Who are the Seminole People? by Willard Steele The Seminole people are the descendents of the Creek people, and the Creek people are the descendents of the Lamar peoples. The ancestral lands of both the Lamar and Creek cultures encompassed parts of Alabama, Georgia, Florida, North and South Carolina, and Tennessee. The Lamar period lasted from about 1350 until 1700. The descendents of the Lamar peoples became the historic nations known as the Creeks and Cherokees. The Creek Nation was created through a gradual process of assimilation. This continued into historic times. Remnants of the Westo (Yuchi), Apalachee and Yemassee Tribes were absorbed by the tribe after their defeats by the English. The Creek were unlike any other tribe in that it can be said that, in the southeast, there were the Chickasaw, the Cherokee, the Choctaw- and everyone else was a Creek. The nation was a confederation of dozens of towns. The diversity of the Tribe is reflected in the fact that it's members spoke seven languages-- Muscogee, Hitchiti, Koasati, Alabama, Natchez, Yuchi and Shawnee. The first five are dialects of Muskogean. The early history of the Creek people in Florida is not well understood. While most people think of the Creeks as having come into Florida after 1700, this is not true. The Apalache were a Hitchiti speaking people that may have been related to the Creel Tamathli or Apalachicola. The Apalache, situated along the Apalachicola River, were in Florida at the time of Spanish contact. At the same time, another Hitchiti speaking Creek group, the Sawokli, were located at Choctawhatchee Bay, on the Gulf of Mexico. At the beginning of the sixteenth century, the Spanish attempted to set up a system of missions across north Florida and southern Georgia. While these efforts to set up missions in the Creek country failed, there were Creeks that were drawn from Georgia down to the Spanish missions in Florida. These included the Oconee at San Francisco De Oconi (1659); the Sawokli at Encarnacion de Sabacola el Minor (1675); and the Tamathli at Nuestra Senora de la Candelaria de la Tama (1675). Also in Florida at this time were other native peoples that would later be incorporated into the Seminole tribe. They included the Apalachicola who were settled along the river of the same name; the Yemassee, at San Antonio Anacape (1681), and Nuestra Senora de la Candelaria de la Tama (1675); the Tawasa, of the Timuqua; and the Yuchi, who were at this time located between the Apalachicola River and the Choctawhatchee Bay area. The nucleus of the Seminole Nation however, was to form around a settlement of Oconee, Chiaha, Apalachicola and Sawokali town members. They came to prominence as allies of the English General Oglethorpe in his attack on St. Augustine in 1740. Afterwards they established a settlement at Cuscowilla (present day Micanopy, Florida) where they flourished as cattlemen. Their first leader, appropriately known as the Cowkeeper (an Oconee), was a sworn enemy of the Spanish. Throughout his life he kept both the Spanish and English out of what he considered to be the Seminole Nation. This was essentially all of the land west of the St. Johns River. The Cow keeper issued a warning that any Spaniard that he found on Indian lands would be killed. He kept this promise with alarming regularity. The people of Cuscowilla Town were Miccosukee speakers. The first Creek speaking people, settled at Chocuchattee (Red House) near present day Brooksville, Florida. This was some time around 1760. Like their Mikasuki speaking neighbors, they were also cattlemen. Soon the vast herds of the growingSeminole Nation drew the attention of their white neighbors to the north. Conflicts that were occurring in Georgia spilled into Florida due to an increased white desire for land and cattle. The story of the Cow keeper and his family is typical of what occurred to many Seminoles for the next one-hundred years. The Cow keeper's nephew was Payne. Payne's nephew was Micanopy. And Micanopy's nephew was Billy Bowlegs. The Cow keeper would kill eighty-six Spaniards before he died in 1784. He was recorded as saying that his only regret was in not having killed a hundred. Payne would die in 1813 of wounds he received defending the Seminolelands against a band of Georgia cattle thieves operating under the guise of an army. Micanopy would be forced to go west to Oklahoma during the Second Seminole War (1835-1842). And Billy Bowlegs would survive the Second Seminole War only to be sent west at the end of the Third Seminole War (1858). He died of yellow fever during the Civil war while serving as a Major in the Union Army. In four generations, the only one of these men who died peacefully at his Florida home, had to kill eighty-six people to do it. The Seminole population in Florida remained fairly small, around 1200, compared to the main body of Creeks in Georgia and Alabama, who numbered possibly 25,000 people. Then came the War of 1812. Thought of as a war between the U.S. and Britain, it was a fierce Indian war as well. Everywhere from the Great Lakes to the Gulf of Mexico, native peoples dissatisfied with the increasingly aggressive actions of their white neighbors and the state governments joined the British against the Unites States armies. This was the beginning of a period of open warfare that continued almost unabated for the next fifty years. This period of time has been divided by historians into the War of 1812 (1812-1815); the Creek War (1813-1814); the Creek Civil War (1813); the First Seminole War (1818-1819); the Second Seminole War (1835-1842); the Scare of 1849-50 (1849-1840); and the Third Seminole War (1855-1858). The fallacy in these dates lie in the fact that one history says that the destruction of the British post on the Apalachicola River was the last battle of the War of 1812 and another calls it the first battle of the First Seminole war. It is unlikely that anyone there at the time saw the difference. In reality, all of these conflicts were one long war against the Creeks. One result of these battles was that thousands of refugees from the war came into Florida. By 1823 the native population had increased three or four fold by the newcomers. This population of about five thousand was thrown together and subjected to the fiercest of all the wars ever waged by the U.S. Government against native peoples, known as the Second Seminole War, 1835-1842. This seven year war cost more than the American Revolution (estimates start at $20,000,000). It involved fifty-two thousand soldiers fighting against less than two thousand warriors. The army included the whole Marine Corps, all but one regiment of infantry, all of the artillery regiments, and a new regiment of Dragoons (formed just for service in Florida) and by wars end, four of the five highest ranking officers in the Army had been in Florida leading the troops. Add to this hundreds of ships and thousand of volunteers from Georgia, Florida, Philadelphia, Washington D.C., Louisiana, South Carolina, Alabama, Tennessee and even Missouri. There were even Creek, Delaware and Shawnee warriors brought in to fight the Seminoles. By the end of the war there were reportedly only three-hundred Seminoles left in the territory. Then they fought the Third Seminole War and removed another 240 or so Seminoles. No one really knows how many Seminoles were left in Florida after the 3rd Seminole War ended in 1858. The American Civil War drew attention away from the "Indian problem". In 1887 Special Indian Agent A.M. Wilson recorded that there were sixty adult males in a Florida Seminole population that totaled two hundred and sixty-nine men, women and children. "But", he added, "in case of trouble they could easily muster 200 fighting men, as there are doubtless 40 or 45 young men, who, though they have not reached their majority, they are good hunters and expert marksmen." Without explaining where the other one hundred warriors would come from, Agent Wilson only added a warning that there could be "serious trouble at no distant day." From beginning to end the government and its citizens would harbor an irrational fear of living next to the Indians. For the next sixty years the small population of Seminoles would live on the fringes of society. They made livings as hunters, guides and sometimes, curiosities for the tourists. One positive side to this was that the Seminoles were able to make a living while maintaining a distance from the influences that tried so hard to change them. Outside of a few anthropological reports written by people like Clay MacCauley and Captain R.H. Pratt, knowledge of the Seminoles from 1860 until 1930 is relatively sparse. In 1907, the Department of the Interior set aside 540 acres of land near Dania for Seminole use. In 1911, President Taft set aside lands in Martin, Broward and Hendry Counties as reservations. But when, in 1913, the State legislature voted 45 to 1 in the House and 23 to 0 in Senate to set aside 100,000 acres of lands for Indian use, Governor William Jennings vetoed the bill. Jennings believed that the Seminoles had signed a treaty to move to Oklahoma, had no rights as citizens of Florida, and that the rights of 800,000 non-tribal members outweighed those of the 400 Seminoles that lived in the State. In spite of Jennings' archaic views, by 1913 there were 18 Indian reservations in Florida, ranging in size from 40 acres to16,000 acres.