"De Soto crossed Northern Georgia and Northeastern Alabama to Maubila, where they had that terrific fight of which I have just told you. The following winter was a severe one, passed by the Spaniards in the country of the Chickasaws, around the tributaries of the Yazoo. In the spring a furious engagement took place with the Chickasaws, in which the Spaniards came near being annihilated. In April the forlorn remnant began again tramping through the wilderness, blindly groping for the land where De Soto had been told he would find great quantities of gold.
"In the month of May, 1541, De Soto and his men reached the bank of the Mississippi River, above the mouth of the St. Francis. The men stood a long time, gazing upon it with awe and admiration, for it is one of the mightiest rivers of the world, and they were the first Europeans to see it at any distance above its mouth."
"And did they stop there, papa?" asked Ned.
"No, my son; they were not yet ready to give up their search for gold and for the Pacific Ocean, which they believed was now not far away."
"Didn't know much about geography, did they?" laughed Ned.
"No; scarcely anything of that of this continent," replied his father; "but perhaps my little son is not much wiser now in regard to what was then the condition of what is now this great country of ours. Can you tell him, Grace, what it was at that time?"
"In 1540, papa? A wilderness peopled only by savages and wild beasts. It was not until 1620 that the pilgrims came to Massachusetts. The first settlement in Maryland was not made until 1631. Virginia's first settlers came in 1607. But the French Huguenots planted a colony in South Carolina as early as May, 1562, twenty years later than De Soto's visit to Alabama. Georgia was the last settled of the thirteen original colonies."
"And those thirteen colonies were all there was of our country at the time of the Revolutionary War, weren't they?" asked Elsie Dinsmore.
"Yes," replied the captain; "thirteen colonies at the beginning of that war, thirteen States before it ended.
"But to go back to the story of Alabama. It seems to have been left to the Indians until the spring of 1682, when Robert Cavalier de la Salle descended the Mississippi to its mouth, named the country Louisiana, and took possession of it in the name of the King of France. All the Mississippi valley was then claimed by France, but in 1763 she ceded it to England. West Florida, from 1764 to 1781, included quite a good deal of the present territory of Alabama and Mississippi. In May of 1779 Spain declared war against Great Britain, and the next March the Spanish governor of Louisiana captured Mobile. In 1783 Great Britain ceded to the United States all territory east of the Mississippi, except Florida, which she ceded back to Spain.