De Soto Park
When one visits Florida it’s tough to imagine the hardships people suffered there before the invention of air-conditioning. The population growth of Florida jumped significantly in the 1950s when window air-conditioning units became commercially available. Nowadays you have to carry a sweatshirt to the movie theater to avoid sharing a single seat with your adult son.
Four hundred years earlier Hernando De Soto landed in Manatee County, the current city of Bradenton, on his way to become the first European to cross the Mississippi River. He and his pals landed in May wearing this heavy armor.
Maybe that heavy plate armor would prevent the mosquitos from feasting but it makes me wonder how they were able to drink enough water to keep from dehydrating.
De Soto’s landing and subsequent route through Florida north to his eventual demise in either Arkansas or Louisiana is called the De Soto Trail and is commemorated by a park run by the National Park Service.
The photos above are from the welcome center.
One of the park rangers was demonstrating how the indigenous people made canoes by hollowing out logs.
They didn’t have the tools to cut all that wood out of the shell to make the canoe. They burned it out.
Not far outside of the park is a quaint little church that is a historical site.
I kind of wish we had spent a bit more time researching it before we visited. We didn’t bother to walk the whole park and missed the monument to the Holy Eucharist.
~ Freddy
