Places: Fort Marion/Castillo de San Marcos, St. Augustine, FL

The Castillo de San Marcos (St. Mark's Castle), also known as Fort Marion, is a place of tears and death for many tribes who members and leaders have been imprisoned there.  The Apache Wars are beyond the scope of this blog, but we'll touch on the imprisonment of Apaches here as it relates to this Fort, one of the oldest fortified locations in the United States.

St. Augustine is one of the oldest cities in the United States, being founded and continuously inhabited from 1565.  Construction on the Fort began in 1672, over a hundred years later, to combat raids on the town by English pirates.  Britain gained control of Florida briefly in 1763 and renamed the Castillo Fort St. Marks.  Its name was changed back to Castillo de San Marcos in 1783, when Britain returned Spain to Florida.  After 1819, when the Adams-Onis treaty turned Florida over to the United States, they christened the place Fort Marion, after Francis Marion, the Swamp Fox of Revolutionary War fame.  Only in 1942 was its original name, Castillo de San Marcos, restored by an act of Congress.  Today, it's known as both Fort Marion and Castillo de San Marcos.

When one looks at the Fort in aerial photographs, its plan of defense because obvious.  Situated on Matanzas Bay, on the coastline, it's intended as a coastal defense and was used as such until the U.S. Coastal defense system was dismantled after World War II.  It's curious star-shape allows for four large bastions where guns can be placed.  It has a dry moat, a large ditch surrounding the structure, though that moat can be filled in with water when required.  Inside the thick concrete walls are several large rooms, with walls almost twenty feet high.  It was in these quarters that Osceola, Coacoochee and other Seminole prisoners, men women and children, were crowded after their capture in 1837.  And it was from a high window like one shown in the picture that Coacoochee, John Horse and 18 other Seminole warriors escaped to rejoin the fight.  For their fellow captives left behind, the overcrowded conditions spawned outbreaks of fevers, measles and head lice.  At least one Native leader, Uche Billy, died from fever and Dr. Frederick Weedon did to him what he would later do to the Unconquered at Fort Moultrie, saw his head off postmortem to use as a medical specimen. 

The Castillo has survived in almost in its original state since Spanish times.  It was besieged twice, in 1702 and 1704, but managed to stand, making it in military terms a maiden fortress, one never taken by siege.  It has changed hands peacefully six times, from Span, to Britain, back to Spain, then to the United States, to Confederate control during the Civil War, and back to the United States after the War was over.  Following the Civil War, two more Native tribes would suffer there, the Comanche and Geronimo's Apache band, enduring much the same conditions as the Seminoles, including overcrowding and rampant sickness.