{"id":35938,"date":"2026-11-14T13:02:06","date_gmt":"2026-11-14T19:02:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/?p=35938"},"modified":"2026-11-12T10:21:29","modified_gmt":"2026-11-12T16:21:29","slug":"book-report-the-story-of-de-soto-by-artie-l-hatfield-1905","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/2026\/11\/14\/book-report-the-story-of-de-soto-by-artie-l-hatfield-1905\/","title":{"rendered":"Book Report: The Story of De Soto<\/em> by Artie L Hatfield (1905)"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"BookYou know, in this time of reading short books until my house is put back together and I can relax and focus on longer works in the primary reading chair, you would think I would be more focused on the pamphletish single-shot textbooks like The Unsinkable Mrs. Brown<\/a><\/em>, Quinto Lingo Classic Stories<\/a><\/em>, The Story of the First Crusade<\/a><\/em>, and Builders of the World<\/em><\/a>. But not until now, but I have moved the stack onto the chairside table, and I will be going through them now.<\/p>\n

This book is a very brief look into the life of Fernando [sic?]<\/em>de Soto. Born to a relatively poor aristocratic family–he did not live in a fancy castle, but a older, kinda shabby one–he was ‘adopted’ and educated by a better-to-do gentleman, and he (Fernando) wanted to follow in Columbus’s footsteps a generation later, so he came to the New World, made some money, came back to the New World, and led an expedition westward, encountered a variety of tribes, and died before returning to Spain. <\/p>\n

It pitches the love story between the daughter of the gentleman and De Soto–a match of which the father did not approve, so the father was the one who sent De Soto to the New World in hopes he would die there. De Soto spent a lot of time in Central and South America, conquering the Incas with Pizarro–the plunder was the source of his wealth. The book instead focuses on a later excursion where De Soto was set to conquer North America, but found a bunch of tribes instead of an empire, which made North America unconquerable even in those days.<\/p>\n

So, yeah, at 32 pages, it’s not comprehensive, but it’s just designed to give one a passing familiarity with the subject. One probably does worse in modern schools, where De Soto would probably be portrayed as a bad white man if at all.<\/p>\n

Still, for a brief time, I will be able to speak about Hernando<\/em> de Soto. Not sure why the book gives his first name as Fernando; perhaps that was the style at the time, 120 years ago.<\/p>\n

So, gentle reader, be prepared for a blizzard of these book reports whose content will almost be as long as the books they cover. I will definitely turn to these in the next couple of weeks, after which I can watch a video or focus on Caesar and Christ<\/em>, the third book of the Story of Civilization.<\/p>\n

And, yeah, this trivia might have come in handy when I was in DeSoto, Missouri, in 2021<\/a>. By the time I am in the St. Louis area again, I will have crammed other similar content into my head from the other little booklets, so who knows?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

You know, in this time of reading short books until my house is put back together and I can relax and focus on longer works in the primary reading chair, you would think I would be more focused on the pamphletish single-shot textbooks like The Unsinkable Mrs. Brown, Quinto Lingo Classic Stories, The Story of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3334,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20,11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-35938","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-book-report","category-books"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35938","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3334"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=35938"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35938\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":35942,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35938\/revisions\/35942"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=35938"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=35938"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=35938"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}