The Everglades War: Osceola, the Seminoles, and America's Longest Indian War

The first shots were American. In late November 1817, soldiers crossed the Flint River at dawn to seize Neamathla, the Fowltown chief who had refused to give up his people's land or stop sheltering fugitives from Georgia. He got away, and they burned his town. Nobody in Washington called it a war yet.

Behind that raid lay the Creek War and the 1814 Treaty of Fort Jackson, which took twenty-three million acres from the whole Creek Nation, and the families who drifted south into Spanish Florida rather than live under it. Mikasuki and Hitchiti speakers, Yuchi, Koasati and Alabama people, and Black families who had escaped slavery built new towns on the Suwannee and the Alachua prairie. Outsiders called them Seminole, and they made the name their own.

Most of the book belongs to the war that began in December 1835 with the destruction of Major Francis Dade's command: Osceola's war and his seizure at a truce talk, the fighting on the Withlacoochee, the summer sickness that killed more soldiers than bullets did, and Zachary Taylor's campaign in the swamps. It is usually counted the longest and costliest war the United States ever fought against a Native nation. Thousands of Seminoles were shipped west, and some of them went on to Mexico.

In 1842, after seven years and tens of millions of dollars, the war simply stopped. No treaty ended it, and the few hundred Seminoles still in the Everglades stayed where they were.