That Hernando de Soto. He sure got around. The intrepid Spaniard commenced to explore and trade in the West Indies and Central America before trundling down to Peru to conquer it over the Incans. After a quick return to Spain, he set out for North America, stopping first in Cuba before landing at Tampa Bay, where he and his band of soldiers then marched through the South hunting for gold before zigzagging across Arkansas and stopping in what is now Hot Springs long about 1541.
Hot Springs honored the well-traveled explorer with a life-size statue at the Fordyce Bathhouse on Bathhouse Row in Hot Springs National Park. The statue of de Soto and an Indian maiden is inexplicably in the men's bath, but now that Fordyce Bathhouse is the official visitors center for Hot Springs, you don't have to be of the male persuasion to see it.
The unquestionable showstopper of Hot Springs is, well, its hot springs. The near-mythical water for thousands of years has been attracting the likes of explorers such as de Soto, and according to some accounts, Ponce de Leon, Native Americans, presidents including Truman and both Roosevelts, baseball greats with Babe Ruth and Honus Wagner among that number, notorious gangsters such as Alphonse Gabriel Capone and Salvatore Lucania, whom you may know better as Al Capone and Lucky Luciano, health aficionados, and then just curious tourists like me.
