Black Natives: the Seminoles

The Seminole people of Florida and Oklahoma did not originate from a single ancestral tribe.  The nations that would merge to become the Seminoles began appearing in Florida around 1750.  Creeks, Miccosuki and other Muscogean peoples were fleeing White encroachment on their lands in the buildup to the final French and Indian War (1755-1763).  Another group was also seeking freedom, enslaved Blacks.  Some blacks had already fled their masters, emerging as the Gullah people of Georgia and South Carolina.  They kept a few of their African traditions and remnants of their language alive.  They were lured by the Spanish promises of wages if the Blacks would agree to join the Spanish garrisons of Florida.  The Gullah and other blacks, both escaped slaves and freedmen, soon discovered that army life wasn't any better than slavery.

They deserted and took up dwelling in the swamps of Florida, where they would be inaccessible to slave catchers or Spanish authorities seeking to round up deserters.  The Spanish name for these runaways was maroons.  The word Seminole, first applied to the Natives who had fled to Florida, may come from the Spanish word Cimarron, meaning wild or a runaway, but scholars differ on this application.  At first, the blacks and the Natives maintained their own identities and their own villages and means of tribal governance.  As more Settlers moved into Florida from the Southern colonies/later states, Blacks and Natives saw the need to join forces.  While they maintained their own villages and camps, Blacks and Natives traded, coordinated on strategy for dealing with the Whites, and intermarried.  Many Blacks had mixed Native ancestry and soon became regarded as Black Indians, or Black Seminoles.

One such man was John Horse, or Gopher John (1812-1882).  The son of a Seminole father and an escaped slave mother, he was considered a slave by both Whites and Natives.  Nominally, he belonged to Chief Micanopy.  A skilled warrior who could speak English, he was useful to the Seminoles as an interpreter and often joined forces with Osceola.  Osceola may have been married to a black woman, though sources aren't definite on this point.  He abhorred the idea of slavery and was willing to work with John and another Black Seminole leader, Abraham, to make sure that the Blacks were not used as a bargaining chip in treaties with the Whites.  Osceola fiercely protested any treaty provisions requiring Natives to disclose the whereabouts of Black Seminole villages or any promises to return Black slaves to their former owners. 

John was captured with Osceola in October, 1837, and sent to Fort Marion, in St. Augustine.  He and several other Seminole leaders, both Black and Native, starved themselves for several days, pried the bars off the windows of their common cell, and slipped away from the fort.  With Osceola sidelined by captivity and later dead, a younger generation of leaders had to step up.  Only after he was assured that his people would not be enslaved did John Horse agree to talks with the Army.  He and his band resettled in Oklahoma, and later returned to Florida in 1840 in an attempt to talk Wild Cat/Cooacochee, a Native Seminole leader, into surrendering.  Cooacochee agreed to do so in 1840, and he and John Horse accompanied Cooacochee's people to Oklahoma.  For this service, John was given his freedom by White authorities, and personally by Chief Micanopy. 

But more White settlers were pouring into the Plains states, some illegally into Oklahoma itself.  Many of these people were from the South and wanted to bring Oklahoma into the Union as a slave state.  They also wanted to dispossess the Natives of land they had been promised in return from agreeing to move West.  Uneasy at these developments, Cooacochee and John Horse gathered their people in 1847, fled across Texas and into Mexico.  John Horse served for a time in the Mexican army, but in the coming years, went back to Oklahoma, were he also served with the United States Army as a scout.  In 1882 he traveled to Mexico City to plead with Mexican authorities to reaffirm the land grants to the Seminoles and Black Seminoles still living south of the border.  He died during this trip.  No one knows how or where he is buried. 

Today, Black Seminoles still live in Oklahoma, Texas, Mexico, Florida, and the Bahamas.  They honor the memory of John Horse and Osceola, the Native leader who was willing to fight for their rights and welcome them into the ranks of his warriors.

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