From 1492 through 1702, European exploration and colonization in the region progressed from Columbus in the Caribbean to Pineda and Narváez in the Mobile area, De Soto’s exploration of Alabama in 1540, De Luna’s retracing of De Soto’s route in 1559, and the French establishment of a permanent colony at Dauphin Island in 1702. The exact route of Hernando de Soto through the southeastern United States remains a major historical mystery because his expedition left little physical evidence and did not record accurate latitude and mileage, and although the 1939 United States De Soto Commission report proposed an official route, later archaeological study has produced competing interpretations; in Alabama, many scholars accept the route advanced by Dr. Charles Hudson and his associates from northeastern Alabama near Piedmont down the Coosa River Valley into the Montgomery-Selma area, while others argue that he went south toward the forks of the Alabama-Tombigbee rivers, west from Selma, or northwest, and only further archaeological exploration is likely to resolve the question. De Soto first heard of the chiefdom of Coosa in April 1540 in eastern Georgia, and three months later his army approached the main town, where Indian noblemen met the Spaniards in procession bearing Chief Coosa on a litter; impressed by the chief, his subjects, and his country, the Spaniards later planned under Tristan de Luna to return and establish a European town there. The chief and his principal town both bore the name Coosa, and the area was described as thickly settled with numerous communities, corn fields, two streams joining within the main town, a mountain range to the north, and three earth mounds topped by buildings of the chief, where De Soto and some of his men stayed for three weeks before departing southward to rendezvous with supply ships at Ochuse on the Gulf of Mexico. De Soto abducted Chief Coosa and carried away many of his subjects in chains, and when Tristan de Luna’s soldiers and priests arrived twenty years later they found that the once-thriving country had greatly diminished after De Soto’s pillaging and slave-taking. At its height, Chief Coosa’s dominion extended across parts of present-day Alabama, Georgia, and Tennessee, was one of the most important chiefdoms in the eastern United States during the sixteenth century, and its descendants later formed an important segment of the Creek Confederacy, whose main town was then near present-day Childersburg, Alabama.