Donald Harris

Misi Ziibi Donald Harris

The confrontation between Desoto and the Chickasaws in 1541has a couple of curious log entries made by two of the men chronicling the event. A Portuguese chronicler and a Spanish chronicler mention that there was a Spanish woman attached to the expedition. Those men also recorded that the woman was burned to death trying to retrieve a string of pearls from her lodging when the Chickasaws drove the Spaniards out of their Mississippi home lands. Those same chroniclers decided that it was very much worth mentioning that there was a horse killed by a spear that had a red colored shaft. Both of them wrote about a spear that was thrown so hard that it penetrated one side of the horses' chest and exited the other side by "a hand's width."This is a story about that Spanish woman and that Chickasaw Warrior.