This powerful novel tells the story of Hinachuba Lucia, a Native American wise woman caught in the rapidly changing world of the early colonial South. With compelling drama and historical accuracy, Apalachee portrays the decimation of the Indian mission culture of Spanish Florida by English Carolina during Queen Anne's war at the beginning of the eighteenth century and also portrays the little-known institution of Indian slavery in colonial America. The novel recounts the beginnings of the colony of South Carolina and the struggle between the colonists and the Indians, who were at first trading partners-bartering deerskins and Indian slaves for guns and cloth-and then enemies in the Yamasee War of 1715. When the novel opens, Spanish missionaries have settled in the Apalachee homeland on what is now the eastern Florida panhandle, ravaging the native population with disease and altering its culture with Christianity. Despite these changes, the Apalachees maintain an uneasy coexistence with the friars. Everything changes when English soldiers and their Indian allies from the colony of Carolina invade Spanish Florida. After being driven from her Apalachee homeland by the English, Lucia is captured by Creek Indians and sold into slavery in Carolina, where she becomes a house slave at Fairmeadow, a turpentine plantation near Charles Town. Her beloved husband, Carlos, is left behind, free but helpless to get Lucia back. Swept by intricate and inexorable currents, Lucia's fate is interwoven with those of Juan de Villalva, a Spanish mission priest, and Isaac Bull, an Englishman in search of fortune in the New World. As the three lives unfold, the reader is drawn into a morally complex world where cultures meet and often clash. Both major and minor characters come alive in Hudson's hands, but none so memorably as the wise woman Lucia-beautiful, aristocratic, and strong. Informed by the author's extensive research, Apalachee is an ambitious, compelling novel that tells us as much about the ethnic and social diversity of the southern colonies as it does about the human heart.

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.