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The indigenous people of the Everglades region arrived in the Florida peninsula approximately 15,000 years ago. Paleo-Indians came to the Florida peninsula probably following large game. There, they found an arid landscape that supported plants and animals adapted for desert conditions. However, 6,500 years ago, climate changes brought a wetter landscape; the large animals became extinct in Florida, and the Paleo-Indians slowly transitioned into Archaic peoples. They were more adapted to the environmental changes than their ancestors, and created many tools with the resources they had. Approximately, 5,000 years ago, the climate shifted again to cause the regular flooding from Lake Okeechobee that became the Everglades ecosystems.

From the Archaic peoples, two major tribes emerged in the area: the Calusa and the Tequesta. Descriptions of these peoples were given by the first Spanish explorers, who attempted to missionize and conquer them. Although they lived in complex societies, little evidence of their existence remains today. The Calusa were more powerful in number and politics. Their territory was centered around modern-day Ft. Myers, but extended as far north as Tampa, as far east as Lake Okeechobee, and as far south as the Keys. The Tequesta lived on the southeastern coast of the Florida peninsula around what is today Biscayne Bay and the Miami River. Both societies were well adapted to live in the various ecosystems of the Everglades regions, and often traveled through the heart of the Everglades, though rarely lived within it.

After more than 200 years of relations with the Spanish, both societies lost cohesiveness. The remaining Calusa were assimilated into the newer Seminole nation, born of invading Creeks, leftover Timucua, other tribes absorbed by the Creeks, and escaped African slaves. The last mention of the Tequesta was their transport to Havana. Seminoles entered the Everglades after being forced there by the Seminole Wars from 1835 to 1842. The U.S. military enforced their exile, and pursued them into the Everglades which allowed some of the first recorded explorations of much of the region. Seminoles continue to live in the Everglades region, although they support themselves with casino gaming on six reservations throughout the state.

Prehistoric peoples

People did not reach the peninsula of Florida until approximately 15,000 years ago. The landscape exhibited large dunes and sweeping winds that was a result of an arid region, and pollen samples show foliage was limited to small stands of oak, and scrub bushes. As glacial ice retreated, winds slowed and vegetation became more prevalent and varied. The Paleo-Indian diets were dominated by wild game available on the peninsula that included saber-toothed cats, sloths, and spectacled bears, and small plants. The climate of Florida began to change, and the land became much wetter around 6,500 years ago. The large game that were adapted for desert conditions that comprised Paleo-Indian diets became extinct on the peninsula, probably due to a combination of overhunting and the change of climate.

The Paleo-Indians then slowly transitioned into the Archaic peoples of the Florida peninsula, most probably due to the extinction of big game. Archaic people were primarily hunter-gatherers who depended on smaller game and fish, and relied more prominently on plants for food. They were highly adaptable to changing climate and the resulting change of animal and plant populations. Florida experienced a prolonged drought at the onset of the Early Archaic era that lasted until the Middle Archaic period. Although the population decreased overall on the peninsula, the use of tools increased significantly during this time, as artifacts have shown these people used drills, knives, choppers, atlatls, and awls made from stone, antlers, and bone. During the Late Archaic period, the climate became wetter again, and by approximately 3000 BCE the rise of water tables allowed an increase in population and cultural activity. Florida Indians developed into three distinct but similar cultures that were centered around bodies of water: Okeechoobee, Caloosahatchie, and Glades.

The Glades culture is divided into three periods based on evidence found in middens. In 1947, archaeologist John Goggin described the three periods after examining shell mounds on Matecumbe Key, Gordon Pass near modern-day Naples, and south of Lake Okeechobee near modern-day Belle Glade. The Glades I culture, lasting from 500 BCE to 800 CE, was apparently focused around Gordon Pass and is considered the least sophisticated due to the lack of artifacts, and what has been found — primarily pottery — is gritty and plain. With the advent of a well-established culture in 800 BCE, the Glades II period is characterized by more ornate pottery, wide use of tools throughout the South Florida region, and the appearance of religious artifact at burial sites. By 1200, the Glades III culture exhibited the height of their development. Pottery became ornate enough to be subdivided into types of decoration. More importantly, evidence of an expanding culture is revealed through the development of ceremonial ornaments made from shell, and the construction of large earthworks associated with burial rituals.

Calusa

What is known of the inhabitants of Florida after 1566 was recorded by European explorers and settlers. Juan Ponce de León is credited as the first European to have contact with Florida's indigenous people in 1513. Ponce de León met with hostility from tribes that may have been the Ais and the Tequesta before rounding Cape Sable to meet the Calusa, the largest and most powerful tribe in South Florida, where he found at least one of them fluent in Spanish. The explorer assumed the Spanish-speaker was from Hispaniola, but anthropologists have suggested that communication and trade between Calusa and native people in Cuba and the Florida Keys was common, or that Ponce de León was not the first Spaniard to make contact with the native people of Florida. During his second visit to South Florida, Ponce de León was killed by the Calusa, and the tribe gained a reputation for violence enough to cause future explorers to avoid them. In the more than 200 years the Calusa had relations with the Spanish, they were successfully able to resist the attempts to missionize them.

The Calusa were referred to as Carlos by the Spanish, which may have sounded like Calos, a variation of the Muskogean word kalo meaning "black" or "powerful". In 1545 a 13-year-old boy was the only survivor of a shipwreck off the coast of Florida. For seventeen years Hernando de Escalante Fontaneda lived with the Calusa until explorer Pedro Menéndez de Avilés found Fontaneda in 1566. Avilés took Fontaneda to Spain where he wrote about his observations. Avilés approached the Calusa with the intention of establishing relations with them to ease the settlement of the future Spanish colony. The chief, or cacique, was referred to as Carlos, and Avilés married his sister in order to facilitate the relations between the Spanish and the Calusa.

Fontaneda explained in his 1571 memoir that Carlos controlled fifty villages located on Florida's west coast, around Lake Okeechobee (which they called Mayaimi) and on the Florida Keys (they called Martires). Smaller tribes of Ais and Jaega, lived to the east of Lake Okeechobee, and they paid regular tributes to Carlos. The main village of the Calusa, and home of Carlos, bordered Estero Bay at present-day Mound Key where the Caloosahatchie River meets the Gulf of Mexico. Fontaneda described that human sacrifice was a common practice: when the child of a cacique died, each resident gave up a child to be sacrificed, and when the cacique died, his servants were sacrificed to join him. Each year a Christian was required to be sacrificed to appease a Calusa idol. Building shell mounds of varying sizes and shapes was significant to the Calusa. In 1895 Frank Hamilton Cushing excavated a massive shell mound on Key Marco that was comprised of several constructed terraces hundred of yards long. Cushing unearthed over a thousand Calusa artifacts of tools made of bone and shell, pottery, human bones, masks, and animal carvings made of wood.

The Spanish suspected the Calusa of harvesting treasures from shipwrecks and distributing the gold and silver between the Ais and Jaega, with Carlos receiving the majority. The Calusa, like their predecessors, were hunter-gatherers who existed on small game, fish, turtles, alligators, shellfish, and various plants. Finding little use for the soft limestone, most of their tools were made of bone or teeth, although sharpened reeds were also effective. Weapons consisted of bows and arrows, atlatls, and spears. Most villages were located at the mouths of rivers or on key islands. Canoes were used for transportation, evidenced by shell mounds in and around the Everglades that border canoe trails, and South Florida tribes often canoed through the Everglades, but rarely lived in them. Canoe trips to Cuba were also common.

Calusa villages were sometimes populated by more than 200 inhabitants, and their society was organized in a hierarchy. Apart from the cacique, other strata included priests and warriors. Family bonds promoted the hierarchy and marriage between siblings was common. Fontaneda wrote, "These Indians have no gold, no silver, and less clothing. They go naked except for some breech cloths woven of palms, with which the men cover themselves; the women do the like with certain grass that grows on trees. This grass looks like wool, although it is different from it." Only one instance of structures was described: Carlos met Aviles in a large house with windows and room for over a thousand people.

Estimated numbers of Calusa at the beginning of the occupation of the Spanish ranged from 4,000 to 7,000. Following the leadership of cacique Carlos, leadership of the society passed to two caciques who were captured and killed by the Spanish. The society endured a decline of power and population; by 1697 their number was estimated to be about 1,000. In the early 1700s, the Calusa came under attack from the Yamassee to the north, and asked to be removed to Cuba where almost 200 died of illness. Soon they were relocated again to the Florida Keys.

Tequesta

Second in power and number to the Calusa in South Florida were the Tequesta (also called Tekesta, Tequeste, and Tegesta). They occupied the southestern portion of the lower peninsula in modern-day Dade and Broward counties. They may have been controlled by the Calusa, but accounts state that they sometimes refused to comply with the Calusa caciques which resulted in war. They, too, rarely lived within the Everglades, but found the coastal prairies and pine rocklands to the east of the freshwater sloughs habitable. To the north, their territory was bordered by the Ais and Jaega. Like the Calusa, the Tequesta societies centered around the mouths of rivers. Their main village was probably on the Miami River or Little River. A large shell mound on the Little River marks where a village once stood.

Spanish depictions of the Tequesta state that they were greatly feared by sailors. The Tequesta were suspected of killing shipwrecked sailors after torturing them. Spanish priests wrote of child sacrifices in order to to mark the occasion of resuming a friendship with a neighboring tribe with whom they had been fighting. Like the Calusa, they hunted small game, but they depended more upon roots and less on shellfish in their diets. They were skilled travelers in canoes, where they hunted what Fontanda described as whales, but where probably manatees, in the open ocean by lassoing them and driving a stake through the snout.

The first contact with Spanish explorers occured in 1513 when Ponce de León stopped at a bay he called Chequescha, or Biscayne Bay. Finding the Tequesta unwelcoming, he left them to make contact with the Calusa. Avilés met them in 1565 and maintained a friendly relationship with them, building some houses and setting up a mission. He also took the chief's nephew to Havana to be educated, and the chief's brother to Spain. After Avilés visited, there are few records of the Tequesta; a reference to them in 1673, and further Spanish contact to convert them. The last reference to the Tequesta during their existence was written in 1743 by a Spanish priest, who described their ongoing assault under another tribe. The survivors eventually numbered 30, and they were taken to Havana. An British surveyor in 1770 described multiple deserted villages in the region where the Tequesta lived. Archeologist John Goggin suggested by the time white settlements existed in 1820, any remaining Tequesta were assimilated into the Seminoles. Common description of Native Americans in Florida by 1820 used only the term "Seminoles".

Seminole

Following the demise of the Calusa and Tequesta, Native Americans in southern Florida were referred to as "Spanish Indians" in the 1740s, probably due to their friendlier relations with Spain. Between 1763 and 1783, occupation of Florida was under England. The term "Seminolie" was first used by a British Indian agent in a document dated 1771. Their beginnings are vague, but records show that Creeks invaded the Florida peninsula and conquered and assimilated what was left of pre-Columbian societies into the Creek Confederacy. The mixing of cultures is evident in the language influences present among the Seminoles: Muskogean, Timucuan, Hitchiti, and Creek. In the early 1800s an Indian agent explained the Seminoles this way: "The word Seminole means runaway or broken off. Hence ... applicable to all the Indians in the Territory of Florida as all of them ran away ... from the Creek ... Nation." Linguistically, the term "Seminole" comes from Creek words Sua (Sun God), ma (mother, although in this connotation it is perjorative), and ol (people) to mean "people whom the Sun God does not love", or accursed.

Creeks, who were centered in modern-day Alabama and Georgia, were known to incorporate conquered tribes into their own. Some Africans escaping slavery from South Carolina and Georgia fled to Florida, lured by Spanish promises of freedom should they convert to Catholicism, and found their way into the tribe. Seminoles originally settled in the northern portion of the territory, but the 1823 Moultrie Creek Treaty forced them to live on a 5-million acre reservation north of Lake Okeechobee, but they soon ranged farther south where they numbered approximately 300 in the Everglades region, including bands of Miccosukees—a similar tribe who spoke a different language—who lived in the Big Cypress. Unlike the Calusa and Tequesta, the Seminoles depended more on agriculture and raised domesticated animals. They made a living by hunting and trading with white settlers, and adapted housing probably from the Calusa to build chickees: open-sided palm-thatched structures.

In 1817, Andrew Jackson invaded Florida to hasten its annexation to the United States. After Florida became a U.S. territory, conflicts between settlers and Seminoles increased, causing the Second Seminole War from 1835 to 1842 and another from 1855 to 1859. The Seminole Wars pushed the Indians farther south and directly into the Everglades. Those who did not flee into the Everglades were relocated to Oklahoma Indian territory. At the end of the third conflict, 20 Seminoles were killed and 240 were removed. By 1913, Seminoles in the Everglades numbered no more than 325. They made their villages in hardwood hammocks—islands in the rivers—or pinelands, had diets of hominy and coontie roots, fish, turtles, venison, and small game. Villages were not large, due to the limited size of hammocks. In the center of the village was a cook-house, and the largest structure was reserved for eating. When the Seminoles lived in northern Florida, they wore animal skin clothing similar to their Creek predecessors. However, the heat of the Everglades was influential in changing their style of dress. Seminoles continue to wear clothing of unique calico patchwork design made of cotton, or silk for more formal occasions.

The Seminole Wars increased U.S. military presence in the Everglades that called for exploration and mapping of many regions that had not previously been recorded. The military officers who had done the mapping and charting of the Everglades were approached by Buckingham Smith in 1848 to consult on the feasibility of draining them for agricultural use. Between the end of the last Seminole War and 1930, the tribe lived in relative isolation. The construction of the Tamiami Trail, beginning in 1928 and spanning from Tampa to Miami, bisected the Everglades and brought a steady stream of whites into their territory that altered their ways of life forever. With the road came hunters who plundered wildlife in the Everglades, impacting the subsistence hunting practiced by the Seminoles. They instead began to work in local farms, ranches, and souvenir stands. They helped to clear land for the town of Everglades, and were "the best fire fighters could recruit" when Everglades National Park caught fire in times of drought. As metropolitan areas in South Florida began to grow, the Seminoles became closely associated with the Everglades, simultaneously seeking privacy and serving as a tourist attraction, wrestling alligators and selling craftworks. As of 2008, there were six Seminole reservations throughout Florida featuring casino gaming that support the tribe.

See also

• History of Florida
• Arawak
• Taíno
• Spanish Florida
• Trail of Tears
• Indian removal
• Black Seminole
• Geography and ecology of the Everglades

Bibliography

• Douglas, Marjory (1947). The Everglades: River of Grass. R. Bemis Publishing. ISBN 0912451440
• Griffin, John (2002). Archeology of the Everglades. University Press of Florida. ISBN 0813025583
• Hann, John (ed.) (1991). Missions to the Calusa. University Press of Florida. ISBN 0813019664
• McCally, David (1999). The Everglades: An Environmental History. University Press of Florida. ISBN 0813023025
• Tebeau, Charlton (1968). Man in the Everglades: 2000 Years of Human History in the Everglades National Park. University of Miami Press.

References

1. McCally, p. 32.
2. McCally, p. 34.
3. McCally, p. 35.
4. McCally, p. 36.
5. McCally, p. 37–39.
6. ^ Goggin, John (October 1947). "A Preliminary Definition of Archaeological Areas and Periods in Florida", American Antiquity, 13 (2), p. 114–127.
7. Griffin, p. 163.
8. Griffin, p. 161.
9. Hann, p. 4–5.
10. Griffin, p. 161–162.
11. Douglas, p. 68.
12. Griffin, p. 162.
13. Griffin, p. 164.
14. ^ Worth, John (January 1995). "Fontaneda Revisited: Five Descriptions of Sixteenth-Century Florida", The Florida Historical Quarterly, 73 (3), p. 339–352.
15. Cushing, Frank (December 1896). "Exploration of Ancient Key Dwellers' Remains on the Gulf Coast of Florida", Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, 35 (153) , p. 329–448.
16. McCally, p. 40.
17. Tebeau, p. 38–41.
18. McCally, p. 39.
19. Griffin, p. 171.
20. Tebeau, p. 42.
21. Griffin, p. 165.
22. Griffin, p. 170.
23. Hann, John (October 1992). "Political Leadership Among the Natives of Spanish Florida", The Florida Historical Quarterly, 71 (2), p. 188–208.
24. Griffin, p. 171.
25. Griffin, p. 173.
26. Griffin, p. 164.
27. ^ Goggin, John (April 1940). "The Tekesta Indians of Southern Florida", The Florida Historical Quarterly, 18 (4), p. 274–285.
28. Griffin, p. 174.
29. Tebeau, p. 43.
30. Tebeau, p. 45.
31. Griffin, p. 176.
32. McReynolds, p. 12.
33. Drew, Frank (July 1927). "Notes on the origins of the Seminole Indians of Florida", The Florida Historical Quarterly, 6 (1), p. 21–24.
34. Bateman, Rebecca (Winter, 1990). "Africans and Indians: A Comparative Study of the Black Carib and Black Seminole", Ethnohistory, 37 (1), p. 1–24.
35. Tebeau, p. 50.
36. Griffin, p. 180.
37. Tebeau, p. 50–51
38. Griffin, p. 180.
39. ^ Skinner, Alanson (January–March 1913). "Notes on the Florida Seminole", American Anthropologist, 15 (1), p. 63–77.
40. Blackard, David (2004). "Seminole Clothing: Colorful Patchwork". Seminole Tribe of Florida. Retrieved 2008-04-30.
41. Tebeau, p. 63–64.
42. Tebeau, p. 70–71
43. Tebeau, p. 55–56.
44. "Tourism/Enterprises". Seminole Tribe of Florida. 2007. Retrieved 2008-04-30.

• Extinct languages of North America
• History of Florida
• History of Key West, Florida
• Native American tribes in Florida