Joara sat in what is now Burke County, North Carolina, roughly 300 miles from the Atlantic coast in the foothills where the Piedmont meets the Blue Ridge Mountains. It was a regional chiefdom of the Mississippian culture, the same broad civilization that built Cahokia's great mounds along the Mississippi River. The settlement featured an earthen platform mound twelve feet high, the kind of ceremonial architecture that marked a place of political and spiritual authority. Surrounding it, the upper Catawba River Valley provided fertile bottomlands, hardwood forests, and access to trade routes running through the mountain passes. When Hernando de Soto's expedition passed through in 1540 -- the first Europeans to make contact -- his chroniclers recorded Joara under the name Xuala and noted that the queen of Cofitachequi province, brought along as an unwilling member of de Soto's entourage, claimed political dominion over the settlement. She escaped from the Spanish upon reaching Joara, a detail that speaks to the place's significance as a power center where her authority still commanded respect.

Captain Juan Pardo departed Santa Elena -- a Spanish outpost on present-day Parris Island, South Carolina -- on December 1, 1566, with 125 men. His orders from Governor Pedro Menendez de Aviles were breathtaking in their ambition: pacify the interior natives, convert them to Catholicism, and blaze an overland route to the Spanish silver mines near Zacatecas, Mexico. The plan rested on a spectacular geographic error. The Spanish believed the Appalachian Mountains were the same range that ran through central Mexico, and that Santa Elena was far closer to the mines than it actually was. Pardo's men traveled northwest through the Carolina Piedmont, passing through Native settlements at Otari near present-day Charlotte and Yssa near present-day Denver, North Carolina, before arriving at Joara in January 1567. Snow choked the mountain passes ahead. Pardo had no choice but to make a winter camp. His men built Fort San Juan -- the first European settlement in what would become North Carolina, predating Roanoke by eighteen years.

With Pardo called back to the coast by rumors of a French invasion, Sergeant Hernando Moyano took command of the garrison and promptly began making enemies. In spring 1567, Moyano led a combined force of Spanish soldiers and allied Natives north, attacking and burning the Chisca village of Maniateque near present-day Saltville, Virginia. He then pushed west to Guapere on the upper Watauga River in Tennessee and burned that settlement too, before marching to Chiaha on the French Broad River and building yet another fort. When Pardo returned to Fort San Juan in September 1567, he found the local population furious -- angered by the raids, the constant demands for food, women, and canoes, and the devastating toll of European diseases that were killing their people. Pardo left another garrison and marched west to resupply Moyano, passing through settlements near present-day Asheville and Canton before reaching Chiaha. He returned to the coast. The six forts he left scattered across the interior were on borrowed time.

Shortly after May 1568, word reached Santa Elena that the indigenous people had risen in coordinated rebellion. All six Spanish forts were burned. Of the 120 soldiers Pardo had stationed across the interior, only a single man survived. Spain abandoned every claim to the southeastern interior. Pardo never returned. The story might have ended there, buried under centuries of forest growth, but in the 1980s, Pardo's own account of his expeditions -- written by his scribe Bandera -- was rediscovered in Spanish archives and translated into English for the first time. Archaeologists began excavating in Burke County in the 1990s. In 2008, they found both European and Mississippian artifacts at the Berry site. Then on July 22, 2013, the team announced the discovery of Fort San Juan's actual remains: burned palisade posts and a moat that cut through one of the Mississippian platform mounds. The physical evidence of that eighteen-month collision between two worlds had survived, just barely, beneath the Carolina soil.

By the time English, Moravian, Scots-Irish, and German settlers arrived in the mid-to-late 18th century, Joara had been abandoned for generations. European diseases and absorption into larger nations like the Catawba and Cherokee had dissolved the smaller communities that once populated the upper Catawba Valley. The great platform mound still stood, though. In the early 1950s, farmers bulldozed it flat to make way for cultivation -- a twelve-foot earthen monument to a civilization, leveled without ceremony. English explorer John Lederer had passed through in 1670 and described a large mountain town that "received from the Spaniards the name of Suala," where Natives mined cinnabar to make purple face paint and traded cakes of salt. That observation, and the Bandera manuscript, and the charred timber posts pulled from red clay in 2013, are what remain of a place where European colonization of the American interior began and failed, all within a year and a half.