_Indian High Priest. "Old prophecies foretell our fall at hand. When bearded men in floating castles land, I fear it is of dire portent._"—_Dryden's Indian Emperor._ De Soto's invasion of Florida is, we think, most memorable for what it has preserved touching the manners and customs of the Indians with whom the Spaniards dealt in such evil sort. In this light only has it historic value. Though incomplete as to details it is our earliest portrait of this singular people, as they existed a full century before New England was settled, and so marks a definite limit of history whence to date that knowledge from. Yet when we shall have gone so far back in the history of this primitive race as the beginning of the sixteenth century, nothing is found in their manners, customs or traditions, as they have come down to us, which would go to confirm the theory that the ancestors of these people were more civilized than themselves. The little they seem to have known about it belongs to the very infancy of art, not to its growth out of lower conditions. These Indians knew how to make beads of the pearl oyster. So did those of New England know how to make shell wampum. The Florida Indians could weave cloth of the fibre of wild hemp and dye it prettily; they could tan, dress, and decorate deerskins; had found out how to mould rude earthen vessels and bake them in the sun. In some of these things they certainly surpassed their brethren of New England, though their arms and implements are quite like those used farther north. Then inasmuch as all the tools they had to work with were of the rudest sort, being shaped out of stone or bone, so the making of most things cost them a great deal of time and labor, and hence the mechanical arts in use among them were such only as spring from the first and most pressing wants of a people, as is everywhere the case in the history of primitive man.[1] [Illustration: FLORIDA WARRIOR.] It must be borne in mind that what we are told about these Florida Indians is written by their enemies. Therefore, when their courage is praised, we feel that they must have deserved it. Perhaps what most astonishes us about the narratives themselves is the cold-blooded way in which they recount the slaughter made of these Indians, who seem hardly to have been considered in the light of human beings. It would seem as if the ill-repute of the Spaniards must have gone before them, for upon nearing the Florida shore the invaders saw smokes everywhere curling above it, which they soon found were lighted for the purpose of warning the inhabitants to be on their guard.