Ferdinand de Soto,
THE
DISCOVERER OF THE MISSISSIPPI
BY
JOHN S. C. ABBOTT.
NEW YORK:
DODD & MEAD, No. 762 BROADWAY.
1873.
Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1873, by
DODD & MEAD,
in the Office of the Librarian of Congress at Washington.
| Wm. McCrea & Co., Stereotypers, Newburgh, N. Y. | Lange, Little & Hillman, PRINTERS, 108 to 114 Wooster Street, N. Y. |
|---|
AMERICAN PIONEERS AND PATRIOTS.
FERDINAND DE SOTO.
THE
DISCOVERER OF THE MISSISSIPPI.
By JOHN S. C. ABBOTT.
ILLUSTRATED.
NEW YORK:
DODD & MEAD, No. 762 BROADWAY.
1873.
PREFACE.
Mr. Theodore Irving, in his valuable history of the "Conquest ofFlorida," speaking of the astonishing achievements of the SpanishCavaliers, in the dawn of the sixteenth century says:
"Of all the enterprises undertaken in this spirit of daringadventure, none has surpassed, for hardihood and variety ofincident, that of the renowned Hernando de Soto, and hisband of cavaliers. It was poetry put in action. It was theknight-errantry of the old world carried into the depths ofthe American wilderness. Indeed the personal adventures, thefeats of individual prowess, the picturesque description ofsteel-clad cavaliers, with lance and helm and prancingsteed, glittering through the wildernesses of Florida,Georgia, Alabama, and the prairies of the Far West, wouldseem to us mere fictions of romance, did they not come to usrecorded in matter of fact narratives of contemporaries, andcorroborated by minute and daily memoranda ofeye-witnesses."
These are the wild and wondrous adventures which I wish here torecord. I have spared no pains in obtaining the most accurateinformation which the records of those days have transmitted to us.It is as wrong to traduce the dead as the living. If one should becareful not to write a line which dying he would wish to blot, heshould also endeavor to write of the departed in so candid andpaternal a spirit, while severely just to the truth of history, as tobe safe from reproach. One who is aiding to form public opinionrespecting another, who has left the world, should remember that hemay yet meet the departed in the spirit land. And he may perhaps begreeted with the words, "Your condemnation was too severe. You did notmake due allowance for the times in which I lived. You have held up myname to unmerited reproach."
Careful investigation has revealed De Soto to me as by no means so bada man as I ha