Mobile Mobile Alabama United States

Alonso Álvarez de Pineda attempts to sail east at the western tip of Southern Florida, but the winds are uncooperative.

Instead, Alvarez de Pineda sail west from the Florida Keys to hug the Gulf Coast.

On June 2, 1519, Alvarez de Pineda enters a large bay with a sizable Native American settlement on one shore.

He sails upriver for eighteen miles and observes as many as forty villages on the banks of the large, deep river he names "Espíritu Santo".

Long assumed to have been the first European report of the mouth of the Mississippi River, the description of the land and its settlement has led many historians to believe he was describing Mobile Bay and the Alabama River.

Hernando de Soto, at the age of eighteen or nineteen, had sailed to the New World in 1514 with the first Governor of Panama, Pedrarias Dávila.

Brave leadership, unwavering loyalty, and clever schemes for the extortion of native villages for their captured chiefs, had become de Soto's hallmark during the conquest of Central America.

Having gained fame as an excellent horseman, fighter, and tactician, he is notorious for the extreme brutality with which he has wielded these gifts.

Hearing Cabeza de Vaca’s stories of gold found routinely by the native peoples along the Chatahoochee River north of present Atlanta, De Soto had led his five hundred-man expeditionary force from the Florida Panhandle in the spring of 1540 through present Georgia, the Carolinas, and Tennessee.

Continuing his ruthless practice of ransoming captured village chiefs for food and sex slaves, de Soto turns south toward the Gulf of Mexico to meet two ships bearing fresh supplies from Havana.

En route, a river in southern Alabama leads de Soto into the fortified town of Mauvila, or Maubilla (near present Mobile).

The Spaniards, ambushed on October 18 by the Mobilians under the leadership of Tuskaloosa, manage to fight their way out, then attack and burn the city to the ground.

Twenty Spaniards die and most are wounded during this nine-hour encounter, and twenty more will die during the next few weeks.

The Native American warriors of this area, numbering between two thousand and six thousand, die fighting in the fields, by fire in the city, or suicide.

Leaving more than forty of his horses dead on the battlegrounds after this bloody and costly victory,De Soto rests his now-depleted army, minus most of their equipment and all of their Cofitachequi pearls, for a month.

The Spaniards are wounded, sickened, surrounded by enemies and without equipment in an unknown territory.

Fearing that word of this will reach Spain if his men reach the ships at Mobile Bay, de Soto leads them away from the gulf coast, turning north again and heading inland in search of treasure.

Iberville, on his third voyage, builds a second fort in February 1701 at 26-Mile Bluff on Mobile Bay, where Tonti aids him in establishing good relations with the local people.

Ships from Fort Maurepas arrive at Twenty-Seven Mile Bluff in January, 1702, to build Fort Louis de la Mobile (future Mobile, Alabama) to become the capital of French Louisiana.

The Choctaw and the Chickasaw of northern Alabama and Mississippi, both of Muskogean linguistic stock, may have been a single tribe in their earlier history; the Choctaw dialect being practically identical to that of the Chickasaw.

Among the southeastern agriculturists, the Choctaw are the most skillful farmers, the only tribe who grows surplus produce to sell or trade.

They plant maize, beans, and pumpkins; fish; gather nuts and wild fruits; and hunt deer and bear.

Their dwellings, scattered mainly along the Pearl, Chickasawhay, and Pascagoula rivers, are thatched-roof cabins of logs or bark, plastered over with mud.

The Choctaw’s most important religious ceremony, as is true of the Chickasaw, is the Busk, or Green Corn, festival, a first-fruits and new-fire rite celebrated at midsummer.

The Choctaw wear their hair long, and, following a custom common among the native peoples of the American Southeast, practice head deformation, flattening the heads of male infants.

The Choctaw pick the bones of their dead in a rite performed some days after death by professional bone pickers, male and female, who bear distinctive tattooing and long fingernails.

Jean-Baptiste Le Moyne, Sieur de Bienville, moves his fort on Mobile Bay to the present site of Mobile on the lower part of the bay in 1710.

The Sieur de Cadillac had been appointed governor of Louisiana in 1710, although he had not arrived in this territory until 1713, when he supersedes Bienville in the position.

Cadillac has quarreled fiercely with the French colonists here, and in 1716 is recalled to France.

Bienville is restored to the governorship in 1717 under the Mississippi Scheme.