Reading: Kimberly C. Borchard, Appalachia as Contested Borderland of the Early Modern Atlantic, 1528-1715 (Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2021).
This book has told the story of how colonial Appalachia emerged from the Spanish myth of Apalache, which quickly dissociated from the very real Apalachee people of the Florida panhandle in the early sixteenth century and migrated — along with the legions of European explorers who sought its fabled riches — north and east into the sprawling eastern mountains of the contemporary United States. This migration was the product of a protracted rivalry among three European empires, narrated in no less than five languages, as generation after generation of would-be conquistadors and fortune-seekers composed frantic accounts of their failed exploits to herald the imminent discovery of indescribable wealth just around the bend in the next river, just at the summit of the next mountain. [153]