History for ready reference, Volume 1, A-Elba

volume 1, part 1, section 2.

Chapter 77219 wordsPublic domain

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"Ever since the first settlement of these Indians in Florida they have been engaged in a strife with the whites. ... In the unanimous judgment of unprejudiced writers, the whites have ever been in the wrong."

_D. G. Brinton, Notes on the Floridian Peninsula, page 148._

"There were in Florida, October 1, 1880, of the Indians commonly known as Seminole, 208. They constituted 37 families, living in 22 camps, which were gathered into five widely separated groups or settlements. ... This people our Government has never been able to conciliate or to conquer. ... The Seminole have always lived within our borders as aliens. It is only of late years, and through natural necessities, that any friendly intercourse of white man and Indian has been secured. ... The Indians have appropriated for their service some of the products of European civilization, such as weapons, implements, domestic utensils, fabrics for clothing, &c. Mentally, excepting a few religious ideas which they received long ago from the teaching of Spanish missionaries, and, in the southern settlements, excepting some few Spanish words, the Seminole have accepted and appropriated practically nothing from the white man."

_C. MacCauley, The Seminole Indians of Florida (Fifth Annual Report of the Bureau of Ethnology, 1883-84), introduction and chapter 4._

ALSO IN _J. T. Sprague, The Florida War_.

_S. G. Drake, The Aboriginal Races of North America.