1491_ New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus - Charles C. Mann [56]
From today’s perspective, it is difficult to imagine the ethical system that could justify De Soto’s subsequent actions. For four years his force wandered through what are now Florida, Georgia, North and South Carolina, Tennessee, Alabama, Mississippi, Arkansas, Texas, and Louisiana, looking for gold and wrecking most everything it touched. The inhabitants often fought back vigorously, but they were baffled by the Spaniards’ motives and astounded by the sight and sound of horses and guns. De Soto died of fever with his expedition in ruins. Along the way, though, he managed to rape, torture, enslave, and kill countless Indians. But the worst thing he did, some researchers say, was entirely without malice—he brought pigs.
According to Charles Hudson, an anthropologist at the University of Georgia who spent fifteen years reconstructing De Soto’s path, the expedition built barges and crossed the Mississippi a few miles downstream from the present site of Memphis. It was a nervous time: every afternoon, one of the force later recalled, several thousand Indian soldiers approached in canoes to within “a stone’s throw” of the Spanish and mocked them as they labored. The Indians, “painted with ochre,” wore “plumes of many colors, having feathered shields in their hands, with which they sheltered the oarsmen on either side, the warriors standing erect from bow to stern, holding bows and arrows.” Utterly without fear, De Soto ignored the taunts and occasional volleys of arrows and poled over the river into what is now eastern Arkansas, a land “thickly set with great towns,” according to the account, “two or three of them to be seen from one.” Each city protected itself with earthen walls, sizable moats, and deadeye archers. In his brazen fashion, De Soto marched right in, demanded food, and marched out.
After De Soto left, no Europeans visited this part of the Mississippi Valley for more than a century. Early in 1682 white people appeared again, this time Frenchmen in canoes. In one seat was René-Robert Cavelier, Sieur de la Salle. La Salle passed through the area where De Soto had found cities cheek by jowl. It was deserted—the French didn’t see an Indian village for two hundred miles. About fifty settlements existed in this strip of the Mississippi when De Soto showed up, according to Anne Ramenofsky, an archaeologist at the University of New Mexico. By La Salle’s time the number had shrunk to perhaps ten, some probably inhabited by recent immigrants. De Soto “had a privileged glimpse” of an Indian world, Hudson told me. “The window opened and slammed shut. When the French came in and the record opened up again, it was a transformed reality. A civilization crumbled. The question is, how did this happen?”
Today most historians and anthropologists believe the culprit was disease. In the view of Ramenofsky and Patricia Galloway, an anthropologist at the University of Texas, the source of contagion was very likely not De Soto’s army but its ambulatory meat locker: his three hundred pigs. De Soto’s company was too small to be an effective biological weapon. Sicknesses like measles and smallpox would have burned through his six hundred men long before they reached the Mississippi. But that would not have been true for his pigs.
Pigs were as essential to the conquistadors as horses. Spanish armies traveled in a porcine cloud; drawn by the supper trough, the lean, hungry animals circled the troops like darting dogs. Neither species regarded the arrangement as novel; they had lived together in Europe for millennia. When humans and domesticated animals share quarters, they are constantly exposed to each other’s microbes. Over time mutation lets animal diseases jump to people: avian influenza becomes human influenza, bovine rinderpest becomes human measles, horsepox