Florida Indians.
THE FLORIDA INDIANS.
The Palarches, Eamuses and Kaloosas, were the ancient possessors of Florida, and are all extinct. The present Florida Indians are the remains of that ancient and warlike tribe on the Mississippi, which being almost extirpated by the French, retreated along the Northern coast of the Gulf of Mexico, and united with broken bands of Biloxies, Red Sticks, and runaway Creeks, called Seminoles. The largest portion of these Indians are Lower Creeks, and are of the most dissolute, daring, and abandoned of that tribe.
The word Seminole signifies a wanderer or runaway, or it means a wild people or outsettlers, the ancestors of the tribe having detached themselves from the main body of the Creeks, and dwelt remotely, wherever the inducements of more game, or greater scope for freedom of action, might casually lead them. They settled in Florida about 115 years ago.
That this is the period of their becoming a separate community, is confirmed by the connection of their history with that of the Yemasees, of whom there occur frequent notices in the account of the early settlement of Georgia and South Carolina.
In a talk, which the Seminoles about the year 1820, transmitted to the American government, they say, alluding to their ancient independence: “An hundred summers have seen the Seminole warrior reposing undisturbed under the shade of his live oak, and the suns of an hundred winters have risen on his ardent pursuit of the buck and the bear, with none to question his bounds, or dispute his range.”