In 1984, Joyce Rockwood Hudson accompanied her husband,
anthropologist Charles Hudson, on a 4,000-mile trek across the
Southeast. His objective was to retrace and verify the route taken
by Hernando de Soto four and a half centuries earlier. The effort
would bring into question, and ultimately supplant, much of what
was earlier thought to be the course of the Spanish explorer's
journey. This is the journal Joyce Hudson kept during that trip. A
kind of scholar's version of Blue Highways, the book is a warmly
humane and almost daily account of the people the Hudsons met, the
places they saw, and the things they did as they searched for De
Soto's trail beneath railroad tracks and two-lane blacktops, along
riverbanks and mountain ridges. Thus it is largely a travel story
about rural and small-town life in eleven states, from Florida to
Texas. Descriptions of the region's everchanging terrain,
vegetation, and climate fill the book-colored at times by Joyce
Hudson's troubled musings about Americans' increasing
disconnectedness from the land and irreverence for the past.
Conveying the rewards and frustrations of lives spent in
painstaking scholarly inquiry, Looking for De Soto also offers a
firsthand glimpse into the daily work of anthropologists and
archaeologists: the exchanges of ideas, the ventures through swamps
and down deeply rutted farm roads, the endless porings over maps,
charts, and notes. As if writing a detective story, the author
suspensefully paces the narrative with the accrual of geographical,
artifactual, and documentary evidence, punctuating it with false
leads and other setbacks, as mile after mile of the trail is
redrawn. The story even has its villains-"pothunters" and private
collectors; the builders of canals and dams that alter the courses
of rivers and inundate ancient village sites; and the owners of
corporate farms, who have leveled and eradicated ceremonial mounds
with their massive agricultural machinery. Finally, a sense of the
headlong cultural collision between Europeans and Native Americans
pervades the book. De Soto and his six hundred conquistadores were
the first Europeans to explore the interior of the southeastern
United States and the only ones to witness its aboriginal society
at its zenith. Hudson's evocation of this encounter so central to
the history of the New World may well send readers on their own
excursions into the past. Looking for De Soto is a fascinating
journey through today's South, illuminated by a richly informed
perspective on its earlier days.
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