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Show De Soto's Futile Quest for Gold Brought Exploration of Arkansas Arkansas was one of the earliest of the Mississippi states to be explored. ex-plored. The first white man to touch Arkansas soil was Hernando Her-nando de Soto, the Spanish explorer ex-plorer who discovered the Mississippi Missis-sippi river. In May, 1541, he came tb a river so broad that he called it, in Spanish, the Rio Grande, or great river. The Indian name for the stream, Meschacebe, '.'father of waters," has come down to us, however, as Mississippi. De Soto crossed the river to the Arkansas side. For nearly a year, the last year of his life, De Soto traveled over what is now Arkansas, through a vast wilderness inhabited by wild animals and equally wild savages. Beginning near the mouth of the White river, De Soto went up the western shore of the Mississippi beyond the mouth of the St. Francis river, then journeyed southwest until he came to the Arkansas river. riv-er. There is a tradition that he was defeated in a battle with the Indians In-dians near where Jacksonport now stands,, and that he was compelled to turn north again. Learning that there were mountains moun-tains to the northwest, he continued toward northeast Arkansas where he hoped to find gold, traveling through swamps and dense forests for-ests and crossing mountain streams. Disappointed in not finding gold, he turned south, passed over the Boston Bos-ton mountains, crossed the Arkansas Arkan-sas river near Dardanelle Rock, and came into the land of the Cayas. Here, De Soto fell seriously ill, and a friendly Indian chief brought him to a lake of "very hot water" where he was healed. This lake was doubtless the now famous Hot Springs. On Ouachita river near the springs, De Soto and his party found salt which the Indians gathered and sold to their neighbors. The explorers ex-plorers spent the winter of 1541, a severe one, in an Indian village on the Ouachita, De Soto's faithful interpreter, in-terpreter, Juan Ortiz, died. Disheartened Dis-heartened by not finding gold and losing so many of his men, De Soto resumed his journey south in the spring of 1542. He followed the Ouachita Oua-chita to the Red river and then went downstream to the Mississippi. Mississip-pi. Exposure brought on a fever and De Soto died, his survivors burying him in the great river he had discovered. Spain profited little by the explorations ex-plorations of De Soto. Through her negligence, the Mississippi valley had remained unsettled for nearly a century and a half. But while Spain slept, the French were active. After securing the lands bordering on the St. Lawrence river, France had pushed southward along the Mississippi. |