Welcome to the history of the Americans podcast, Episode 18.

I'm your host, Jack Heneman, and this episode is Hernando de Soto Part 2.

I'm recording at an April 22nd, 2021, in Austin, Texas.

Last week, we introduced the story of Hernando de Soto's three-year invasion of the American South,

from 1539 to his death in 1542.

Ending the episode, just as his 600-man expedition arrived on the Gulf Coast of Florida, probably Tampa Bay.

Ponce de Leon had gone ashore in roughly the same place in 1521, and Poncello de Nervais had disembarked his doomed expedition there in 1528.

Soto, like Ponce and Nervais before him, would claim all of North America for Spain from roughly the same spot.

He would survive longer than either Ponce or Nervais, but not by much.

Claiming North America for Spain was a dangerous business. Rather than dragging you painstakingly along as Soto and his men scramble around 10 southern states, I'm going to experiment

with telling Soto's story and themes. First, we'll talk about Soto as a person. Then we'll do an

overview of the route. He and his men took over three years, and they're ever more desperate

search to find the next great, rich, golden Indian civilization. After that, we'll roll back to the

landing zone at Tampa Bay

and hit some of the more interesting parts of the journey,

or at least those that are interesting to me.

So we'll do a series of vignettes, if you will, in chronological order,

but there will be big gaps that the Soto nerds out there would castigate me for punting.

Don't worry, I don't think you're missing anything that you really care about.

Finally, we'll return to the strange question of all the places in the country that are named

after De Soto, notwithstanding what we all now know, that Soto crashed and burned.

And anyway, he would have named those places Soto.

...