Mauvilla: The Deadliest Battle Before Jamestown

Somewhere near here, in October of fifteen forty, the Spanish explorer Hernando de Soto walked into the most devastating military ambush in the early history of the continent. The Choctaw chief Tascalusa had led de Soto to a fortified village called Mabila, later called Mauvilla, where more than twenty-five hundred warriors waited behind a wooden palisade. The battle lasted all day.

When it ended, Tascalusa's forces had been destroyed but so had nearly everything de Soto had. Dozens of his men were dead, hundreds were wounded, and the expedition's supplies were gone. Historians consider it one of the most significant battles between Europeans and Native Americans ever fought on North American soil, and the exact location, somewhere in Alabama, is still debated.