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ARKANSAS HISTORICAL QUARTERLY, Volume LI, No. 4 (Winter 1992), p. 297
The Expedition of Hernando de Soto
A Post-Mortem Report Part II
By DAVID SLOAN
Those who have read the first part of this essay, covering interest in the de Soto expedition from the sixteenth through the nineteenth centuries, will recall a long period of sustained preoccupation with the march, together with voluminous commentary upon it. Readers will also recall that certain similarities emerged in the work on this largest of all the Spanish conquest entrusts, similarities that would ultimately limit the possible lines of inquiry. The accounts from the first generation, those of the "Gentleman of Elvas," Luys Hernandez de Biedma, Rodrigo Ranjel, and Garcilaso de la Vega,(1) provided more that factual information (sometimes reliable, sometimes not): they shaped the contours of interpretation as well. Only by using the expedition as a point of departure for fiction (as many had, and more would, with results proportional to the author and the inclinations of the readers), or by manufacturing documentation (as that odd character Lambert Wilmer had done in his xenophobic tract of the mid-nineteenth century), could one avoid the redundancy that would make a twentieth-century study such
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David Sloan is associate professor at the University of Arkansas, Fayetteville. This article is the second of a two-part study published in the Arkansas Historical Quarterly. The first part was published in the Spring 1992 issue 1 Reference to these accounts will be to the same editions cited in Part I of this essay.