A selection of Seminole, Cheyenne, and Apache tales in North Florida, really.

For those of you unfamiliar with the Greater Brooker-LaCrosse Metroplex you might be surprised to learn how much conflict in the Early American portion of Florida’s history happened right here, or very closely nearby.   I’m basically talking about the northern part of Alachua County from the northern half of Gainesville to the Santa Fe River, with forays to St Augustine and Baldwin just because the history is so fantastic.

For no clear reason I decided a couple of years ago I was tired of not really understanding the 2^nd Seminole War (there were 3 primary ones, and sometimes a 4^th but not everyone considers the last two distinct  https://www.seminolenationmuseum.org/history/seminole-nation/the-seminole-wars/ ).  Pulling that thread has turned into about 75 books and probably 500 pdfs that have stuffed my brain with more than I can process, but this is a start on that and many of the places and people discussed below are part of ongoing (and hopefully future) Paleo to Pioneer posts and publications.

Just getting to this point where I have to decide what to include I realize there will have to be a Part II to this topic.  Since, among other things I will not cover, are the 1702 raid of the Carolinians under John Moore into Florida (part of Queen Anne’s War or the War of Spanish Succession) where they attacked and pretty much destroyed Santa Fe De Toloca (what it is called on the Co. historical marker) aka San Tomas de Santa Fe Mission, on May 20.  There are probably additional names for this mission that I don’t know yet either. And somehow this episode doesn’t even get a mention in the Wikipedia Apalachee Massacre page.  But I’m not gonna get into this…;).   I also will not be talking about the activities of Daniel Newnan and the Patriot Army in and around Alachua County during the 1^st Seminole War in 1812, other than to say the Dell Brothers, of ye olde Patriot Army, settled just a mile east of present Alachua and formed Dell, which was changed to Newnansville in 1828.

Newnansville grew very quickly for a number of years, and at one point was the second largest city in Florida.  In 1824 when John Bellamy of Monticello was contracted to build the road from St Augustine to Pensacola it went through Newnansville, and turned NW pretty quickly headed towards Traxler.  Continuing west from there you can find it today often labeled as the Old Spanish Trail.  The poorly made and maintained road had innumerable trees cut off just below axle height and is truly said to be the origin of the term “Stumpknocker”.  So next time you pass below SR326 (the old Bellamy Road) on I75 you can be thankful that Stumpknocker now means a good beer and not a travelers nightmare.

East of Newnansville is a bit of a different story as the next established point on the road (that I can confidently find) is just south of Starke near old Fort Harllee (or Harlee).  The important point here, in the Greater Brooker-LaCrosse Metroplex, is that east from LaCrosse the road roughly paralleled State Road 235 for at least a few miles.  Part of me hopes it was on the north side and went through our cow pasture.

In 1835 when the 2^nd Seminole War began Newnansville was about the farthest south you could really safely stay in Florida, or so many of the roughly 10,000 people said to be living in tents around Fort Gilliland thought. What was likely being called Fort Newnansville was renamed for a murdered Lt. Gilleland (probably his spelling) in 1837.  The rough locations of F for Fort Gilliland and the cleverly labeled M for Newnansville are shown in a GoogleEarth image below.

One of the army’s approaches to this fight was to place a fort at the center of a patchwork of 12 square mile blocks.  Sometimes the forts seem to match these locations and other times not so much.  Three miles east of Alachua (not measured from Newnansville?) there was supposed to be a Fort Gillispie at a now unknown time and location.  I have a single reference for a Fort Mills in LaCrosse that no one else has ever referred to that I can find.  And finally, variously referred to as 5, 8, or 9 miles east of Newnansville was Fort 12.

In 1839 Lt. James Willoughby Anderson was tasked with erecting a small fort at the center of one of those 12 mile blocks, just east of LaCrosse.  Not very much has been written about the fort itself, though it is mentioned passingly by several authors, including several diaries or memoirs of soldiers.  One of the most interesting stories unfortunately explained a wagon that brought supplies to Fort 12 was attacked and all of the men killed about a mile west of LaCrosse on their return to Newnansville.  Anderson drew a detailed map that survives and the location is well known to those in the immediate area (it’s on private property so please leave them alone… I’d like to ask permission to try some non-destructive remote sensing sooner than later).  As the focus of warfare shifted south the post was abandoned in May, 1840 and the soldiers re-assigned to Fort King near Ocala.

Lt Anderson stayed in the army for several years, including coming to greater prominence in the Mexican-American war.  Alas, he was badly wounded at the battle of Cherubusco, which I believe was actually the last day of the war, and passed away the next day.  His son Edward went to West Point, and was very active for the Confederacy through the war and beyond.  He refused to surrender with General Lee, or Johnstone, and eventually turned for Texas and General Kirby Smith’s forces (it didn’t happen).  All of this is well documented because the family eventually donated the original correspondence to the library at the USMA at West Point and a book has been published that includes much of the surviving Fort 12 information.  There is considerably more to talk about here and in the area during the 2^nd Seminole War and both archaeological and archival work to do.

So far I’ve talked about fairly well documented, if nowadays somewhat obscure, Florida history.  I’d like to turn to other Indian War era stories from the 1870s and 80s that just feel tremendously out of place for having occurred at all, let alone in Florida.  I am still gathering information on both of these and eventually each should turn into a historic publication as wading through the mis-information is at least half the battle when trying to correct factually inaccurate publications.  The one consistent element of both stories is that each man is repeatedly said to have been held in St. Augustine and neither ever actually made it there, ever.

The Castillo de San Marcos in St. Augustine, FL was known as Fort Marion for much of the 19^th and 20^th Century after it came into American hands.  From the 1830s into the late 1880s what happened there includes some of the darkest parts of American history.  It would be a very serious book length discussion to begin to do that justice and here I just hope to introduce parts of the lives of two individuals brought to Florida against their will.  Fort Marion served as a prison for Seminole captives in the late 1830s, a group of Apache in 1886-87, and for about 80 Cheyenne, Kiowa, Comanche, Arapaho, and Caddo, people between 1875 and 1878.  The Plains Indians were transported and imprisoned under the watch of Lt Richard Henry Pratt, who later used his attempts at education to launch the Carlisle Indian School in Pennsylvania.  All of the original information about this story ultimately seems to come from Pratt and I am working on getting copies of his original papers.

A Cheyenne man named Graybeard (often spelled Grey Beard) was among those being brought to Florida by train.  He was very well known in his lifetime and had been involved in many significant fights and events (including surviving the 1864 Sand Creek Massacre in Colorado).  Between Live Oak and Lake City, probably near Houston, FL in Suwannee County, the train slowed to 25 miles an hour and even though his feet, and possibly his hands, were shackled Graybeeard opened the window and dove out into the darkness.  The train was stopped and soldiers searched for him until the engineer indicated they were short of water and had to go if they wanted to make the next station.  As the train started to leave he was heard moving and one of the soldiers shot him, over the yelling not to by Pratt. 

Graybeard only survived about two hours and his body was left in Baldwin for burial.  That’s it.  End of story.  The whole horrific episode involving a famous western Cheyenne man comes to a tragic screeching halt in Baldwin, FL, where he should never have been, and has only been adequately told once in the last 140 years (much credit to Brad Lookingbill for this telling).  I suspect much of this will be revised in the near future, or hopefully expanded with greater detail.

What I know of this story at present comes from an uninformative 1940 article, a Carlisle Indian School Webpage created by Barbara Landis and Genevieve Bell at http://home.epix.net/~landis/graybeard.html and the book War Dance at Fort Marion: Plains Indian War Prisoners (2006) by Brad Lookingbill who has been incredibly helpful in my attempts to track down the four sources of information he cited.  Right now I am waiting to hear back from Dr. Lookingbill and also the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University.  I will of course update this post when I have additional information.  Most of all I would like to find his final resting place, and find out if the Cheyenne feel it should be in Florida?

Eight years after the Plains people were released from Fort Marion several hundred Apache Indians were incarcerated there.  Mostly this was Chiricahua people but included members of other groups, some of whom had been the very Scouts the Army depended on to capture Geronimo and his band. 

Unpublished, unique image of Geronimo later in life at the 101 Ranch, Oklahoma. Real photo postcard in author’s collection, Paleo to Pioneer world headquarters.

This omelet of tangled information and incorrect sources is as dense as the two stories discussed above.  Geronimo was brought from Arizona in late 1886 and held in Fort Pickens in Pensacola (arriving October 25 ^th he was one of 16 or was with 16 more men left there).  Late in the spring of 1888 he was moved to Mount Vernon Barracks, north of Mobile, Alabama, and probably reunited with family at that point. A wife of Geronimo. and probably at least one child, were held in Fort Marion.  She-gha, one of his three wives, was with him at Fort Pickens and passed away there, being buried in Pensacola.  Later authors chronically state that Geronimo was held at Fort Marion which absolutely never happened.

I am not positive I have all of the details correct yet, as this is most certainly all work in progress, but when I do I will make a separate post on this.  Who was where, and exactly when is not as easy to determine at this late date even with all of the historic documentation available.  My goal is to get as many of the basic details of these stories correct and publish that information so people stop repeating things we know are wrong.  I have a very keen awareness of exactly how hard it is to get these things right.  This post took me two weeks to get together and I have had to just go with what I know is incomplete information, but hopefully I am not repeating anything that is wrong.

My synopsis here is intentionally very brief and does not do this story justice at all.  I am actively working on writing a publication intended to get the basic facts correct based on information gleaned directly from original, period sources.  That goal, and this post for that matter, are not the end though.  Getting the basic facts correct is the absolute minimum of accurate reporting.  Once that has been corrected we can talk about what all of these things mean.  To me, the most interesting, underexplored aspect is how extremely bizarre it is that both the Plains men of the 1870s, and the Apache in the 1880s (and into the 1890s), while actual enemy combatant prisoners of war of the United States, were put in US Army uniforms and charged with guarding themselves.  In the world we live in today that this ever occurred is incomprehensible. 

Well there you have quick a overview of some interesting and all too poorly known history across North Florida. More information and revision to follow soon.  And enough with the serious stuff… I’m telling jokes next time.