Good morning, Whitewater.
Mother’s Day in town will be sunny with a high of seventy-one. Sunrise is 5:38 AM and sunset is 8:04 PM, for 14h 26m of daytime. The moon is a waxing crescent with 4.1% of its visible disk illuminated.
Friday’s FW poll asked if readers thought an Oklahoma town’s residents should try to tame a wolf in the area. Most respondents (81.82%) thought that the wolf should be returned to the wild.
On this day in 1541, De Soto reaches the Mississippi:
Hernando de Soto reaches the Mississippi River, one of the first European explorers to ever do so. After building flatboats, de Soto and his 400 ragged troops crossed the great river under the cover of night, in order to avoid the armed Native Americans who patrolled the river daily in war canoes. From there the conquistadors headed into present-day Arkansas, continuing their fruitless two-year-old search for gold and silver in the American wilderness.
Born in the last years of the 15th century, de Soto first came to the New World in 1514. By then, the Spanish had established bases in the Caribbean and on the coasts of the American mainland. A fine horseman and a daring adventurer, de Soto explored Central America and accumulated considerable wealth through the Indian slave trade. In 1532, he joined Francisco Pizarro in the conquest of Peru. Pizarro, de Soto, and 167 other Spaniards succeeding in conquering the Inca empire, and de Soto became a rich man. He returned to Spain in 1536 but soon grew restless and jealous of Pizarro and Hernando Cortes, whose fame as conquistadors overshadowed his own. Holy Roman Emperor Charles V responded by making de Soto governor of Cuba with a right to conquer Florida, and thus the North American mainland.
In late May 1539, de Soto landed on the west coast of Florida with 600 troops, servants, and staff, 200 horses, and a pack of bloodhounds. From there, the army set about subduing the natives, seizing any valuables they stumbled upon, and preparing the region for eventual Spanish colonization. Traveling through Florida, Georgia, South Carolina, across the Appalachians, and back to Alabama, de Soto failed to find the gold and silver he desired, but he did seize a valuable collection of pearls at Cofitachequi, in present-day Georgia. Decisive conquest eluded the Spaniards, as what would become the United States lacked the large, centralized civilizations of Mexico and Peru.
On this day in 1891, the ‘father of Social Security’ is born:
On this date Arthur J. Altmeyer, the “father of social security,” was born in DePere. Altmeyer was one of the seminal figures of the Social Security program in America. He was part of the President’s Committee on Economic Security that drafted the original legislative proposal in 1934. He was a member of the three-person Social Security Board created to run the new program, and he was Chairman of the Board or Commissioner for Social Security from 1937-1953. Altmeyer died on October 19, 1972 and is buried in Madison’s Forest Hill Cemetery. [Source: Social Security Adminsitration]