Many explorers have visited Mississippian Indian villiages, but few have left written records. However, one that does exist is the record left by the Spanish travelers who came through the Mississippi Valley in 1542-1543. These travelers were members of the army of Hernando DeSoto. DeSoto landed somewhere near Tampa Bay, Florida and, over two years, traveled throughout present day Florida, Georgia, South Carolina, Tenessee, Alabama, Mississippi, Arkansas, Texas and Lousiana. Click here to see a map of DeSoto's route. The European explorers and Mississippian Indians traded with each other. Europeans provided guns, ammunition, metal kettles, iron tools, glass beads, and metal ornaments. These were sometimes given as gifts to hosts, guides, or to the chief, and they were also exchanged for pearls or baskets, and for necessities, such as meat, oil, salt, skins, and horses. The reports left by Desoto's army are some of the only eyewitness accounts of the Mississippian culture.

    "Having arrived in the town, we found that the caciques there were accustomed to have, next to the houses where they lived, some very high mounds, made by hand, and that others have their houses on the mounds themselves. On the summit of that mound we drove in the cross, and we all went with much devotion, kneeling to kiss the foot of the cross."
--Luys Hernandez de Biedma, 1539, from The De Soto Chronicles

Spanish explorers and missionaries making contact with the
Mississippian Indians. (National Park Service Website)

    "On Wednesday, the fifth of October, they left from the site of Tanico or Cayase (Forsyth, Missouri) and arrived on Friday at Tula (Harrison, Arkansas, having camped on the clearings of Hollister, on the White River across from Branson, and at the top of the mountain pass at Cricket), and they found the people (of Tula) gone; but they found many supplies. And on Saturday in the morning the Indians came to give them a surprise attack or battle. They brought long poles like lances, the points fire-hardened, and these were the best warriors that the Christians came upon (in North America); and they fought like desperate men, with the greatest courage in the world..." --DeSoto's Secretary

Some of DeSoto's men reported to a later historian, "In the village our men found many cowhides tanned and dressed with the hair on them, which served as blankets on the beds. They found many other rawhides, not yet tanned. They also found beef, but they saw no cattle in the country, nor did they learn from where they had brought the hides. The Indians of this province of Tula are different from all the other Indians whom our Spaniards had encountered hitherto, for we have said that the others are handsome and graceful in person. These, however, both men and women, have ugly faces, and though they are well-proportioned, they deform themselves by deliberate distortion of themselves. Their heads are incredibly long and tapering on top, being made thus artificially by binding them up from birth to the age of nine or ten years. They prick their faces with flint needles, especially the lips, inside and out, and color them black, thereby making themselves extremely and abominably ugly. The hideous aspect of their faces corresponds to their bad dispositions... Their neighbors said that they deformed their heads... and painted their faces and mouths, inside and out, to make themselves uglier than they were already, so that their faces would be as forbidding as their bad dispositions and fierce natures, for they were the most inhuman in every way."

 

(Midwestern Conquest Trails)

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    This is a late 19th century sketch of the Phenard Mounds, Arkansas by Cyrus Thomas, head of the Smithsonian's Bureau of American Ethnology. Thomas did not believe that Indians could have constructed  the geometric precise mounds but later reconsidered. (National Park Service Website)
 

A sketch of the Gardener Mound, Arkansas made by Cyrus Thomas
in the late 19th century. (National Park Service Website)