgia campus where Hudson had taught for thirty-six years. “It’s not just De Soto that’s forgotten in the South,” he said. “It’s the colonial period and almost everything else before 1861.”
I’d come to see the Georgia professor because the path I’d been following since Bradenton was known, in his honor, as the Hudson Route. The story of how Charles Hudson came to chart De Soto’s march was as tortuous as the ten-state trail he’d mapped across the South. For starters, his academic field wasn’t geography or Spanish history: it was anthropology, a specialty he traced to his upbringing on a Kentucky tobacco farm at the tail end of the Depression.
“It was a very small, very homogenous world. I never met anyone different—not even a Republican, for Chrissakes, until I was well along.” Charles chuckled. “That’s changed, of course.”
Now in his seventies, he still looked the part of a Kentucky farmer: long white hair, silver mustache, wide-brimmed felt hat, denim vest and jeans. But he’d fled his modest rural roots at an early age, in rather the same manner as De Soto: by enlisting as a teenager to serve overseas, in Japan during the Korean War.
“Japan bumfuzzled me,” Charles said. “I was unable to make sense of the fact that people could be so different, and have so much history. In Owen County, Kentucky, we thought we’d just come out of the ground, like the crops.” So when he returned home, Charles used the G.I. Bill to attend college and went on to earn a Ph.D. in anthropology.
After a stint among the Inuit, Charles focused his fieldwork on Indians of the southeastern United States. He was quickly struck by a lacuna in their history. Archaeologists had documented the existence of large, agricultural societies that thrived for centuries before Europeans first arrived. Yet these centralized empires bore little resemblance to the scattered tribes that English colonists later encountered. The period between, from about 1500 to 1700, was what Charles called a “dark age,” little studied or understood.
This led him to Spanish accounts of De Soto’s expedition, known collectively as The De Soto Chronicles, which contain many details about native life. To mine them for anthropological insight, Charles needed to know where exactly De Soto traveled and what societies he encountered. So he started mapping De Soto’s route, thinking this would be a short-term project. Instead, it consumed twenty years of his career and drew him into a contentious public fight.
The first hurdle was the comparative absence of physical markers in the territory De Soto traveled. It’s relatively easy to spot the Grand Canyon or Rio Grande in the writings of Coronado’s men, much harder to tell if a wide, slow river crossed by De Soto in Florida was the Suwannee, Aucilla, or Waccasassa. Also, while much of the Southwest’s despoblado remains empty today, the Southeast’s landscape has been radically reconfigured by dams, farms, logging, and sprawl.
The human landscape offered Charles even fewer historic clues. In contrast to the pueblo people, few southeastern tribes occupy the same land as their distant ancestors. De Soto’s march displaced and destroyed many native societies, and the U.S. government completed the job in the 1830s, when the Indian Removal Act forced most surviving tribes to move west of the Mississippi.
As Charles grappled with these problems, his search for De Soto’s route took on elements of the conquistador’s own obsessive quest. With a team of academic lieutenants, he sifted documents and archaeological data for traces of gold: a bead, a nail, a village name—anything that might lead to De Soto. He pored over topographical maps, which helped strip the landscape of its modern, man-made clutter. When Charles scored a hit, identifying a site he felt confident De Soto had visited, he pinned a red flag to an aeronautical chart on his office wall.
He also took reconnaissance trips, accompanied by his wife, Joyce, who joined us at the café in Athens. “I remember one time, the landscape didn’t fit and Charlie decided he had the whole route wrong,” she said. “He went out that night and got drunk.”
Charles also found himself battling the ghost of John Swanton, a Smithsonian scholar commissioned by the U.S. government in the 1930s to study De Soto’s route. Swanton’s work led to historic markers going up across the South, allegedly tracing the army’s path. But much of his data had since been discredited by archaeological finds and other evidence. When the National Park Service unveiled a proposal in 1990 for a new De Soto Trail based on the Hudson Route, it bypassed many towns that had long taken pride in their connection to the conquistador.
This sparked a firestorm of local protests, and put pressure on politicians to deny the project funding or to get Hudson allies fired from state jobs. Typical of the vitriol was a submission to the Park Service by an elderly Mississippian. “What the hell does some Dr. Phuddy-Duddy Ph.D. from Georgia,” he fumed, “know about the fine details of Coahoma County topography, archaeology, and history?”
In the end, the Park Service recognized “a scholarly consensus” backing the Hudson Route, but decided there was insufficient agreement to establish a national De Soto Trail. Florida and Alabama erected new markers, along the path Charles had laid out, but other states left Swanton’s flawed route intact.
“I riled up the natives, like De Soto I guess,” Charles said. “When you tell folks, ‘Sorry, what your third-grade teacher told you and what’s on your signs isn’t true,’ that gets people upset.”
Joyce, a native of rural Georgia, sensed a deeper regional instinct. “Southerners have a strong sense of place, and it’s often a place where they and their kin have always been,” she said. “It’s their territory. So when you go messing with the history of their place, you’re messing with their identity, you’re messing with them. It’s the Civil War all over again.”
Charles had since retired from the fray. But he still poked at the mystery that drew him to De Soto in the first place: whom did the Spanish meet, and what happened to them? As part of this quest, he’d written a novel imagining the thoughts of a sixteenth-century Indian priest in Georgia.
“Sometimes that’s the best we can do with history,” he said, as we parted in the rain. “Make an educated guess.”
DRIVING FROM ATHENS to Sparta, I picked up the Hudson Route again and followed it east across the Savannah River. To ford the wide, swift Savannah, the Spanish had to tie themselves together. A number of pigs were carried off by the current. Trudging on, through a damp and trackless wilderness, the exhausted and hungry Spanish began to doubt the young Indian guide who had promised to lead them to his wealthy, woman-ruled homeland of Cofitachequi.
Then, in present-day South Carolina, the army came to yet another river and a settled bluff on the other side. For the first and almost the last time on De Soto’s long journey, the encounter that followed was peaceful and enchanting. Indians came down to the river carrying a litter veiled in thin white linen. Inside sat a beautifu
l young woman: the “lady of Cofitachequi,” as the Spanish called her.
Crossing the river in a cushioned, awning-draped canoe, she stepped ashore, removed a string of pearls, and placed it around De Soto’s neck. She also provided canoes to ferry the army to her settlement, where the weary soldiers were given sable blankets and jerked venison. “That land was very pleasing and fertile,” wrote one of De Soto’s men, “and had excellent fields along the rivers, the forests being clear and having many walnuts and mulberries.”
Cofitachequi also had a large mortuary temple, which De Soto promptly looted. Unwrapping burial shrouds, he found bodies bedecked with freshwater pearls, some two hundred pounds in all, as well as ornaments made of copper—possibly the “gold” the Indian guide had promised. The graves also held glass beads and axes, evidence of a Spanish attempt to settle the Atlantic coast a decade before. The goods had been traded or carried inland, along with another European import. Much of Cofitachequi was depopulated and overgrown, the result, Indians said, of a devastating “plague.”
Even so, the province seemed heavenly to the Spanish, who had spent a year marching on short rations through mostly hostile territory. “All the men were of the opinion that we should settle that land,” one wrote. Peaceful, fertile, and rich in pearls, Cofitachequi was only a few days’ march from the coast—a potentially profitable base for servicing ships sailing between the New World and Spain.
De Soto’s men had reason to hope their commander might concur in their wish to stay. His contract with the Crown gave him the right to choose over five hundred miles of coastline as his personal domain, to colonize and govern “for all the days of your life,” with a generous annual salary. But at Cofitachequi it became clear that De Soto had his eyes on a much greater prize. “Since the governor’s purpose was to seek another treasure like that of Atahualpa, the lord of Peru,” wrote one of his men, “he had no wish to content himself with good land or with pearls.”
And so, after a stay of eleven days, the army turned its back on the sea and marched toward yet another land rumored to have “a great lord.” De Soto took along his looted pearls—and also the lady of Cofitachequi. He held the ruler hostage to guarantee safe passage through her land, and to assure he could collect corn and porters from her subjects. Accustomed to traveling in a litter, with a large retinue, the lady of Cofitachequi now had to cross her realm on foot, accompanied by a single servant.
SPEEDING DOWN THE Strom Thurmond Freeway into South Carolina, I phoned an archaeologist who had excavated an Indian settlement believed to have been Cofitachequi. The archaeologist gave me directions to the site, near Camden, S.C., but said there wasn’t much to see. “It’s just a bump in a field.” Also, the site was on private land, owned by a family that didn’t welcome visitors. “If you ask the supervisor of the plantation, he might let you have a look,” she said, ringing off to go teach a class.
By now, I’d seen enough archaeological sites to know they rarely amounted to much. But the mention of a plantation intrigued me. It also seemed a pity to bypass one of the pleasantest stops on De Soto’s route. So I followed the archaeologist’s directions, exiting the interstate by the Wateree River and navigating a small road until I reached a tree-lined avenue leading into a plantation.
Finding the supervisor’s house empty, I drove on to a brick cottage, set fifty yards in front of a columned mansion. A handsome middle-aged woman appeared at the door of the cottage and inquired, rather coolly, “Can I help you?”
Caught by surprise, I burbled something about following De Soto’s route and being entranced by the story of Cofitachequi.
“Which part of the story?” she asked.
“The lady with the pearls going in a canoe to meet De Soto.”
A smile crept across the woman’s face, as if I’d guessed the secret password. “Well, then,” she said, “perhaps I can show you around.”
Marty Daniels belonged to the extended family that owned Mulberry Plantation. Her forebears had been drawn there by the rich soil and river access that Indians, centuries earlier, had recognized as well suited to settlement. Where natives sowed beans and corn, Marty’s ancestors had planted indigo and cotton, seeding a plantation that grew to twenty thousand acres, worked by hundreds of slaves.
Climbing into Marty’s four-wheel drive, we drove through a pine grove to a cleared bluff overlooking the Wateree, a slow brown river about a hundred yards across. At the center of the clearing rose a grassy knoll, no more than six feet high. “That’s Cofitachequi, or what’s left of it,” Marty said.
Excavations of the surrounding land had revealed a large settlement dating back to the thirteenth century, including a workshop for mica, the shiny, thinly layered white rock that natives showed De Soto when he asked about silver. English travelers, arriving in 1670, described Cofitachequi as a still-powerful province, ruled by “an emperor.” But by the early 1700s, its people had mysteriously vanished, possibly having moved west and melded with other tribes.
They left behind a dozen mounds, which incoming planters used as perches for their buildings. In the nineteenth century, an overseer’s cottage crowned the tallest mound; slave quarters covered the others. The mounds had since been leveled for landfill and eroded by floods, exposing bones, pottery, and other artifacts, which Marty had enjoyed collecting as a child. But what she’d loved best was hearing relatives’ stories about the Indian “queen” who greeted De Soto wearing nothing but pearls.
“For those of us born before the women’s movement, the story of this chieftainess had special power,” Marty said, stopping on the drive back to feed her horses. “She was a gracious hostess, a real Southern lady. But she was also this accomplished, independent woman.”
Best of all, the queen eventually succeeded in outwitting De Soto. After being taken hostage and marched across her realm, she entered the woods, claiming she had to relieve herself; instead, she hid, then ran off with her servant and a cane box of pearls. “Whenever we got to the part of the story where she takes the pearls and steals away,” Marty said, “all the girls in our family would go, ‘Yes.’ ”
De Soto later learned that his escaped prisoner had met several deserters from his expedition, including a runaway Indian. He and the escaped queen “held communication as husband and wife,” wrote one of De Soto’s men, “and made up their minds to go to Cofitachequi.” No more is known of the lady and her lover.
Curiously, Cofitachequi later became home to another renowned woman: Marty’s great-great-grandmother, Mary Chesnut, whose diary of the Confederate home front is a classic of Southern literature. Chesnut chafed at her “useless existence” as a Mulberry plantation wife, attended by twenty-five house slaves. It was, she wrote, “a pleasant, empty, easy going life. But people are not like pigs; they cannot be put up and fattened. So here I pine and fret.”
Like Cofitachequi, Mary Chesnut’s coddled world came under attack, and then collapsed; after the Civil War, the plantation was abandoned, as the Indian capital had been centuries before. Marty’s grandfather later restored the Chesnut mansion to its antebellum grandeur: formal drawing room, spiral staircase, busts of Scipio and Caesar, shelves filled with books such as Cotton Is King.
Marty lived more modestly, “back of the big house” in a renovated slave cottage. On her mantel perched an ambrotype of Mary Chesnut in a formal gown, black hair pulled back. Marty, with her fair, uncoiffed hair and muddy jeans, didn’t take after her forebear. Though taught by a plantation tutor before attending boarding school and Sarah Lawrence College, she’d spent most of her adult life outdoors: rock climbing, wrangling horses, and roaming the country in a beat-up camper van, banding hawks.
“I guess I identify with the natives here more than with my Mulberry ancestors,” she said, showing me another picture, this one of a striking longhaired man at an American Indian rally. This was Marty’s boyfriend, Val Green, who belonged to the Catawba, the tribe that came to occupy Cofitachequi after its original inhabitants fled.
Val was due to visit that evening and Marty invited me to join them for dinner. The man who drove up at sunset in his pickup truck was a combination of Indian and backcountry Carolinian: dark brow, long black ponytail, flannel shirt and jeans, deep Southern drawl, and “Catawba” written on the front of his baseball cap. Settling by the fire, Val told me that he saw a natural kinship between his Indian and Southern bloodlines.
“If you read the early English accounts, they describe how the Indian men hunted in the morning and evening and hung around like hogs in the day,” he said. “Just like good ol’ boys today. Indians loved their ball games, too. And their beans and corn and barbecue and tobacco. There’s a lot of Indian in Southern culture.”
There was a lot of Southern in Indian culture, too. While pueblo people had been partly Hispanicized, adopting Catholicism and Spanish surnames, Indians in the Southeast took on the language and customs of English and Scotch-Irish settlers. Most became Baptists, though the Catawba were predominantly Mormon, owing to the arrival of missionaries in the nineteenth century. During the Civil War, every Catawba of military age served in the Confederate Army. Most tribal members now lived on a reservation an hour north of Mulberry and worked on farms or in textile mills, much like their non-Indian neighbors.
In Val’s case, the cultural fusion extended to politics. Each year, he donned a black armband to protest Columbus Day, and at election time he cast write-in votes for Geronimo. But he was also a Southern nationalist, who believed the region should secede again. To him, the Indian cause and the Lost Cause were the same.
“Both are fiercely antigovernment,” he explained. “Indians are basically conservative people—they want to be left alone with their land and traditions, same as Southerners. There’s no way to preserve what we have without getting out from under the Union.”
