This week I began tracing Hernando de Soto’s journey through Alabama. While de Soto’s precise path is still debated by scholars – largely due to lack of physical evidence and an excess of conflicting written reports – most agree that the Spanish conquistador entered present-day Alabama from the northeast somewhere between Chattanooga, Tenn. and Rome, Ga. and followed Native American trails southward then west through the Black Belt before heading back north through Tuscaloosa and onward. De Soto left a wake of death and destruction – killing and enslaving thousands of indigenous people while also introducing Afro-Eurasian diseases like smallpox, measles, and influenza to the continent. Five hundred years later, racial, ecological, and economic injustice continues along the same path de Soto traveled.

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