Clay MacCauley

“ Of the characteristics of the gentes of the Florida Seminole, I know only that a man may not marry a woman of his own clan, that the children belong exclusively to the mother, and that by birth they are members of her own gens. ”

“ 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 ”

“ 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. ”

“ The climate in which these Indians live is warm and equable throughout the year. They consequently do not need much clothing or shelter. They are not what would be called intemperate, nor are they licentious. The “sprees” in which they indulge when they make their visits to the white man’s settlements are too infrequent to warrant us in classing them as intemperate. Their sexual morality is a matter of common notoriety. The white half-breed does not exist among the Florida Seminole, and nowhere could I learn that the Seminole woman is other than virtuous and modest. ”

“ He is not at all in favor with the Seminole of pure blood. “Me-le ho-lo-wa kis” (Me-le is of no account) was the judgment passed upon him to me by some of the Indians. Why? Because he likes the white man and would live the white man’s life if he knew how to break away safely from his tribe. He has been progressive enough to build for himself a frame house, inclosed on all sides and entered by a door. More than that, he is not satisfied with the hunting habits and the simple agriculture of his people, nor with their ways of doing other things. ”

“ The feet being otherwise well formed, the toes have only narrow shells for nails, these lying sunken across the middles of the tough cushions of flesh, which, protuberant about them, form the toe-tips. But, regarded as a whole, in their physique the Seminole warriors, especially the men of the Tiger and Otter gentes, are admirable. Even among the children this physical superiority is seen. ”

“ At the northern camps, a kerchief bound about the head frequently takes the place of the turban in everyday life, but on dress or festival occasions, at both the northern and the southern settlements, this curious turban is the customary covering for the head of the Seminole brave. Having no pockets in his dress, he has discovered that the folds of his turban may be put to a pocket’s uses. Those who use tobacco (I say “those” because the tobacco habit is by no means universal among the red men of Florida) frequently carry their pipes and other articles in their turbans. ”

“ In their intercourse with one another, they are, as a rule, voluble, vivacious, showing the possession of relatively active brains and mental fertility. Certainly, most of the Seminole I met cannot justly be called either stupid or intellectually sluggish, and I observed that, when invited to think of matters with which they are not familiar or which are beyond the verge of the domain which their intellectual faculties have mastered, they nevertheless bravely endeavored to satisfy me before they were willing to acknowledge themselves powerless. ”

“ The statement I had from some cattlemen in mid-Florida I have thus found true, namely, that the Seminole are producing more men than women. What bearing this peculiarity will have upon the future of these Indians can only be guessed at. It is beyond question, however, that the tribe is increasing in numbers, and increasing in the manner above described.
There is no reason why the tribe should not increase, and increase rapidly, if the growth in numbers be not checked by the non-birth of females. The Seminole have not been at war for more than twenty years. ”

“ So far as personal maintenance is concerned, a woman is, as a rule, just as well off without a husband as with one. What is hers, in the shape of property, remains her own whether she is married or not. In fact, marriage among these Indians seems to be but the natural mating of the sexes, to cease at the option of either of the interested parties. ”

“ My attention was called to the remarkable use of beads among these Indian women, young and old. It seems to be the ambition of the Seminole squaws to gather about their necks as many strings of beads as can be hung there and as they can carry. They are particular as to the quality of the beads they wear. They are satisfied with nothing meaner than a cut glass bead, about a quarter of an inch or more in 488 length, generally of some shade of blue, and costing (so I was told by a trader at Miami) $1.75 a pound. Sometimes, but not often, one sees beads of an inferior quality worn. ”

“ The platform is composed of split palmetto logs lying transversely, flat sides up, upon beams which extend the length of the building and are lashed to the uprights by palmetto ropes, thongs, or trader’s ropes. This platform is peculiar, in that it fills the interior of the building like a floor and serves to furnish the family with a dry sitting or lying down place when, as often happens, the whole region is under water. The thatching of the roof is quite a work of art: inside, the regularity and compactness of the laying of the leaves display much skill and taste on the part of the builder ”

“ The ground they select is generally in the interiors of the rich, hammocks which abound in the swamps and prairies of Southern Florida. There, with a soil unsurpassed in fertility and needing only to be cleared of trees, vines, underbrush, &c., one has but to plant corn, sweet potatoes, melons, or any thing else suited to the climate, and keep weeds from the growing vegetation, that he may gather a manifold return. The soil is wholly without gravel, stones, or rocks. It is soft, black, and very fertile. To what extent the Indians carry agriculture I do not know. ”

“ I saw no gold ornaments. Gold, even gold money, does not seem to be considered of much value by the Seminole. He is a monometalist, and his precious metal is silver. I was told by a cattle dealer of an Indian who once gave him a twenty dollar gold piece for $17 in silver, although assured that the gold piece was worth more than the silver, and in my own intercourse with the Seminole I found them to manifest, with few exceptions, a decided preference for silver. I was told that the Seminole are peculiar in wishing to possess nothing that is not genuine of its apparent kind. ”

“ Piercing the ears excepted, the Florida Indians do not now mutilate their bodies for beauty’s sake. They no longer pierce the lips or the nose; nor do they use paint upon their persons, I am told, except at their great annual festival, the Green Corn Dance, and upon the faces of their dead. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The Florida Indians are not nomads. They have fixed habitations: settlements in well defined districts, permanent camps, houses or wigwams which, remain from year to year the abiding places of their families, and gardens and fields which for indefinite periods are used by the same owners. There are times during the year when parties gather into temporary camps for a few weeks. Now perhaps they gather upon some rich Koonti ground, that they may dig an extra quantity of this root and make flour from it; now, that they may have a sirup making festival, they go to some fertile sugar cane hammock ”

“ 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. ”

“ The unique industry, in the more limited sense of the word, of the Seminole is the making of the Koonti flour. Koonti is a root containing a large percentage of starch. It is said to yield a starch equal to that of the best Bermuda arrowroot. White men call it the “Indian bread root,” and lately its worth as an article of commerce has been recognized by the whites. There are now at least two factories in operation in Southern Florida in which the Koonti is made into a flour for the white man’s market. I was at one such factory at Miami and saw another near Orlando. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The Florida Seminole are a people containing, to some extent, the posterity of tribes diverse from the Creek in language and in social and political organization; but so strong has the Creek influence been in their development that the Creek language, Creek customs, and Creek regulations have been the guiding forces in their history, forces by which, in fact, the characteristics of the other peoples have yielded, have been practically obliterated. ”

“ 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 Florida Seminole, considered as a tribe, have a very imperfect organization. The complete tribal society of the past was much broken up through wars with the United States. These wars having ended in the transfer of nearly the whole of the population to the Indian Territory, the few Indians remaining in Florida were consequently left in a comparatively disorganized condition. There is, however, among these Indians a simple form of government, to which the inhabitants of at least the three southern settlements submit. ”

“ The Seminole, living in a perennial summer, is never at a loss when he seeks something, and something good, to eat. I have omitted from the above list honey and the sugar cane juice and sirup, nor have I referred to the purchases the Indians now and then make from the white man, of salt pork, wheat flour, coffee, and salt, and of the various canned delicacies, whose attractive labels catch their eyes. ”

“ But just as soon as the Seminole baby has gained sufficient strength to toddle he learns that the more he can do for himself and the more he can contribute to the general domestic welfare the better he will get along in life. No small amount of the labor in a Seminole household is done by children, even as young as four years of age. They can stir the soup while it is boiling; they can aid in kneading the dough for bread; they can wash the “Koonti” root, and even pound it; they can watch and replenish the fire ”

“ 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. ”

“ By reference to the population table, it will be noticed that there are three negroes and seven persons of mixed breed among the Seminole. It has been said that these negroes were slaves and are still held as slaves by the Indians. I saw nothing and could not hear of anything to justify this statement. One Indian is, I know, married to a negress, and the two negresses in the tribe live apparently on terms of perfect equality with the other women. Me-le goes and comes as he sees fit. No one attempts to control his movements. ”