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Florida and particularly South Florida was difficult to colonize. One soldier during the Seminole Indian conflicts wrote home that, “If the Devil owned both Hell and Florida, he would rent out Florida and live in Hell!”

DeSoto Landing 1539And it would be many years before the peninsula would become hospitable. In 1513, Spanish explorer Ponce de Leon, who had sailed with Columbus came from Puerto Rico to Florida, searching for gold and slaves. He sailed along Florida’s shores, stopping briefly at a place near present-day St. Augustine, and claimed the land for Spain. He named the territory , “Florida,” in honor of Spain’s Easter holiday, Pascua Florida , “feast of flowers.”

Ponce de Leon is officially attributed with the discovery of Florida but there is evidence to suggest that he was not the first. He was not welcomed by the native inhabitants.In fact they were downright hostile. Generally this was not the reception given to the Europeans on their first visits. However due to typical European bad behavior natives were almost always hostile on subsequent visits. One may presume other visits and Spanish cruelty had preceded Ponce de Leon to Florida.

For the next few years Florida was visited by other little known expeditions nearly every year. Ponce de Leon returned in 1521, to established a colony on the southwestern side of the peninsula. There the Indians were also unfriendly and he was wounded. Ponce de Leon died of his wounds and the latest efforts to colonize Florida were abandoned.

Other wanderings continued by the Spanish in Florida . These included Cabeza de Vaca, Hernando de Soto explored from present day Tampa Bay to Tallahassee In 1559, Tristan de Luna tried to set up a colony on Pensacola Bay, but hardships and hurricanes put an end to the struggles after only two years.. Within a few years of de Luna’s efforts, the French began exploring Florida. Rene Goulaine de Laudonniere established a little bastion, Fort Caroline, at the mouth of the great northward-flowing St. Johns River.

These French inroads challenged the Spanish to work even faster and harder. After nearly 50 years of trying, In 1565, Pedro Menendez de Aviles arrived on the northeast coast and established what would become the first permanent settlement in the present-day United States St. Augustine. In 1565, Spanish captain general Pedro Menendez de Aviles sailed to South Florida to make peace with the native peoples and settle the lands for his king. His fleet was caught in a storm, and the crew took refuge in a Tequesta village in Biscayne Bay. Menendez resumed in 1567 so that “the souls and natives thereof may be saved and his Majesty’s purpose be furthered, which is to prevent the [French] Lutherans from setting foot in that land, and to endeavor to implant the gospel therein.”

During this voyage, he established a mission, protected by 30 soldiers. The soldiers occasionally provoked acts of hostility, culminating with killing one of the uncles of the Tequesta chief. This enraged the Tequestas, who attacked and forced the missionaries to retreat. The Spanish continued to establish missions and forts along the Florida coasts to strengthen their hold on the New World. During this time, however, the and Calusas began to feel the decimating effects of slave raids and European diseases.

MenendezMenendez promptly set about removing the French, converting Fort Caroline into San Mateo, only to see it recaptured with much loss of life two years later. But Spanish progress continued across northern Florida in the form of a chain of forts and missions established to convert the Indians to Christianity. With the Spanish grip seemingly secure, the English steered clear of Florida.

They established their first colonies far to the north, away from the threat of Spanish power, although Sir Francis Drake did manage to raid struggling St. Augustine in 1586. By the early 1700s, English colonists began causing trouble for the Spanish, particularly in present-day South Carolina and Georgia. Little by little, they trickled south, laid waste the missions between St. Augustine and Pensacola, destroyed the little “first colony” and killed many of the Indians.

Meanwhile, the French had their eyes on Florida’s far western coast; they captured Pensacola in 1719. As Spain’s hold grew weaker, England’s desire for the territory strengthened. Finally, in 1763, following the devastating Seven Years’ War, Spain traded Florida for Cuba, abandoning the glorious dreams of eternal youth, gleaming treasure and religious conversion for which her explorers, settlers and missionaries had struggled. Meanwhile, the Spanish and the English were feuding. In 1588, when Sir Francis Drake beat the sails off the Spanish Armada, Britain gained sovereignty over the high seas. In 1763 Britain acquired Florida in a swap with Spain, which got Cuba.

Always a contrary lot, those few settlers living in Florida during the Revolutionary War sided with the British. When Britain lost, the Brits took one look at swampy, mosquito-infested Florida—and what it would cost to keep it—and tossed most of it back to Spain in exchange for the Bahamas, to which many of Florida’s Tory sympathizers judiciously fled

North Florida was a land of big plantations that needed growing space. General Jackson tried to get it by ousting the Seminoles, the Native Americans who had settled in the state in the 1700s.

Andrew JacksonIn 1823 hostilities ended temporarily when the tribe agreed to live on a reservation stretching from Ocala to Lake Okeechobee, but peace did not last; in 1835 the fighting began again when the government decided the best place for the Seminoles was another reservation—in Oklahoma! Fierce and fervent tribal chief Osceola responded to that idea by tossing his long knife into the center of the proposed treaty papers.

When the Maskókî tribes in Alabama, whom English speakers erroneously called “Creeks,” rose up against the white settlers in the Creek War of 1813-14, the brutal repression and disastrous treaty forced upon them by General Andrew Jackson sent thousands of the most determined warriors and their families migrating southward.

But Spain could not afford enough soldiers to patrol the long frontiers of Florida. Its choice lands were openly coveted by white settlers who regularly moved across its borders. English war ships anchored off its Gulf coast and English agents encouraged the Seminoles, Creeks, and Mikisúkî to resist US settlement openly. US officials, angry that the Spaniards could not oust the English or control the Indians, were particularly incensed by the protection and shelter the Seminoles offered to African slaves.

These freedom seekers had been finding refuge in Spanish Florida for over a century, but the new US government was determined to stop this practice. In the late 1700s and early 1800s, conflicts, skirmishes, and ambushes erupted and racial hatred flared into violence more and more frequently on the new frontier. First Seminole War. During 1814 and 1818,

General Andrew Jackson, marched across Florida’s international boundaries to settle the “Indian problem,” Over a period of several years, he burned Indian towns, captured Africans, and hanged one Maskókî medicine man, Francis, as well as two Englishmen whom he suspected of inciting the Indians. And the conflicts did not end there; they only escalated.

Through the Treaty of Moultrie Creek (1823), the Treaty of Payne’s Landing (1832), and numerous “talks” and meetings, US Indian Agents sought to convince the Florida Indians to sell their cattle and pigs to the US government, return runaway slaves to their “rightful owners,” leave their ancient homelands in Florida, and move west of the Mississippi River to Arkansas Territory.

In 1830, soon after Jackson the Indian fighter became Andrew Jackson, the president of the United States, he pushed through Congress an Indian Removal Act. With this Act, the determination of the government to move Indians out of the Southeast and open the land for white settlement became the official policy of the US, and the willingness of the government to spend monies in support of military enforcement of this policy increased. Second Seminole War

The clash that inevitably resulted from this policy finally began in 1835, and the seven years that it lasted frame the last, the greatest, and arguably the most tragic years in the history of US-Indian relations east of the Mississippi River. Known to history as the , the US government committed almost $40,000,000 to the forced removal of slightly more than 3,000 Maskókî men, women, and children from Florida to Oklahoma.

This was the only Indian war in US history in which not only the US army but also the US navy and marine corps participated. Together with the desultory Third Seminole War, a series of skirmishes that took place between 1856 and 1858, the United States spent much of the first half of the 19th century in trying, unsuccessfully, to dislodge about 5,000 Seminoles from Florida. In addition to “Old Hickory,” as Jackson had come to be known, an impressive list of US military figures eventually joined the fight to remove the Seminoles from Florida.

Edmund P. Gaines, Zachary Taylor, Oliver O. Howard (“the Christian General”), Richard Keith Call, and Thomas S. Jesup, among many others, would nearly ruin their reputations trying to fight the Seminoles. Those years were further illuminated by two legendary Seminole leaders - the famous warrior Osceola (a.k.a. William Powell) and the inspirational medicine man Abiaka (a.k.a. Sam Jones).

Elegant in dress, handsome of face, passionate in nature and giant of ego, Osceola masterminded successful battles against five baffled U.S. generals, murdered the United State’s Indian agent, took punitive action against any who cooperated with the white man and stood as a national manifestation of the Seminoles’ strong reputation for non-surrender.

Osceola2Osceola was not a chief with the heritage of a Micanopy or Jumper, but his skill as an orator and his bravado in conflict earned him great influence over Seminole war actions. Osceola’s capture, under a controversial flag of truce offered by Gen. Thomas Jessup, remains today one of the blackest marks in American military history. A larger-than-life character, Osceola is the subject of numerous myths; his 1838 death in a Charleston, S.C. prison was noted on front pages around the world. At the time of his death, Osceola was the most famous American Indian. Though his exploits were not as well publicized, Seminole medicine man Abiaka may have been more important to the internal Seminole war machine than Osceola.

Abiaka was a powerful spiritual leader who used his “medicine” to stir Seminole warriors into a frenzy. His genius directed Seminole gains in several battles, including the 1837 ambush now known as the Battle of Okeechobee. Many years older than most of the Seminole leadership of that era, wise old Sam Jones was a staunch resistor of removal. He kept the resistance fueled before and after Osceola’s period of prominence and, when the fighting had concluded, was the only major Seminole leader to remain in Florida.

Starved, surrounded, sought with a vengeance, Sam Jones would answer no flag of truce, no offer of compromise, no demand of surrender. His final camp was in the Big Cypress Swamp, not far from the Seminole Tribe’s Big Cypress community of today. No Surrender! By May 10, 1842, when a frustrated President John Tyler ordered the end of military actions against the Seminoles, over $20 million had been spent, 1500 American soldiers had died and still no formal peace treaty had been signed.

At that time, it marked the most costly military campaign in the young country’s history. And it wasn’t over yet. Thirteen years later, a U.S. Army survey party - seeking the whereabouts of Abiaka and other Seminole groups - was attacked by Seminole warriors under the command of the colorful Billy Bowlegs. The nation invested its entire reserve into the apprehension of the ambushers. The eventual capture and deportation of Bowlegs ended aggressions between the Seminoles and the United States.

Unlike their dealings with other Indian tribes, however, the U.S. government could not force a surrender from the Florida Seminoles. Historians estimate there may have been only a few hundred unconquered Seminole men, women and children left - all hiding in the swamps and Everglades of South Florida. The descendants of these last few Indian resistors are the members of today’s Seminole Tribe of Florida, the Miccosukee Tribe of Indians of Florida and the unaffiliated Independent or Traditional Seminoles.

Around 1700 the lands vacated by the original inhabitants attracted native indian people from Georgia and Alabama. They came to Florida to avoid the European intrusion into their homelands.Many were Maskókî speakers,

In the early days of its existence, the fledgling United States government carried out a policy of displacement and extermination against the American Indians in the eastern US, systematically removing them from the path of “white” settlement.