Description
Three surviving sixteenth-century journals, written during the expedition of Hernando De Soto into North America, detail a complex array of twelve different nations in a land just across the Mississippi River. Each had separate beliefs, languages, and interconnected villages with capital towns comparable in size to European cities of the time. Through these densely populated sites, the Spanish carried a powerful new religion, a host of deadly old-world diseases, famines and wars.
De Soto died in the land he ravaged and plundered, disillusioned that he could not find the gold and great treasures he had promised. The surviving war-weary conquistadors under constant attacks fled down the Mississippi River on hastily built barges.
No other Europeans ventured into this land until French explorers arrived over a century later. They found nothing of the vibrant people, the flourishing societies, or the grand cities that the Spanish had so vividly described in their journals.
A hundred cold winters pass, since the foretold arrival of the Son-of-the-Sun (assumed to be De Soto). Far from the ancient homelands in a small tribe of survivors Manaha, Mother-of-None, steps into the light of the village fire. Rejecting long-held taboos, the old woman demands that the tribe allow the children to hear her passed-down stories about their abandoned homeland and the time of the Great Dying.
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