The Cross and the Mound: An Excerpt from My New Book in Progress

Earlier this week, I briefly discussed a book I have been working on for the past few years, which will tell the story of the mound builder myth and how it affected the growth and development of the United States. As I described in my earlier blog post, so far no agent or publisher has expressed interested in the book. In lieu of a blog post today, I would like to share the first few pages of the book so you can get a sense of my approach to the topic. The book opens with a brief preface providing a factual overview of the history of mound building in North America, after which our story begins. The pages below are, of course, a draft, and they will likely undergo further revision, fact-checking, and correction should the book ever proceed to publication.

Prologue
The Cross and the Mound

On Monday March 29, 1540, the day after Easter, the six hundred Spanish and Portuguese volunteers of Hernando de Soto’s exploratory army were cold and wet and miserable. Several of their number had already died from illness or clashes with Native Americans, and more than a few had become convinced that death awaited them, too. [1] They had been tramping across the damp expanses of what is today the southeastern United States for nearly eleven months, tracing a jagged northward course from Espíritu Santo, now known as Shaw’s Point, in southern Florida, dragging in tow more than two hundred horses, upwards of two hundred pigs (though some say as few at ten or twelve), and sundry other livestock. They were largely young men, most barely in their twenties, many only just established in their chosen professions—craftsmen and priests, farmers and merchants. All had come with the promise of gold, glory, and God. A few had brought their families with them, imagining wealthy fresh lives in the New World. But things were not going particularly well.

Already some of the lean, long-legged Alentejano, or Black Iberian, pigs had gotten loose, a few here and there as the ragtag caravan had marched slowly across woods and plains and streams. Lost in the unending expanses of primeval forests, the pigs had vanished into the darkness but would not be forgotten. Someday these pigs would grow wild and mean and come back out of the forest as feral razorback hogs. In the woods, they would give to the deer and turkeys a host of European diseases to which the indigenous peoples of North America had no immunity. When the Native Americans hunted and ate the deer and turkeys, their chief game, they grew sick and many died. None of De Soto’s men would live to see razorbacks, but the pigs became a kind of cameo of the expedition as a whole, a symbol of European arrogance grown into something angry and dangerous.

Worse, the expedition had failed in its first objective. They had recovered none of the vast reserves of gold that De Soto, whom they all called “The Governor,” for he was by royal appointment the Spanish ruler of Cuba, had promised they would find hidden among the temples and tombs of the Native Americans, treasures every bit as fabulous as the immense wealth of Peru that had made De Soto one of Spain’s wealthiest men. A decade ago, the Governor had aided the bloodthirsty and illiterate Francisco Pizarro in conquering and enslaving the vast empire of the Inca far to the south. Pizarro had held the Inca emperor, Atahualpa, ransom for a room full of gold, and when he received it, he killed Atahualpa anyway. De Soto, untroubled by this, gladly received his share of the ransom. The nearly limitless gold and silver of the Inca had made Spain’s monarch, King Carlos I, better known by his other title, the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V, the wealthiest man in all the world. Surely if Charles V and Hernando De Soto promised a life of wealth in a new, Catholic colony, the gold must be there. So they had traveled from Spain to Cuba to stage a massive expedition to the uncharted mainland in the north. For most, this would be their first trip outside their native villages in Iberia. The search across Florida turned up little gold in its first months. In the winter of 1539-1540 De Soto heard rumors that the gold he sought could be found where the sun rose, and so they marched north and east.

It was now spring, and there was still no gold. In more than a thousand miles of walking from one miserable Native village to the next, the hundreds of Spaniards and Portuguese had found little more than wood and maize—endless fields of yellow maize, the closest thing to fields of gold any would see on this trek. An idol of a rooster or chicken atop a temple they had visited the previous June had gilded eyes, but this was a far cry from the temples whose walls dripped with gold that De Soto had seen in Cuzco. The only similarity between the golden Inca land and this wretched wooden village with its pagan rooster idol, if one could call it a similarity, was the large earthen mound, which a later chronicler would describe as “a very high mount made by hand for defense,” [2] on which the chief’s house stood. If De Soto saw a similarity between the earthen mounds that his army came across with disturbing regularity in Native villages and the great stone platform temples he had witnessed in Peru, the chroniclers did not record it. So far as the Catholic priests in the Governor’s retinue were concerned, the whole sorry mess was the work of the Devil. One can only imagine what they made of the temple topped with a statue of a chicken. The only wealth worth mentioning in that village was some burned pearls they found while ransacking and razing the town, a cache like the one they would later find in a South Carolina village, in the tombs of dead chiefs that they unearthed in their greed.

This day, however, De Soto’s group stood on the banks of a small stream, soaked through to the skin in the midst of a driving rain. The stream was rising rapidly in the downpour, and De Soto’s personal secretary, Rodrigo Ranjel, dryly noted in his journal that the ensuing flood conditions threatened the entire company of men and animals, prompting them to hasten across the river into the territory called Ichisi, a Native chiefdom on the Ocmulgee River in what is today Georgia. Four days earlier, dignitaries from the Ichisi had met with De Soto and asked three questions: “Who are you, what do you want, where are you going?” [3] De Soto told them that he was the representative of the King of Spain and had come to convert them to Christianity, and they needed to submit to the Supreme Pontiff at Rome and the Emperor-King in Madrid at once. Ranjel did not record the Ichisi response. Now, on the other side of the river, the Ichisi greeted the Spanish with great hospitality, as was Native custom, presenting them with corn cakes and young onions. Ranjel found the food especially welcome since the large group had been perpetually in want of food and under orders from De Soto to ration provisions carefully. Ranjel recorded in his journal that the onions, whether eaten boiled, roasted, or raw, “were a great refreshment, for they are very good.” [4]

The next day, they rested in a small Ichisi village, eating the villagers’ food. The hundreds of young European men must have consumed far more than the small village could reasonably have afforded to spare. The villagers, too, must have shuddered to see the vast caravan of white men dragging with them many Native slaves captured en route. On Wednesday, the Governor and his men crossed the “Great River,” probably the Ocmulgee, in a fleet of canoes appropriated from the local people, [5] and they arrived at a village overseen by a one-eyed ruler, who welcomed them with hospitality, offering food and the service of fifteen porters to the visiting army. De Soto’s army could not have known that as they crossed the river, they and their animals also brought with them anthrax, tuberculosis, trichinosis, influenza, and sundry other illnesses to which they had a degree of immunity but to which the Native Americans did not.

Through the services of the interpreter traveling with De Soto, a guide named Yupaha, and a villager De Soto had enslaved, the chief told the Governor that the Spaniard’s horses caused much astonishment, being unknown in that country, “things so altogether new as to strike awe and terror to our hearts.” The chief pledged his resources to De Soto, begging that “with my person, my country, and my vassals, you will do as with your own things.” [6] At least that was the story the Portuguese chronicler of the expedition gave out. The chief also asked the identity of his distinguished guest, and the Portuguese chronicler says that De Soto made it known that he was the son of the Sun God. There is no record of whether the Ichisi believed him, but when De Soto tried the same trick again after crossing the Mississippi, the Natchez told him they would believe him only when he caused the great river to run dry.

This submission of the Ichisi village was apparently a surprise to De Soto, for Ranjel reports that this one-eyed chief was the first who greeted them peacefully. The Governor, Ranjel said, “did not wish to burden him overmuch” as a reward. [7] This translated into the army refraining from razing the village and cutting down all its maize. The King’s agent on the expedition, Luys Hernandez de Biedma, gives a slightly different account, more plausibly stating that the town submitted in order to bargain for the release of their friends and relatives, whom De Soto had captured and enslaved from the neighboring town. [8] Sometime that night, the first bacteria would have moved from their European hosts to some of the Ichisi.

On the morning of Thursday, April 1, the Governor and his men surveyed the relatively large village, which Ranjel said was the regional capital, taking note of the two large earthen mounds that formed its most important feature. Like many villages in the region, the people were in the habit of building large mounds, as their ancestors had for centuries, and as other peoples of North America had been doing for thousands of years. These particular mounds were not impressive enough for the Spanish secretary Ranjel to make much note of. He recorded only one mound at the site, and in the later memory of the Portuguese chronicler, even this mound vanished altogether, becoming little more than the town square.

Today, most historians believe this place was the Lamar site at the Ocmulgee National Monument, home to two large earthen mounds on either side of a broad open court. The village was surrounded by a wooden palisade 3,500 feet in length. One of its two mounds was rectangular, the other round, with a spiral ramp leading upward to its summit. Both survive today. The whole site, however, was nestled on a ridge surrounded by swamp not far from an even larger collection of mounds—the older, more mysterious remnants of an ancient population today called Mississippian that, so far as the Ichisi knew, were lost to the sands of time. They had all died out centuries before, around 1050, and only the Ichisi’s two small mounds, built around 1350, preserved the memory of their ancient culture. Nobody went to the old mounds anymore, and they were overgrown with shrubs and trees. The Governor and his men may not have even known the old mounds in the woods were anything but hills.

That Thursday the Governor had a large wooden cross nailed together and brought up to the top of one of the Ichisi village’s mounds, and the expedition’s priests preached to the Ichisi the Gospel of Jesus Christ. But the expedition was in a hurry to get moving, so De Soto ordered the priests to cut the Bible lesson short. According to the Portuguese chronicler, “as time did not allow more to be done, the Indians were instructed that it [the cross] was put there to commemorate the suffering of Christ, who was God and man; that he had created the skies and the earth, and had suffered for the salvation of all, and therefore, that they should revere that sign.” [9] Ranjel records that “they received it and worshipped it devoutly to all appearances.” [10] It was not as though they had a choice.

De Soto and his six hundred companions moved on, leaving behind the wooden cross atop the Ichisi’s mound and a host of diseases that entered the villagers just as invisibly, but more potently, than the Holy Ghost. Many among the Ichisi must have grown sick, though we can never know if they blamed the cross up on the mound for the illnesses that caused many of the tribe to waste away and die. Within a generation, the Ichisi chiefdom had crumbled; its population collapsed. With no people to grow food, agriculture fell in to abeyance, and without food there was no labor to maintain the village mounds. The great mound-building project launched more than two millennia earlier ground to halt. The story repeated in villages across what is now the southern United States. A regional population that once numbered in the hundreds of thousands dwindled to just tens of thousands within a century. Mounds were still being built here and there into the 1600s, but by 1700, the mound builders were no more.

Leaving the cross up on the village mound ended the official interest of Hernando de Soto, illustrious Governor of the Island Cuba and Adelentado of Florida, in the mounds of the territory of Florida. The Crown of Spain would not trouble itself with the mounds again. De Soto would die in 1542. His followers weighted down his body and sunk it into the Mississippi to hide it from the Native Americans to preserve the illusion that he was the immortal sun god. When the 311 survivors of the expedition entered Mexico and some returned to Europe to record their adventures, all they had to say about the mounds of North America was that they were built of earth and used as platforms for temples and chiefs’ houses.

The Portuguese chronicler traveling with De Soto had made plain that such mounds were built “by hand” by the Native peoples, and fifty years later the writer Garcilasco de la Vega, who wrote an account of de Soto’s expedition, even witnessed one such mound being built in Florida by packing earth into a large pile until the mound was tall enough and wide enough to hold houses or temples. Several French explorers in the 1600s saw the same thing. But in time this would be forgotten.

The devastation caused by the diseases De Soto and his fellow conquistadors had introduced into North America had by the eighteenth century left the mounds desolate and abandoned. Radically smaller Native populations moved about the country in response to European colonization. Tribes combined; cultures adapted or vanished. Eventually, even the Natives themselves forgot who had built the mounds or why. When American explorers asked after the origin of mounds near St. Louis in the nineteenth century, the Native peoples told them that they had no legends or traditions of the mounds; they knew nothing of them and considered them mysterious and possibly supernatural. [11] In what is now South Dakota, the Maha people would tell Lewis and Clark that Spirit Mound was the secret home of a race of miniature leprechaun-like demons. [12] The Choctaw, the first tribe forced from the southeastern United States to Oklahoma under the 1830 Indian Removal Act, were heavily influenced by Christianity and remembered the mounds of their ancestors only as the Biblical Tower of Babel. [13]

By that point most educated Euro-Americans believed the mounds were the remains of a lost white civilization whose lands America had a duty to reclaim from the Red man. Exactly how that happened is an epic all its own.

​

Notes

[1] De Soto’s expedition left from Havana with 620 men, but after a year at least 20 had died.

[2] The Narrative of the Expedition of Hernando de Soto, ed. Theodore H. Lewis, in Spanish Explorers in the Southern United States, 1528-1543 (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1907), 147. The identity of the chronicler, known only as “the Gentleman of Elvas” has never been conclusively established, but he was certainly among De Soto’s men and witnessed accounts firsthand.

[3] Gonzalo Fernandez de Oviedo y Valdés, A Narrative of De Soto’s Expedition Based on the Diary of Rodrigo Ranjel, His Private Secretary, trans. Buckingham Smith, in Narratives of the Career of Hernando De Soto, ed. Edward Gaylord Bourne, vol. II (London: 1905), 87.

[4] Oviedo, Narrative, 87-88.

[5] The Gentleman of Elvas omits the river and instead says they crossed a small stream by a bridge they built.

[6] Narrative of the Expedition, 167.

[7] Oviedo, Narrative, 89.

[8] Luys Hernandez de Biedma, Relation of the Conquest of Florida, trans. Buckingham Smith, in Narratives of the Career of Hernando De Soto, ed. Edward Gaylord Bourne, vol. II (London: 1905), 10.

[9] Narrative of the Expedition, 167.

[10] Oviedo, Narrative, 89.

[11] J. Thomas Scharf, History of St. Louis City and County (Philadelphia: Louis H. Everts & Co., 1883), 101.

[12] Official narrative of Lewis and Clark Expedition for August 25, 1804, at Spirit Mound, South Dakota.

[13] Allan A. Macfarlan, North American Indian Legends (Mineola, New York: Dover, 2001), 21.