FORT MOULTRIE, SOUTH CAROLINA.
Since the date of my last Letter, I have been a wanderer as usual, and am now at least 2000 miles from the place where it was dated. At this place are held 250 of the Seminolees and Euchees, prisoners of war, who are to be kept here awhile longer, and transferred to the country assigned them, 700 miles West of the Mississippi, and 1400 from this. The famous Os-ce-o-la is amongst the prisoners; and also Mick-e-no-pah, the head chief of the tribe, and Cloud, King Phillip, and several others of the distinguished men of the nation, who have celebrated themselves in the war that is now waging with the United States’ Government.
There is scarcely any need of my undertaking in an epistle of this kind, to give a full account of this tribe, of their early history—of their former or present location—or of their present condition, and the disastrous war they are now waging with the United States’ Government, who have held an invading army in their country for four or five years, endeavouring to dispossess them and compel them to remove to the West, in compliance with Treaty stipulations. These are subjects generally understood already (being matters of history), and I leave them to the hands of those who will do them more complete justice than I could think of doing at this time, with the little space that I could allow them; in the confident hope that justice may be meted out to them, at least by the historian, if it should not be by their great Guardian, who takes it upon herself, as with all the tribes, affectionately to call them her “red children.”
For those who know nothing of the Seminolees, it may be proper for me here just to remark, that they are a tribe of three or four thousand; occupying the peninsula of Florida—and speaking the language of the Creeks, of whom I have heretofore spoken, and who were once a part of the same tribe.
The word Seminolee is a Creek word, signifying runaways; a name which was given to a part of the Creek nation, who emigrated in a body to a country farther South, where they have lived to the present day; and continually extended their dominions by overrunning the once numerous tribe that occupied the Southern extremity of the Florida Cape, called the Euchees; whom they have at last nearly annihilated, and taken the mere remnant of them in, as a part of their tribe. With this tribe the Government have been engaged in deadly and disastrous warfare for four or five years; endeavouring to remove them from their lands, in compliance with a Treaty stipulation, which the Government claims to have been justly made, and which the Seminolees aver, was not. Many millions of money, and some hundreds of lives of officers and men have already been expended in the attempt to dislodge them; and much more will doubtless be yet spent before they can be removed from their almost impenetrable swamps and hiding-places, to which they can, for years to come, retreat; and from which they will be enabled, and no doubt disposed, in their exasperated state, to make continual sallies upon the unsuspecting and defenceless inhabitants of the country; carrying their relentless feelings to be reeked in cruel vengeance on the unoffending and innocent.[37]
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The prisoners who are held here, to the number of 250, men, women and children, have been captured during the recent part of this warfare, and amongst them the distinguished personages whom I named a few moments since; of these, the most conspicuous at this time is Os-ce-o-la ([plate 298]), commonly called Powell, as he is generally supposed to be a half-breed, the son of a white man (by that name), and a Creek woman.
I have painted him precisely in the costume, in which he stood for his picture, even to a string and a trinket. He wore three ostrich feathers in his head, and a turban made of a vari-coloured cotton shawl—and his dress was chiefly of calicoes, with a handsome bead sash or belt around his waist, and his rifle in his hand.