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  • The Hernando de Soto Expedition: History, Historiography, and “Discovery” in the Southeast
  • Jon Muller
The Hernando de Soto Expedition: History, Historiography, and “Discovery” in the Southeast. Edited by Patricia Galloway. (Lincoln, University of Nebraska Press, 1997) 447 pp. $60.00.

This valuable book concerns the first European expedition, under the leadership of Hernando de Soto, to penetrate deeply into the interior of eastern North America. Data and sources about this expedition are important evidence for the nature of southeastern political and organizational [End Page 521] forms at the time of first contact. These issues are doubly important because of the sparse historical record afterward, during times that may have seen significant changes. In addition, the nature of these early contacts arguably shaped interactions between European and Native Americans for generations.

The Hernando de Soto Expedition is a collection of essays under four topics: sources (five essays), discussion of the expedition itself (six essays), the expedition and Native American history (three essays), and Euro-American history (five essays). The sad truth is that historians and anthropologists (including archaeologists) alike have competed until now in naiveté concerning the use of these documents and other evidence relating to the Soto entrada. Neither camp has understood the strengths and weaknesses of the other, or even sometimes of its own field. Since the editor called for an “archaeology” of the sources on this expedition nearly a decade ago, we may examine this volume for the progress that has been made toward that end.

The first section includes analyses that are too often neglected. As several authors demonstrate, the independence of the sources has been overestimated.1 The single primary source is that of Hernández de Biedma. The account usually described as that of Rodrigo Ranjel survives only partially in a summary history by Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo y Valdés—Historia General y Natural de las Indias (1547–1549). Galloway argues convincingly that this secondary source had, at the very least, a strong influence on the formation of the text generally known as the Relaçam (1557) of the “Gentleman of Elvas” (Fidalgo Deluas) and then, in turn, on the writing of Garcilaso de la Vega’s Florida del Inca (1605). However, Martin and Ivana Elbl argue in their paper that the Elvas account has more historical value than a mere literary expansion of Oviedo’s version of Ranjel. As important as these cautions are, it would not be prudent to become so deeply embedded in “critical criticism” that the delineation of the material and behavioral aspects of these accounts is abandoned. After all, the search for biases and interpolations in the sources is not a task pursued for its own ends but should be a means to assess what parts of these accounts describe, within their own limits, the sights seen by the Iberian explorers of the sixteenth-century Southeast. Neither textual analysis nor tracing the route of the expedition constitutes the full usefulness of these data. Finally, two essays see the Garcilaso account as a kind of “novelization” based mostly on secondary and tertiary sources with an unhealthy dose of both classicism and Incan overgeneralization.

The second section shifts to the character of the expedition. These essays begin with efforts to understand de Soto. A skeptical account of eastern “roads” by Jack Elliott is correct in its assessment of the poor state of current knowledge, but he goes too far in classifying these [End Page 522] phenomena as cases that “can be neither proved nor falsified” (253). For example, archaeological research in the Southwest has delineated “roads” with far less impact on the landscape than many “traces” in the East. To find archaeological evidence for paths in the forested East, it is first necessary to look for them. Research on historical trails shows that it is not impossible to do so. The section ends with an important paper by Ann Ramenofsky and the editor on the possible role of the expedition in introducing Old World diseases to the East.

Although details of Galloway’s treatment of the “Direct Historical Approach” in the paper opening the third section might be debated, she usefully draws attention to problems in using sources...

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