Much of the piedmont, indeed, was vacant in —perhaps a result of a
very long drought that had devastated agriculture and destabilized chief-
doms—and the Europeans went hungry.
The exception was their encounter by the Wateree River in South Caro-
lina with a Mississippian culture called Cofitachequi. De Soto and his trans-
lators presented themselves as peaceable sojourners to subchiefs, then to a
‘‘brown but well-formed’’ woman they called the Lady of Cofitachequi. She
arrived upon a fine fabric-covered litter carried by her servants. De Soto’s
Muskogean translator, Perico, thought the Lady a niece of the paramount
chief, but the Spaniards accepted the Lady herself as chief. She brought
gifts of food, fine cloth, and dressed skins and presented de Soto with
strands of freshwater pearls from her own neck. Later, however, the Span-
ish broke into a burial temple to rob noble corpses of pearls and various
metal and glass ornaments. In the principal tomb they found scarily lifelike
wooden statues of warriors on guard. While the robbery continued, Span-
iards and their horses consumed much of Cofitachequi’s corn supplies. The
Lady, now disaffected, disappeared, but de Soto had her hunted down and
forced her to walk, as a hostage, as the expedition made its way into western
North Carolina. One day the Spaniards, starving again and distracted, per-
mitted the Lady and her native servant to enter the woods to urinate. They
escaped and later connected with several other runaways from the expedi-
tion. One of these was an African slave whom the Lady of Cofitachequi took
as mate as they made their way back to her kingdom and safety—a mar-
velous outcome to an otherwise dreadful intercultural collision. Assuming
(plausibly, I think) that the romantic couple were striking physical speci-
mens, I cannot resist the conjecture that among their remote descendants
might be the most beautiful of the inventors of rock ’n’ roll, the Georgia-
born Little Richard.
tIn the mountains of North Carolina and the valleys of eastern Tennes-
see, meanwhile, the invaders found people and corn to extort, especially
among the Coosa. At one point natives brought the white men barbequed
turkeys, and here and several times later in the expedition there were gifts
of small ‘‘dogs,’’ barkless and edible, which the Spanish concluded Indians
actually raised for food. The explorers were frustrated again in searches for
valuable minerals; yet the northern trek did yield more stores of freshwater
pearls, most of these in tombs of the native nobility, and the Spanish helped
themselves. In the eastern Tennessee Valley, then along the Coosawattee
in present-day northwestern Georgia, they encountered larger and larger