The Palarches, Eamuses and Kaloosas, were the ancient possessors of
Florida, and are all extinct. The present Florida Indians are the remains
of that ancient and warlike tribe on the Mississippi, which being almost
extirpated by the French, retreated along the Northern coast of the Gulf
of Mexico, and united with broken bands of Biloxies, Red Sticks, and
runaway Creeks, called Seminoles. The largest portion of these Indians
are Lower Creeks, and are of the most dissolute, daring, and abandoned of
that tribe.
The word Seminole signifies a wanderer or runaway, or it means a wild
people or outsettlers, the ancestors of the tribe having detached
themselves from the main body of the Creeks, and dwelt remotely, wherever
the inducements of more game, or greater scope for freedom of action,
might casually lead them. They settled in Florida about 115 years ago.
That this is the period of their becoming a separate community, is
confirmed by the connection of their history with that of the Yemasees,
of whom there occur frequent notices in the account of the early
settlement of Georgia and South Carolina.
In a talk, which the Seminoles about the year 1820, transmitted to the
American government, they say, alluding to their ancient independence:
“An hundred summers have seen the Seminole warrior reposing undisturbed
under the shade of his live oak, and the suns of an hundred winters
have risen on his ardent pursuit of the buck and the bear, with none to
question his bounds, or dispute his range.”
The greater part of East Florida appears to have been originally in
possession of the Yemasees—a powerful people, who not only occupied this
province, but spread themselves over Georgia, and into the limits of
South Carolina, which on its first demarcation was bounded on the South
by the Altamaha. Some of the tribes resided within the present limits of
that State, in and about Beaufort and Savannah River, and also the Sea
Islands. Bartram relates that these people, after a hardy contest, and
many bloody defeats, were nearly exterminated by their ancient enemies
the Creeks, who had a tradition, that a beautiful race of Indians, whose
women they called Daughters of the Sun, resided amidst the recesses of
the great Oakefanokee wilderness, where they enjoyed perpetual felicity,
in ever blooming islands, inaccessible to human approach.
Bartram with probability supposes, that this fable took its rise from a
fugitive remnant of the Yemasees, who found a refuge in this swamp, and
were perhaps, after a lapse of years, accidentally seen by some of the
hunters of the Creek nation.
There is frequent mention, in the early colonial history of South
Carolina of wars between the first settlers and the Yemasees, the latter
having been excited to attack the Colony by the Spanish authorities in
St. Augustine.
A formidable war was kindled by these people, which would have proved
destructive to the infant settlement of Carolina, had not timely
intimation of the danger been obtained by means of one of the outsettlers
to whom Sanute, a chief of the hostile Indians, from a feeling of
friendship, gave notice of the impending attack. On this occasion the
Indians were defeated by Gov. Grant, and driven out of the province. Dr.
Ramsay mentions that the Yemasees retired into Florida, to which country
they seem to have been subsequently restricted by the increasing power of
the whites, and by the Creeks. No further mention of them occurs, until
the Seminoles came into notice, by whom they were conquered, and nearly
exterminated, in 1721, in the manner mentioned by Bartram. When in the
year 1715, the Yemasees were driven within the limits of Florida, they
became slaves to the Seminoles. Another account states, that the Yemasees
left St. Augustine in a body, in 1722; or rather were expelled by the
Spaniards, who essayed in vain to compel them to labours which were
regarded as degrading drudgeries by the warriors of Yemasee.
The Yemasees were remarkably black people, and the Ocklewahaw tribe,
who are of a deeper shade than the Seminoles, are descendants of the
conquered race. The chief of the Ocklewahaws, Yaha Hadgo, who was killed
by General Shelton in the campaign of ’36, was very dark; but generally,
the Seminole’s complexion is like that of the Creeks.
Under King Payne, grandfather of Micconope, (the present Chief) the
Seminoles invaded and achieved the conquest of the territories they
lately occupied. He lived to near 100 years of age, and married a Yemasee
woman, his slave, by whom he had the late chief Payne, who bore, in the
darkness of his complexion, a proof of his Yemasee descent.
The Indians were formerly very numerous in Florida, perhaps as much so
as in Mexico. They are now reduced to comparatively small bands, in few
villages.
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