03/07/2025
The Cherokee Nation's first encounter with non Indigenous people happened in 1540, when the Spanish Conquistador De Soto showed up on their land. He demanded to be taken to their gold mines. The Choctaw had already warned the Cherokee about the Spanish army and their man eating dogs. The Cherokee told them they didn't have any gold and sent them in the direction of the Mississippi River where they said the Spanish could find all the gold they wanted. But soon scouts brought back word that the Spanish had turned around. The Cherokee waited for them to make camp, and then surrounded them with overwhelming numbers. They told De Soto he needed to leave but he refused so they killed him and his officers, and told his men they could live if they left and they did. History books claim De Soto died from a fever, but that's not what happened. 26 years later another Spaniard showed up with an army. His name was Juan Pardo and he established a settlement and a fort named Fort San Juan, in 1567. It was the first Spanish fort ever built in what would become the US. Within about a year Pardo had built five other forts and at least six more settlements. Two of these forts were just barely inside Cherokee territory including San Juan, the largest one. The Spanish thought that the Appalachian Mountains were the same mountain range as the Rocky Mountains in Mexico, where their silver mines were located. So they were trying to find a short cut to those mines. The Cherokee at that time were living in a golden age, they were in need of nothing. They had beautifully grown food, plenty of animals and no one was hungry. They had lived in that area for a thousand years and had a complex society that took care of young and old people alike. Their woman were respected and probably had more freedoms than most woman today. They would go to water everyday and were very clean people. Then they met the Spanish, who were dirty and smelled like they had been on a ship for a very long time. But the Cherokee were not rude to these smelly people. When they first heard about the fort on their land they went to check it out. They actually brought food to their uninvited guest. The Spanish saw it as a weakness assuming the Natives were in awe of the strangers. Soon the Spanish supplies began to run out and they started to visit different tribes and told them they needed to build them a building on their land, and fill it to the top with corn for their guest. At first the tribes would do this for the Spanish but then their winter supply of food began to run low, tribes began to say no. About that time the Cherokee started to notice people were disappearing from their tribe, mostly woman. The Spanish were kidnapping young girls to be sold as slaves in Europe.
In 1568 several tribes from different areas attacked the forts and they were all destroyed. Only one man survived all those attacks, and it's believed he only survived because he had married an Indian woman. The Cherokee burnt down the two forts on their land. No one knows for sure if all those tribes acted together fighting the Spanish, or if they all came to the same conclusion that the Spanish needed to go about the same time. Either way the Spanish were driven all the way down to Florida where they still maintained forts. The Spanish never attempted to enter into Woodland Indian lands in the Southeastern U.S. again. All of this happened years before the pilgrims had even landed. In 1986 archaeologists discovered the ruins of Fort San Juan in North Carolina. They also found Spanish ceramic olive jar fragments, and iron plate from a 16th-century type of armor, typical of what that expedition would have used.
This photo is the remains of Fort San Juan.
