De Soto Discovers the Mississippi River

Hernando de Soto and his expedition stumbled upon the Mississippi River in May 1541, near present-day Memphis, Tennessee, and the Spanish conquistador saw not a geographic wonder but an obstacle. De Soto had spent two years marching through the American Southeast searching for gold and silver comparable to what Cortes had found in Mexico and Pizarro in Peru. He had found none, and the massive river blocking his westward path was just another disappointment in a journey defined by suffering. De Soto's expedition had left Havana in May 1539 with roughly 600 soldiers, 200 horses, and a herd of pigs that would serve as mobile provisions. They landed near Tampa Bay and marched north and west through territories that are now Florida, Georgia, the Carolinas, Tennessee, Alabama, and Mississippi. The journey was characterized by violent confrontations with Indigenous nations, the enslavement of native people as porters and guides, and the spread of European diseases that devastated communities the expedition passed through. The expedition reached the Mississippi sometime in May 1541, though the exact date is uncertain because the Spaniards' journals were imprecise about chronology. De Soto named the river "Rio de Espiritu Santo" and spent a month building barges to ferry his force across. Indigenous populations along the river were large and organized, occupying mound-building civilizations that the Spanish described with grudging respect. Once across, de Soto spent another year wandering through present-day Arkansas, Oklahoma, and Texas, still searching for wealthy civilizations to conquer. He found none. Disease, desertion, and combat losses reduced his force by more than half. De Soto himself fell ill with a fever, probably malaria, and died on the banks of the Mississippi on May 21, 1542. His men weighted his body with sand and sank it in the river to prevent Indigenous people from discovering that their seemingly invincible leader was mortal. The surviving 300 members of the expedition built boats and floated down the Mississippi to the Gulf of Mexico, eventually reaching Spanish settlements in Mexico. De Soto's three-year odyssey produced no wealth and established no colonies, but the diseases his expedition introduced killed an estimated 75 to 90 percent of the region's Indigenous population within a century.