and foot of a man, and the lower part of it was painted black. This staff, being carried out of the cassekey's house, was set fast in the ground standing upright, which being done he brought out a basket containing six rattles, which were taken out thereof and placed at the foot of the staff. Another old man came in and set up a howling like unto a mighty dog, but beyond him for length of breath, withal making a proclamation. This being done and most of them having painted themselves, some red, some black, some with black and red, with their bellies girt up as tight as well they could girt themselves with ropes, having their sheaths of arrows at their backs and their bows in their hands, being gathered together about the staff, six of the chiefest men in esteem amongst them, especially one who is their doctor, took up the rattles and began an hideous noise, standing round the staff with their rattles and bowing to it without ceasing for about half an hour. Whilst these six were thus employed all the rest were staring and scratching, pointing upwards and downwards on this and the other side, every way looking like men frightened, or more like furies. Thus they behaved until the six had done shaking their rattles; then they all began to dance, violently stamping on the ground for the space of an hour or more without ceasing, in which time they sweat in a most excessive manner, so that by the time the dance was over, by their sweat and the violent stamping of their feet, the ground was trodden into furrows, and by morning the place where they danced was covered with maggots; thus, often repeating the manner, they continued till about 3 or 4 o'clock in the afternoon, by which time many were sick and faint. Being gathered into the cassekey's house they sat down, having some hot casseena ready, which they drank plentifully of, and gave greater quantities thereof to the sick and faint than to others; then they eat berries. On these days they eat not any food till night. The next day, about the same time, they began their dance as the day before; also the third day they began at the usual time, when many Indians came from other towns and fell to dancing, without taking any notice one of another. This day they were stricter than the other two days, for no woman must look upon them, but if any of their women went out of their houses they went veiled with a mat.' The fact that the castaways had an abundance of fish and berries to eat on the 25th probably had something to do with the ceremony, feasting being a constant preliminary accompaniment of fasting. The day after (i. e., the 26th) Dickenson says: We observed that great baskets of dried berries were brought in from divers towns and delivered to the king or young cassekey, which we supposed to be a tribute to the king of this town, who is chief of all the towns from St. a Lucia to the northward of this town of Jece.2 These presents were probably rather to discharge social obligations or secure the good will of the chief than actual tribute, and it is to be suspected that they had some connection with the ceremony just concluded. Altogether the culture of the people of Ais and the east Florida coast generally seems to have belonged with that of Calos. Its simplicity was partly due, without doubt, to the poverty of the country; in fact, in later times the economic condition was considerably advanced by frequent wrecks along the coast, though at the same time native industry must have been proportionately discouraged. The rather high position of the chief is probably attributable in some degree to the influence of their neighbors on the north and west. THE SEMINOLE The history of the Seminole is very well known in outline, and much has been written regarding our famous Seminole war; yet it is evident that much remains to be said, on the Indian side at least, before we can have a clear understanding of the Seminole people and Seminole history. The name, as is well known, is applied by the Creeks to people who remove from populous towns and live by themselves, and it is commonly stated that the Seminole consisted of "runaways and outlaws from the Creek Nation proper. A careful study of their history, however, shows this to be only a partial statement of the case. Perhaps the best account we have regarding the beginnings of the Seminole is by Bartram. The destruction of the Apalachee towns in the manner elsewhere narrated had partially cleared the way for settlements in Florida by Indians from the north, and in the period immediately succeeding bodies of them gradually pushed southward from the large Creek towns on Chattahoochee River. The first impulse toward Florida of any consequence began with that great upheaval we have so often mentioned-the Yamasee war. The Yamasee themselves entered Florida almost in a body, but they arrived there as friends of the Spaniards, adding their strength to the decaying forces of the original Floridian tribes, and themselves shared in large measure the fate of those peoples-extermination or expulsion from the country. At the same time a movement was started which resulted in the invasion of the peninsula on its western side, and this, indeed, marks the real beginning of the Seminole. Bartram gives an account of it in describing his journey from the Savannah River to Mobile, and it has been reproduced in detailing the history of the Oconee Indians." 3 By consulting this it will be seen that the Oconee Indians were a nucleus about which the Seminole Nation grew up. It is evident that for a considerable period part of them remained near the Chattahoochee, for they are recorded in the census of 1761 and their town is described by Hawkins in 1799. It disappears in the interval between 1799 and 1832, when the government census of Creeks was taken, and probably all had then moved to Florida. Brinton says that the first group of Seminole came into Florida in 1750, under a chief named Secoffee.5 He was probably the one known to the English as 1 See pp. 121-123. 2 See p. 180. Ga. Col. Docs., vm, p. 522. See p. 181. Brinton, The Floridian Peninsula, p. 145. 2 "the Cowkeeper," mentioned in the quotation above from Bartram. He appears in the Georgia Colonial Documents as living well toward the south and spending most of his time in warring with the Spaniards.1 The Oconee chief who participated in Oglethorpe's first general Indian council was "Oueekachumpa," called by the English "Long King." It does not appear whether Secoffee was his successor or merely the leader of those Oconee who went into Florida. I do not know on what authority Brinton places the invasion of Florida by Secoffee in 1750, but the date appears to be at least approximately correct, and is important as establishing the beginnings of the Seminole as a distinct people. Fairbanks incorrectly states that is, if Secoffee is really the Cowkeeper of the English-that he "left two sons, head chiefs, Payne and Bowlegs." This is, of course, an assumption natural to a white man, but descent was in the female line among both Creeks and Seminole, and Cohen, who knew Indian customs much better than Fairbanks, is undoubtedly correct when he says that Cowkeeper was "uncle of old Payne." He adds that 5 the former had been given a silver crown by the British Government for services during the American Revolution, from which we know that he lived at least almost to the end of that struggle. Cohen apparently contradicts himself in referring to these chiefs, but his later statement appears to be correct, and from this it seems that the Cowkeeper was succeeded by a chief known as "King Payne." Cohen says that he married a Yamasee woman. The grant of land to Forbes & Co. made in 1811 in payment for debts contracted by the Indians was signed among others by Payne for all of the Alachua settlements and by Capitchy Micco [Kapitsa miko] for the Mikasuki. In 1812, in revenge for depredations committed on the Georgia settlements by these Indians, Colonel Newman, Inspector General of Florida, offered to lead a party against Payne's town, which was still in Alachua, and probably just where Bartram found it. In the fight which ensued near that place King Payne was mortally wounded, and many other Indians killed or wounded, but the invaders were forced to retreat under cover of night. King Payne was succeeded by his brother, Bowlegs, whose Indian name is given by Cohen as Islapaopaya [opaya meaning "far away"]. Cohen says that the Alachua settlements were broken up in 1814 by the Tennesseeans and Bowlegs was killed. At any rate about this time the Alachuas, or part of them, moved farther south, and we presently find their head chief, Mikonopi (“Top Chief"), the nephew of King Payne and Bow 1 Ga. Col. Docs., VII, p. 626 et seq. 2 Acct. Shewing the Progress of Ga., pp. 35-36. Cohen, Notices of Florida, p. 238. Ibid., p. 33. Ibid., pp. 35, 238. 7 Ibid., p. 35. legs, living at Okihamki, just west of Lake Harris or Astatula.1 Mikonopi came as near being "head chief of the Seminoles" as any at the outbreak of the great Seminole war. We may therefore say that the nucleus of the Seminole Nation was not merely a body of "outcasts" as has been so often represented, but a distinct tribe, the Oconee, affiliated, it is true, with the Creeks, but always on the outer margin of the confederacy and to a considerable extent an independent body, representing not the Muskogee but the Hitchiti speaking peoples of southern Georgia-those who called themselves Atcik-hata.2 The Hitchiti character of this Seminole nucleus comes out still stronger when we turn to examine those towns established in the wake of the Oconee invasion. The only early lists available are those given by Bartram and Hawkins, which are as follows: SEMINOLE TOWNS ACCORDING TO BARTRAM (1778) 3 Hawkins says of the Seminole settlements enumerated by him: These towns are made from the towns O-co-nee, Sau-woog-e-lo, Eu-fau-lau, Tummault-lau, Pā-la-chooc-le and Hitch-e-tee." Of these six towns only Eu-fau-lau is certainly known to have belonged to the Muskogee proper, and one early writer represents this as made up of outcasts from all quarters. We do not know the status of Tum-mault-lau with certainty, but the form of the name itself, the position which it occupied in very early times, and certain other 1 His residence is often given as Pilaklakaha, which appears to have been a Negro town near Okihamki. 2 See p. 172. 3 Bartram, Travels, p. 462. 4 Ga. Hist. Soc. Colls., I, p. 25. A more nearly phonetic way of rendering the fifth would be Aklawaha lako, and the sixth Talaa'lgi tcápko popka (“a place to eat cow or stock peas"). Ga. Hist. Soc. Colls., II, p. 25. considerations, all point to a connection with the Hitchiti-speaking peoples. The language of the Mikasuki in Oklahoma is so close to that of the Hitchiti that they are commonly considered to be parts of one people; and the following story regarding them was told to me by Jackson Lewis, an old Hitchiti Indian, for whose opinions I have the greatest respect. He said that the name was properly Nikasuki. The Nikasukis are precisely the same as the Hitchiti. In early days some Hitchiti went hunting to a point where two rivers met. They found alligators there which they ate, and when they came back they reported that they were good food. They went many times, and finally they came to like this point of land so well that a number of them settled there permanently. They had reported that alligators were as numerous and as easy to obtain as hogs (suki in Hitchiti), so that the parent tribe called their settlement Hog-eaters, which is what Nikasuki means. 2 We can not, however, concede the likelihood that n could so easily have been corrupted into m, since the latter appears in the early documents as far back as we can go. I have elsewhere quoted the opinion of the old Mikasuki chief relative to the distinction between his people and the Hitchiti, and their supposed relationship to the Chiaha. It must be remembered that the Chiaha anciently came away from the Yamasee, at a point not far from the earlier home of the Oconee, and it is quite possible that they recognized a closer connection with the Oconee Indians than with the Hitchiti proper. True, Mr. Penieres, subagent for Indian affairs in Florida, reported in 1821 that only a few straggling families of Chiaha were to be found in the peninsula; but it is quite possible that these represented a much later immigration, the earlier colonists having already (by 1778) adopted the name Mikasuki. The first settlement of these "true Mikasuki," as I venture to call them, was, so far as we know, at Old Mikasuki, near the lake which bears their name, in Jefferson County, Florida. Later they, or part of them, moved to New Mikasuki, somewhere near Greenville, in Madison County. In 1823 the chief of this town was Tuskameha (Taski heniha). It appears from Cohen, however, that at a somewhat earlier date the chief of the Mikasuki was named Tokos imała, called by the whites John Hicks, or Hext. Tokos imała appears in a list of towns dated 1821 as chief of the town in the Alachua plains, and he did not die until 1835; therefore when no town is enumerated in the Alachua plains in 1823 and no chief bearing the name, we are left to guess whether the town has been omitted or whether someone else appears in his place. It is probable that the Mikasuki 1 See p. 12. ? See p. 404. See p. 411. 148061-22-26 Cohen, Notices of Florida, p. 641. ⚫ See p. 406. List on pp. 411-412. 6 |