(Snip the part of the post I agree with, which is actually most of it).
As noted, I agree on most of this post. However, there is one section I disagree rather strongly on.
Elsewhere, the Mississippi/Ohio valley and US southeast was essentially depopulated thanks to a single European exploratory mission. Where de Soto had reported native villages within sight of each other, French explorers over a century later found a land which was basically empty.
(snip)
Again, agreed. We see nothing of the sort in the historical record, look at the de Soto example above. The Spanish moved through the region once between 1539 - 1541 noting a high population density and unwittingly spreading diseases. Later, in the 1670s, when French explorers from the north began entering the region, they found a land which was essentially empty. The numerous villages the Spanish had seen were gone forever and no perceptible bounce back had occurred in the 130 years before the French arrived.
Um, very much no, for a lot of reasons.
(1) The Spanish went through or attempted to settle on the coasts in the Southeast multiple times.
(a) Before DeSoto, there was an expedition by Narvaez that fell apart. There was also a rather large Spanish attempt to settle on the coast of South Carolina or northern Georgia in the mid-1520s.
(b) After DeSoto, there were several expeditions.
- DeLuna attempted to settle the Southeast in 1559 with a large expedition that included several DeSoto expedition survivors. They found some of the same towns DeSoto saw, but the towns were considerably smaller than they remembered them. Whether that was due to actual shrinkage or memories playing tricks on these guys is not determined.
- French Huguenots attempted to settle northern Florida in the 1560s.
-The Spanish killed them and then, to make sure they didn't try again, the Spanish founded St. Augustine. As part of that effort they attempted to set up a string of forts in the interior of the Southeast. The forts ultimately failed, but there are some interesting accounts of the interior tribes. See Juan Pardo expeditions.
- The Spanish did, of course, successfully establish mission colonies in Florida itself, starting in the 1560s and running continuously until the British and allied Indians pretty much wiped them out in the early 1700s. For quite a while those missions extended into Georgia. You don't hear much about Florida tribes like the Timucua, and the Appalachee, mainly because they were nearly wiped out by a series of epidemics that spread from Spanish settlers and finished off by British-led slave raids. Did those epidemics stop at the boundary of the Spanish colonies? Be very surprising if they did.
Other Europeans got to the interior Southeast after the Spanish and before the French did:
- Before the French reached the interior southeast, there had been colonists in Virginia, etc for close to a hundred years. There are records of numerous epidemics near those colonies. There is little evidence one way or the other as to how far those epidemics reached inland, but what there is points to an ongoing series of population reductions, not a single blow that the Indians never recovered from.
- Before the French reached the interior southeast, the British had been trading into the area from Virginia for somewhere between 25 and 50 years. We know that the trading expeditions occurred but have little to no record of what they saw or if they spread diseases.
- Before the French reached the interior southeast, the British in South Carolina had been instigating slave raids by various Indian groups on one another for years or decades, depending on when you say the French had solid contact. Thousands of Indians were enslaved either in South Carolina or sent to the West Indies. Some recent scholarship is claiming that the Indian groups that survived into the mid-1700s (Creeks, Cherokee, Choctaw, etc) were mostly formed around groups that saw which way the wind was blowing and became slave raiders rather than slaves or of formerly separate people who banded together to resist slave raids.
3) While the population of the interior southeast was almost undoubtedly lower at the time of the French explorations than the DeSoto ones, there were still a lot of Indians there and they were still largely agricultural. Creeks, Cherokee, Choctaw and to a lesser extent Natchez and Catawba, among others, were fair-sized groups of people.
The Natchez in particular still had institutions (The Great Sun and the nobility) appropriate for a much larger and more settled people, which probably means that conditions that would support a nobility (much larger populations) persisted there until not long before the French arrived. The social structure the French saw would have collapsed within a few generations given the size of the populations the French saw.
The French also saw signs of recent disease in their wanderings. For example, the Quapaw had recently had a smallpox epidemic that killed almost all of their women.
Bottom line: The depopulation of the interior Southeast was NOT due solely to DeSoto, probably extended over most of the 150+ year interval between DeSoto and LaSalle, and still left a lot of Indians with a pretty sophisticated culture.