SWANTON] INDIANS OF THE SOUTHEASTEiRN UNITED STATES 39 



events took place near Pensacola and Mobile is strongly indicated 

 by the fact that, 12 years later, De Soto learned that the Greek and 

 the Negro had been killed at a town called Piachi on the lower course 

 of Alabama River. He was shown a dagger which had belonged to the 

 former. Shortly afterward Narvaez and his companions passed the 

 mouth of the Mississippi and, after skirting the shores of the Gulf 

 many miles more, were finally cast ashore on Galveston Island. This 

 location is indicated with considerable exactitude by the name of the 

 tribe of Indians living there which they call Caoque or Cahoque, the 

 Cogo or Coaque of later writers, the easternmost tribe of the Karan- 

 kawa Indians. This was on November 6, 1528. Of those whom the 

 sea spared, only four ultimately reached their own people in Mexico, 

 and it is from the narrative of one of these men, Cabeza de Vaca, 

 treasurer and high sheriff of the expedition, that we derive most of 

 our knowledge of its fortunes, or rather misfortunes. It is from 

 that, too, that we derive one of our most important single bodies of 

 information regarding the Indians of the Karankawan, Tonkawan, 

 and Coahuiltecan stocks. (Cabeza de Vaca, 1905, pp. 9-54 et seq. ; 

 U. S. De Soto Exped. Comm., 1939, pp. 109-116.) 



THE EXPEDITION OF HERNANDO DE SOTO ' 

 (See map 12) 



We now come to the most impressive of all Spanish attempts to 

 conquer and settle the territory of our Gulf States, the expedition of 

 Hernando de Soto. The original documents bearing on this adventure 

 have been reviewed elsewhere and the arguments for the route accepted 

 by the present writer. Here I will confine myself to a somewhat dog- 

 matic review of the course of the army and brief notices of the tribes 

 encountered by it. 



De Soto was born at the little town of Xeres de los Caballeros in the 

 Province of Estremadura, Spain, in 1500, and in 1514 he accompanied 

 Pedro Arias de Avila, better known by the shortened form of his name 

 Pedrarias Davila, when that commander accepted the government of 

 Castilla del Oro or Darien. By the time he was 20, De Soto had become 

 a captain, and in 10 years more of warfare with the Indians and civil 

 broils between the Spaniards he became a seasoned commander. A 

 trading partnership with Hernan Ponce, plus the spoils of the Indians, 

 brought him a considerable fortune, which he risked in the most lucky 

 gamble of his life, the Peruvian expedition of Francisco Pizarro. He 

 took an active part in the conquest of the Inca Empire and, next to 

 the Pizarros, benefited most largely from its plunder. In 1536 he 

 returned to Spain to seek a government of his own, applying unsuccess- 



1 Authority for tbe material contained in this chapter will be found in the Final Report 

 of the U. S. De Soto Expedition Commission (1939). 



