One day, as the tradition goes, all the Indians left. Some time after, some Indians came along, Seminoles presumably, and seeing many houses—but Indians “hiepus” (gone), exclaimed, “Tallahassee”—“all gone or deserted.”
THE WILD HERON IN DOMESTICATION
“Littly white birds me send.”
“Mr. Billy Bowlegs.”
We-la-ka is the Indian name for the St. John river and describes it so graphically that the old Spaniards retrograded when they named the “river of lakes” for their patron saint. Ock-la-wa-ha, “crooked water,” appropriately describes the most crooked stream in America. Okeechobee, with her vast expanse of water and over-hanging mists, in Seminole significance means “the place of big water.” With-la-coo-chee, so memorable in Seminole war days as the place of Osceola’s strategic movements, is a long but very narrow stream, meaning, in the Seminole tongue, “Little Big river.” Alachua, “the big jug without a bottom,” We-Kiva, “mystery,” and so on all over the Peninsula do we find names preserved which mark the wanderings of the picturesque Aborigines.
The unwritten, but highly poetical, language of the Florida Indians, should be incorporated into schoolcraft form and preserved with the archives of history for future generations. One who has heard the war shouts, their mythological tales, the words accompanying their dancing tunes, or listened in the darkness of the night, with breathless wonder to the heart-moving dirges sung by wailing women as they move around the corpse of some dead member, the whole scene lit up by the flickering flames of the lurid camp fire, cannot doubt but that the Florida Indian has a literature, and the white race is to blame for its imperfect knowledge of the unwritten but priceless productions of a savage race.
The linguistic perfection of the Seminole language, with its fluent, oratorical powers, shows itself in every speech or talk ever made to the white man.
With linguistic research, the scientist readily finds that man does not invent language any more than a bird does its twittering or a tree its leaves. It requires a whole nation to produce a language.
Of the world’s famous orators we have our Demosthenes of the Greek, Cicero of the Roman, England’s great Gladstone, America with her Calhoun, Clay and Webster; but as yet has the world ever found greater eloquence than in the “talks” of the famous Indian chiefs?