“A taste for archæological inquiries was rapidly developed, even in this country, until Dickens ridiculed its devotees mercilessly and successfully in his Pickwick Papers; but gentlemen of taste, learning, and leisure, like Alexander B. Meek, Benj. F. Porter, Joseph B. Cobb, and especially the late Governor and United States Senator from this State, George R. Gilmer, were devoted to the prosecution of inquiries affecting primeval dwellers in America. I was reading a paragraph to-day,” said the journalist, “in the Tallahassee (Fla.) Sentinel, that tells of the discovery, two miles from that city, of a Spanish horseman's heavy spur. On either side of the rowel, an inch and a half in diameter, little bells dangled. Such spurs are still used in Mexico, and, I presume, in Spain. More recently a farmer plowing in the field, and near the spot at which the spur was found, unearthed a solid, shapeless mass, which proved to be a bronze stirrup, of heavy, ancient pattern. It is as massive, relatively, as the spur. This stirrup was firmly imbedded in the ground, and thick coatings of rust enveloped it. Raised figures on the stirrup still stood out in strong relief. Its sides are Ethiopian statuettes, facing each other, and leaning forward till they almost meet. Their uplifted clasped hands hold the leathern strap that attached the stirrup to the saddle. The Florida editor says: 'So unlike are both these relics to anything known to this generation, and, both being found near the same place, it is not unreasonable to ascribe them to the same era and artisan. Nor is the supposition at all improbable that one of the knightly followers of De Soto was allured on through this then unknown region and wilderness, like that dauntless son of Spain, by a thirst for yellow heaps of gleaming gold that loomed up ahead of them in vain visions and heated fancies, Here he fell a victim to the tomahawk and scalping-knife of the wronged and revengeful red man; and, no doubt, some one of the “Tallahassee Tribe,” of which “Tiger Tail” claimed to be a descendant, boasted, as he displayed at his belt a yet bloody scalp, that he had here killed a pale-face.'

“Beyond the fact that trifling discoveries of this character define with a share of probable accuracy the route of De Soto, they have little value, and yet to such an extent is the taste for the old and curious indulged, that I am told I cannot secure this old stirrup and spur save at great cost. My purpose was to send models of them to Castelar, the Spanish scholar and statesman, that he might discover when and where such spurs and stirrups were manufactured. We should not forget, while noting the spot at which such remains of De Soto are found, that Indians may have stolen and lost this property of Spaniards, and it is not impossible that some Floridian, who served in the Mexican war of 1846-47, may have brought the spur and stirrup from Mexico. Are there such evidences of decay that this supposition cannot be well founded?

“After Governor Gilmer had served many years in each branch of the United States Congress, he devoted his old age to the perfection of an archæological and mineralogical cabinet. When a boy, I was often at his attractive home in the ancient village of Lexington, Georgia. The Spanish consul at Charleston visited the venerable statesman, who was not well enough to designate for the stranger the wonders of the cabinet. Of this I was telling the curious Spaniard all I knew, when he stopped me suddenly, and holding up a blood-red, beautiful carnelian between his fingers, asked whence it came. I had heard Governor Gilmer tell that it was plowed up by a negro in a field near Macon, Georgia. I remembered, too, that the governor had paid ten dollars for the stone and an old musket stock found about the same time, near the same spot. The stone was perforated longitudinally. Its length was about five and a half or six inches, and its transverse diameter about one and a half inches. The stone was very beautiful, but Governor Gilmer had no conception of its design as shaped, or of its value. He often wondered why it was so deftly carved and what old race of artisans did this cunning work. He said it was strange that such an old-fashioned musket stock had been unearthed near the same spot.

“ ‘This,’ said the Spaniard, as I conducted him to Governor Gilmer's private apartment, ‘is a Castilian dagger handle. Very few were ever made. Noblemen of Spain wore them there four hundred years ago.’ Brilliant light, in Governor Gilmer's eyes, fell from the Spaniard's lips upon the pretty carnelian. It shone with lustrous glory as the stranger held it in the bright sunbeams falling through the open window, and flooding the apartment. The gleaming stone became as eloquent as beautiful, and Governor Gilmer deemed it invaluable. It may not be improper to say that a few years ago I caused the cabinet of Governor Gilmer, now the property of the University of Georgia, at Athens, to be examined by Mrs. General King, of Chalky Level, that I might photograph the stone and publish its history in Harper's Monthly. The carnelian dagger handle had disappeared. It could not be used or exposed in this country. There is not another like it. Is it not barely probable that it finally found its way, through Charleston, back to Spain? Though I was a little boy at the time, I remember how eagerly that courtly gentleman, the Spanish consul, with his great lustrous black eyes devoured that brilliant stone. But any rude soldier of this dreary age would have deported such a carnelian for its beauty and uniqueness.

“From old books gathered in the admirably well-selected and costly library of the University of Alabama, of about 150,000 volumes, I had gathered a share of information affecting religious creeds and 'superstitions,' as we are pleased to term them, of Oriental peoples.* I had read of the crude faith that clings everywhere to the horseshoe as an emblem of good fortune. Our ancestors, as do we, through many centuries, persisted in hanging old horseshoes over gateways. Lord Nelson sailed into the battle of the Nile with a horseshoe nailed to the masthead of his ship. Recently, the vague, undefined superstition has gathered fresh vigor, Young gentlemen, strangely enough, have scarf pins fashioned after horseshoes, Fairest dames, more wonderfully, knowing not what they do, deck miniature horseshoes with brightest jewels, worn as amulets. Old horseshoes, found in the highway, are gilded with gold and suspended over mantels in fashionable salons of wealth and taste. Hindu maidens originally set the example. They have muttered prayers, through many centuries, looking to the horseshoe as the vehicle of supreme delights. Who can tell in what facts the vague, but universally accepted superstition had origin? What does it signify, and what is this significance? The Eastern and Asian origin of the Irish race has been asserted, because Irishmen are especially addicted to that faith in the capacity of old horseshoes to ward off evil which obtained among Phœnecians everywhere in the Orient. It was not a horseshoe, as such, that won, originally, this superstitious regard. But the horseshoe either represented the crescent moon or probably symbolized that depraved nature- worship practiced by devotees of Siva in Hindustan. I saw Spratling pluck a worn-out horseshoe from its deep burial place in the roadway only yesterday, and carefully suspend it from the body of the oak beneath which he slept. He said his father did such things, and he only followed in his footsteps.

“But all this is simply a prelude to an account of two discoveries, *Soon after the date of conversations here recited, the University of Alabama, with all its costly structures, observatory, dormitories, professor's residences, and the old Roman pantheon, containing the library, was destroyed by fire. The torch was applied by the specific orders of a commanding general. supposed to define De Soto's route from Florida to Arkansas and Texas.

“William Richardson is an old and intelligent citizen of Pickens County, in Eastern Alabama. Plowing in his field along an old roadway, not many miles from the little village of Yorkville, and, perhaps, twenty miles east of Columbus, Mississippi, he unearthed a package of twelve rust-eaten horseshoes. They were superimposed upon one another in the edge of this old roadway which was used at some period and by some race before Mr. Richardson was born, and before his farm was cleared and cultivated. I have what is left, by the corroding tooth of time, of one of these horseshoes. It is quite one-half broader than a modern horseshoe. It had no ‘heel’ and no groove or depression for the heads of the nails. We are not told by any chronicler of De Soto's wanderings and battles how his horses were shod or that he brought horseshoes from Europe and I am curious to know whether horseshoes of this description were made three hundred and fifty years ago in Spain. Since Indians never shod ponies, and no army ever invaded Pickens County, and these iron platings were designed for the hoofs of the largest horses and not for Indian ponies, and Mr. Richardson and his neighbors were always puzzled about the origin of the queer old rust-eaten horseshoes. Dr. Alexander Agnew, a gentleman of singular learning and literary taste, living in Richardson's neighborhood, carefully preserved the ‘relic’ which I have. It gained value in his eves when he learned that in the same old roadway several miles west of Richardson's and near the village of Yorkville, another discovery had been made which shed light upon the mystery attached to the horseshoes and to the origin of the ‘old road.’ Indians made no roads, only ‘paths,’ and yet here was a road evidently carved out as a wagon-way, its outlines perpetuated by rain-falls along the hill-sides, in primeval forests and beside this old road, at the foot of a hill, and at a bright, sparkling spring, perhaps seven or eight miles from Richardson's farm, a pair of apothecary's scales were found. A great chestnut tree was blown down, shown by consecutive rings of annual production to have been more than two hundred and fifty years old. It had drawn its life from the fountain of which I tell, and fell that a thirsty farmer might find the scales, guarded through centuries beneath its roots. The scales themselves and the weights, having on them Spanish inscriptions and numerals naming the King of Spain and the Pope of the period, and dated, if I remember accurately, 1534, had rested two and three feet below the earth's surface, and below the great tree, from the day the thirsty Spanish pharmaceutist, who accompanied De Soto, drank, and ate chestnuts at this spot. The tree sprang up. Its roots covered and guarded the scales till the tempest overthrew this monarch of the forest. The farmer, Mr. Alexander, who discovered the scales, took one of the weights to Carrollton, the capital of Pickens County, that the inscription might be translated. A Mexican war veteran said that the words were Spanish and that it was very strange that implements of druggists' art, as old as these, should be found in such a spot. It never occurred to him that De Soto's followers lost the scales and thus designated a point in his route to the Mississippi. It can hardly be supposed that the Indians stole or seized in battle and lost both the horseshoes and the apothocary's scales found so near the same spot, and I have ever believed, since I became conversant with the facts here recited, that De Soto passed through Pickens County and crossed the Tombecbee, of which his chroniclers tell, at Barton, a little village a few miles above Columbus. Many persons of the neighborhood of Yorkville saw the scales and horseshoes of which I tell. They gossiped about the inscriptions, and this inter-state war came, and when I sought, not very long ago, to secure the relics, the finder had moved away. His grandson, a citizen of Columbus, Mississippi, wrote very recently that he had not abandoned hope of their recovery. But do not forget,” added the journalist, “that I have the oldest horseshoe in the world, and that it belonged to De Soto. I have heard most intelligent officers and many soldiers, since the inception of inter-state hostilities, and since we began to march over the country in all directions, ascribe the erection of the old stone fort in Kentucky, and of that, more wonderful, at Winchester, Tennessee, to De Soto. General Bragg examined the ancient fortress at Winchester, and stated when I asked him what he thought of it, that it was constructed in accordance with the most approved rules of the highest military art, and that with guns, even of a century ago, it was absolutely impregnable. Who reared this massive structure, and who carved out this stone and lifted up those enduring walls and when was the mighty task accomplished? Great earthworks, fortifications, and mounds in Eastern Tennessee have been ignorantly ascribed to De Soto as their builder. He was never in East Tennessee, or at Winchester, or in Kentucky and nobody pretends that red men of our time ever executed these tasks comparable with works of highest civilization; and I am persuaded that as Indians have been valueless and incapable, since 1492, when Columbus came, even so were they always averse to toil; and, digging few graves, were addicted to no species of industry. They were always nomadic and homeless as the Apaches, Creeks, and Sioux, and I have never believed that any Indian tribe, except the bearded Natchez, ever reared mounds like that at Florence, Alabama. The Natchez alone had beards like white men; and, claiming descent from white men, were always, like the mound-builders, fire-worshippers. They were most civilized of all the red race. They gave La Salle a grand festival, sitting at tables covered with buckskin as white as linen. They used chopsticks, as do Chinese, and were greatly frightened when the Frenchmen of two hundred years ago drew broad, glittering knives from sheaths and thrust them with food into their mouths. They said their original king and queen came down from the skies, and that they were white; that they lighted the sacred fires on the summit of the great mound just below Natchez which would burn while the Natchez were free, and no longer. The French made the priests drunken, extinguished the fires, the dispirited Natchez were easily beaten in battle, and migrated west, and became extinct. These Natchez Indians said that their fathers, who may have been the moundbuilders, once reigned over the whole continent, and that the land, covered with great cities, extended, unbroken by the sea, an infinite distance toward the east. There came a great convulsion of nature, and the Gulf of Mexico supplanted their sunken domains which had extended far out into the Southern Atlantic towards Africa.

“When Commodore Maury surveyed the ocean's bottom from Cuba towards the western coast of Africa, he found abrupt chasms and shallow depressions, and there were those who believed that sunken cities rested in the ocean's depths, and that the Natchez were not mistaken, and that Solon and Diodorus Siculus were not misled by Egyptian priests who told them of the sunken continent, Atlantis, lying west of Africa. Isn't it strange that traditional lore of our red men was conformed to that communicated by Egyptian priests, five hundred years before Christ, to the Greek philosopher? Plutarch tells the story in his life of Solon.

“If you would listen and know what I think about it,” continued the newspaper man, “I would designate upon the map the route of De Soto, as I have defined it. We are constantly marching blindly over the country, and it invests one's movements with peculiar, intelligent interest, if we may read the history of men and battles of a former age in geographical facts. That we may not err and ascribe to the Spanish hero the works of primeval races found almost everywhere in America, I will give you a succinct definition of the route pursued by the heroic Spaniard. I was reading, even in Smithsonian papers, the grave statement that De Soto reared those skillfully constructed ancient fortifications, described by Edwin M. Grant, in Eastern Tennessee. The story was once told that De Soto built the great mounds at Birmingham, Alabama, and opened the tunnel as a means of underground communication, said by the people of the vicinity, when Lord Lyell was there in 1846, to connect the mounds with the spring, three hundred yards distant. The greater Birmingham mound is a parallelogram having an area of more than an acre on its summit. It is lifted up fifty or sixty feet above the valley in which Birmingham rests idly in the sunshine between mountain ranges five miles apart, of coal on the one hand and of iron on the other, each stratum thirty feet in thickness. I visited the place, when a boy, with ‘Mr.’ Lyell, the English geologist, but gave little attention to peculiar facts now discussed. I only know that there is nothing in books or in the peculiarities of the ancient earth-works at Birmingham to induce the belief that De Soto visited the spot. It is hardly necessary to suggest the reflection that, as these greatest mounds commonly designate centers of moundbuilders' wealth and population, so, in our time, they mark sites of most prosperous town and cities, and we may yet discover evidences of the use of coal and iron which must have attracted primeval inhabitants of the continent, if they used these minerals, to the beautiful valley in which Birmingham reposes. Whether they did or not, it is nevertheless true that the site of each great city in the valley of the Mississippi was designated for our race by great mounds, showing that the same commercial laws and facts begat aggregations of wealth and population in the moundbuilders' age as in ours. Did they have steamers and railways? Surely they were not modern red men who had no commercial ideas and located towns and villages without reference to facilities for navigation or proximity of productive districts. I have said this that one may not confound works of primeval races with those of the heroic Spanish knight.

“Using Theodore Irving's translations of old records preserved in Spain, and applying data somewhat vague to geographical and topical facts familiar to those who have traversed the Gulf States as often as most Confederate soldiers, and then cognizant of each antiquarian's discovery that designates a spot visited by the Spanish adventurers, I would state that De Soto left Tampa Bay, Florida, going northwest, June 31, 1539. De Soto's route was parallel to or near the road from Tampa to Fort King. He crossed the Withlacoochee and Suwanee Rivers. He moved into Georgia and passed the winter of 1539-40 on the Bay of St. Marks. March 3, 1540, he left Appalachee and following up the east bank of the Flint River, crossed into Baker County, Georgia. The Alabama poet and literateur, Alexander B. Meek, in his book entitled, ‘Romantic Passages in Southwestern History,’ published in 1837, says that De Soto passed very near the site of the present beautiful city of Macon. But Judge Meek never heard of Governor Gilmer's carnelian dagger handle or of the discovery more recently made at Macon, in this State.

“When the place was partially fortified not many months ago, Dr. I. E. Nagle, now of New Orleans, was sent thither to organize army hospitals and provide for the sick and wounded. He was watching Confederate soldiers employed in perfecting old military earthworks planned and upheaved by prehistoric races in the suburbs of Macon. These earthworks were made after the models used in our time and it was only necessary to repair them. They may have been planned and built by De Soto, but it is much more probable that he, as did these Confederate soldiers, used here, as the latter did the mounds to resist Grant's gunboats along Yazoo Pass, these old strongholds of primeval occupants of the country. In any event, while the Confederates were digging away the base of a broad, earthen wall, they came upon a grave, its occupants' skeletons encased in rust-eaten coats of mail. Dr. Nagle sought to secure the relics, but these were claimed and retained by the owner of the spot, and the doctor was only suffered to have a broken rosary twined about a skeleton's neck. This rosary adorns to-day, so Dr. N. tells me, the walls of the priest's rooms attached to the cathedral in Memphis, Tennessee. A part of the sword of an armored knight remained undestroyed by time; but the armor itself was only a series of layers of iron rust. But full details of this discovery may be obtained by the curious in such matters by addressing Dr. I. E. Nagle, No. 13 St. Charles Street, New Orleans, Louisiana, as W. B. Bryan, of Columbus, Mississippi, will tell of the discovery of the Spanish apothecary's scales by his grandfather at Yorkville, Alabama.

“Leaving Macon, where he probably fought the Indians, using moundbuilders' earthworks, he passed near Milledgeville, and crossed the Ocmulgee and Oconee Rivers, entering the province of Cofachiqui lying within the fork of the Broad and Savannah Rivers. May 3, 1540, the Spaniards moved northwest and were five days crossing the mountains of Habersham County, in the midst of which the late Texas soldier and senator, Rusk, - Houston's peer, - was born. In De Soto's time, this Cherokee County was known as Chalaque. He came to Canasauga, after several days' march, on the banks of the Etowah. June 25, 1540, the Spaniard encamped at Chiaha situated on the upper end of an island, as described by De Soto's chroniclers, fifteen miles in length. There is no such island in the Coosa River, but the Spaniard probably mistook the peninsula formed by the Coosa and Chattooga for an island, or these rivers were originally united, creating an island above the point of confluence. Farmers of the district say that such was the case. In any event there is no doubt that the indian town and stronghold, Chiaha, was but a short distance above the junction of the Coosa and Chattooga.

“Leaving Chiaha July 2, 1540, De Soto on the same day reached Acoste on the southern extremity of the island. The next day he crossed the Coosa River, marching several days through a province of that name - it is sometimes spelled Cosa - embracing Benton, Talladega, Coosa, and Tallapoosa Counties, in Alabama. He rested at an indian town called Cosa, till August 20, 1540, when he began to move through Tallamuchassie Ullobali and Toasi. He reached Tallise, in the curve of the Tallapoosa River at the site of the present village of Tallase, September 18, 1540. From Tallise he went to Tuscaluza, on the banks of the Alabama, in Clarke County, where he fought his most terrible battle. November 18, 1540, he moved northwardly and, in five days, arrived at Cabusto, in the province of Pafalaya on the Black Warrior River in Green County near the village of Erie. After a few days' anabasis, he crossed the Tombigbee in a province called Chicasa, in a few days encamping at a town of the same name. Northern Mississippi and Western Tennessee were dwelling places of the heroic Chicsas or Chicasaws. We only known that after a terrific battle with these red men, De Soto was six days in reaching the Mississippi. Whether this battle was fought, as many suppose, near Tupelo or at Carrollton, in Mississippi, I am not prepared to say. From either point the great river might have been reached at Memphis after a six days' march. He crossed it forty miles above Memphis. With much accuracy the district known as Surrounded Hill, in Arkansas, sixty miles west of Memphis, is described by those who recited the story of De Soto's adventures. Beyond this, it is needless to follow him. Except Surrounded Hill, no place of encampment or of battle west of the river has been identified, except, as I have shown, that he was buried below Helena, at the base of Crowley's Ridge, in the channel occupied by the river at that date, now known as Old Town Lake.

“When Arkansas and Texas and the Indian Territory are more densely populated, and broader areas are cultivated, the plow and spade may make discoveries to define paths as made west of the Mississippi by the daring, resolute Spaniard.”

“Will you not tell me,” asked the schoolmaster, “how you know that De Soto was entombed in Old Town Lake. I never heard the assertion before. I have seen many pictures of the sad burial scene, but never one representing the locality as now identified.”

The newspaper man replied:

“We have heard enough of De Soto for to-night. Remind me to-morrow evening or at noon that the story should have its proper conclusion, and I will tell all I know of De Soto that has not been published in countless books and magazine articles devoted to this attractive theme.”