Book Review

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Book Review | The Journal of American History, 86.4 | The History Cooperative

The Hernando de Soto Expedition: History, Historiography, and "Discovery" in the Southeast. Ed. by Patricia Galloway. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1997. xvi, 457 pp. $60.00, isbn 0-8032-2157-6.)

This collection of analytical essays, edited by Patricia Galloway and published by the University of Nebraska Press, offers the best examination of the Soto expedition currently available. While thoughtful and scholarly, its most important contribution is a critical look at the Soto sources too long accepted as accurate accounts of the conquistador's expedition through the Southeast. As a consequence of the essayists' scrutiny, much of the Soto history remains in doubt. And, whatever else scholars and students of colonial history learn from this valuable historiographic study, they will never again read heroic and personal chronicles of the past without questioning their accuracy, if not their validity. 1

The sources are studied in the first section of the book, and, as Galloway says, "they tell us as much or more about their authors and the contexts in which they were writing as they do about actual expedition events." For this reader, the sources, once analyzed by such scholars as Ida Altman, Martin Malcolm Elbl and Ivana Elbl, Lee Dowling, and David Henige, as well as Galloway, seem to offer only the skeletal remains of the well-known Soto story. Such are the logical consequences of the careful research of contemporary historiographers. . . .

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