Page:The Red Man and the White Man in North America.djvu/99

Rh the vilest outrages upon those who treated them with the most deference and friendliness. Making their way to Mobile, the mailed scoundrels were withstood by the brave but unprotected natives, who were overborne by horrible carnage. A battle which lasted for nine hours proved severe in its results upon the Spaniards. Eighty-two of them were killed, with forty-five of their horses. All their camp equipage, stores, instruments, medicines, and sacramental furniture were burned. Of the savages five or six hundred were slain. After similar progress and ravages De Soto reached the bank of the Mississippi, where, worn out by excitement, effort, and disease, he died, in May, 1542; and his body was sunk by night in the turbid stream.

His successor in command, with a remnant of three hundred and twenty men of the splendid army of one thousand, — their array humiliated and reduced to starvation, — leaving five hundred of his Indian slaves and taking with him one hundred, put together some wretched rafts, and floating down the river landed again at Tampa Bay, after four years of reckless and devastating wandering through Florida, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, and the Arkansas territory. The natives had been terribly reduced in numbers, except in Georgia. The Muscogees, previously living in the Ohio Valley, moved down soon after to Alabama, incorporating with them remnants of northern tribes which had been ravaged by the Iroquois and Hurons. It is to this miscellaneous gathering from fragments of adopted and conquered tribes that the English, when first penetrating the country, gave the name of “Creeks,” from the number of streams which course it.

The Spaniards were the first of Europeans to come into contact with the natives on our Pacific coast. While Pizarro, after crossing the Isthmus, went southward, and with heroic perseverance against all bafflings discovered Peru, in 1527, and made his “Conquest” of it in 1532, another