Notes on the Floridian Peninsula; its Literary History, Indian Tribes and Antiquities

The main idea that inspired the Spanish expeditions to Florida was the hope of discovering riches there, equal to the gorgeous opulence of Peru and Mexico. Although the country was supposed to be north of the auriferous zone—in accordance with which geological notion in his map of the world (1529) Diego de Ribero inscribes on the land marked “Tierra de Garay,” north of the Gulf of Mexico, now West Florida, “This land is poor in gold, as it lies too far from the tropic of Cancer”[347 - Humboldt, Krit. Untersuch. ueber die Hist. Entwickelung der Geog. Kentnisse der neuen Welt, B. I., s. 322; the same reason is given by De Laet, Descrip. Ind. Occident. Lib. IV., cap. XIV.]—yet an abiding faith in its riches was kept alive by Spanish traders obtaining from time to time morsels of gold from the natives. As early as the first voyage of De Leon (1512), they possessed and used it as an article of barter in small quantities.[348 - “Guañines de oro,” Navarrete, Viages, Tom. III., p. 52; Herrera, Dec. I., Lib. IX., cap. XI.] The later explorers, Narvaez, De Soto, Ribaut, and Laudonniére, report both gold and silver, but never, as far as their own observations went, in any abundance. The savages were always eagerly questioned as to its origin and always returned one of two answers; either that they had pilfered it from the wrecks of vessels driven on their coasts, or else they referred the inquirer to a distant and mountainous country to the north, known both to the nations on the Gulf of Mexico, those at the extreme south of the peninsula, and those on the Atlantic coast as far north as the Savannah river, as Apalache. Here, said the rumors, the men wore cuirasses of gold and shields of burnished silver, while the women were impeded in their dancing by the weight of their golden ornaments and strings of pearls. We have seen that this name was at one period applied to a large area of country, and hence have no difficulty in appreciating the error that Narvaez committed when he supposed the small town of that name east of the Apalachicola to contain the major part of the nation. Fontanedo, whose long residence among the Indians renders him one of our best authorities on certain points, says expressly that the snowy mountains of Onagatano whence the gold was obtained were the furthermost possessions of Apalache.[349 - Mais on n’y trouve pas d’or, parce qu’elle est eloignè des mines d’Onagatono, situées dans les montagnes neigeuses d’Onagatono dernieres possessions d’Abolachi, Memoire, p. 32.]

There is a general similarity in the accounts of the direction and remoteness of the mines. The coast tribes north of the St. Johns river had pieces of sieroa pira, red metal, which was tested by a goldsmith who accompanied Laudonniére and found to be pure gold. When asked where this was obtained they pointed to the north. Another chief who gave them slips of silver said it came from a country at the foot of lofty mountains ten long days’ journey inland, towards the north. A third had small grains of gold, silver, and copper, procured, according to his own account, by washing the sands of a creek that flowed at the base of lofty mountains five or six days journey in a northwesterly direction. The artist Le Moyne de Morgues, drawing somewhat on his imagination, represents in his forty-first sketch this method of cleaning it. Hence on some maps of a very early period the southern Alleghanies bear the name Apalatcy Montes Auriferi. Years afterwards, rumors derived from the Indians were rife among the Spanish colonists of a “very rich and exceeding great city, called La Grand Copal, among the mountains of Gold and Chrystal,” fifteen or twenty days journey northwest of St. Augustine.[350 - Pedro Morales, in Hackluyt, Vol. III., p. 432.]

Now as the gold mines of Georgia and Carolina lie about three hundred miles north or northwest of Florida, such accounts as these can leave no reasonable doubt but that they were known to the Indians, and to a certain extent worked before the arrival of the white man. Indeed, may we not impute to them the ancient and unrecorded mining operations, signs of which are occasionally met with in the gold country of Georgia? Such are the remains of what are called “furnaces,” the marks of excavations, various rude metallurgical instruments, the buried log houses, and other tokens of a large population in some remote past, found from time to time in the vicinity of Dahlonega and various parts of the Nacooche valley.[351 - See Lanman’s Letters from the Allegheny Mountains, pp. 9, 26, 27; White, Hist. Coll. of Georgia, pp. 487-8.] These were referred by the finders to De Soto, who offers a favorite and ready explanation for any construction of unknown age, in that part of our country; thus I have been told that the bone mounds in Florida were the burial places of his soldiers, and on one occasion a post pliocene bank of shells on Tampa Bay was pointed out to me as the ruins of one of his forts. It is unnecessary to add that the soldiers under this ill-fated leader spent no time in digging gold either in north Georgia or anywhere else.

That in the course of barter small quantities of the metals here obtained—for we must ascribe to shipwrecks the “lumps of gold several pounds in weight” said to have been found in modern times on the shores of Florida and Carolina[352 - Humboldt, Island of Cuba, p. 131, note.]—should have gradually proceeded to the nations on the shores of the Atlantic and the Gulf of Mexico, and even to the Caloosas in South Florida, four hundred miles from their starting point, will not astonish any one acquainted with the extent to which the transportation of metals was carried by the aborigines in other portions of the continent.

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