by Tony Horwitz
Discovery of the Mississippi, a painting in the U.S. Capitol Rotunda by William Powell
Most inaccurate of all was the painting’s portrayal of cowering Indians. In reality, natives patrolled the Mississippi in an armada of two hundred canoes packed with warriors in battle regalia. The dugouts, bedecked with shields, awnings, and banners, “had the appearance of a beautiful fleet of galleys,” wrote one of De Soto’s men. Each afternoon, for the duration of the conquistador’s monthlong stay by the Mississippi, Indians gave a great shout and rained arrows on the Spanish camp.
The river itself, as first described by the Spanish, was of little interest except as an obstacle. The lone recorded detail concerning De Soto’s arrival at the river was his discovery of “an abundance of timber,” suitable for rafts, which the army set about building. Then, before dawn on June 8, De Soto ordered the four barges loaded with “men who he was confident would succeed in gaining the land in spite of the Indians and assure the crossing or die in doing it.”
Natives evidently hadn’t expected a predawn crossing, and left the opposite shore undefended. But the river trip was nonetheless daunting. The Mississippi was larger than the Danube, wrote one awed Spaniard: so wide, another man added, that “if a man stood still on the other side, one could not tell whether he were a man or something else.” He was also struck by the river’s fish, including one ungainly species, “a third of which is head,” with “large spines like a sharp shoemaker’s awl.” This is the first European description of a catfish.
Most fearsome of all was the river’s current, which sent uprooted trees shooting through the roily water. Men in the rafts had to paddle almost a mile upriver before crossing, so they could land at a designated spot across from their camp. Finally, after five difficult hours, the Spanish succeeded in ferrying every man and beast across.
“They gave many thanks to God,” one Spaniard wrote, “because in their opinion, nothing so difficult could ever be offered them again.”
BY THE TIME I crossed into Mississippi, I’d compiled a small album of colorful claims on De Soto by the towns along his route. In Georgia, there had been the De Soto Nut House; in Alabama, the De Soto Caverns and their aboveground amusement park, with cartoon cutouts of Spaniards and Indians battling at “De Soto’s Squirt Gun Maze.” A nearby town displayed a block-length mural titled Chief Coosa Welcomes De Soto to Childersburg. This was strange, since I’d already visited Coosa’s capital two hundred miles back, in north Georgia. But Childersburg, like many towns, refused to acknowledge the Hudson Route and stood by a decades-old claim that it was the true site of Coosa.
Mississippi was even stauncher in its defense of De Soto lore. Entering the town of Aberdeen, I pondered a sign stating, with startling specificity, that on December 16, 1540, De Soto “marched up what is now this street.” Two hours on, I reached a town that outdid even Aberdeen: Hernando, seat of DeSoto County. Town fathers in the nineteenth century laid out Hernando in Spanish colonial style, with a twelve-street grid and a central plaza. The courthouse, decorated with murals of De Soto, had a red star set in the marble floor, marking the exact spot where the conquistador slept on his way to “discovering” the Mississippi.
As to where, precisely, De Soto launched his army across the river, almost every county along the Mississippi awarded the honor to itself. Each competing claim was buttressed by the work of local antiquarians who had found irrefutable proof that the True Crossing began in their district. After spending several days studying these hermeneutic tracts, and trying to follow historic markers as elliptical as pirate maps, I began to appreciate why Charles Hudson had needed years to elucidate De Soto’s path across the South.
Characteristically, the Hudson Route bypassed all the traditional claimants, instead meeting the river near an unsung community called Walls, just below Memphis. So I followed a small road west from Hernando until it dipped, suddenly, from a wooded bluff into the low open plain of the Mississippi Delta. A carpet of green and coffee-colored fields spread before me, wet and lush even in winter.
The Delta is one of the most fertile plains on earth, layered, like a rich chocolate cake, with alluvial soil scooped up by the river during its long course through the continent. The Delta is also the nation’s poorest region, a legacy of its settlement by former slaves who were reenslaved after the Civil War, as cotton sharecroppers. When mechanical pickers displaced field laborers, many Deltans were left stranded in rural ghettos, of which Walls remained one.
Entering the town, I passed sagging weatherboard shacks, derelict public housing, and the sorriest trailer park I’d ever seen, with snarling dogs chained before battered single-wides. At the only open shop, a convenience store, I asked the woman at the counter if she could direct me to the site of De Soto’s riverside camp.
“Say who?”
“De Soto. The Spanish explorer who discovered the Mississippi near here.”
She chuckled, lighting a Kool. “There’s a few Mexicans at the trailer park. Could be he’s there. Ask me, I’d take a gun.”
A lean, tattooed customer came over. “There’s an old river landing down the road where we used to go and get drunk,” she said. “Don’t know the history, but that might be your spot.”
Lacking other leads, I followed her directions, into a maze of back roads, none of which brought me to the river. Then I saw a dirt track leading to an earthen levee. At the top of the embankment stood a sign that read, “No Loaded Weapons or Shooting.” As the road dipped down the levee’s other bank, the Huck Finn in me stirred. The Mighty Mississippi, the Father of Waters, lay just ahead.
If only I could see it. My view was obscured by a black cloud pouring from a truck parked on the riverbank. Going over to see whether anyone needed help, I found two men in grimy camouflage standing by the truck’s tailgate. They were stuffing something into a dented trash can from which billowed flames and foul-smelling smoke.
“What are you doing?” I asked.
“Cooking wire,” one of them said. He poked in the can with a stick and held up a tangle of singed copper wire. “Scrap dealers won’t buy it with the insulation on. So we come down here to burn off the plastic. Folks don’t like you doing this near town, on account of the smell.” Once stripped, he said, the wire brought 75 cents a pound, which struck me as a difficult and unpleasant way to make a living.
“What are you doing?” the man asked.
“Looking for where De Soto crossed the Mississippi.”
He heaved another coil of wire into the can. “Coulda been here, coulda been anywhere. It’s a big river.”
I gazed out at the water. The river was turbid and swift and a mile or more wide, just as the Spanish described. But the bank was paved with ugly concrete slabs, held together by wire mesh: revetments, the men said, to guard against erosion. A barge loaded with coal churned past. The wind shifted, enveloping us in acrid smoke from the wire inferno. My inner Huck withered.
En route to Walls, I’d conceived a vague plan to cross the river in a small craft, so I could grasp a little of what the Spaniards experienced in their rafts. But the wire burners said they’d lived their whole lives by the Mississippi and rarely ventured on it. “Definitely not now, not in this water, no sirree,” one of them said. “Not in anything smaller than a tugboat.”
I tried my luck downriver, only to hear the same refrain at every landing. The water was too high, too rough, too unpredictable, a vortex of unseen dangers. Boats got caught in whirlpools or crushed by hidden dikes; were capsized by huge waves from passing barges; were speared by sunken trees, called blues, which filled with gas and exploded out of the deep, like torpedoes. “It looks like lazy ol’ man river out there,” a grizzled fisherman warned, “but believe you me, that water will eat you right up.”
I’D ALMOST RESIGNED myself to a ride on a faux steamboat, at one of the Delta’s casinos, when I met a man named Bubba, who told me about a “river rat” named John Ruskey, who “might could take you out.” I didn’t know what
“river rat” meant—my first thought was “drowned”—but I tracked him to the cellar of a former tire factory, which he used as a workshop for hewing cypress canoes. A lean man with a full beard, graying shoulder-length locks, and a feather stuck rakishly in his wide-brimmed hat, John Ruskey looked like a Confederate sawyer. He was actually from Colorado, which explained why he was willing to take me out on the Missisissippi when no one else would.
“People around here think I’m crazy,” he said, as we loaded a canoe on his truck. “They’ve heard so many horror stories since birth that they don’t get on the river unless it’s in something motorized and conditions are perfect.” He handed me a life jacket. “Now, I have to warn you, if you fall in, you probably won’t be able to swim to the bank. The current’s too strong, it’d take an hour, and by that time hypothermia and exhaustion will get you. So stay with the canoe and don’t let go of your paddle.”
As we drove between cotton fields, John told me about his first trip on the Mississippi, several decades before. Smitten by the romance of the river, he and a high school friend from Colorado had built a raft from plywood and oil drums. They launched it in Wisconsin and had floated all the way to Memphis when, in the middle of a chess game, the raft struck a submerged pylon. “It looked like someone had crushed soda crackers and scattered them on the river,” John said of the raft. He and his friend had to be fished out by a patrol boat.
John later settled in Mississippi to play guitar with the Delta’s legendary bluesmen. But he couldn’t stay away from the river. So he began making canoes and working as a guide on summer trips. “You’re far safer in a canoe than a motorboat,” he said, “because you’re never going so fast that if you hit something you’ll get into big trouble.”
We reached Friar’s Point, one of the many river towns that laid claim to De Soto. The setting, at least, matched my image of the Mississippi much more closely than other landings I’d visited. The bank was free of concrete revetments, casino paddle-wheelers, or men burning wire—just a sandbar strewn with driftwood.
It took us only a minute to launch the canoe and glide out into the water. Then we paddled upriver, along the shore, as De Soto’s men had done. I had little experience in canoes, apart from summer-camp floats in Pocono ponds. But with John in back, performing the hard work, all I had to do was paddle and keep watch on the water ahead.
From shore, the river’s surface had looked deceptively uniform. Up close, with John’s guidance, I saw its variations. Glassy, seemingly calm patches denoted boils, reverse whirlpools spiraling up from the depths. Rough patches revealed eddies circling rocks, or the limbs of drowned trees. Shears formed at the point where the current hit an eddy. “It’ll be a bit of work getting around this bend,” John said each time the shore curved. Contrary to what I’d imagined, the current was strongest around bends rather than in the middle of the river.
There were no locks or dams on the lower Mississippi, leaving this stretch of river relatively untamed. The shore looked just as wild. Though the land had been logged many times, the Delta’s topsoil was so rich that nature quickly reclaimed abandoned fields. John said the riverside teemed with white-tailed deer, turkey, beaver, boars, even the rare cougar. There were also a dozen different species of trees—a dense, lush forest much like the one the Spanish described.
“The lower Mississippi was once America’s Amazon,” John said, “twenty-two million acres of hardwood forest.” As an expert canoe builder, he reckoned that some trees must have been six or more feet in diameter for Indians to make dugouts like those De Soto’s men saw, each filled with dozens of warriors.
After paddling for several miles, we pulled the canoe onto a narrow beach of deep, sticky goop—what locals call gumbo, or Mississippi mud. John said most of the silt came from the Missouri River, which dredged the Plains before emptying into the Mississippi. “I figure there’s more of Montana in the Delta than there is of Mississippi,” he said. This was a startling reminder of the river’s immensity; it was almost four thousand miles long and served as a drainage basin for close to half the continent.
The river was also a thoroughfare for three-quarters of the nation’s grain. We watched 250-foot-long barges of barley crawl by, tied together to form massive flotillas. “If you get too close to them they can’t even see you,” John said. “On their radar, a canoe just looks like another log.”
Once the barges passed, we shoved off and paddled straight across the river. Perched in the canoe’s bow, eyes trained on the Arkansas shore, I realized we were slipping rapidly downriver, pressed by the wind and current. Logs and one entire tree chuted past, limbs flailing in the foamy water. It took us twenty minutes of hard paddling to reach an island only midway across the river.
The passage would have been far trickier for De Soto’s men, who crossed at night. “Things get weird out here in the dark,” John said. “You lose your sense of direction and get disoriented. You have to navigate by the shapes of trees and snags and their relation to each other.” This from a river rat who had paddled the Mississippi for fifteen years. When the Spanish crossed, it was their virgin journey on the river.
After a short rest, we paddled close to the low Arkansas shore and then turned downstream. John lifted his paddle and the canoe drifted with the current, easing us back into the middle of the river. For the next few hours we had the Mississippi to ourselves, with no barges or other traffic, just woods and sky and water.
At sunset, we pulled the canoe onto a sandbar strewn with bits of petrified Mississippi mud, black and hard and molded in sculptural shapes. Stretching my pleasingly tired limbs on the sand, I watched the stringy clouds overhead turn scarlet and mauve. The water also changed colors, from its customary muddy hue to a glassy wash of pinks and oranges and pale blues. I needed only a corncob pipe to make my river fantasy complete.
Lolling on this lovely sandbar, I was struck, once again, by how rarely the Spanish described the beauty and grandeur of the continent they crossed. At best they’d note the land’s agricultural potential, or call it “attractive.” Many of De Soto’s soldiers had trekked through the tropics and the Andes; by comparison, the less dramatic wilds of La Florida may have seemed unimpressive. Or perhaps, five centuries ago, travelers took stunning natural vistas for granted.
When I ran this by John, he offered a different theory. “They must have been too terrified most of the time to think of America as anything but threatening,” he said. “They were fighting for survival.”
This was certainly true of De Soto’s men by the time they crossed the Mississippi, in the summer of 1541. Reaching the far shore, soldiers pulled the rafts apart to save scarce nails, and then slogged through “the worst road of swamps and water they had seen.” At an Indian town, they fell greedily on “deer, lion, and bear skins,” and cut them into jerkins, leggings, and moccasins. Six months before, the men had mocked a nobleman clad in an Indian blanket. Now, all were driven by necessity to go native.
In the twilight, we left the sandbar and glided along a back channel of the river. Late at night, John said, beavers gnawing trees created a chorus so loud that it sounded like an army chewing corn on the cob. As we returned to the main part of the river, a sliver of moon and a few faint stars appeared. The Arkansas shore sketched a low, dark line, barely visible at all.
“It’ll be a little work getting around this point,” John said, for the umpteenth time, as we fought the current around yet another bend. Beyond it lay the landing we’d launched from eight hours before. I fell gratefully ashore, like De Soto’s men after crossing the Mississippi. “That was a breeze,” John said, lugging the canoe past me. “You’ll have to come back in summer so we can do some serious paddling.”
WEST OF THE Mississippi, The De Soto Chronicles become hard to follow. Geographical coordinates blur and so do the names of Indian towns: Quixila, Quipana, Quitamaya, Quiquate, Chaguate, Coligua, Catalte. De Soto’s army lurched this way and that, chasing rumors of riches or searching for a “populous
district” to pillage. First northeast Arkansas, then the boot heel of Missouri, then the Ozarks, where De Soto again hoped mountains might yield gold and silver. Then west to a plain where the population was “scattered” and warriors battled the Spanish with the ferocity of “wounded dogs.”
After one fight, natives surrendered woolly blankets made from “cowhides,” and told of a barren land a short way on, where the “cattle” roamed. De Soto had reached the boundary between the settled, corn-based people of the South and the nomadic hunters of the buffalo plain. He had also crossed a linguistic divide. None among the chain of a dozen interpreters De Soto had assembled since Florida could communicate with the tattooed nomads, except by signs.
With winter approaching, the army marched back from the Plains and made camp in east-central Arkansas, almost closing the crooked circle De Soto had traced since crossing the Mississippi six months before. The winter proved harsh, and scores of men died, including the interpreter Juan Ortiz. This was a loss De Soto “felt deeply,” one of his men wrote, a rare mention of the conquistador’s emotions.
Without Ortiz, De Soto was forced to rely for translation on an Indian youth seized two years before, who had learned a little Spanish. According to the Chronicles, it took the youth an entire day to relay what Ortiz “stated in four words,” and “most of the time he understood just the opposite of what was asked.” As a result, the Spanish frequently became lost, sometimes marching for days on trails that brought them back to where they’d started.
