Hernando: County Seat Named for the Conquistador Who Found the River

The county seat of DeSoto County, Mississippi, is named for Hernando de Soto, the Spanish conquistador who became the first European known to reach the Mississippi River in fifteen forty-one. De Soto was hunting gold through the Southeast, and he found a river instead. He died in May of fifteen forty-two, far downriver in what is now Arkansas or Louisiana, his men sinking his body in the water to hide his death from the Native Americans he had been systematically terrorizing.

The town that bears his name was called Jefferson when it was settled in eighteen thirty-two, then incorporated as Hernando in eighteen thirty-six. The Chickasaw and Choctaw nations had called this land home before the treaties and forced removals that cleared the way for white settlement. Today Hernando serves as a commuter seat for Memphis, less than twenty miles north, but its courthouse square still carries the name of the man who made it to the river and never made it home.