Environment Of The Seminole.
Nature.
Southern Florida, the region to which most of the Seminole have been
driven by the advances of civilization, is, taken all in all, unlike any
other part of our country. In climate it is subtropical; in character
of soil it shows a contrast of comparative barrenness and abounding
fertility; and in topography it is a plain, with hardly any perceptible
natural elevations or depressions. The following description, based upon
the notes of my journey to the Big Cypress Swamp, indicates the
character of the country generally. I left Myers, on the Caloosahatchie
River, a small settlement composed principally of cattlemen, one morning
in the month of February. Even in February the sun was so hot that
clothing was a burden. As we started upon our journey, which was to be
for a distance of sixty miles or more, my attention was called to the
fact that the harness of the horse attached to my buggy was without the
breeching. I was told that this part of the harness would not be needed,
so level should we find the country. Our way, soon after leaving the
main street of Myers, entered pine woods. The soil across which we
traveled at first was a dry, dazzling white sand, over which, was
scattered a growth of dwarf palmetto. The pine trees were not near
enough together to shade us from the fierce, sun. This sparseness of
growth, and comparative absence of shade, is one marked characteristic
of Florida's pine woods. Through this thin forest we drove all the day.
The monotonous scenery was unchanged except that at a short distance
from Myers it was broken by swamps and ponds. So far as the appearance
of the country around as indicated, we could not tell whether we were
two miles or twenty from our starting point. Nearly half our way during
the first day lay through water, and yet we were in the midst of what is
called the winter "dry season." The water took the shape here of a swamp
and there of a pond, but where the swamp or the pond began or ended it
was scarcely possible to tell, one passed by almost imperceptible
degrees from dry land to moist and from moist land into pool or marsh.
Generally, however, the swamps were filled with a growth of cypress
trees. These cypress groups were well defined in the pine woods by the
closeness of their growth and the sharpness of the boundary of the
clusters. Usually, too, the cypress swamps were surrounded by rims of
water grasses. Six miles from Myers we crossed a cypress swamp, in which
the water at its greatest depth was from one foot to two feet deep.
A wagon road had been cut through the dense growth of trees, and the
trees were covered with hanging mosses and air plants.
The ponds differed from the swamps only in being treeless. They are open
sheets of water surrounded by bands of greater or less width of tall
grasses. The third day, between 30 and 40 miles from Myers, we left the
pine tree lands and started across what are called in Southern Florida
the "prairies." These are wide stretches covered with grass and with
scrub palmetto and dotted at near intervals with what are called pine
"islands" or "hammocks" and cypress swamps. The pine island or hammock
is a slight elevation of the soil, rising a few inches above the dead
level. The cypress swamp, on the contrary, seems to have its origin only
in a slight depression in the plain. Where there is a ring of slight
depression, inclosing a slight elevation, there is generally a
combination of cypress and pine and oak growth. For perhaps 15 miles we
traveled that third day over this expanse of grass; most of the way we
were in water, among pine islands, skirting cypress swamps and saw-grass
marshes, and being jolted through thick clumps of scrub palmetto. Before
nightfall we reached the district occupied by the Indians, passing there
into what is called the "Bad Country," an immense expanse of submerged
land, with here and there islands rising from it, as from the drier
prairies. We had a weird ride that afternoon and night: Now we passed
through saw-grass 5 or 6 feet high and were in water 6 to 20 inches in
depth; then we encircled some impenetrable jungle of vines and trees,
and again we took our way out upon a vast expanse of water and grass. At
but one place in a distance of several miles was it dry enough for one
to step upon the ground without wetting the feet. We reached that place
at nightfall, but found no wood there for making a fire. We were 4 miles
then from any good camping ground. Captain Hendry asked our Indian
companion whether he could take us through the darkness to a place
called the "Buck Pens." Ko-nip-ha-tco said he could. Under his guidance
we started in the twilight, the sky covered with clouds. The night which
followed was starless, and soon we were splashing through a country
which, to my eyes, was trackless. There were visible to me no landmarks.
But our Indian, following a trail made by his own people, about nine
o'clock brought us to the object of our search. A black mass suddenly
appeared in the darkness. It was the pine island we were seeking, the
"Buck Pens."
On our journey that day we had crossed a stream, so called, the
Ak-ho-lo-wa-koo-tci. So level is the country, however, and so sluggish
the flow of water there that this river, where we crossed it, was more
like a swamp than a stream. Indeed, in Southern Florida the streams,
for a long distance from what would be called their sources, are more a
succession of swamps than well defined currents confined to channels by
banks. They have no real shores until they are well on their way towards
the ocean.
Beyond the point I reached, on the edge of the Big Cypress Swamp, lie
the Everglades proper, a wide district with, only deeper water and
better defined islands than those which mark the "Bad Country" and the
"Devil's Garden" I had entered.
The description I have given refers to that part of the State of Florida
lying south of the Caloosahatchee River. It is in this watery prairie
and Everglade region that we find the immediate environment of most of
the Seminole Indians. Of the surroundings of the Seminole north of the
Caloosahatchee there is but little to say in modification of what has
already been said. Near the Fish Eating Creek settlement there is a
somewhat drier prairie land than that which I have just described. The
range of barren sand hills which extends from the north along the middle
of Florida to the headwaters of the Kissimmee River ends at Cat Fish
Lake. Excepting these modifications, the topography of the whole Indian
country of Florida is substantially the same as that which we traversed
on the way from Myers into the Big Cypress Swamp and the Everglades.
Over this wide and seeming level of land and water, as I have said,
there is a subtropical climate. I visited the Seminole in midwinter;
yet, for all that my northern senses could discover, we were in the
midst of summer. The few deciduous trees there were having a midyear
pause, but trees with dense foliage, flowers, fruit, and growing grass
were to be seen everywhere. The temperature was that of a northern June.
By night we made our beds on the ground without discomfort from cold,
and by day we were under the heat of a summer sun. There was certainly
nothing in the climate to make one feel the need of more clothing or
shelter than would protect from excessive heat or rain.
Then the abundance of food, both animal and vegetable, obtainable in
that region seemed to me to do away with the necessity, on the part of
the people living there, for a struggle for existence. As I have already
stated, the soil is quite barren over a large part of the district; but,
on the other hand, there is also in many places a fertility of soil that
cannot be surpassed. Plantings are followed by superabundant harvests,
and the hunter is richly rewarded. But I need not repeat what has
already been said; it suffices to note that the natural environment
of the Seminole is such that ordinary effort serves to supply them,
physically, with more than they need.
Man.
When we consider, in connection with these facts, what I have also
before said, that these Indians are in no exceptional danger from wild
animals or poisonous reptiles, that they need not specially guard
against epidemic disease, and when we remember that they are native to
whatever influences might affect injuriously persons from other parts of
the country, we can easily see how much more favorably situated for
physical prosperity they are than others of their kind. In fact, nature
has made physical life so easy to them that their great danger lies in
the possible want or decadence of the moral, strength needed to maintain
them in a vigorous use of their powers. This moral strength to some
degree they have, but in large measure it had its origin in and has been
preserved by their struggles with man rather than with nature. The wars
of their ancestors, extending over nearly two centuries, did the most to
make them the brave and proud people they are. It is through the effects
of these chiefly that they have been kept from becoming indolent and
effeminate. They are now strong, fearless, haughty, and independent.
But the near future is to initiate a new epoch in their history, an era
in which their career may be the reverse of what it has been. Man is
becoming a factor of new importance in their environment. The moving
lines of the white population are closing in upon the land of the
Seminole. There is no farther retreat to which they can go. It is their
impulse to resist the intruders, but some of them are at last becoming
wise enough to know that they cannot contend successfully with the white
man. It is possible that even their few warriors may make an effort to
stay the oncoming hosts, but ultimately they will either perish in the
futile attempt or they will have to submit to a civilization which,
until now, they have been able to repel and whose injurious
accompaniments may degrade and destroy them. Hitherto the white man's
influence has been comparatively of no effect except in arousing in the
Indian his more violent passions, and in exciting him to open hostility.
For more than three centuries the European has been face to face with
the Florida Indian and the two have never really been friends. Through
the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the peninsula was the scene of
frequently renewed warfare. Spaniard, Frenchman, Englishman, and
Spaniard, in turn, kept the country in an unsettled state, and when the
American Union received the province from Spain, sixty years ago, it
received with it, in the tribe of the Seminole, an embittered and
determined race of hostile subjects. This people our Government has
never been able to conciliate or to conquer. A different Indian policy,
or a different administration of it, might have prevented the disastrous
wars of the last half century; but, as all know, the Seminole have
always lived within our borders as aliens. It is only of late years, and
through natural necessities, that any friendly intercourse of white man
and Indian has been secured. The Indian has become too weak to contend
successfully against his neighbor and the white man has learned enough
to refrain from arousing the vindictiveness of the savage. The few white
men now on the border line in Florida are, with only some exceptions,
cattle dealers or traders seeking barter with the red men. The cattlemen
sometimes meet the Indians on the prairies and are friendly with them
for the sake of their stock, which often strays into the Seminole
country. The other places of contact of the whites and Seminole are
the settlements of Myers, Miami, Bartow, Fort Meade, and Tampa, all,
however, centers of comparatively small population. To these places,
at infrequent intervals., the Indians go for purposes of trade.
The Indians have appropriated for their service some of the products of
European civilization, such as weapons, implements, domestic utensils,
fabrics for clothing, &c. Mentally, excepting a few religious ideas
which they received long ago from the teaching of Spanish missionaries
and, in the southern settlements, excepting some few Spanish words, the
Seminole have accepted and appropriated practically nothing from, the
white man. The two peoples remain, as they always have been, separate
and independent. Up to the present, therefore, the human environment
has had no effect upon the Indians aside from that which has just been
noticed, except to arouse them to war and to produce among them war's
consequences.
But soon a great and rapid change must take place. The large immigration
of a white population into Florida, and especially the attempts at
present being made to drain Lake Okeechobee and the Everglades, make it
certain, as I have said, that the Seminole is about to enter a future
unlike any past he has known. But now that new factors are beginning to
direct his career, now that he can no longer retreat, now that he can
no longer successfully contend, now that he is to be forced into close,
unavoidable contact with men he has known only as enemies, what will he
become? If we anger him, he still can do much harm before we can conquer
him; but if we seek, by a proper policy, to do him justice, he yet may
be made our friend and ally. Already, to the dislike of the old men of
the tribe, some young braves show a willingness to break down the
ancient barriers between them and our people, and I believe it possible
that with encouragement, at a time not far distant, all these Indians
may become our friends, forgetting their tragic past in a peaceful and
prosperous future.
INDEX
Big Cypress Swamp Seminole settlement 477, 478, 499, 507, 529
Billy, brother of Key West Billy 492-494, 499, 528
Brown, Lieutenant, aid of, among Seminole 489
Catfish Lake Seminole settlement 477, 478, 509
Cow Creek Seminole settlement 477, 478
Cypress swamps, Florida 527-529
Devil's Garden, Florida 478
Hendry, F. A., aid in Florida 492, 511, 528
Key West Billy 484, 485
Koonti, preparation of 513-516
Seminole tradition of origin of 519
Me-le the Seminole 489, 490
Miami River Seminole settlement 477, 478
Errata
(Table of Contents)
Use of Medicines...
_missing from printed text_
(Green Corn Dance diagram)
"TEOK-KO-CLACO"
_may be error for -CLAC-O_
End of Project Gutenberg's The Seminole Indians of Florida, by Clay MacCauley