“Those Who Camp at a Distance”

Patsy West: My name is Patsy West. I’m an ethno-historian and museum curator. I was born in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, and my family has lived within 20 miles of there, where we homesteaded in 1888.

Nathan Connolly: For many years, Patsy has devoted her career to preserving the history of Florida’s Native American population.

Patsy West: Great-granddad was very close to the Miccosukee people on Little River. At that time everybody knew them only as Seminoles, because they’d been through the Seminole Wars and they really didn’t know their pedigree. He and great-grandma invited their friends, mostly Bird Clan people and Panther Clan and Big Towns Clan, to all the events at the family property. That was the focal point on Little River was my great-granddad’s house.

Nathan Connolly: Patsy says most information regarding the Seminoles is wrong, so she’s made it her mission to teach the public their real story.

Patsy West: They generally start out with something like the Seminoles were Creeks that were pushed into Florida during the Seminole Wars, and that’s absolutely incorrect.

Nathan Connolly: Who were the Seminoles? Patsy has traced the word back to the 18th century. She says that’s when Native Americans in Florida contracted epidemic diseases from the Spanish, which devastated their population.

Patsy West: There may have been a few people left. We don’t know how many. We don’t have any statistics about that. Generally speaking, it was a void. We do know that other tribes, Choctaw, Creek, Miccosukee, came into Florida, and the people that came in around 1740 were considered, quote unquote, Seminoles.

Nathan Connolly: In the wake of this devastation, the Seminoles built remarkable communities that included both Native Americans and African Americans. I wanted to learn more about this diverse pairing, so I turned to Andrew Frank. He’s one of the leading experts on the Seminoles. I started by asking a simple question. What does the word Seminole mean?

Andrew Frank: Traditionally we’ve always described Seminole as a derivative of the Spanish word cimarron, which is kind of wild domesticated animal, so wild cow. Seminoles historically have translated it somewhat differently, those who camp at a distance or those who camp at distant fire. One’s more poetic than the other. One would more be the version that enemies would give, you’re the runaway, you’re the wild person. I think both ideas give an image of the people who are in Florida, these indigenous folks, or folks who don’t want connections with say Creeks in Georgia, Alabama, Creek Indians, but they also don’t want connections sometimes with each other. We had these communities in Florida that some of them have real interactions with one another, but they set their villages up at really quite a distance even from each other. There was very little in the way of pan-Indian politics. There may be marriages and social ties and communal ties, but on a day-to-day or even monthly basis, these are really autonomous communities.

Nathan Connolly: In the 19th century, the United States, as part of its effort to incorporate the Florida territory within the territorial bounds of the country, part of that process actually includes using Seminole as a kind of blanket term to describe indigenous peoples in the territory. Just give me some sense about what actually is a Seminole in the eyes of U.S. government officials.

Andrew Frank: A Seminole in the eyes of the U.S. government is someone who is, and I guess maybe this is where the word wild really comes from, they are out of the control of a government that is not in alliance with the United States. There’s this one gentleman named [Nayamofla 00:14:14], Indian leader. He is widely seen as a Creek. He calls himself a Creek. Then at the start of the First Seminole War, he is asked to return a suspect for a murder who’s in his villages, and he says, “No.” This is actually in southern Georgia. The U.S. military comes in, they raise his village, and he moves into Florida, and the United States now calls him a Seminole. Then lo and behold, when removal comes, he moves to the Creek Nation in what is now Oklahoma.

Andrew Frank: For a long time the U.S. calls them Seminoles as a means of saying, “Okay, these are Seminoles, and Seminoles aren’t indigenous to Florida. Therefore they have no right or sovereignty to that land. There’s no one that we can actually treat with, and they are deserving of conquest.” This is the language that James Gadsden uses, that, “The Seminoles should be treated with conquest the same way that they conquered the people who were there beforehand.” It becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy that the United States uses the phrase Seminole to basically say that they are deserving of removal and deserving of no protection.

Nathan Connolly: Do we have any sense at all from source material at the time what these indigenous communities, small and potentially atomized, what they thought of themselves or how they identified themselves?

Andrew Frank: They identified themselves with village. In terms of family, they identified themselves with clan, these totems of normally a name for animals, bear and tiger and tiger or panther, but they really are village-oriented. Even in say the 1890s, long after the Seminole Wars, there are these five clusters of villages in Florida, and the Cow Creeks were very different than those folks who lived at say Big Cypress. They would identify themselves, “I’m a Cow Creek. I’m a Miccosukee from Big Cypress.” It’s really only a modern reality that they have found a way to really centralize.

Nathan Connolly: The big economic backdrop of all of these contests about village and personhood in the Florida territories, of course, the plantation economy of the 18th century. It may surprise some folks to learn that it wasn’t simply a case that people of African descent, in their attempts to escape slavery, fled North. They actually fled South, into Florida. How is it that these territories and these villages became part of the land that African Americans sought to escape to?

Andrew Frank: The Underground Railroad, if you will, heading South really is something that people done pay attention to. I think the first context I would say is there are these marooned communities, independent communities of African Americans who simply want to find freedom in the American South in various swamps and mountainous areas, where if they can find ways where natural geography can protect them or shield them. They exist in the great dismal swamp and they exist in the Appalachian Mountains. They’re often very small.

Andrew Frank: Florida’s slightly different in that a good chunk of Florida had been depopulated through the slave raids and through disease, and so there are these areas where they can set up rather large villages that really run much the same way that we would say Seminole villages run. They’re autonomous from one another. They’ll have trading ties. They may have social ties with their neighbors, but they can be out in the open because there are no enslavers nearby. The Spanish have no ability to get into the interior, and later the English have no ability to get into the interior. We can say the same thing for the United States. These villages set up often in full sight of the world outside them, which provides a unique story in the American South.

Nathan Connolly: Do we have any idea about how these villages responded with the arrival of African descended people?

Andrew Frank: I think they respond the same way they respond to the arrival of other indigenous people. Sometimes they are allowed to live on land nearby, and they are incorporated as daughter towns. Sometimes the villages are providing symbolic tribute, a percentage of whatever crops they grow. Sometimes there are marriages that connect elites within the communities. Sometimes they serve as advisors to one another. Sometimes they’re really completely independent from one another. It runs the gamut. Normally we see real alliances take place when they are both being attacked by the same enemy. We can see a lot more say coordination taking place during moments of war than in moments of peace. As slave raiders come in or the United States military comes in, we can see Native people and African Americans behaving in concert with one another.

Nathan Connolly: The 19th century, if it’s known at all in the Seminole story, it’s likely around the question of the Seminole Wars. Let’s bear down here a little bit and just tell us what interest the U.S. government had in staging military campaigns against the Seminole in the 19th century.

Andrew Frank: The United States has really two really large ambitions when it comes to Seminoles. One is that Seminoles provide safe harbor, or the perception is they provide safe harbor for runaway slaves, which makes the motives of white citizens support a war, at least white citizens in the American South support a war to prevent the runaway of slaves. Also the land that Seminoles occupy, especially for the First and Second Seminole Wars, are widely seen as this opportunity for the expansion of the cotton South. The Seminoles in North Florida were farmers, and they farmed corn. The idea of expanding slavery into North and Central Florida and turning Indian cornfields into cotton fields with un-free labor, that’s the dream. They referred to it as white gold. Florida’s this Caribbean hope that the climate was comparable, and if they can turn North Florida not into a better version of the Carolinas, where many of the migrants come from, but even better would be if we can turn this into a Caribbean island, where slave populations would be significantly higher than white populations, but they can extract cotton at just an exorbitant rate.

Nathan Connolly: As these military conflicts are sweeping up, they’re moving against villages and populations that have been going through this slow and steady process of incorporating African-descended peoples and having them intermarry with these indigenous groups. How would we describe, if at all, what the impact was of the military campaigns on the African Americans in these communities, and was there in any way a split along racial lines within these villages when the U.S. government showed up?

Andrew Frank: The United States, from the very beginning of the Seminole Wars, they recognized that there are preexisting divisions within Florida. One general calls it a Negro, not an Indian war. This is Colonel Jessup. Jessup calls it that, in part not to diminish the Native American component of it all, but to highlight the opportunities that the United States military had to divide and conquer.

Andrew Frank: His grand plan, and it’s pretty effective, was he offered a version of freedom to escaped runaways who were in Florida. He basically says, “If you are willing to put your guns down, stop fighting, we’ll provide passage with you to Indian Country, where you’ll be free.” Now that offer is made at the same time that thousands ultimately of Seminoles, they surrender as well. It’s not as if they’re turning their backs on their allies, but lots of people are looking for opportunities to get out of a war zone.

Andrew Frank: It’s romantic to imagine that everyone should’ve stayed and fought to the last man, but lots of Native people are surrendering as well, because the cost of fighting is really high. Hundreds of Africans put their guns down, and about 600 find their way on their way to Indian Territory. That becomes a means that the United States really disrupts this coalescing process.

Nathan Connolly: What happens to the Seminole identity, if such a thing is hard-formed by the time you get to the 1830s or ’40s, as a result of these gambits on the part of U.S. military officials?

Andrew Frank: The folks who are in Florida who are being called Seminole increasingly acknowledge that they are fighting a common cause. One example would be during the … When the United States first gets control over Florida, there’s a treaty that they sign in 1823. It’s signed with, I think the quote is, “The Indian Tribes of Florida.” The word Seminole is never used, and there is acknowledgement of a plurality. By the time these Seminoles or the Indians in Florida are signing treaties in the 1830s and ’40s, they’re referring to themselves as Seminoles, even if they acknowledge that that’s a façade. There is this collective identity that starts to form, at least in terms of its practicality.

Nathan Connolly: How would you describe the way that Florida creates this very distinct moment in Native history? Thinking specifically about Seminole peoples as largely being able to fight or push back against American military interests at multiple points over the course of the 19th century, is there any way that the distinctiveness of Florida as a legal space, as a simply geographic region, helps to account for the uniqueness of the Seminole experience there?

Andrew Frank: There are two major influences. One, the geographic topography of Florida is unique, especially the further south you go, but it’s unique in a way that the land increasingly becomes less desirable to perspective planters, but also significantly harder to traverse. Even the names of some of the vegetation in Florida says it all. The idea of going into sawgrass, it’s amazing. It’s also the thickets of either the Everglades or Paynes Prairie or the big Cypress Swamp. The large American horses didn’t go there nearly as well as the smaller ponies that the Seminoles used. The deep boats of the U.S. Navy were not quite equipped for the rapid shallowing and disappearing waters of the interior. The United States tries to adapt some of its technology to fight this war, but their desire to go there was significantly less. Then you add alligators and mosquitoes and all sorts of animals that the typical U.S. soldier had no interest in dealing with.

Andrew Frank: That’s part of it, but the other part of it is that when the Third Seminole War ends, there’s a few hundred Seminoles left in Florida, and when the United States sends a handful of missions to find out whether they’re willing to go West or to find out what their population is, they find a few hundred living in an area, that if it weren’t for Native Americans who live there welcoming them in and then walking them into their village, no one can get in there, but they always conclude things like, “There aren’t that many. They have no interest in going West, and man, would it be a lot of work to actually do it.” Geography and politics and economic motivation all combine to give them the space that most Native people don’t have.

Nathan Connolly: On that same score, the geography and the politics and maybe just the remoteness of Florida, is that at base for why the Seminole story isn’t more widely known than say the Sioux story or the Iroquois story in American history?

Andrew Frank: That may be true. I think part of the reason why we don’t tell the Seminole story is historically the Seminole story was not a glorious victory by the United States. The most notable moment in the Seminole Wars was the capture of Osceola. He was a Seminole leader, not a tremendously significant leader, but a leader. He’s captured with a bunch of other Seminoles under a white flag of diplomacy, and it becomes really controversial. It becomes a spark for the anti-slavery movement, because here it is, the United States waging a war to expand slavery into Florida, and what does it do, it corrupts our military to break our own code of conduct. He dies in prison. This is not a glorious moment in U.S. military history. The cost of the wars were astronomical for its time. Lots of generals went down there and lost their reputations.

Andrew Frank: Also Florida doesn’t fit in general in the U.S. story, in part because we as 21st century Americans have a hard time imagining Florida as really being the Confederacy or the South or the slave-holding South, even though for a good chunk of it it was. Florida suffers in general in its inclusion in the American story.

Andrew Frank: The other part of it is, for Seminoles when it comes to Native American history, they don’t fit that model either. I teach a lot of courses in Native American history, and all the textbooks have these rather large episodes in American history that are really important allotments, Red Power. Seminoles, they weren’t subject to allotment, and virtually none of their members were connected to Red Power, and so they exist outside of that narrative as well.

Nathan Connolly: Patsy West is an ethno-historian and a museum curator. Andrew Frank is a history professor at Florida State University. He’s also the author of Before the Pioneers: Indians, Settlers, Slaves, and the Founding of Miami.