Tascalusa
Tascalusa, meaning "black warrior" in Choctaw, was a paramount chief of the Mobile Indians, a significant tribe in the Mississippian culture of southeastern North America. He played a crucial role during the early encounters between Native Americans and Spanish explorers, particularly Hernando de Soto. Little is known about his early life, largely due to the cultural disruptions caused by European contact, which led to the decline of his tribe. Tascalusa governed a society that had evolved from hunter-gatherers to a complex farming community, notable for its mound-building practices.
His most prominent historical moment came during the Battle of Mabila on October 18, 1540, one of the largest battles between Native Americans and Europeans in the 16th century. Tascalusa initially attempted to engage with de Soto diplomatically but ultimately faced the Spanish forces in a fierce confrontation that resulted in significant casualties on both sides. The battle marked the end of Tascalusa's leadership and had profound implications for the indigenous peoples of the region. His legacy continues through the naming of the city and county of Tuscaloosa in Alabama, symbolizing the dramatic and often tragic encounters between Native American cultures and European colonizers.
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Tascalusa
Choctaw chief
- Born: c. 1500
- Birthplace: Mabila (now in Alabama)
- Died: October 18, 1540
- Place of death: Mabila (now in Alabama)
Tascalusa was the paramount chief of the Mobile Indians, who led his people first in diplomacy with Spanish explorer Hernando de Soto and then in opposition. The first-contact experience ended for the Mobile with a valiant but deadly battle, the largest and deadliest in sixteenth century North America between American Indians and Europeans, but it did stop de Soto’s advance.
Early Life
Not much is known of the early life of Tascalusa (taw-skah-LOO-saw). The legendary parameters of Tascalusa’s spare biography never entered the folk storehouse of southeast Indian stories for a number of reasons. First, the Mobile Indians began to disappear as a tribe after 1540, eventually being absorbed into the Choctaw Nation in the early eighteenth century. Second, the North American Indian cultures in the path of Hernando de Soto’s expedition suffered almost complete cultural annihilation, wiping out any form of oral history that might have been passed on about Tascalusa and his tribe. Third, Spanish versions of Tascalusa’s life focus solely on his final days serving as the worthy counterpart to de Soto.
Tascalusa, whose name means “black warrior” in the Choctaw language, governed one of the most developed and complex of the Mississippian Indian cultures at the end of what had been an approximately eight-hundred-year period of growth and development before the first European contact in the sixteenth century. The hunter-gatherer society had metamorphosed into a more complex farming society that included one of the southernmost examples of mound building. The Mobile Indians, in their daily religious practices, paid religious honor to the sun, a behavior de Soto himself attempted to exploit by introducing himself to the Southeast Indians as the “child of the sun.”
Tascalusa appears to have been married, though there is no specific mention of him having a wife. There are, however, multiple references to groups of tribal women expressing both their homage to and their concern for him as he fought in the nine-hour Battle of Mabila. Tascalusa had a namesake son who was old enough to fight at Mabila and whose grisly death in combat is recounted by several different Spanish eyewitnesses. Interestingly enough, although all the Mobile men and virtually all the women were reported to have been dead or dying by nightfall on October 18, 1540, there is a single transcribed report of captured Indian women by a Spanish lieutenant that claims that Tascalusa was encouraged to leave the fortress walls of Mabila, repeatedly refused to do so, but finally relented and left with thirty men. This report, however, might simply be flawed understanding. The report assumed that many Indians, presumably twenty-five hundred or more, died outside the fortress walls of living trees and daub, even as another three thousand died inside the walls by the sword or lance; another thirty-five hundred died horrible deaths, either burned or suffocated in the huge structures to which de Soto and his men set fire and often blocked egress of the mostly women and children inside.
Life’s Work
Tascalusa, as the leader of the largest village among North American Indian tribes of the southeast of his day, made every attempt to remain a diplomat rather than become a warrior-leader. Indeed, he seems to have been well-prepared to play both roles. Tascalusa had welcomed de Soto initially and sent amicable, if somewhat cryptic and reserved, messages by courier to de Soto as the expedition moved west and north toward Tascalusa and his people.
On October 11, 1540, the two men finally met face-to-face. De Soto asked for several hundred men to serve as guides and carriers and seems to have asked for at least one hundred women as well, presumably for sexual favors. Tascalusa apparently provided a significant number of burden carriers but told de Soto that the women would be provided at the next town to the north, the fortress town of Mabila. Over the next few days, Tascalusa traveled with de Soto toward Mabila. Extremely tall, Tascalusa’s stature was such that one of de Soto’s lieutenants noted that only a pack horse would be large enough to support his impressive frame.
De Soto seems to have become suspicious as he approached the walled fortress of Mabila, since houses that were outside the tree-and-mud-walls had been dismantled, which would have provided a more open plain for fighting. De Soto also seems to have received some information from a Christian missionary at Mabila, who reported to de Soto that the Indians were acting suspiciously and that an inordinate number of armed men were collecting within the huts and meeting halls of the town, including Tascalusa, who by this time had been in one of the larger houses near the central plaza and had refused to emerge from the structure. The largest and bloodiest battle of the century on the North American continent soon ensued during all nine sunlight hours of October 18, 1540.
The Spaniards were not ready for the scope or organization of the Indian attack, so they gathered outside the gates of the city to regroup. The Spaniards fought for hours, then launched a four-pronged attack on both gates and two points of the wall of the city, entering the fortress to kill the remaining soldiers and set fire to all the houses inside the walls of Mabila.
Despite the extent of the battle, the ferocity of the ensuing firestorm was so complete that to this day, scholars debate the exact location of the battle, though it was most likely at what is now known as Choctaw Bluff in Clarke County, Alabama. Somewhere in south-central Alabama, there is an archaeological library of information embedded in the swampy earth, containing at minimum more than ten thousand skeletal remains, pottery, arrowheads, and the remnants of a remarkable village, palisaded with live (most likely, pine) trees daubed into city walls.
Tascalusa and his entire retinue of subordinate chiefs died that day, but so did a number of significant officers on the Spanish side, notably de Soto’s two nephews, Don Carlos Enriquez and Diego de Soto. De Soto died two years later of a fever, and his men hurriedly buried him in the Mississippi River so that his demigod stature would not be mitigated. Therefore, the Battle of Mabila and de Soto’s confrontation with Tascalusa constitute the critical points not only in the lives of these two leaders but also in the history of their cultures in North America as well.
Significance
Tascalusa was the paramount chief of forces who engaged in the largest and most significant sixteenth century battle involving North American Indians and Europeans. His name has been given to both a city and a county in Alabama (Tuscaloosa), and his life is emblematic and representative of first-contact experiences with Europeans: With diplomacy, guile, and pitched and valorous battle, the Spaniards followed through by annihilating and then essentially ending the chiefdom-level leadership within tribal cultures that faced colonialist Europeans.
Bibliography
Clayton, Lawrence A., et al., eds. The De Soto Chronicles: The Expedition of Hernando De Soto to North America in 1539-1543. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1996. Widespread use of primary sources detail the scope of de Soto’s four-year expedition from Florida to Texas and its impact on the indigenous tribes of the Southwest.
Duncan, David Ewing. Hernando De Soto: A Savage Quest in the Americas. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1997. Revisionist biography of de Soto, which uses expedition logs, colonial archival manuscripts, and eyewitness accounts to describe de Soto as a gambler and megalomaniac, not a genial bearer of Western civilization.
Higginbotham, Jay. Mauvila. Mobile, Ala.: A. B. Bahr/Factor Press, 2000. The only full-length book about the Battle of Mabila (also known as Mauvila).
Hudson, Charles. Knights of Spain, Warriors of the Sun: Hernando De Soto and the South’s Ancient Chiefdoms. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1997. Uses archaeological and documentary evidence to establish the route of de Soto’s entrada and its impact on the indigenous tribal communities.
Josephy, Alvin M., Jr. Five Hundred Nations: An Illustrated History of North American Indians. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1994. Revised edition of a seminal text that includes brief but relevant discussions on Mississippi Indian civilizations, Tascalusa, Mabila, and de Soto.
Mancall, Peter C., and James Merrell, eds. American Encounters: Natives and Newcomers from European Contact to Indian Removal, 1500-1850. New York: Routledge, 1999. Republished academic essays, mostly from scholarly journals, describing first-contact encounters throughout North America.
Swanton, John R. Final Report of the United States De Soto Expedition Commission. 76th Congress, 1st Session, House Document no. 71. Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1939. Swanton established an initial route for de Soto’s entrada, which has been revised numerous times by subsequent scholars.
Trigger, Bruce G., and Wilcomb E. Washburn, eds. The Cambridge History of the Native Peoples of the Americas, vol. 1, pt. 1. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Comprehensive survey of indigenous North America, with passages on precontact Mississippian Indian cultures and their rapid sociopolitical decline after initial contact.
Wilson, James. The Earth Shall Weep: A History of Native America. New York: Grove Press, 1998. Historical survey that includes descriptions of hunter-gatherer and farming cultures as well as moundbuilding traditions of Mississippian Indian tribes at the time of the de Soto expedition.