The History of Florida (45 page)

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Territory to persuade the Florida remnant to come west. In 1850, Major

General David Twiggs, in command, offered Bowlegs $10,000 to remove the

entire group with a fee to each migrating Indian. In 1852, the government

put the matter in the private sector. It designated Luther Blake to achieve

the removal peaceful y. Blake took Bowlegs to Washington with three sub-

chiefs to show them the power of the United States. When Jefferson Davis

was secretary of war, he heeded the cries of the Floridians, and inaugurated

a policy calculated either to make the Seminoles leave or fight. It included

an embargo on trade with them and survey of land within the reservation,

fol owed by some sales. Efforts were made to rebuild some of the abandoned

roads made during the Second Seminole War and to patrol them. Boats, too,

appeared for use in the swamps. These white invasions of the reserved land

did indeed push the Seminoles into war. Some accounts say that it was the

vandalizing of one of Bowlegs’s camps “to see how Bil y would cut up” that

started the conflict. But it is more likely that the chiefs had decided earlier

that they must fight. In any case, thirty warriors opened fire on Lt. George

Hartsuff’s detachment (the vandalizers) at 5:00 a.m. on 18 December 1855,

wounding four of the ten and killing four. Thus began the Third Seminole

War.

Florida’s Seminole and Miccosukee Peoples · 213

The United States commander, Colonel John Monroe, had at his disposal

800 regulars, 260 Florida militia in federal service, and 400 not in federal

service. Since there were about 100 warriors left, the manpower odds were

fourteen to one. White organization, however, was faulty, there being poor

communication between federal and state commanders.

The Seminoles without a planned strategy isolated habitations and small

detachments at random. For six months they held the initiative. During

1856, they made fifteen raids and kil ed 28 people. In September 1856, Brevet

Brigadier General William S. Harney took command in Florida. He com-

menced a system of patrols that reduced the raiding, but never found the

retreats of Bil y Bowlegs and Sam Jones. Harney left Florida in April 1857,

followed in the command by Colonel Gustavus Loomis.

Governor James Broome insisted that citizen soldiers would be required

to defeat the Indians. He ordered militia companies into service, appealing

in all cases to the federal government to muster them into United States ser-

vice. In July 1857 he called for ten companies. Not all of the companies that

he ordered into service were acceptable to the War Department, and some

of them, never official y mustered by regular officers, waited decades before

receiving any pay. Nevertheless, as the conflict lengthened, the number of

citizen soldiers in the field increased, while the number of regulars declined.

proof

In the fall of 1857, only four companies of regulars remained in Florida.

Since the volunteers and militia from south Florida were in the main

ranchers, they insisted on serving as horse troops. But horsemen could not

penetrate the swamps and lakes where the last refuges of the Indians were.

In the summer of 1857, the State of Florida organized three boat compa-

nies, equipped with shal ow-draft vessels carrying 16 men each. Manned

by a motley, unmilitary assortment, this flotil a forced its way through the

swamps and sawgrass into Bowlegs’s refuge on 19 November 1857. For two

years the white forces had been unsuccessful y hunting this place. There the

boat people burned down more than fifty dwellings, took large quantities of

corn and rice, some oxen, and destroyed food growing in several hundred

acres.

Captain John Casey worked before and during the conflict to limit the

violence. Because of his influence, the chiefs knew that they were safe from

seizure when they entered white camps for talks. Sam Jones never came

in. He was by this time more than 100 years old, senile, and represented in

meetings by Assinwah, Bowlegs’s son-in-law. To induce migration, Con-

gress in August 1856 created an area of 2 mil ion acres in Indian Territory for

Florida Indians, separating them from the Creeks, toward whom they were

214 · Brent R. Weisman

hostile. Congress also made substantial funds available to pay Seminoles

who removed.

Bowlegs, beaten down by the destruction of his ultimate refuge, final y

accepted money to go west: $6,500 for himself, $1,000 each for four sub-

chiefs, $500 each for all other warriors, and $100 for women and children.

Under these terms, 164 persons shipped out on 4 May 1858: all of Bowlegs’s

band, all of Assinwah’s, and ten from Sam Jones’s band. They received a total

of $44,600. Sam Jones, with perhaps 17 warriors, remained hidden on an

island deep in the Everglades. He died in Florida at an estimated age of 111.

Colonel Gustavus Loomis, who succeeded Harney in command, received

permission official y to declare the war ended on 8 May 1858. In this third

conflict, there had been no action classifiable as a battle. About 40 war-

riors had lost their lives in combat and the same number of white fighters.

Whereas in the Second Seminole War the regular soldiers had done the final

mopping up, in this one the citizen soldiers did it.

No more than 200 Indians remained in the state, but they preserved

the Seminole culture, and were the basis for a slowly increasing number of

inheritors.

Isolation (1858–1880)
proof

Following the Third Seminole War, the remaining Seminoles understand-

ably withdrew from any but the most fleeting contacts with the few non-

Indian Floridians inhabiting the lower portion of the peninsula. Settlement

for the most part was in smal , remote, matrilocal camps located on tree

islands in the Everglades and Big Cypress regions. The familiar open-air

pole and thatch Seminole chickee (from the word in the Mikasuki language

meaning “house”) typified such settlements, which also had outdoor cook-

ing and work areas and garden plots. Gradual y a coalescence of settlements

occurred, with locations on the north side of Lake Okeechobee, the north-

ern edge of the Big Cypress, and the Pine Island Ridge area west of Fort Lau-

derdale regularly inhabited. The Okeechobee settlements would give rise to

the Muskogee-speaking Cow Creek Seminole, ancestors of today’s Brighton

group occupying a reservation in the same area. The Mikasuki-speaking

Big Cypress and Pine Island groups were general y ancestral to the present

populations of the Big Cypress and Hol ywood reservations, respectively,

and contributed to the ancestry of the Miccosukee Indians living along the

Tamiami Trail as wel .

Florida’s Seminole and Miccosukee Peoples · 215

Seminole chickee in the Big Cypress Swamp drawn by Clay MacCauley in 1881. Cour-

tesy of the National Anthropological Archives, National Museum of Natural History,

Smithsonian Institution (Neg. No. 1178-N-8[1]).

Travel between islands was accomplished by dugout canoe. Trade con-

tacts were established with stores on both coasts, with skins and pelts being

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exchanged for cloth, corn, beads, pots and pans, rifles, and ammunition.

Ceremonial life centered on the Green Corn Dance, when scattered camps

would come together to a shared dance or busk ground. Each busk group

also shared in common a medicine bundle, a gathering of sacred objects

bundled in a deerskin pouch under the exclusive care of the medicine man.

Major busk grounds were located at Pine Island, although the Cow Creek

and Big Cypress groups also possessed medicine bundles and held separate

busks.

Development of Modern Tribalism

After 1880, Seminole contact with whites became more frequent and, inevi-

tably with this increased interaction grew the making of more “Indian trou-

ble.” The government again developed a plan of removal to Indian Territory.

A succession of federal agents from the Bureau of Indian Affairs and gov-

ernment-sponsored investigators were sent to assess the current Seminole

situation and determine the feasibility of removal. During this time various

216 · Brent R. Weisman

plans were put forth by groups of Seminole sympathizers to purchase res-

ervation lands in Florida for the Indians, and private funds were raised for

this purpose. However, the problem of getting the Seminoles to move to

such lands was more complex than had been thought, and these plans came

to naught. By 1891, the State of Florida agreed to set aside a 5,000-acre tract

for an Indian reservation, to include lands then currently inhabited by the

Seminoles, but no al ocation was made for proper boundary survey. By 1917,

however, largely through the efforts of Minnie Moore-Wil son, the state de-

signed nearly 100,000 acres for reservation use in the swamps of Monroe

County, although few if any Indians actual y ever resided there. With the

creation of Everglades National Park in 1935, the Monroe County lands were

exchanged for acreage in Broward and Palm Beach Counties.

Through the diligence of Lucian Spencer, U.S. government special com-

missioner to the Seminoles, and a few others, the Seminoles gradual y be-

gan moving to federal reservation lands during the 1920s, particularly to a

smal tract at Dania where the current Hol ywood reservation is located.

The opening of the Tamiami Trail highway (U.S. 41) across the Everglades

in 1928 attracted far-flung northern and southern bands to establish tour-

ist camps along the road. Here motorists could see colorful patchwork,

palmetto dol s, split palmetto baskets, animal skins, live baby al igators,

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wooden spoons, and other items for sale. These groups and others still liv-

ing in remote camps showed little interest in the reservation policy of the

federal administration. Through the early 1930s, less than 10 percent of the

Seminole population lived on reservation lands. Exhibition vil ages, primar-

ily in and around Miami, also housed a number of Seminole families in the

early to middle decades of the twentieth century.

A burst of success by Christian missionaries in the 1940s led by the Creek

Baptist preacher Stanley Smith created a schism between the new con-

verts and those adhering to traditional religion, with the result that Chris-

tian Seminoles began to move to reservations where they could establish

churches. As the reservations at Dania, Big Cypress, and Brighton became

true population centers, the Bureau of Indian Affairs had less difficulty in

developing formal governing bodies through which new policies and pro-

grams could be introduced and administered. The Seminoles living along

the Trail continued to be little interested in formal relationships with the

federal government, and resented efforts to lump them with the reservation

Seminoles for administrative purposes.

Antagonisms between the Trail Indians and the reservation Seminoles

were accelerated in 1950, when a small group of reservation Seminole with

Florida’s Seminole and Miccosukee Peoples · 217

legal representation filed a land claims lawsuit before the Indian Claims

Commission. The suit, filed under terms specified in the Indian Claims

Commission Act of 1946, sought financial compensation for land taken

from the Seminoles in treaties before and during the Second Seminole War

and for the land lost to Everglades National Park in 1935. The Trail Indians

wanted nothing to do with the Seminole suit, fearing the government would

accept no future claims once this case was settled. In fact, ful y one-third

of the adult reservation Seminoles did not back the case. Partly due to the

impetus of the land claims case, a central tribal government was formed in

which the Big Cypress, Brighton, and Dania reservations were political y

linked. In 1957, the Seminole Tribe of Florida was official y recognized by

the United States government.

The Trail Indians also found it necessary to organize, and in 1962 they

were granted federal recognition as the Miccosukee Tribe of Florida.

In 1970, after years of expensive legal maneuvers by both sides and the