The Importance of the Arrival of
Hernando DeSoto
By Ranger Ben Sims from
DeSoto National Memorial
Manatee County Historical Society
Luncheon Meeting at
“Renaissance on 9th” Street
Bradenton, Florida
March 20, 2013
President David Bates: I’ve always been jealous of people with dual backgrounds in terms of Spanish-U.S., or in this case British-U.S. It gives them a broader perspective.
I’ve asked him what does he think of himself and he says: Well, originally a Brit but now a U.S. citizen. He embraces it. He sees some good things. I’m going to let Ben give you as much of his background as he wishes to share, then give our program and I’m really excited. Welcome, Ben.
Ranger Ben Sims: Good afternoon folks. How are we all today? I’d like to start by thanking Pam and David for having us here. Like he said, I’m a not going on for too long.
I’ll speak for about half and hour and then take questions at the end, which I am always happy to do.
My name is Ben Sims. I’ve been a Ranger in the National Park Service fro about four years. I came to the job by accident by I have graced it as my career. I work for the Division of Interpretation, which is what the Park Service calls Education. It is essentially the same thing. When I talk about Interpretive, or interpret, what I’m really talking about is teaching.
What I do, day in and day out, is talk to people, much like I’m doing here. We usually do things on-site, but we sometimes do things off-site as well, such as yacht clubs and now I’m speaking to the Historical Society.
At the DeSoto National Park, we are like any park where we commemorate or are based around some specific mission. So we are like other National Parks that I’m sure you have been to, like the Grand Canyon, Yosemite, and Yellowstone. Those are the big ones that are nature based. Their mission is fairly clear. It’s cut and dried, like they drew a big circle around a specific piece of nature like the Grand Canyon or something there that is of note, then everybody in that Park works at protecting that resource.
But actually, of the 398 units in the National Park Service, the great majority of them protect a piece of history, which should be of particular interest to you guys from the Historical Society. Many of those Parks are quite small. We are one of the smallest but actually the smallest is just one room, the Kosciuszko Memorial in Philadelphia. Most of the Parks are 100 acres plus. Here at DeSoto National Memorial in the northwest corner of Bradenton we are only 25 acres and we butt up to another County segment, which adds to our Park.
So every National Park is based around a mission. That mission is usually encompassed in a couple of sentences in the enabling legislation. National Parks and Monuments either have to be created by Congress or the Executive Branch. Ours was ratified in 1948. Our mission is within that legislation that created the Park. It is “to commemorate the DeSoto Expedition of 1539 and its effect on the Native Americans of the Southeast.”
Now this is obviously a very difficult history. This is not an easy sort of history to get through. Especially, as I’m sure you folks are all aware, the study of history changes all the time. We have been around since 1948 and the way in which we approach this history has changed immeasurably. Changed because historians and scholars changed the way they looked at it and changed because of the relationship to Bradenton, which has really centered its identity around DeSoto for many, many years. There are tensions but also collaborations there. There’s the Historical Society, the DeSoto Society and the DeSoto parade. Things like that.
So I’m going to talk a little bit about the history and how it is looked at these days. As I’m sure you’re aware, the study of history changes all the time. The way that we look at this expedition and its effect on the Indians will probably be looked at very differently in fifteen years. Or twenty years, or fifty years, just as it was looked at differently twenty years ago. It was a very different history. The actual understanding of history is a very fluid thing. Never trust anyone who tells you they know exactly what happened and why it happened. [Laughter from Audience] Because five years from now they’ll probably be wrong.
This is obviously one of the challenges that we face in the Park. Especially because the administration of the Park changes over time. The Park Service requires travel and movement within the Park Service in order to get promoted. We end up with a new superintendent every few years. If the new superintendent has a different idea of the way we should be doing our job, then we all have to do our job differently.
We are Federal Land. We are not, actually, technically part of Manatee County although we have a very close relationship with the county at large. This history is different for a couple of different reasons. The first reason is the local element. Many of you may not know is that DeSoto National Memorial could very well have been in St. Petersburg. The original site for what is now DeSoto National Memorial was on Weeden Island. It is still there as a nature preserve in Hillsborough County, or Pinellas County. If you haven’t been there, it is beautiful. You should really go. But I digress.
One of the cliché’s in our administrative history is: “If it wasn’t for the Depression and World War II, we wouldn’t exist.” We’d be up in St. Petersburg at a 100 acre site up there. But the Depression did happen, as did World War II, and eventually Bradenton sort of won the right to have DeSoto National Memorial. Of course, the Memorial was put in first, the stone marker that was placed there by the Colonial Dames of America. After that, the rest of the Memorial was established and the Visitors Center was eventually put there in the 1960s. It grows a little bit over time. Every superintendent that comes in adds a little bit. It gloms a little bit on the side and we have become a large operation because of that.
One of the, I suppose you could say controversial things about the Memorial, is the question of: “Where did DeSoto land?” Let me preface this by saying that I don’t think it matters in the slightest! The significance of this expedition, its importance to the American story, bears little relevance to where, exactly, he landed.
But, the reason that DeSoto National Memorial is where it is, at Shaw’s Point at the northwest corner of Bradenton, where the Manatee River flows into Tampa Bay, is because there was an historian, an archeologist, named Mr. Swanton. He decided that the Indian village of Ucita, which was the first village DeSoto encountered, was in fact on Terra Ceia. Desoto’s chronicles tell us that he lands a few miles south of there. Shaw’s Point was thought to be the most logical place where that could be. Given the almost complete lack of archeological evidence, any guess would be a good guess at this point.
But at some point in the 1980s, better archeological guesses were made and some evidence was found and now our best guess is that the village of Ucita or the tribe of Ucita or the central settlement of Ucita was round about the little Manatee River. DeSoto probably dropped his men a bit farther south, round about where Ruskin is today, if you are familiar with that. That’s the best guess. They’ve found archeological evidence that suggests that the town of Ucita was on that location. But yet, then again, this is “best guess.” Most of the DeSoto expedition, when you read about the minutia and the various aspects of it, is almost always “best guess”.
There is only one place in the entire southeast, now remember that DeSoto marches 4,000 miles. He passes through what is now ten states, from here up to the Carolinas and from there to Texas and all the states in between. There is only one place we are reasonably certain that he passed through. Just one in that 4,000 miles. So when you see that route, that sort of looks like wet string that has been dropped on the ground, that is really a “best guess”. It is the best guess right now of a man named Charles Hudson who was a very eminent historian and wrote most of the great books on DeSoto in the last 20 years. That’s his route that we go by now. But, twenty years from now? Lord only knows where that route will be. If they find archeological evidence, that route could shift left or right.
The only place we know he went though, and it is not even 100% sure, is right downtown Tallahassee at what is often called the Governor Martin House site. And if you ever go up to Tallahassee, it is where the head of the state archeological society has its headquarters. Right on that site, in the ground they found a bunch of chain mail, Spanish stuff, and they found a coin with Desoto’s emblem on it. That is how they determined that it was the place where the DeSoto expedition wintered.
The reason that this is a difficult history is because in the four years that DeSoto was here, to put it mildly, bad things happened. Right? The DeSoto expedition did not come in peace by any stretch of the imagination. He came and enacted all manner of violence and pillaging and things you can’t describe in polite company upon the Native Americans.
When Bradenton sort of constructed its identity around DeSoto, there was a certain amount of hero-izing that went on. DeSoto became a sort of conquering hero, a civilizer, a military tactician, and he may very well be all of those things. But the history over the last hundred years has judged him very, very differently. This makes it very difficult to have a Memorial that is named after a man whom many historians consider as committing a sort of genocide. Like most history, it can only be understood in the grey areas between polarized opinions. For hundreds of years after the expeditions, and this goes for Cortez, for Pizarro, for Pineda and for many of the Spanish conquistadors, they were often seen as heroes. They were seen as great, sort of Lewis and Clark-type figures, who came here and civilized this great barbaric land. That was the prevailing historical view until, really, the middle of the Twentieth Century. At which point, in the middle of the 1960s, DeSoto National Memorial had already been set up, as had the DeSoto Historical Society, the DeSoto Crew, the DeSoto Parade and, you know, all of this stuff.
And so, those things kind of took on that initial character. The 1960s come along and the study of history changes profoundly, for many reasons beyond this talk. Our view of DeSoto changes a lot then. He goes from a hero to a sort of evil man. You could say that history turned on a dime. It turned on DeSoto completely. And it turned out that even this new hero-DeSoto, sort of barbaric and evil and unnecessarily violent, swung too far in that direction. So you are left with these two polarities. You’ve got DeSoto as this great civilizing force and great military tactician against DeSoto as almost a Hitler figure.
Well, of course, again like all good history, the understanding of this history is the grey area in between. As is said often about DeSoto: Among the pantheon of conquistadors; Cortez, Pizarro, Pineda, Narvaez, Ponce de Leon, all the big ones; DeSoto is somewhat of a moderate. There are many, many conquistadors, even those that touched Florida such as Narvaez, who history will tell us were drastically more violent than DeSoto. In fact the way that DeSoto deals with the Native Americans is more of a “standard operating procedure” than anything else. He doesn’t go out of his way to be violent. He operates in a way that he knows will be successful. In the context of the times, many people believed him not to be brutal enough, that he was too soft on them. Which, when we think of it now, seems crazy.
But all history must be understood in a context. There are certain things in history that will forever be judged and will remain to be judged as evil men. All right, Hitler is the obvious example of that. But there are many other men throughout history, Genghis Khan and people like this.
DeSoto is not one of those guys. He is not particularly, exceptionally, horrible. Is he horrible? Should he get a pass for what he did to the Native Americans? Absolutely not! Should we learn from the experience of the Spanish colonial period and attempt not to do this to people again? In the greater societal sense, yes, we should. But for DeSoto, simply calling him a marauding evil barbarian does nothing for the study of history.
Actually, Native Americans suffer from the same type of polarity. When the three colonial powers of France, England and Spain first came here in their varying stages, they saw the Native Americans as brutes, sort of sub-human, barbaric, uncivilized for many different and complex reasons. They were seen as a sort of missing link between animals and humans.
This is obviously complete nonsense, right? But this was the prevailing view for hundreds and hundreds of years. They were able to ignore the fact that in 1491 the five biggest cities in the world were right here in the Americas. The two biggest civilizations in the world in 1491 were right here in the Americas. These societies, even though they don’t utilize the wheel and they don’t have currency, they are as complex and as large and as interesting as any society that existed anywhere else in the world.
Round about the time that history turns on DeSoto and sort of does its 180, the same thing happens to the Native Americans. They go from being denigrated as sort of sub-human to being, how do you describe it? Sort of as living in Eden as a peaceful people that were just minding their own business before those evil Europeans came along. Of course this is also complete nonsense. The Native Americans were violent. They took slaves as the Europeans did. They were constantly invading and being invaded. They were doing exactly what the Europeans were doing at this time. They were just doing it with different weapons. [Laughter of Audience]