Human beings have simple needs: water to drink, food to eat, shelter to keep them from the elements. Sometimes they need each other. And sometimes—and this is a powerful driver of history—they need to be left alone.
Along the western spine of the rich peninsula the Spanish called Florida lived a people who prized territory that the European newcomers dismissed as humid swamp and sandy waste. Living in towns along the Apalachicola River and along the west coast down to the Tampa Bay, the Seminoles were a people apart. They called themselves Ikaniuskalgi, “people of the peninsula.” The name by which they came to be known, Seminole, signals their very apartness; it comes from the Spanish word cimarrón, meaning wild or untamed.
The Seminoles were, in fact, many peoples. The core population was made up of bands of people indigenous to central Florida. In about 1750, Oconees from South Carolina and northern Georgia moved south and joined them. To their number, over the next few decades, were added Yuchis from eastern Tennessee, along with Alabamas, Hitchitis, and Yamasees from neighboring parts of the Southeast, fleeing encroaching English settlers. After the American Revolution, many more came, for the old royal restrictions on colonial settlement on Indian-owned land were now a thing of the past, and white settlers came pouring into Indian country. With those whites came slaves, some of whom ran away and began lives as free people among the Seminoles.
Tecumseh, the Shawnee prophet, organized a ferocious campaign of resistance against the whites, recruiting many peoples to join him. The Choctaws, western neighbors to the Seminoles, refused to participate, saying that it would be suicide to go to war against the United States. Many of their neighbors, the Muskogees, agreed. Others did not, and they formed an alliance called the Red Sticks, after the red-painted poles that they carried into battle. For a time, in 1812 and 1813, the Red Sticks scored victory after victory, driving settlers away and defeating American forces in battle. But then, in March 1814, thousands of soldiers under the command of Andrew Jackson arrived in Muskogee country, destroying villages and killing Red Sticks by the hundreds. In the treaty that followed, almost all the territory that had belonged to the Muskogee people, whether Red Stick or not, was ceded to the United States.
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