DeSoto Expedition

The Spanish are remembered here, but the Chickasaw were the ones at home. De Soto's army spent the winter at Chicaca, where Native warriors attacked it and the Spaniards lost most of what they had left. They then pushed west and became the first Europeans to see the Mississippi River. Native informants said the lands west held no large populations, so De Soto turned southeast toward the river. He died in 1542, probably of typhoid fever, and was buried in the Mississippi to hide his death from the Native people.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Howlin' Wolf Memorial and Blues Trail Marker — 16 mi
  A Mississippi Blues Trail marker and granite memorial on East Broad Street honoring Chester Burnett, who was born nearby in 1910 and became the Chicago blues giant Howlin' Wolf.
• Waverley Mansion — 18 mi
  A National Historic Landmark mansion above the Tombigbee River, home of a plantation family that enslaved more than a hundred people, left empty for half a century before a family restored it.
• Tennessee Williams Welcome Center — 24 mi
  The 1875 Episcopal rectory where Tennessee Williams was born in 1911, moved to Main Street in the 1990s and now Columbus's welcome center and a National Literary Landmark.
• Chickasaw Council House — 27 mi
  A roadside exhibit on the Natchez Trace Parkway marking the Chickasaw capital of the 1820s and the council house where the 1832 treaty of Pontotoc Creek ended Chickasaw title to Mississippi.

More markers nearby

• Aberdeen Mississippi Blues — steps away
• Dr. W.A. Evans — 0.5 mi
• Aberdeen — 0.6 mi
• Reuben Davis — 0.9 mi