Valley via the French Broad River, rested for several days at Chiaha, and followed a trail to the upper Little Tennessee River before being forced to turn back. At Chiaha, one of Pardo's subordinates, Hernando Moyano de Morales, established a short-lived fort called San Pedro. It, along with five other Spanish forts across the region, was destroyed by natives in 1569, thereby opening the area to other European colonization. Chronicles of the Spanish explorers provide the earliest written accounts regarding the Tennessee Valley's 16th-century inhabitants. Most of the valley, including Chiaha, was part of the Coosa chiefdom's regional sphere of influence. Inhabitants spoke a dialect of the Muskogean language, and lived in complex agrarian communities centered around fortified villages. Cherokee-speaking people lived in the remote reaches of the Appalachian Mountains, and may have been at war with the Muskogean inhabitants in the valley. The village of Tali, visited by De Soto in 1540, is believed to be the Mississippian-period village excavated at the Toqua site in the 1970s. The villages of Chalahume and Satapo, visited by Pardo in 1567, were likely predecessors (and namesakes for) the later Cherokee villages of Chilhowee and Citico, which were located near the modern Chilhowee Dam. As of the 17th century, Tennessee was the middle ground for several different native peoples. Along the Mississippi River was the Chickasaw & Choctaw peoples, and inland of them were the Coushatta—all three were part of the Muskogean language family. Before European contact, they were supposedly all a loose collection of Mississippian culture city-states with their own leaders, but upon contact with Europeans, they merged into larger nations, spread out and adopted a European lifestyle, earning many of them the title of the "Civilized Tribes." During the height of the Mississippians, hundreds of walled cities extended throughout the American south from Louisiana to the east coast, up the Mississippi into Wisconsin & a few fringe cities along larger rivers on the Great Plains. They had complex society & agriculture. They did not build with stone, but made plenty of examples of sculpture work in clay, stone & copper. Most of what remains of these cities, however, are large, pyramidal, earthen hills (upon which chiefs & upper-classmen would build their homes) and artful burial mounds. These people did not develop the Mississippian culture, however, but adopted it from the Caddo people west of the Mississippi River. To the east were