by Tony Horwitz
Having established his preeminence, Tascalusa fed his guests and entertained them with dancers. De Soto reciprocated by staging jousting matches and horse races—another vain attempt to impress his host, who “appeared to think little of all this.” The ruler thought even less of De Soto’s inevitable demand for women and baggage-carriers. “He responded that he was not accustomed to serving anyone, rather that all served him.”
For the first time in La Florida, De Soto had met a leader as haughty and headstrong as himself, and even craftier. The conquistador insisted that his host stay the night near the Spanish. Tascalusa complied, but not before sending messengers to a town called Mavila, five days’ travel away. He told De Soto that his envoys would arrange for the army to be provided at Mavila with fresh porters, as well as a hundred women, “and those which [the Spanish] most desired.”
As the army marched on, with Tascalusa in tow, “and always the Indian with the sunshade in front of his lord,” one of De Soto’s personal guards strayed in search of a runaway slave, and was slain by Indians. In a fit of anger, De Soto threatened to burn Tascalusa unless he turned over the killers. Once again, the ruler promised to comply—as soon as the army reached Mavila.
Whether he knew it or not, Tascalusa had found De Soto’s weak spot. Cool and calculating in a crisis, the conquistador was quick to anger and rash when enraged. Ignoring his spies, who warned of “evilly disposed” Indians gathering at Mavila, De Soto raced ahead of his army with a vanguard of only forty men, impatient to collect all that Tascalusa had promised him.
Mavila, one of De Soto’s men wrote, was “a small and very strongly palisaded town,” situated on a plain. Houses outside the walls had been hastily torn down, in apparent preparation for battle. De Soto’s captains advised him to camp outside the town. Replying “that he was tired out with sleeping in the open field,” De Soto recklessly entered Mavila with Tascalusa and a dozen soldiers.
They were greeted by several hundred natives singing and proffering gifts of marten skins. The Mavilans also distracted their visitors with a dance “by marvelously beautiful women,” allowing Tascalusa to slip into a council house to confer with his confederates. When De Soto demanded that he come out, Tascalusa refused. A captain sent in to fetch him discovered a crowd of armed men. Other houses were found to conceal more warriors, “a good five thousand.”
Finally realizing he’d walked into a trap, De Soto “placed his helmet on his head and commanded that all should mount their horses.” One Spaniard drew his sword and slashed an Indian. Then warriors rushed from their hideouts, “shouting loudly and discharging their arrows.” Five Spaniards quickly fell; the others managed to escape through the town gate, wounded and having lost their mounts and weapons.
De Soto had to have twenty arrows plucked from his thick cotton tunic. Even so, he demanded a horse and lance, and slew several Indians who chased the retreating Spanish. But knightly bravado couldn’t solve the dilemma De Soto now faced. While he’d been inside Mavila, the army’s Indian porters had arrived and laid their burdens by the town walls. As soon as De Soto fled, the porters moved everything inside the walls, including weapons that soldiers had carelessly left in their packs. Mavilans struck off the porters’ chains and armed them with bows. Then they closed the town gate, “began to beat their drums and to raise banners with a great yell, and to open our trunks and bundles and display from the top of the wall all that we had brought.”
Storming Mavila looked suicidal: natives inside the well-fortified bastion hugely outnumbered the Spanish. But if the Spanish retreated, stripped of supplies and their ability to overawe natives, they would be left weak in a hostile territory ruled by the determined and canny Tascalusa.
De Soto’s anxious lieutenants voiced “different opinions,” but as usual the conquistador ignored their concerns and went on the offensive. The Indians had used guile to exploit his overconfidence; now he would turn the same tactic against them. With forty horsemen, De Soto rode up to Mavila’s gate. A few Indians came out to skirmish, but didn’t stray far from the safety of the town. Then the Spanish turned and galloped off, as if fleeing. When Indians poured out of Mavila in pursuit, the horsemen turned and charged, killing scores with their lances.
De Soto then encircled the town, his best-armed men on foot and his horsemen behind. The foot soldiers attacked in unison, using axes to smash the palisade and firebrands to torch the houses inside. As the fighting raged, so, too, did the flames, flushing Mavilans from their fortified shelter. Horsemen cut them down or drove them back into the inferno, “where, piled up one on top of the other, they were suffocated and burned to death.”
The battle continued until dark, without a single Indian warrior surrendering. “We killed them all,” one Spaniard tersely reported, “some with the fire, others with the swords, others with the lances.” When a warrior realized he was the last still standing, he “climbed a tree that was in the wall itself, and removed the cord from the bow and attached it to his neck and to a branch of the tree and hanged himself.”
One of De Soto’s men estimated the Indian dead at twenty-five hundred; another put the toll at three thousand, not counting the many wounded whom soldiers “found afterward dead in the huts and by the road.” If these figures are close to accurate, the massacre at Mavila, on October 18, 1540, rivals the Civil War battle of Antietam as the deadliest day of combat ever recorded on U.S. soil.
The victors had little to celebrate. More than twenty soldiers lay dead, including De Soto’s brother-in-law and nephew. Many of the Spanish were “killed by arrow wounds in the eyes or mouth, for the Indians, knowing that their bodies were armed, shot at their faces.” About two hundred others—almost half the surviving force—were badly wounded, many by multiple arrows; dozens died after the battle. Scores of horses had been killed or injured, too. And the army’s baggage, including the pearls looted at Cofitachequi, had gone up in flames. De Soto’s men, one wrote, “were left like Arabs, empty-handed and with great hardship.”
They were also left to forage and find shelter in a hellscape out of Hieronymus Bosch. Mavila’s smoldering pyre illuminated the battlefield. Exhausted and thirsty soldiers who sought to drink at a pond found its water “tinged with the blood of the dead.” Others skinned slain horses to get at the meat. Ghastliest of all was the plight of the injured. Desperate for salve, soldiers “busied themselves in cutting open the dead Indians and taking the fat to use as ointment and oil in treating wounds.”
De Soto was forced to linger a month at Mavila, waiting for his army to recover. While there, he learned that ships had landed on the Gulf coast, just six days’ travel away. But De Soto was no longer ready to meet his supply fleet. He now had nothing to show for his journey, not even pearls, and his men might want to board the ships and flee to Cuba. If word of his ravaged and empty-handed state got out, De Soto’s reputation, and his hope of finding new recruits to colonize La Florida, would be ruined. “Consequently,” one of his men wrote, “he determined not to give news of himself so long as he did not find a rich land.”
In late November, with winter approaching, De Soto once again turned away from the sea, marching his depleted army back into the American interior.
TRAILING DE SOTO from Coosa to Tascalusa, I eased out of the piedmont and piney woods, into the black-soil plain of central Alabama. Most De Soto scholars believe Mavila was located somewhere along the Alabama River between Selma and Mobile. But archaeologists haven’t yet found a site with the mass of bones and Spanish artifacts one would expect. Fire and, later, frequent flooding may have destroyed all evidence of the battle.
Charles Hudson, the professor who mapped De Soto’s route, thought the likeliest match for Mavila was a place now known as Old Cahawba, where remains had been found of a fortified Indian settlement that abruptly vanished about the time of De Soto’s march. To reach it, I followed a roughly paved road until it dead-ended at a bluff by the Alabama. There was no trace of the Indian settlement, apart from a diml
y visible moat, encircled by a glade of oak trees wreathed in Spanish moss.
The wealthy cotton town that arose on the same spot in the 1800s had likewise vanished, swept away by the Civil War and constant floods. All that remained were grassed-over mounds where a courthouse and brick stores once stood, and a few lonely columns of antebellum mansions.
Old Cahawba was one of the South’s most haunting ruins, and a dolefully apt memorial to the bloodbath that may have occurred there in 1540. But I couldn’t conjure Mavila. Hoping to catch some echo of battle, I’d instead found its opposite: a bucolic and silent refuge where nothing stirred, except a few deer startled by my boot steps.
RATHER THAN DRIVE on and leave Mavila unexamined, I decided to track down a man who had been recommended to me as an expert on sixteenth-century combat. Kent Goff was an army major who had served as a bayonet-drill instructor at West Point and an intelligence officer in the first Gulf War; now, when his military schedule allowed, he taught college history. I caught up with him in a classroom a day’s drive from Old Cahawba, where we chatted quietly as his students took a World Civ exam.
A clean-cut midwesterner in pressed khakis, polo shirt, and spit-polished black shoes, Kent could recite long passages from The De Soto Chronicles almost verbatim. But he mined the Spanish accounts for very different clues than other students of the expedition.
“I read the Chronicles as after-action reports,” he said, using a military term for detailed postmortems of battle. “You have two warrior societies meeting each other for the first time. It’s a fascinating case study of combat.”
One insight he’d gleaned was that tactics often trumped manpower and firepower. In most battles, Indians had the advantage of numbers, and their longbows had greater range and accuracy than the Spaniards’ crossbows and clumsy muskets. Natives were also much more mobile than their heavily armored foes, at least in woods and swamps, where horses were of little use. What they lacked was experience of European-style warfare.
“Indians fought in the traditional style of the warrior individual,” Kent said, “with great courage and in concert with family members.” The Spanish, by contrast, fought as cogs in sixteenth-century Europe’s most efficient military machine. “It was like the Romans versus the Celts. On an individual level, Celts were better fighters. But led in a group by centurions, the Romans could beat ten times their number.”
At Mavila, he said, the Spanish formed a “combined arms team”: foot soldiers, horsemen, and harquebusiers, launching a coordinated assault. On a signal—a musket shot—they attacked simultaneously from four directions. Soldiers with shields protected axmen from arrows as they chopped at the walls. Infantry poured through the breach.
“Indians had never encountered this kind of warfare,” Kent said. The resulting surprise and disarray helped to explain the lopsided casualty figures. “When the Spanish pierced Indian lines and natives saw their fellow warriors and blood relations go down, they were stunned and broken,” he said. “And they couldn’t outrun a horse. So it became a massacre.”
Also, while native archers had an edge in long-range duels, their foes were much deadlier in close combat. In addition to steel swords, De Soto’s men wielded a versatile weapon called the halberd, a heavy lance topped with a hook, ax blade, and bayonet. Kent had studied a sixteenth-century manual on infantry tactics and demonstrated the use of the halberd, using me as a dummy.
“First, you thrust at the face,” he said, jabbing the point of his imaginary weapon at my nose. I flinched and raised my arm, as a warrior would his shield.
“Now you can’t see me well,” he said, “so I can swing my halberd around and whack you on the head with the butt end.” I stumbled back, as if stunned by the blow.
“Now I take another step forward, with extended arms, and bring down the ax blade.” He made a motion like a man chopping wood. Kent’s students looked up from their exams as their suddenly animated professor dispatched a visiting writer.
“Here’s another move,” Kent said, taking up his phantom weapon again. “You feint toward the head, then rotate the weapon, drop it down and use the hook to grab your enemy behind the knee, and then jerk. That upends him, and once he’s down all you have to do is finish him off with the point.” He pretended to skewer me, as if gigging a frog.
“The Spanish put a lot of thought into how to kill people efficiently,” Kent said, resting his halberd. “And they would have left just horrible wounds on unarmored opponents. Arms, legs, heads, and guts strewn everywhere. The Spanish covered in blood and gore. But, judging from the Chronicles, these guys liked their work.”
Kent acknowledged that this passion for close-range killing made the Spaniards “unpleasant people,” at least by our standards. As a soldier, though, he admired their endurance and discipline. “Navy SEALs would be dropping with exhaustion after what these guys went through. This is a thousands-mile trek, right up there with the epic marches of military history.”
Kent was also awed by De Soto’s ability to hold his men together in the face of extraordinary obstacles. “The Spanish have no supply line, they’re living off the land, they lose most of their gear at Mavila,” he said. Yet the expedition continued for several thousand miles after that.
Kent checked the clock and began to gather his students’ exams. “To most people, De Soto and his men seem like creatures from another world,” he said. “To me, they’re prototypical Americans—spirited and resourceful adventurers who never gave up and had absolute confidence in themselves.”
DE SOTO LEFT Mavila having lost more than a hundred of the six hundred men he had landed in Florida the year before. The weather was turning cold and the army desperately needed food and shelter. The Spanish fortunes had fallen so far that one nobleman wore a torn Indian blanket and otherwise was “bare-headed, bare-footed, without hose or shoes, a shield at his back, a sword without a scabbard.” He “had to look for his supper with his fingernails.”
Marching northwest, into Mississippi, De Soto made winter camp at a settlement called Chicasa, where fleeing Indians had left a large supply of corn. But late one night, natives slipped past the Spanish sentries, “two by two and four by four, with some little jars in which they brought fire.” They torched Chicasa, burning to death a dozen Spaniards, fifty-seven horses, and several hundred pigs. What remained of the army’s gear, including saddles, weapons, and scarce clothing, also went up in flames. “If the Indians had known how to pursue their victory,” one Spaniard wrote, “this would have been the last day in the lives of all the Christians.”
Instead, the Indians withdrew, and it was at this juncture that the Spanish displayed the resilience and resourcefulness Kent Goff so admired. They hurriedly fashioned bellows from bear hides and built a makeshift forge; cut down ash trees to craft lances; made new saddles and shields; and wove grass into sleeping mats. A week after the fire, when the Indians resumed their attack, the Spanish were able to repel them.
Still, the fire at Chicasa, following so soon after the disaster at Mavila, tipped the balance of fear between invaders and natives. In spring, as De Soto marched west, “something occurred that they say has never happened in the Indies,” one Spaniard wrote. Before Chicasa, natives had fought mostly when provoked and usually in defense of food and women. Now, it was they who initiated battle, brazenly erecting a stockade directly in the army’s path. The three hundred warriors inside wore horned headdresses and painted themselves with stripes, “their faces black and the eyes ringed round in red in order to look more ferocious.”
De Soto ordered a frontal assault, “saying that if he did not do so, they would become emboldened to attack him at a time when they could do him more hurt.” The Spanish triumphed, at the cost of fifteen dead and many more wounded. Captured Indians told the Spanish they had sought a fight “only with the intent of proving themselves against us, and for no other purpose.” De Soto’s once resplendent army could no longer overawe natives simply by marching into their territory.
/> De Soto, however, had no choice but to plunge ahead, in search of large settlements; without their stores to pillage, his army would starve. He led his hungry and wounded men across northern Mississippi, through “many swamps and thick woods,” until they reached a corn-rich province called Quizquiz. The Spanish immediately seized several hundred women as hostages. But in a shift that reflected the army’s weakness, De Soto didn’t keep his captives long. “For fear of war,” he quickly released them, in hopes “he could have peace” and desperately needed supplies.
ALMOST IN PASSING, the army’s chroniclers wrote that Quizquiz lay beside el rio grande—“the great river.” In the Algonquian language, the river had a different name: Misi Sipi, meaning Great Water. Before embarking on my trip, I’d gone to see Discovery of the Mississippi, one of eight canvases in the U.S. Capitol rotunda that celebrate great moments in American history. The painting depicts De Soto dressed in satin and shining armor, surveying the Mississippi from astride a white stallion. A priest gazes heavenward as soldiers haul a cross and cannon to the river’s bank, half-naked Indians cowering before them. Commissioned by Congress in 1847, the work is a minor classic of Manifest Destiny, glorifying the triumph of white civilization over Indian savagery.
The painting is also pure fiction, beginning with the natives’ teepees and feathered bonnets—Plains Indian props, transplanted to sixteenth-century Mississippi. The Spanish trappings are just as inaccurate. By May 1541, De Soto’s men looked more like natives than conquering Europeans, having lost or worn out their clothes and replaced them with buckskins and Indian blankets.
Nor did the Spanish raise a cross or perform any other rite upon reaching the river. They were sick and starved and cared only about “little walnuts” and a supply of maize they found in Quizquiz. The Mississippi, in any case, was already known to the Spanish. For two decades, mariners along the Gulf coast had observed the mouth of a great waterway they called the River of the Holy Spirit, the same name given it by most of De Soto’s men.