Update this timeline entry

Mendendez sent Juan Pardo to build a line of forts to the silver mines of Zacatecas

Source: Situado and Sabana #82

Project ID

Chapter

Timeline title

Start date

End date

Filename received

Filename assigned

Content

From Santa Elena, established in 1566 on Parris Island in Orista territory, not far from the site of an ill-fated early French fort, Menendez sent parties of explorers into the interior. Twice, Captain Juan Pardo led expeditions through parts of present-day South Carolina and North Carolina, across Georgia, and into Alabama, laying a line of inland forts across Greater Florida with the object of opening a road to the silver mines of Zacatecas, a task that Viceroy Luis de Velasco I had once laid on the luckless adelantado Tristan de Luna y Arellano. Pardo's expeditions looked more promising. Sergeant Hernando Moyano (or Boyano) stayed behind at the fort of Joara, sallying forth from time to time to answer the challenges of caciques. One of them drew him out by threatening to kill and eat his dog. Chaplain Sebastian Montero remained in a place called Guatari to begin conversions.
 But Menendez's forts in the interior did not survive, probably because the natives did not continue to provision them.
... Fig. 3.2. Southeastern Indian groups around 1565. 
 Most Southeastern Indians, however, were part-time agriculturalists, supplementing the domestic harvest with the harvest available in the wild. They cleared, planted, cultivated, and guarded fields that were moderate in size, from which they gathered, dried, and stored a modest surplus of maize and beans. They saw no reason to exhaust these stores in order to feed grown men who lay in the shade like deer at planting time. 
(Bushnell SS)