For most of the early days of the so-called age of exploration, people didn’t really give two shits about what would eventually become the Untied States. Other than the occasional coastal raid by the Spanish to enslave Native Americans, them running swiftly out of natives to enslave in the Caribbean, it was largely left alone. There were a few exceptions to this, with a few Spaniards, particularly desperate for fame and fortune, attempting to found a colony in Florida in 1521 and a colony in Georgia in 1526, but for some reason the locals, probably because of the whole slave raiding thing, didn’t take too kindly to this. The colony in Florida lasted less than a week and the colony in Georgia lasted only two months. The latter was particularly terrifying given only 150 of the original 600 colonists returned to Hispaniola, the rest succumbing to starvation, disease, infighting, hostile natives, and a slave revolt.
Despite this less than stellar start, many desperate Spaniards remained interested in the giant land mass to the north, mostly because the conquest of Mexico had proven that ridiculously rich civilizations could be hiding in the interior of the continent. One of these was fella named Panifilo de Narvaez, who in 1528 set out with 400 men to explore the Gulf Coast and found some colonies. Upon arriving in Florida, the expedition attacked some random villages in search of gold. They found little, but were told that the tribes further north were much wealthier. Despite having little food, Navraez led his expedition in search of these riches while his ships went off to explore the coast. The two groups never met again. After four months of wandering through swamps, suffering from starvation and near constant native attacks, Navraez returned to the coast and had his men build rafts to carry them to Mexico, the currents being too strong to go east. By the time the expedition reached Texas, it had only 80 men still alive, most starving to death or drowning, including Narvaez himself. In Texas, the survivors were enslaved by a local tribe, who then traded them with other tribes, scattering them across the southwest over the next eight years. Eventually four of these men managed to make their way to Mexico City, arriving in 1536.
To say the least, the survival of these men was seen as nothing short of miraculous, especially given that they brought with them rumors heard during their journey of wealthy cities in the interior, which the Spanish took to mean cities filled with gold and silver, because of course they did. The Spanish called these cities Cibola, which later became known as the seven cities of gold. Now of course rumors of fantastically rich cities got all sorts of Spaniards dreaming of being the next Cortes or Pizzaro all hot and bothered. The two most prominent of these were Hernando de Soto and Francisco Coronado, a soldier who had fought in Peru and the governor of a large amount of territory northwest of Mexico City respectively. Both scrambled to put together expeditions to search for the fabled golden cities.
De Soto’s expedition of some 700 heavily armed men left Cuba in 1539. Convinced Navraez had been on the right track, it followed the earlier expeditions route into Florida and then north into the interior. Over the next three years de Soto and his men crisscrossed what would become Florida, Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina, Tennessee, Alabama, Mississippi, and Arkansas, in general being a bunch of shitheads everywhere they went. Now at the time, the Muskogean peoples of the southeast were the last vestiges of the old Mississippi culture. De Soto found a complex network of walled city-states, each containing thousands of inhabitants. However, he found little to no gold, just a shit ton of corn. Despite the Spanish having the habit of forcefully taking locals as slaves or guides as needed, and the locals in turn carrying out guerilla attacks, the two sides largely avoided open conflict with each other. Instead, most of the native chiefs did their best to hustle de Soto and his men out of their territories, most often by telling the Spanish that there was definitely more gold further north or west. However, as the Spanish became increasingly frustrated, they open conflicts began to break out, culminating in an open battle which resulted in a city burned to the ground and the massacre of its five thousand inhabitants. Things were much more tense after that with guerilla attacks becoming much more common and the Spanish using threats much more often to get what they wanted. De Soto eventually died of a fever in Arkansas in 1542. With about half of the original expedition dead, the remainder split up, some sailing down the Mississippi River and some going overland to reach Mexico City.
Coronado was a much more careful man than de Soto. Prior to heading out himself, he sent a Franciscan friar with one of the survivors of the Navraez expedition north in 1539 to ascertain the exact location of Cibola. Though the survivor did not survive a second time, the friar returned a few months later claiming he’d seen Cibola from a distance while in what is today New Mexico, and that it was a vast golden city. Excited by this, Coronado departed in early 1540 with an expedition consisting of 400 heavily armed Spaniards and 2,000 native allies. When Coronado and his men arrived at the supposed location of Cibola, they found nothing but the small villages of the Zuni. Less than pleased, Coronado forced the Zuni to host him and his men and began sending out expeditions explore west to the Colorado River and east to the Rio Grande, forcing their way into the small villages they found and becomingly increasingly frustrated by the lack of golden cities. This behavior eventually led to open conflict with some of the tribes, to which the Spanish responded by burning several villages to the ground. After a year of this shit, the natives made up a story of a crazy rich city called Quivira far to the northeast, which they promised to guide Coronado to if he would just get the fuck out. The ruse worked, and Coronado headed east onto the Great Plains, where he spent the better part of a year wandering around, reaching as far as eastern Kansas. Though finding some large villages, with populations at times over a thousand, he found no riches, and eventually gave up and returned to Mexico, arriving home in 1542, completely bankrupt.
The significant failure of both the expeditions of de Soto and Coronado left the Spanish with little interest in the interior north of Mexico. Though rumors of Cibola would continue to persist, no further expeditions went north for nearly forty years. Overall, though Coronado’s asshattery had caused harm to the peoples of the southwest, overall they were largely unaffected, going back to how they had lived before once Coronado left. Unfortunately, the same cannot be said for the Muskogeean peoples of the southeast. De Soto’s time amongst them would have dire consequences.
