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CHAPTER VI

SEEKING THE SEMINOLES IN FLORIDA (1835)

WITH THE REGULARS OF MAJOR DADE

MONG the doctrines taught by the Shawnee Prophet and carried into the South by his brother Tecumseh, was the theory that no Indian lands might be sold to the white men without the consent of all the Indians.

This was perhaps a good doctrine for the protection of the tribes, but it brought many disputes; it split the tribes, for some Indians agreed to sell, and then the other Indians refused to let them sell. It ruined the Shawnees; it divided the Creeks and ruined them also; and it ruined the Seminoles of Florida.

Now, the Seminoles were a branch of the Creeks. In an early day they had separated from the Creeks and had withdrawn into Florida. The Creeks called them Seminoles, or Runaways.

Pretty nearly all the wars with the Indians have been occasioned by land disputes. Sometimes the Indians did not understand, sometimes they broke their promises, and frequently the United States broke its promises or enforced harsh contracts.

When in 1821 the United States bought Florida from Spain the Seminoles were living there. They occupied the best lands; they had been friendly with the

Spaniards, who did not try to open the country and farm it; they had their cabins of palmetto leaves, and their patches of tilled ground, and traded furs and meat for powder and lead.

The American settler and land speculator entered Florida. To them the Seminoles were only savageslazy, ignorant savages, at that. They demanded that the Florida lands be thrown upon the market for settlement.

This looked like an easy matter. The Seminoles had no written titles to the land; they were accustomed to doing business by word of mouth with the careless Spaniards. Soon the Seminoles found themselves being gradually pushed into smaller and smaller territory; they signed papers that they could not read, and constantly sold more land than they thought that they had sold; they were punished by fines and whippings when they trespassed, and they were accused of stealing slaves from the white planters. There long had been bad feeling, on this score, between the planters of Georgia and the Seminoles. It was true that runaway slaves sought refuge among the Seminoles of Florida.

The Seminoles evidently had to get out. Then in 1824 their head men were induced to sign a treaty, which bound the nation to remove to a reservation, somewhere else, when such a reservation should be found. In 1832 the reservation was found by the United States in Arkansas.

The Seminoles sent a committee to look at it. The committee did not like Arkansas; but by touching the

goosequill they signed a paper which said that they did like it, and that the nation would go there within three years.

When they had returned to Florida, and learned that they had signed away their homes, they and all the other Seminoles, and their negro slaves vowed that they would never go.

In April, 1834, Brevet Brigadier General Duncan L. Clinch, colonel of the Fourth United States Infantry, was ordered to Florida, to prepare the Seminoles for leaving. The treaty was laid out upon the council table at the house of General Wiley Thompson, the Indian agent.

"It is a white man's treaty," the chiefs declared. "We did not understand it. The agents lied to us. None of us had a right to sign such a paper, and some of us never touched the quill."

A young head-warrior, Osceola or Black-drink Halloer, stepped forward. He drove his knife halfway to the hilt through the paper and into the table. "The only treaty I will sign is with this," he said. The Seminoles went back into their swamps, and General Clinch could do nothing; nor could Wiley Thompson, the Government Indian agent with the Seminoles, who, they said, had lied to them with his smooth tongue and long speeches.

In February of the next year, 1835, the Government sent ten companies of Regulars, as reinforcements to General Clinch; made ready with steamboats to take the Seminoles to New Orleans and up the Mississippi; had wagons assembling to carry them from the mouth

of the Arkansas River across country into Arkansas. The result was seven and one-half years of war, with forty battles, which cost the United States fifteen hundred soldiers and $20,000,000.

The white planters of Georgia and Florida had looked upon the Seminoles as an easy-going, shiftless people, good only as swamp hunters, and without the nerve, to fight. But these stoutly built natives were as fierce in fighting as their brothers the Creeks, although they mustered less than three thousand warriors. Like the Creeks they were of mixed bloodsred, black and white. They had their towns and their farms; they owned slaves. The negroes preferred the red masters to the white, and the half-wild life of the palmetto groves and the bayous to the plantation life.

The Seminoles were helped by the country in which they lived and which they so well knew. They had snug retreats upon dry ground in the midst of the great swamps, reached by blind trails for paddle or moccasin through the tall grasses and the palmettos. There were bear and deer and turkey in plenty; there also were alligators, poisonous snakes, and mosquitoes; a single step aside would plunge man or horse out of sight. By canoe and by foot the Seminoles ranged as they pleased.

Micanopy was their head chief, as Menewa had been the head chief of the warring Creeks, back in 1813. Osceola, aged thirty-two, was another Red Eagle, who spoke as a chief. He was one quarter white, light colored, finely formed, smart, eloquent and fiery, and led the councils.

It was he who enforced the law against selling to the whites without the permission of all the tribe, under penalty of death. Nothing was to be sold; nothing, whether land or goods.

An old chief, Charley-E-Mathlar, accepted American money; he pretended that it was paid to him for some. cattle. Osceola and party met him returning home by the trail; killed him. Taking the money from the handkerchief Osceola scattered it.

"It is blood money, made of red man's blood," he said. "It will bring evil upon all who touch it."

The time limit given the Seminoles by the Government expired January 1, 1836. Agent Thompson declared that Micanopy, Jumper, Alligator, Sam Jones and Black Dirt were no longer chiefs. He himself had put them down. Osceola was seized and imprisoned by Agent Thompson-put in irons for six days until he promised to be peaceful. The traders were forbidden to sell ammunition of any kind to the Seminoles. Powder and lead was to be withheld from the tribe.

Seeing that the United States was determined to remove them from their country, in December, this 1836, the Seminoles struck their American enemy.

When the first of January neared, General Clinch made plans to round up the Seminoles. December 16 Major F. S. Belton of the Second Artillery, commanding officer at Fort Brooke not far from present Tampa of Tampa Bay on the Gulf of Mexico side, received the order:

"The general commanding the Florida district directs that upon receipt of this you immediately de