Description
Book SynopsisLooking for De Soto is the journal Joyce Hudson kept, as she accompanied her husband on a four-thousand-mile trek. It provides a warmly humane account of the people they met and the places they saw as they searched for De Soto's trail beneath railroad tracks and two-lane blacktops, along riverbanks and mountain ridges, from Florida to Texas.
Trade ReviewHudson, calling herself a 'knowledgeable layman,' accompanied her anthropologist husband, Charles, on a six-week trip in 1984 to locate Hernando De Soto's route through the United States in 1540. This book is Hudson's daily journal of their travels: how they worked out De Soto's route using four contemporary yet conflicting chronicles and current archaeological research. Until more aboriginal sites are excavated, the exact De Soto trail remains hypothesis; theirs is a more credible route than John R. Swanton's Final Report of the U.S. De Soto Expedition Commission. The book was published as Hudson wrote it; updated segments of the route appear only in the epilog. This is a fine, nontechnical snapshot of an investigation-in-progress.
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A warmly humane travel story about rural and small-town life from Florida to Texas. Descriptions of the region's ever changing terrain, vegetation, and climate fill the book, along with troubled musings about Americans' increasing disconnection from the land and lack of reverence 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 poring over maps, charts, and notes. As if writing a detective story, Hudson 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.
