Apalachee people, Calusa & Timucua Deer Hunting in the 16th Century This 16th-century German engraving, modeled after a painting by the French artist Jacques Le Moyne, purported to show how Native Americans hunted stags by hiding under deer skins. Scenes like this helped establish Florida's exotic reputation among would-be explorers. Library of Congress There were an estimated 350,000 Native Americans in what is now Florida when Europeans first arrived early in the 16th century. They belonged to three major nations, the Calusa along the southwestern coast, the Timucua in the northern half of the peninsula, and the Apalachee where the peninsula joins the panhandle. Peoples dominated by the Calusa lived along the southeastern coast. All were settled agricultural peoples, as skilled with the hoe as they were with canoes or with bows and arrows. They lived in villages, where they cultivated corn, beans, and other crops. Noted warriors, they fiercely resisted early attempts to bring them under submission, but coexisted peacefully with the Spaniards for most of the first 198 years of Spanish occupation. The populations of these Native Americans were drastically reduced by diseases introduced by the European explorers. They had no resistance to pathogens such as measles, smallpox, and typhoid fever that Europeans normally survived. The Native Americans also lost ground because of slaving raids by English forces from South Carolina and Georgia. By mid-18th century these nations no longer existed. The modern Native Americans of Florida are the Seminole, originally Creek from the Georgia-Alabama border, who entered Florida in the period 1716 to 1767. Today they have five reservations in the state. They farm, hunt, and fish, run tourist-related businesses, and operate a large bingo hall near Miami. *** The Spanish explorer Juan Ponce de León landed on the Atlantic Coast of what is now Florida, probably at or near Melbourne Beach, early in April 1513. He is generally credited with being the first European to set foot in Florida, although he may have been preceded by slavers from the Spanish-held island of La Isla Española (Hispaniola) in the Caribbean Sea. In 1521 Ponce de León returned with two shiploads of colonists to found a settlement on the Gulf Coast, probably in the vicinity of Charlotte Harbor, but he was driven off, mortally wounded, by a Native American attack. A dubious legend of later years attributed his explorations in Florida to a quest for a magic fountain of youth. Later explorations gave Spain a claim to the vast, uncharted area north and west of the peninsula. For many years the name La Florida, given by Ponce de León to the peninsula, was applied by Spain to the entire Atlantic coastline of North America as far north as Newfoundland. *** In 1562 Spanish claims to Florida were challenged by Jean Ribault, a French naval captain, who discovered the mouth of the Saint Johns River and thought it a likely site for a French settlement. Two years later René Goulaine de Laudonnière, one of Ribault's officers, established Fort Caroline there. Spain, a Roman Catholic country, objected to the French settlement for religious as well as political reasons because the French colonists were Huguenots, or Protestants. *** Early in the 17th century, Franciscan priests converted most of the Timucua and Apalachee of northern Florida to Christianity. An interior chain of missions eventually extended from Saint Augustine to present-day Tallahassee, and another chain ran north along the coastal islands of Georgia. England and France contested Spain's claim to the vast area that the Spaniards called La Florida. For 150 years following the establishment of the first permanent English settlement in America at Jamestown, Virginia, in 1607, English colonists pushed slowly southward into Spanish territory, establishing settlements in the Carolinas and in Georgia. The English saw the Spanish missions as a threat to their claims. Throughout the early part of the 18th century, English raiders, accompanied by their Native American allies of the Creek and Yamasee nations, attacked Spanish settlements in northern Florida. All of the Spanish missions were destroyed, and most of the Timucua and Apalachee were killed, captured as slaves, or driven into exile. *** In the second decade of the 19th century, Florida's diverse population included Spaniards, United States settlers, English traders, adventurers, runaway slaves, and the Seminole. Spain maintained a few garrisons in the principal ports, but for the most part left the countryside alone and the Seminole to themselves. An offshoot of the Creek nation of the Georgia-Alabama frontier, the Seminole included remnants of other native peoples and a number of escaped black slaves from Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi. They occupied lands in northern Florida that were coveted by residents of Georgia, although Florida belonged to Spain. Georgia residents were also unhappy over the Seminole practice of giving refuge to fugitive slaves. *** During the War of 1812 the Spaniards allowed the British to occupy Pensacola and set up a naval base there. In 1814 American forces led by General Andrew Jackson attacked Pensacola and drove the British out. After the war the United States intervened in Florida on several occasions on behalf of American interests. The First Seminole War (1817-1818) began when U.S. troops, commanded by Jackson, invaded Florida to retaliate for border raids by the Seminole. Jackson seized a military post at Saint Marks and took as prisoners two British traders, Alexander Arbuthnot and Robert Chrystie Ambrister. He had them court-martialed for inciting the Seminole and then, having been found guilty, executed. Learning that the Seminole had fled toward Pensacola, he made a forced march and captured the post a second time. After long negotiations, Spain agreed in 1819 to cede Florida to the United States. A probable factor in the decision was that Spain was troubled at that time by revolts in its South American colonies and could ill afford to go to war with the United States. Under the terms of the treaty, called the Adams-Onís Treaty, the United States agreed to assume payment of claims, up to $5 million, which American citizens in Florida had lodged against Spain. The United States took formal possession of Florida in 1821. *** For several months, Jackson served as military governor of Florida. Then Florida was organized as a territory with its present boundaries, and William P. DuVal was appointed its first territorial governor in 1822. Tallahassee was chosen as the site of the territorial capital in 1824. Settlers poured into the territory from neighboring states, and a typical Southern plantation system, based on cotton, corn, and tobacco, was established in northern Florida. As the territory's population increased, settlers pushed southward, displacing the Seminole. A treaty was forced on the Seminole in 1832 by which they were to move west of the Mississippi River within three years. However, many of them, led by Osceola, one of their war leaders, repudiated the treaty. Efforts to enforce it led to the Second Seminole War (1835-1842), which took the lives of 1,466 American soldiers and even more Seminole. When the fighting ended, most of the Seminole were removed from the state, but some took refuge in the Everglades, where many of their descendants now live. After the Third Seminole War (1855-1858), about half of those remaining were moved west. The rest stayed in Florida. From "Florida," Microsoft® Encarta® Online Encyclopedia 2001 http://encarta.msn.com © 1997-2001 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.

Apalachee Indians Mission San Luis de Apalachee was the western capital of the mission system in La Florida from 1656 to 1704. The settlement boasted a population of over 1400 Apalachee Indians who resided at the hilltop mission center and in surrounding hamlets and farmsteads. San Luis was also the residence of a lieutenant governor, military garrison and their families, friars and civilians. Except for a few Spanish cattle ranchers scattered across the landscape, colonists lived near the center of San Luis in a community described by one chronicler as having the appearance of a small Spanish city. The fertile soils of Apalachee made it one of colonial Florida's prized provinces. Corn, wheat, hides, tallow and other agricultural products were regularly shipped to St. Augustine and Havana resulting in economic prosperity that allowed San Luis colonists to enjoy a relatively comfortable lifestyle. However, raids by the British and their Creek Indian allies had a devastating effect on the missions. Facing the certainty of future attacks that would end in death or enslavement, the Spaniards and remaining Apalachees decided to evacuate San Luis just two days before a strike force reached it on July 31, 1704. part from an article by http://www.dos.state.fl.us/

the Apalachee The Apalachee Indians were great farmers and fearless warriors, but they were afraid of ghosts and witches and hid their women in round thatched houses with no windows during their menstrual period. They numbered perhaps 50,000 and grew miles of fields of corn in the rolling foothills around today's Tallahassee, corn which they stored in large community houses and exported to Cuba. They also hunted a ton of white-tail deer whose hides they stacked to the sky. It was the Apalachee who chased the heavily armed, 400-man Narváez expedition out of Florida in 1528 using dirty words, guerilla tactics, sticks and stones, and a lot of unfriendly persuasion. When Desoto's 600 men arrived at their town in 1539, the women were topless and wore mini skirts made of Spanish moss (or was it Indian Moss?) Capafi their chief was so fat he had to be carried everywhere on a litter or else crawl on his hands and knees. How the old boy loved his corn syrup (you are what you eat.) The Apalachee had no plow animals, no metal tools, hadn't even invented the wheel yet, so they tended their huge acreages by hand. (As seen in the drawings of Jacques LeMoyne, a Frenchmen who came to Florida in the 16th century.) But when a Spaniard rode into their village they could shoot an arrow into the horse's chest so deep it would penetrate two-thirds of the horse's body. Lordy, were they scared of them horses. The arrows were shot from very tall bows that most Spaniards couldn't even bend. The Apalachee had one complicated marital system. To keep from having kids with six toes, men married outside their clan. And because they were a matrilineal society, their children became the property of their wife's clan and acquired all their training and possessions from that clan. What a mess that was. When a man got hooked up, he had to make a quick choice. 1) Go live with his wife at her clan and watch his children being raised by some incompetent uncle, their mother's brother. 2) Go live with his sister where he would be close to her kids, children he was responsible for teaching the ways of the woods. 3) Or go live with his father, who was neither in his wife's clan (the clan of his children) nor his own clan (the clan of his mother, brothers, and sisters.) This would be the best choice if he was to assume his father's chiefly role. If that was the case, him becoming a chief someday, not only could he then have a number of wives, but one of them, his principal wife, could be his sister, so that their six-toed son, who would someday inherit the throne, could keep the chiefdom in the family clan. It was enough to keep a man from marrying, that and the fact that men were allowed to sleep with as many women as they wanted until they got married then had to stop all that stuff. But marriage had its good points. When a man married, there was often a ceremony in which dozens of young single girls danced in a circle wearing nothing but a belt dangling copper and shell jingles. by Florida Indian Mounds

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