Editor’s note: Ocracoke Islanders Tom and Carol Pahl are on a trek around the United States (following 70-degree weather) and will report back from time to time their reflections. This is their fifth dispatch.
Text and photos by Tom Pahl
We are in the southwest desert now, learning to accommodate this ultra-dry environment with humidity levels in the 10 to 15% range. (On the upside, the corn chips stay crunchy.)
Near Tucson, outside of Saguaro National Park, I asked a propane vendor when they had last gotten rain. He looked away wistfully and considered, “I guess it’s been two years… you know, since we really had a rain.” Before I left, he asked if I had water with me in my truck. “You gotta have water with you all the time,” he said.
And he came over and leaned in my truck window until I actually showed him a water bottle. I think he would have gotten me a bottle of water to take if I hadn’t been able to prove to him that I was prepared. It’s bad. But good in a desert sort of way.
Before my narrative goes to the southwest and west, I wanted to catch up on an interesting bit of history that had seemed to follow us in our travels from December through February.
By happenstance, we had camped in western Georgia along the Florida border before Christmas. It was there, outside of Chattahoochee that we crossed paths with the story of the Seminole Indians. Like so much of the recorded history of Native Americans, even their names are not their names.
Seminole is a linguistic revision of the Spanish “cimarron,” which means wild or untamed. It also was used to refer to runaway slaves.
Spanish colonizers applied the name to a disparate group of native people including Creek, Miccosukee, Muscogee and others who lived in parts of what is now Florida. Over time, and as conflict between the indigenous people and the invaders became more intense, the natives came to adopt the name and its meaning with pride.
The Spanish originally, but then the British and finally the Americans all sought to push the Seminoles out of their homelands. In some cases, this was to allow colonists to take land for settlement and farming and in other cases it was because push came to shove and it turned out that the Seminole tribes chose to fight back, sometimes with brutal intensity. They were portrayed as the aggressors in popular media and in governmental and military communications, often referred to as “savages, half-breeds, reds and hostiles.” Language, of course, providing cover for the moral outrage that is genocide.
It seems natural that, where the Seminoles established safe havens and military strongholds, others seeking refuge would show up asking for aid. And so it was that escaped slaves from the American colonies north of Florida came to be a significant part of the Seminole community, eventually coming to be known as Black Seminoles. Black Seminoles married into Native families and, over time, took on leadership positions in the tribes and as warriors.
It is fair to note that complex relationships developed between the Black and Native Seminoles including the continuation, in some cases, of the enslavement status that the Blacks were seeking to escape. Documentation shows that most of those enslaved by Natives had a degree of autonomy that made them almost indistinguishable from those who were in law and in fact free persons. Slave traders and bounty hunters often raided Seminole outposts attempting to steal away escaped slaves or any of the tribe with dark enough skin, including children, who could be taken back north and sold. The fact that the tribes fought against these raids, often at the cost of members’ lives demonstrates how deeply embedded the Blacks had become in the Seminole community.
The success of Seminole resistance in western Florida resulted in an incremental build-up of the American response. Eventually General (and future President) Andrew Jackson, well known for his animosity toward Natives, was called in to wage what came to be known as the Seminole Wars. Outgunned and outnumbered, the Seminoles were killed and captured, or they retreated eastward into the area around the Swanee River in northern Florida and eventually, under increased military pressure into the Everglades and the area now known as Big Cypress National Preserve.
Repeatedly, during the years of the three Seminole Wars, 1816-1858, the U.S. government negotiated various treaties and cease-fires, all intended to persuade the Seminole leadership to agree to re-locate in the west. Repeatedly the government deceived, ambushed, betrayed and cheated on every treaty and promise. Under the Presidency of Andrew Jackson, the Indian Removal Act of 1830 mandated the removal of all native populations east of the Mississippi River to the west. The implementation of this policy came to be known, by its victims, as the Trail of Tears.
In President Jackson’s address to Congress in 1830 regarding the Indian Removal Act, he stated,
“What good man would prefer a country covered with forests and ranged by a few thousand savages to our extensive Republic, studded with cities, towns, and prosperous farms embellished with all the improvements which art can devise or industry execute, occupied by more than 12,000,000 happy people, and filled with all the blessings of liberty, civilization and religion?”
He added, “And is it supposed that the wandering savage has a stronger attachment to his home than the settled, civilized Christian? Is it more afflicting to him to leave the graves of his fathers than it is to our brothers and children? Rightly considered, the policy of the General Government toward the red man is not only liberal, but generous. He is unwilling to submit to the laws of the States and mingle with their population. To save him from this alternative, or perhaps utter annihilation, the General Government kindly offers him a new home, and proposes to pay the whole expense of his removal and settlement.”
It happens that we spent time camping in Florida, where much of the Seminoles’ story played out, both along the Swanee River and in Big Cypress.
We thought we had left this story behind in February, when we headed west, but in south Texas, we picked up the tale again at what is known as Seminole Canyon.
Finally, in 1842, the Seminole and Black Seminole leadership in Florida agreed to remove to what was known as the Indian Territories, mostly in the remote Oklahoma panhandle and parts of Texas. Seminole tribal leader, Halleck Tustenuggee, said, “I have been hunted like a wolf…and now I am to be sent away like a dog.” Disregarding the agreement of their leaders, a good number of Black and Native Seminoles elected to stay in The Everglades, where they remain today, immensely proud of their independence and of having never signed a treaty; of never capitulating.
Having arrived in the Indian Territories, the Seminoles found life to be extremely challenging. Freedom promised to the Black Seminoles was tenuous at best and relations between and among the various Native tribes broke down under the strain of merely trying to survive.
Not surprisingly, they found themselves on the least productive land and without promised livestock, farming tools and equipment. In time, and under the constant threat of re-capture by slave traders, the Seminoles moved to the border lands where they could seek refuge across the Rio Grande if needed.
And indeed, it was needed. In 1850, a large contingent of Black and Native Seminoles reached an agreement with the Mexican government to settle across the border in Piedras Negras. In exchange for their skills as seasoned warriors, they received land, legitimacy and a certain amount of protection from re-enslavement. Various reports suggest that somewhere around 300 to 400 members of the Seminole tribe eventually moved across the border, among them about 150 warriors.
Under their own local command, they did the bidding of the Mexican government, serving as something of a mercenary border patrol, though they refused to become entangled in inter-Mexican affairs.
While they were generally better off in Mexico than in the Indian Territories, life was difficult, and warfare became a way of life.
Their military contingent often had to fight to retain their land holdings, to hold off cross-border slave traders, as well as joining Mexican regulars, battling various “marauders,” most likely Apache, Comanche and other Native tribes. I’m guessing that it was a bitter pill for the Seminoles to end up fighting other Natives, but I’m also guessing that there were many bitter pills along the way.
In 1870, after the conclusion of the U.S. Civil War and the end of legal slavery, the Black Seminoles moved back across the border into south Texas.
It is there, in the area of Seminole Canyon, where Carol and I camped for a few cold days last February, that the Black Seminoles found refuge under the wing of the U.S. Army.
With the Civil War still a fresh memory, the Black Seminoles looked on the U.S. Army as a liberating ally in their generations-long quest for freedom. And with the border lands still wild and untamed, the Army was happy to create a place for the Seminoles, who knew more than anyone about fighting, tracking and surviving in the harsh Chihuahuan Desert.
Thus was created the Seminole Negro Indian Scouts. From 1872 to 1914, the Scouts successfully carried out 26 missions, 12 engagements and earned four Congressional Medals of Honor without a single casualty. The crossed arrows insignia of the Seminole Scouts is used today as the insignia of U.S. Army Special Forces.
Family of the Seminole Scouts still live in South Texas and regularly gather to remember their story.
As a sidebar, I would add that it was not just in the Seminole Tribe where enslaved Blacks found refuge during the slave-holding period of American history.
There are many such stories, including the Mohegan and Mashantucket Pequot Tribes in Connecticut, where I used to live. In a chilling foreshadow of times to come, a pre-Presidential Donald Trump testified, in 1993, before a Congressional Committee regarding legal recognition of Connecticut Indian Tribes.
In defense of his own failing casino operation in Atlanta, he reflected on the skin color and facial features of tribal members, saying sardonically, “They don’t look like Indians to me…”
The more things change, the more they stay the same.
Primary sources of information: “The Black Seminoles” by Kenneth W. Porter, University Press of Florida and other readily available on-line sources.
