The Juan Pardo Expeditions: Exploration of the Carolinas and Tennessee, 1566-1568 by Charles M. Hudson

The Juan Pardo Expeditions: Exploration of the Carolinas and Tennessee, 1566-1568 Reviews

• 
  Justinian

  2015-07 - Juan Pardo Expeditions: Exploration of the Carolinas and Tennessee, 1566-1568. Charles Hudson (Author) 2005. 356 Pages.
  
  I had read “Knights of the Sun” which was about the De Soto expedition through much of the same area that Pardo traversed though some 20 years apart. I had long wanted to read this book and thanks to an interlibrary loan from Wesleyan University in Ohio, I did. The book felt a bit stilted. It is an important subject, the story of Spanish Conquistadors exploring the American southeast and trying to establish a string of forts and settlements from South Carolina up into Tennessee on the way to the silver mines in Zacatecas, Mexico. While sadly most of this Spanish activity is omitted from the American story due to inconvenience, brevity, or racism, their logs and reports are the only narrative we have of the natives who lived in this area at this time. Because the Spanish pushed inland in their exploration further than the French, English, Dutch, or Swedish at this time it is our best description of the Mississippian Culture before its collapse. For that reason alone the Spanish entradas are worthy of study. With Pardo’s Expedition you get a 20 year follow up to De Soto and can see the effects of Native and European interaction along the fault lines. In some sense though the Spanish never left, they were absorbed and the Pardo entradas left very little written documentation, the author makes the most of the sources available discussing the situation, the activities, causes and results. He also includes a study of the Indians in this area in relation to Mississippian Culture. He does include Spanish copies with translation of the known documents about these entradas.