jects without objection or interference. Quigualtam’s kingdom, a collec-
tion of southwestern Mississippi towns centered on the present-day city of
Natchez, was doubtlessly the same polity known later as Natchez. A cen-
tury after Quigualtam’s time, the Natchez encountered the French and for a
long period resisted subjugation. Generations of hostility near the vortex of
Anglo-French trade rivalry, however, apparently fragmented the Natchez’s
hierarchy. A series of ‘‘rebellions’’ against the French between and
culminated in the natives’ defeat and diaspora. Some of the Natchez
were enslaved on French Caribbean plantations; more fled eastward toward
peoples allied with the British—the Chickasaws and Upper Creeks—with
whom they apparently assimilated.^6
De Soto never laid eyes on Quigualtam, for the Spanish leader died on
May . His successor, Luis de Moscoso, fearing natives might find and
desecrate de Soto’s body, which had been secretly buried in Guachoya, had
it disinterred, weighted, and dumped into the Mississippi by night. Mos-
coso told natives that de Soto was visiting the sky and would return soon.
Moscoso and his officers resolved to march westward in hopes of finding
Mexico. All summer and into the early fall they passed over drier, poorer,
landscapes, hoping to find Mexico just past the ‘‘River Daycao.’’ There at
last—perhaps ‘‘Daycao’’ was the Brazos—Moscoso’s scouts found only a
few poor and frightened people. So the Spaniards turned back, toward the
hostile Mississippi country again, for at least there was corn beside the
lush river. Winter found them passing through poor Anilco again, cold and
wet in their deerskin shirts and moccasins, resembling the natives they
had slaughtered. Moscoso and his scouts found two towns about a mile
from the river. Both had provisions. They tore down one town to enlarge
the other and begin construction of brigantines. With ingenious improvi-
sation, craftsmen with experience in Genoa, Sardinia, and Fez transformed
iron slave chains and collars into timber fastenings, indigenous plant fibers
into caulk, pine sap into waterproofing, and so on.
On July the Spaniards rowed their seven vessels, with canoes
hitched behind, into the Mississippi’s channel, leaving hundreds of native
slaves, some of them Spanish-speaking and Christian, standing on a for-
eign and hostile shore. Two days later, downriver, they encountered at last
the forces of Quigualtam. A fleet of perhaps a hundred canoes, some large
enough to hold sixty or seventy men singing rhythmic songs of martial ex-
ploits, intercepted the Spanish, cut off a contingent in small canoes, and
bashed or drowned most of them while Moscoso, caught in the swift cur-