My mission is to identify every last single Spanish or Portuguese settlement ~ occupied enough so the roadways/paths were still visible when English and American settlers moved in a couple of centuries later ~ in the area bounded by the Arctic Ocean, the Rockey Mountains, the Gulf of Mexico and the Atlantic Ocean.
I"ve found their grand survey of the continent ~ reflected in the Treaty of London (1604) ~ and had verification that some of the Bench Marks are actually identified as "Boundary Markers".
So far I've searched from 45 degrees North to 35 degrees North from the Mississippi to the Atlantic.
Found several structures ~ and best of all, at least one Villa La Real (A Spanish administrative center), a couple of mills (long in the dirt but visible in part), but there are only a few dozen villages/plantations.
I know most historians imagine these things are all over the place and the French put them there, but the French hardly had enough settlers to keep Quebec busy to say nothing of moving in on Indian territories.
The Spanish were different. They'd move in on you with priests from 10 different orders and have your women hitched to a plough before you could say ouch. They had a proven technique for aiding populations to grow and become strong ~ particularly militarily strong, and in the good old days, if you weren't militarily strong you turned into dirt pretty quick.
I really don't know what happened to the French but even in fur trading they demanded the position as middle man ~ unlike the English who let the Iroquois do the hard work of transporting the furs to market. The Spanish actually tried to build a local agrarian society first ~ then the mines!
In 1952 I was riding in a B-25 across the High Plains somewhere around the Texas-New Mexico border when I spotted this large fish-shaped pattern on the ground, outlined in black and having a couple of circles with straight black lines about the quarter points. I had recently read a National Geographic article about some similar prehistoric marks somewhere in the Southwest. I got excited, believing it was authentic Native American, and started to point out my “discovery” to the two fellow passengers sharing the waist seats on the deck of the old B-25. One of the guys, a WW2 Air Force veteran, said “Why, that’s just an old battleship target!”