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from Apalachee territory, where Ortiz spoke the local dialect.36 Upon encountering the people at
Achese it is noted that de Soto's translator could communicate easily with them despite having
problems translating from certain other groups along the way.37 Both Apalachee and Hitchiti are
from the same branch of the much larger Muskogean language tree.38 A speaker familiar with
Apalachee capable of translating at Achese suggests that the people described by the de Soto
expedition spoke a dialect closely related to Apalachee, and chronologically not too long
differentiated from a common cultural background.

Ortiz's experiences in native North America included more than learning new languages.
When he spoke with Soto about his life in captivity, Ortiz described the vocation assigned to him
during part of his life under the Cacique Utica. Ortiz's duties included watching over the bodies
of deceased members of the community, particularly at night to keep scavengers away. As part of
his account, Ortiz detailed a complex ceremonial preparation which required a corpse to be left
to putrefy for an indeterminate amount of time. After an appropriate level of decay, bodies were
stripped of flesh, leaving only the bones for burial.39 Although Ortiz viewed them as signs of
devil worship, the funerary customs practiced by his adopted society offer another chance to link
Mississippian culture with modern Muscogee traditions.

In the 1870s and 80s anthropologists turned their attention to Native American funeral
rituals. Writing over 300 years after Ortiz's death, Henry Yarrow described a very similar
mortuary practice he observed while studying burial customs among various tribes of the
Muskogean family. He notes a tradition in which bodies are laid to rest in a temporary structure,
much like a hut, then later removed and buried permanently after the bones were ceremonially

36 Smith, Narratives of De Soto, 30-47.
37 Smith, Narratives of De Soto, 51.
38 Albert Gatschet, A Migration Legend of the Creek Indians: With a Linguistic, Historic, and Ethnographic

Introduction, (Philadelphia: D.G. Brinton, 1884), 52.
39 Smith, Narratives of De Soto, 30-35.

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