00:00:08 Speaker 1: This is the me Eater podcast coming at you shirtless, severely, bug bitten, and in my case, underware listening podcast. You can't predict anything brought to you by first Light. When I'm hunting, I need gear that won't quit. First Light builds, no compromise, gear that keeps me in the field longer, no shortcuts, just gear that works. Check it out at first light dot com. That's f I R S T L I t E dot com. Good Lord. Writer Jamie Holmes. Here his third books out just out. I'm holding my hand here. It's called The Free and the Dead. The Untold Story of the Black Seminal Chief, the Indigenous rebel in America's Forgotten War, releases on February third. So we're gonna talk about the Seminal Wars, and we're gonna talk about a fella you have certainly heard about, Asciola. Jamie, I was gonna tell you all about how I got interested in this. I got interested in this from Clay on Bear Grease did a series on Asciola and thinking to myself, well, how would clay get the definitive story. There's gotta be more. 00:01:27 Speaker 2: There's no way. 00:01:28 Speaker 1: Claydon missed a bit. There's no way Clay didn't miss something that I would need. 00:01:31 Speaker 2: To know about friendly competition. 00:01:33 Speaker 1: Jamie Holmes is a writer and the author of the books The Free and the Dead of Course what I'm holding right here plus twelve seconds of silence in the book Nonsense. His work has appeared in print or online in The New York Times, The New Yorker, Slate, Wired, the Atlantic, and he has slummed it over at USA Today, among other publications. He holds a. 00:01:54 Speaker 2: Massive words not Jamie's. 00:01:57 Speaker 1: Wow. It was just like I was, you know, really, it was like he was kicking ass there. He's like, you know, he's kicking ass. And then it just I'd be thrilled to be in the U in the USA today. Is that still going? Concern? Remember they used to put it outside the hotel room. 00:02:17 Speaker 3: That was the paper they put outside all the hotel rooms. It's gotta be still going. 00:02:23 Speaker 1: He holds the Masters of International Affairs from Columbia University School of International Affairs. You know rand Over there holds a pH d. 00:02:32 Speaker 2: And you have a masters. 00:02:34 Speaker 1: Yeah, butary, okay, but. 00:02:38 Speaker 2: It than. 00:02:42 Speaker 4: Yeah. 00:02:45 Speaker 2: Uh. 00:02:46 Speaker 1: Previously worked at New America as a policy analyst in international development and served as a Future Tense Fellow. Prior to that, he was a research coordinator at Harvard University's Department of Economics, where he focused on behavioral economics. Can you very quickly time what that means? Yeah? Sure, behavior Yeah, behavioral economics. 00:03:10 Speaker 3: Behavioral economics tries to take insights from psychology and put them into policy. So, for example, there's a there's a psychological phenomenon called. 00:03:23 Speaker 2: What's it called, like priming or. 00:03:27 Speaker 3: Or like let's say, let's say if you're giving a tip in a taxi cab, right, and they say your three options are five dollars, seven dollars, and nine dollars. 00:03:34 Speaker 2: This is not called priming. This is called there's another word for it. 00:03:37 Speaker 1: Uh. 00:03:37 Speaker 3: And then you say seven dollars, nine dollars, and eleven dollars. So it's called anchoring. So you're anchoring your expectation of what the average is based on you know, these three things. And they show how you can move people to give more donations based on these these three numbers, and you move them up and down. 00:03:53 Speaker 2: So then they take that and you know, you use that for fundraising. 00:03:56 Speaker 3: So what they really did is there's a book by this guy CHALDEENI, which was like sort of insights from the business world and how salespeople and people making products use and discovered these psychological insights and maps them on and you know, psychologists are discovering similar things. And then they want to basically turn that around. Instead of manipulating people to buy things or get them to do, what you want is get them, you know, whatever it is, raise money. You want to make positive policy changes. 00:04:26 Speaker 2: So that was the idea behind it. 00:04:28 Speaker 3: It had and there was a big push in the Obama government where he hired a lot of those people cast Sunstein, Richard Taylor, and my boss at at Harvard Sendel Monathan. 00:04:38 Speaker 2: And they tried a bunch of stuff. Some work, some didn't. 00:04:41 Speaker 1: I got lost there. Tried a bunch of stuff on what I don't understand what you mean. 00:04:45 Speaker 3: They tried a bunch of interventions based on psychological insights. So I'll give you another example of what they actually did. So, what happens if to save energy if you send people a letter and in the letter you tell them your neighbors are say a lot of energy, they're not using a lot of water, they're keeping their electricity building. 00:05:04 Speaker 1: This is like social pressure when you see how much they're water they're using. Yeah, and you're like, you don't have three kids. Some bitch doesn't have three kids, so why are you. Yeah, this is a big shot. 00:05:17 Speaker 3: So this is social pressure and they're trying to get it. They're trying to use it to get people to use less. 00:05:22 Speaker 4: They also do They did stuff with the size of soda cups, like if you want people to ingest less sugar, instead of putting a forty four ounce cup out because they're gonna drink. They're gonna drink. It's not like they're going to drink forty four ounces of soda no matter how big the cup is, or like the size of a tray and a cafeteria. 00:05:42 Speaker 3: Or you go to a store and they put the you know, the all the high sugar things right near the cash register because they want you to make an impulse buy. They said, well, what can we do with that? You know what if we put something that's good for you there, which doesn't. 00:05:54 Speaker 1: Say broad I don't want to spend too much. Times they brought in at like on a policy basis, the administration broadened people who would, for lack of a better word, be good at like manipulating the public to have behaviors that they wish they had, absolutely and to counteract what we have to put the seminary counter. 00:06:17 Speaker 4: Corporations are doing this to get you to make certain choices. Sure was Yeah, of leveling the playing field in. 00:06:24 Speaker 1: Terms of coffee shop people are doing it. Yeah, because when you get the tip functions, they're like, you could be like the tip would be like seventy percent or other and you gotta be like, oh, now I'm in a situation where I got to. 00:06:38 Speaker 3: Hit other You know, there are stores in New York now in New York City where you go and you're buying something at the counter and they say, dude, what how much do you want to tip at the counter? 00:06:48 Speaker 1: You have not like I'm I'm actually a human. 00:06:50 Speaker 2: I am not tipping. 00:06:52 Speaker 1: I don't want to get in some counter, but you want to their day. We were when we were on We're going to tip our kids to visit their We were in the restaurant and in the restaurant there's like the price of the menu and I wish I'd take a picture of it. A very fine print in the bottom is that we don't want to because of inflation. We don't want to change our menus prices. So unless you ask otherwise, all of this is elevated by fourteen percent. But you can request to have that not happen. That's wild. I am not kidding you. On the bottom of the menu and I ate there. We were staying in a hotel. I ate there probably three times before my father in law noticed. 00:07:43 Speaker 2: That's weird. 00:07:44 Speaker 1: That's weird. 00:07:44 Speaker 2: So it says eight dollars, but it's really whatever at ninety. 00:07:47 Speaker 1: Like you think your omelet is twelve, your omelet is they're saying we're putting a fort unless you ask otherwise. That's actually fourteen percent more because of inflation. But we don't want to change the menu prices. 00:08:00 Speaker 2: That's too weird. 00:08:01 Speaker 1: It's true. Words guys like you, like you man into the seminal war story. Yea, dude, here's what I here's what I got. I love your book. It does. The story does two things. The book does two things. The book captures all The book validates all of your sort of pre what not your the book. The book validates one's all of one's preconceived notions about the brutality and crime of the Indian Wars. But simultaneously. It turns every preconceived notion you have about the Indian Wars on its head. And then and I'll explain it's like and getting into the story, you have to come to grip with. Here's a group of Native Americans that kind of kind of had slaves. This history involves a Native American that was a West Point graduate that went to fight against Native Americans. It involves a person that is able to ally himself with Native American forces, who is a freed slave fighting alongside Native Americans who at the same time the same individuals that at the same time kind of have some slaves. It involves a Native American war leader who is one eighth maybe one eighth one eighth Native American that is mostly genetically not culturally right, not spiritually, but like through weird circumstances, is like genetically a Western European. It's there is a lot, a lot to up to like unpack in this story. 00:10:13 Speaker 3: Yeah, it's such a it's such a complex story. 00:10:19 Speaker 2: How to set the table for it? 00:10:20 Speaker 1: Yeah, I know, I know. If you don't have an idea, I'll tell you what I think you should do. 00:10:24 Speaker 4: How did you I mean, I'm curious tell me you got ahead. Yeah, how we go from behavioral economics to I wondered. 00:10:31 Speaker 1: Why did you write the book? I was wondered about that. 00:10:34 Speaker 3: Yeah, well it The Bridge is my second book, which is twelve Seconds of Silence, which is completely within this genre, which is historical narrative nonfiction with a ton of archive work. 00:10:45 Speaker 2: I did a lot of original archive work. 00:10:47 Speaker 3: Yeah, some of some of the archive work I found contradicts some of the assumptions that we've had about the story. And there's there's a lot of things that are that are set the Yeah, zoom in on this bill. There's a lot of things that are cential notes. 00:11:06 Speaker 2: Yeah. 00:11:07 Speaker 1: So if you're one of those guys that looks at the book and he's like, I can't read that, it's too long, don't read the note I sat down, but it makes it like a look at how then how look attractive it is. 00:11:14 Speaker 4: I sat down with it twenty four hours ago and I thought, there's no way I'm going to get through this, and then I flipped to the the end of the actual last chapter and I thought, yeah, it's a pretty good chance. 00:11:24 Speaker 3: I'll tell you why I did that, and then I'll answer your question about how I got to it because of because I think one of the things that Clay said on his first podcast is like, imagine if somebody from a foreign country came and observed you, and maybe they had a political agenda, and almost all of the documentation about you is from these outside observers. 00:11:46 Speaker 2: What kind of an evidence base would you be dealing with. 00:11:49 Speaker 1: That's an interesting point. 00:11:50 Speaker 3: So that's the kind of evidence space that's and and the evidence base is messy, and it's full of contradictions, and it's full of biases, and it's full of errors. It's the newspapers at the time are making stuff up. 00:12:03 Speaker 2: So there's a lot of mythology. 00:12:04 Speaker 3: So as I began to get my way closer to it, I thought the story was I realized I had to kind of do a separate book in the back for the academics and say, Okay, here's where I think this academic says this. I don't think that's right. Here's my evidence, and I'm going to lay it all out because I wanted to keep the front of the book just a story. I came to it just as a storyteller and just wanting to enjoy the story, explore the archives, myself very quickly, and then I'll return to your point. There's a great quote that says the past is a foreign country, and it comes from a nineteen fifties Edwardian novel. But there's a scholar named David Lowan Lowenthal who did a famous book with that title, The Past is a Foreign Country, and it's really about history and then heritage as mythologized history, but the idea of a history book and writing and reading about history as an exploration. I know you've traveled a lot of traveled, some going to a foreign place at first kind of being overwhelmed by the weirdness and the difference of it, and slowly starting to pick up clues as to what these different things mean that are new to you, and then also having that experience reflect back on you. So you're exploring the world, and then it's also reflecting on how you what is normal there? 00:13:28 Speaker 2: Do it like this? 00:13:28 Speaker 3: I thought this was normal, So it's changing your view of yourself as you're exploring. 00:13:33 Speaker 2: I think in that way, it's a lot like travel writing. 00:13:36 Speaker 3: So I came to it with that with that goal to just selfishly explore the story that I was interested in and do as much archive work as I could. After I did this, this book on science, my first book, I kind of got disenamored with it a little bit for various reasons that are not very interesting. But I love writing with the psychological science. Yeah, but I love writing and I love narrative writing. I kind of started off wanting to do fiction before I got into nonfiction, and so I. 00:14:13 Speaker 2: Thought, well, this is a genre. 00:14:14 Speaker 3: I really like Eric Larsen's books and David Grant stuff, like, I love this genre. Maybe this is a place I can reinvent myself a little. So Twelve Seconds of Silence is I'm very proud of that book. It's about World War two and these group of scientists. So science was kind of the bridge from the first book to the second book. And it's about a group of scientists who World War two who invent this new weapon to shoot down airplanes and they take down the Nazi super weapon with it. So I fell in love with archive work during that process. Like you're digging in the crates, you're going to these you're going to the library at Congress, you're going to the NARA, the National Archives and Records Administration. 00:14:52 Speaker 2: It's kind of like a treasure hunt. 00:14:55 Speaker 3: And you know, so just a couple things in here that nobody has. They didn't have Abraham's Indian name, right. If you look it up online, it's going to be wrong. I mean, I haven't changed the Wikipedia. I actually think that he was born among the seminoles and not a former slaves from Pensacola, and I have good evidence for that in the back of the book. 00:15:17 Speaker 2: So there's a lot of things that I add in, a lot of things. 00:15:19 Speaker 3: That I discovered new archival evidence that historians get to debate and disagree with and move forward in that way. But so I fell in love with it with my second book, and then I just found this story and jumped in and it was a different archival challenge because of where the archives are for this story. The last one, it was almost all in DC, so I moved to DC for it this one. All of the archives, the best archives are really written by soldiers, either in the army or they're militia or they're volunteers, and all of those archives are all across America. I mean, there's some military files in DC. There's some important people that have stuff at the Library of Congress Jackson, like the main General Thomas Jessup, But all the soldiers diaries and those are really the best records. It's like state historical societies and universities. So you know, I went poking around, like main historical says, oh, here's a journal that's not been sight of it for So that was that was fun and I love that part of it. And then you kind of sit with all of these contradictions and you try to distill the story that that you know makes sense as far as you can make sense of it. 00:16:29 Speaker 2: That's awesome. 00:16:30 Speaker 1: Can you start by When I was kicking around how to get into this, I thought, let's start with the thing that was most confusing to me. Yeah, and then I'm just going to trust that it's going to be a thing that's very confusing to other people. I always thought that. 00:16:50 Speaker 2: There was a. 00:16:53 Speaker 1: Tribe, and I just assumed the tribe had been in existence for a thousand years, that there was a try of people that were the Seminole. Uh, can you explain what how like how that group of people came to Coalesce, where that name came from, who they were? What you're when you say seminal? What are you saying? 00:17:17 Speaker 2: Sure it's a good question. 00:17:19 Speaker 3: So, semino comes from the Spanish cimarron, which is sometimes translated as runaway or untamed. I think it was originally in reference to undomesticated cattle life, you know, horses, I think, and to some degree, the the Seminole tribe of Florida doesn't like the runaway designation untamed. 00:17:46 Speaker 1: But just quickly that that is a thing that that that is very common in European nomenclature for tribal peoples. Is we use used, used a lot of words that were not their words. Yeah, but we'd be allied with or make contact with the tribe. Yeah, the tribe would be like, well, I'll tell you what I call them, and that would become the name. 00:18:13 Speaker 2: There's a word for that. 00:18:14 Speaker 3: It's called an exonym name given by an outside group. And then to some degree those names can be reclaimed, Yeah, and they take them back. But to answer your question, you know, originally there's an estimate of twenty five thousand indigenous people in Florida. This is at Spanish contact, those including the Timaqwans like some others, those people were wiped out, you know, those people were gone by the time the Seminoles come down from disease from military conflicts. The people that became the Seminole and even the Mikazuki tribe which is down there, come from the Creek Confederacy at Creek another exonym the Muskogie people, uh. And these are kind of loose confederations. And what happens with the Seminoles is you have Americans settlers coming down pressuring people in what is now Georgia and Alabama, and you have the elements of the Creek Confederacy starting to acculturate. 00:19:19 Speaker 2: Starting you have some intermarrying. 00:19:22 Speaker 1: Tell people what that means, the culture. 00:19:23 Speaker 3: A culture meaning they're starting to adopt the customs of the Anglos and then the Americans. And eventually you have Creek enslavers running plantations at scale. So they're you know, growing crops and they're having slaves at that scale. 00:19:42 Speaker 1: I mean, that's the degree of a culturation people of Creek descent like, yes, okay, Creek descent have but that, but they're the own deeded land. 00:19:52 Speaker 2: A portion of them. No it's not needed, no, okay. 00:19:55 Speaker 1: So they're running they're running plantain operations on open on claimed lands. 00:20:01 Speaker 3: Yes, I see, yes, so, but so you have this this split within the Creek Confederacy, this schism, and it's sort of continuing, and then in the seventeen nineties it sort of becomes even. 00:20:15 Speaker 2: More dramatic. 00:20:17 Speaker 3: As to are we going to adopt these new ways, which you know, it's like, okay, we've got hunting rifles, our clothes are changing, We're buying things at markets. You know, the things that women used to make were now we're now purchasing. 00:20:32 Speaker 1: They. 00:20:32 Speaker 3: You know, are we going to shift fully into agriculture were they were growing things? 00:20:36 Speaker 2: But you know, also hunting. 00:20:38 Speaker 3: So there are all these pressures that are changing the culture, and of course the settlers are pushing them out, and there's military conflicts and all that. 00:20:46 Speaker 2: The Seminoles, the. 00:20:47 Speaker 3: Main seminal force, the main body of the people who came to be called Seminoles, came in three phases. 00:20:54 Speaker 1: Would you mind tie in this real quick? Yeah, known American history, just just to remind like, where are we in terms of the post revolution? 00:21:03 Speaker 2: Yeah? 00:21:04 Speaker 3: Yeah, So the first wave of people that became seminoles is seventeen hundred and seventeen fifty, so this is pre revolution and they broke apart from the Creek Confederacy and decided we're going to go with the old ways. 00:21:19 Speaker 2: We're not going to change. 00:21:20 Speaker 1: So they're having this debate about us do we adopt what would become American ways. But they're having this conversation before America exists. 00:21:31 Speaker 3: As America, as America is coming to exist, and then after the revolution as well. So one of the dramatic things that happens. So anyway, quickly, I'll quickly answer the immigration thing, because you brought up an important point, and then I'll get back to this creek split seventeen fifty, another wave around seventeen ninety, another wave around eighteen fourteen. You have a bunch of groups down in Florida at this time that Americans all call seminoles, even though the Americans knew they were not all setminals. So you have seminoles. The main two to remember are seminoles and mikazuki. You also have some people who still identify as creeks down there. You have some tallasses, some yuciese, some Tallahasses, and in American newspapers they're all called seminoles. I think in part because it makes it easier to sell the treaty if it's. 00:22:23 Speaker 2: All one people, all one people agreed to this. 00:22:25 Speaker 3: Treaty to leave, but really it's fragmented and at the time they don't identify as one group. Really, you know, I have something that Abraham wrote at the chief Abraham wrote at the time, where he's listing the different groups. Now, later after the Seminole Wars, those groups begin to reclaim that term and identify all as seminos. But at the time they were not thinking of themselves that way, even though it appears that way in American newspapers. And of course this causes a lot of confusion because if you have a split between the seminos and Mikazuki's you call them all seminoles, you can't understand what's going on. 00:23:03 Speaker 2: You can't read the situation. 00:23:04 Speaker 3: Yeah, so there's a lot of confusion that comes from, of course, the generals, the people closest to the story. 00:23:10 Speaker 2: They know very well, they're highly aware. 00:23:13 Speaker 1: But in a lot of it, they know they're dealing with different groups, different leaders, with different motivations, with different objectives. But the story is we're fighting seminoles. 00:23:22 Speaker 2: That's exactly right. 00:23:23 Speaker 3: Yeah, the greatest schism in one of the great schism you know, there's a war, of course, in thirteen eighteen fourteen called the Creek War. 00:23:35 Speaker 2: In a way, it's a civil war. 00:23:37 Speaker 3: But going back to the seventeen nineties is a very interesting part of this story where the Creeks are allied with the British, the Upper Creeks, i think, and they're attacking against they're fighting the Americans during the Revolution, and they're attacking what's there. 00:23:52 Speaker 2: What's there? 00:23:53 Speaker 3: It's plantations, and they're taking POW's, which is the old way. 00:23:57 Speaker 2: You would always take POW's. 00:23:59 Speaker 3: You didn't care what's in color they were, and you would either kill them, adopt them into the tribe, or make them servants, not agricultural workers on a farm, but they would be servants and their children would be free. Their children could be part of the tribe, which is important. And the Seminoles still practice that as late as seventeen seventy four. Now the Creeks start to change and in about seventeen ninety Okay, well, if we're going to practice the other way, then enslavement is going to be by skin color, and it's going to be transgenerational. So I'm going to own your children, and we're going to do it by skin color. And that is a radical change. In Greek culture, there was a. 00:24:39 Speaker 1: Term that had to look up. I've seen it a thousand times. I don't even know how to pronounce it. Yeah, chattel chat like chattle slavery. Yeah, and it was like i'd seen that where I never looked at up reading your book, I look it up and it's like this concept that I own you. Yeah, you're my servant and your child is my servant. 00:25:00 Speaker 2: It's dramatic. That's dramatic. 00:25:02 Speaker 1: It's an interesting distinction. 00:25:03 Speaker 3: Yeah, and so I think a number of the people who became black seminoles were children of POW's who escaped down to the seminoles who had a more open view of this. As Greek culture is changing, that's for sure part of the story. So yeah, it's really the pressure from the north and then these various groups coming down and identifying generally as seminoles, even though they're not exactly that yet. 00:25:31 Speaker 1: Yeah. Where where does as these groups get pushed down? Oh, you know, there's nothing I want to top before we get there, because it's part of the pushing down. Can you explain the was it the Red shirts or Red arrows? What was it? 00:25:46 Speaker 4: Red sticks? 00:25:47 Speaker 1: Red stick? 00:25:47 Speaker 3: I will, but you brought up something and I didn't respond to it. Chattle slavery. So and then I'll get to the red sticks. So chattle slavery. Right, I own, you own your children, but it's basically your your piece of property. And what they wanted to do after especially after eighteen thirty one, when you have Nat Turner's rebellion, it. 00:26:06 Speaker 2: Was illegal to teach the slave to read. 00:26:09 Speaker 3: So the rules are basically I can tell you I can split apart your family. You're not going to have any knowledge. I don't want you knowing anything. You're not going to be allowed to read. Right, You're not going to be allowed to travel freely. And these rules very very on different plantations. You can't travel without a pass, and you can't accumulate wealth. And then if you look at the rights of the black seminoles, almost all of them worldly, they speak two or three languages, they have vast wealth, they're traveling freely, and there's a rule, according to Wilie Thompson, who's Andrew Jackson's Indian agent, that it is illegal to sell them. And their constant promise is not to split up the families. Now, laws get broken, but that's apparently a law now, when Americans take. 00:26:56 Speaker 2: Over Florida, you have this population. 00:26:59 Speaker 3: I would say there's five hundred black seminoles estimated. I would say about one hundred are servants by the old Muskogi way, which is not hard labor, and it's sort of a system of tribute where you get a portion of the corn that you grow, which sounds to me like attacks more than slavery. And then you have about four hundred who are claiming to be slaves who the quote is they all pretended to be free. 00:27:24 Speaker 2: I'm all pretended to be purchased. 00:27:27 Speaker 3: And if they're children of POW's from the revolution, they're not going to have any papers proving that. Of course, the Creeks can't claim can't prove that they own them. So in a way there they are more free to go down to Florida, but in a way they're vulnerable because there's no paperwork. So you have when America takes over Florida, it becomes the territory of Florida in eighteen twenty one. It's different than the Spanish policy, where you really had three groups of people, and it was pretty easy to free yourself if you're an enslaved person, Florida doesn't. 00:28:03 Speaker 2: Want to do that. 00:28:04 Speaker 3: They want to have and in fact, when they write their constitution it becomes a state. In eighteen forty five, they try to ban all African Americans who are free from entering Florida. They're not allowed to do that, but they tried to do. 00:28:17 Speaker 1: That because they wanted to clean it up. They wanted to clean up all the confusion. Well who was who? 00:28:24 Speaker 3: You don't yeah, you don't want They didn't want free black people there as a bad example to the enslaved population. 00:28:33 Speaker 2: That was their idea. 00:28:34 Speaker 3: So the black seminos are claiming to be slaves in an environment where you cannot have a large free black population. In a way, they are using it as protection. And I'm sure there was variation. 00:28:44 Speaker 1: So that'd rather be these guys quote slaves than your slave slave. 00:28:49 Speaker 4: And you don't want to be vulnerable to being enslaved exactly if you're already someone else's property, that the eyes of the outsiders that they can't take you. 00:29:00 Speaker 3: That's the game. So Abraham owns his son Reni as a slave. 00:29:04 Speaker 4: Yeah, I thought that was the paperwork that when they have a kid, they establish all this paper that their kids are owned by them. 00:29:10 Speaker 3: Chief Mikonopee sells the child and you go and you write it down in the record books of the local administrators. There's a family that goes and tries to write down the free status of their children in three different record books. So they're trying to protect their children. They know a day is going to come that claims are going to be made on them, and they want to be able to say, look at the record books at Palaca, at Fort Brook or you know, Tampa Bay. So that's what's happening mostly. And you have historians in the past who have said, oh, they say they're all slaves. 00:29:44 Speaker 2: They are all slaves. It's more complicated. 00:29:47 Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah, uh, I still want to get to the red Sticks, but I want the slavery thing fer me. Yeah, yeah, just because this becomes a big part. Yeah, you'd mentioned that there's almost like a reverse there's like a Southern railroad. Yeah, where if you in the Deep South, if you're an escaping slave, it's understood among slave communities that an option, if you can't get north, an option is to get south. 00:30:18 Speaker 2: Yeah, that's such. 00:30:19 Speaker 3: It's Yeah, so as early as I want to say something like a sixteen eighty five. It's in it's the late seventeenth century. The Spanish adopt a policy in which an escaped slave can come down, say that they're Catholic, join the army, and they will back up their rights. So there's this deal that's going down. If you can get down there, if you're willing to fight, the authorities down there will recognize your status. I mean we do this in the United States military today, right get you can get a fast track to citizenship if you serve in the armed forces, in the American Armed Forces. This is a very old deal, going back to antiquity, soldiery for so rights. And then some people are coming down to Florida and leaving. You know, you can get you can get down to the Caribbean, you can get down to Spanish Cuba. 00:31:09 Speaker 2: So that's happening as well. 00:31:12 Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, it's it's you know, the interior of Florida, and then we'll give back to the resistics. 00:31:18 Speaker 2: The interior of Florida is not settled. 00:31:21 Speaker 3: It's there's no minerals to extract, and the Spanish don't try to settle it, and neither do the British. I mean, there are some Spanish missions, but it's really the coasts. It's kind of a strategic buffer, you know. You know, Spain comes, they settle Saint Augustine. 00:31:41 Speaker 2: I think it's fifteen. 00:31:42 Speaker 3: Sixty five or sixty three, something like that, and they lose it to Britain very quickly because they side with the French and the French and Indian War. French lose, Britain takes over, and the Spanish side with US in the American Revolution. They attack British Florida both from Spanish Louisiana and from Cuba. They take it back over, but it's still a strategic buffer. It's like you don't really want to live there. It's like Greenland, you want to It's the Greenland of its day. 00:32:14 Speaker 2: So so to the red Sticks. 00:32:17 Speaker 1: I got a comment about, yeah, go ahead, the how in your description of Florida. That is funny because you hear you have these like the e Like if you look at a map now, you'd be like, oh, it's the eastern US. Yeah, and you haven't in your head that there's like Boston and Philadelphia and Charleston. You're like, that's the whole settled part. Yeah, by these dates. Yeah, And it made me think of MacArthur had this approach in World War Two where he would just shoot through areas and just pass everybody up and grab cities, and he'd be like, we'll sort that out later. Yeah, like instead of instead of rolling along on a unified front, he would now and then just bust. 00:32:59 Speaker 2: Through it sounds like a blitz creek and. 00:33:01 Speaker 1: Then yeah, and then be like, well, no, I know, we drove past tons of people, but we'll just get them later. Yeah, Like I just want to keep moving. Yeah. And you think of in a little bit like when you imagine your mind's eye the settlement in United statesification of the continent. You imagine it being this line, yes, but it has all these like Missus, yes, missus Florida. For a while it misses the Mississippi delta, and then just kind of go like, we'll get to that later. Then the Great Plains. You know, San Francisco's a big city, so like, oh, they're done, they're done conquering the thing. Like, oh no, we left off a huge we left off the Great Plains. We'll come back and get to that later, you know. Yeah. 00:33:41 Speaker 3: By by eighteen thirty five, you have everything up to the Mississippi except maybe parts of like what I don't know what the Mississippi does when it gets super far north. It may go into Minnesota or something. But basically it's Michigan and Florida are the only places that are not states. And Florida is the least settled, and it's the most sparsely populate populated. You have fifteen million people in the US at that time, you have. 00:34:10 Speaker 2: Almost all of it is rural, really small cities. 00:34:13 Speaker 3: New York's like two hundred thousand, seventy percent of people are working on farms. It's like most of the country is farming and hunting and fishing, and and Florida is really these cities and you have you know, in twenty we take it over. We take over Florida. It becomes the territory of Florida. In eighteen twenty one. One of the first things they do is they move the tribes into an Indian reservation in the center of Florida. 00:34:42 Speaker 2: But we don't. 00:34:43 Speaker 3: It's unmapped. The middle of Florida is unmapped. We have maps for less than half of it. There's you know, there's a quote, we know less about the interior of Florida than the interior of China. At some point in the war, there's a general who has to go to a bookstore to buy a map of Florida. That's the best map he can get of the territory. So Florida is lagging and and you know, the bottom half A lot of it's because it's not good for farming. You know, the bottom half of it. You've been to Lake Okachobee, I think below that the natural everglades, Like, you're not farming there. So the Red Sticks is you know, there's this is about the split in the Creek Confederacy and Osciola comes from a red comes from the Red Sticks. And they fought against Andrew Jackson. They're the upper Creeks. The lower Creeks were called the White Sticks. By the way, red sticks. Baton rouge the red Sticks, oh yeah, and they fight and Jackson fights with the White Sticks against the Red Sticks. 00:35:45 Speaker 1: There's there's the are these colors related to skin color? Totally coincidental, coincidental. 00:35:50 Speaker 3: It's the Red War Club that they had. I guess it was painted red, got it? Yeah, baton the stick, red Stick. And so there's the Battle of Horseshoe Bend. I want to say it's eighteen fourteen where Jackson and the White Sticks have a resounding defeat and they kill eight hundred Red Sticks. There's reportedly twenty or so survivors, and you know, widows and orphans come down in Florida and Oscioli is part of that group, so. 00:36:23 Speaker 2: You know he's in Florida. 00:36:25 Speaker 3: Then Jackson, you know, the guy who killed his people, becomes president and he's got to sit in these meetings where Jackson's representative says, you know, please leave, I'm your friend, I'm trying to help you. 00:36:35 Speaker 2: And so you know, he. 00:36:37 Speaker 3: Comes out of this deep scar of seeing real violence when he's young. He comes down to Florida when he's ten. So he's carrying this profound trauma of seeing his people split in two. Yeah, and he starts to see it again happen in Florida, and you know he won't he won't stand for it. 00:36:57 Speaker 1: One thing that Clay got right in his series on the Seminal Wars and Asola is Clay starts it out with John Lee Anderson's Seminal Wind, tell Me the famous song Blow Blow Blow Seminal Wind, and Clay's favorite part of Seminal Wind is when the guy sits on a cypress stump and he can hear the voice of Osceola cry and this was a huge, like huge country song, and it would be probably my guess would be that that would be the same way we recently interviewed by individual about uh, the Edmund Fitzgerald and like this, Ah Gordon Lightfoot's the wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald is many people's passageway into knowing that there is a thing, a shipwreck called the Edmund Fitzgerald. I would say seminal wind for many people was probably there introduction to these terms for people that far away from Florida. 00:38:04 Speaker 3: Yeah, and Aciola too, you know, he's that he's still the icon of the Florida Seminal football team. 00:38:10 Speaker 1: So explain his background, Osiola, because he's gonna as we're gonna get into the wars, he emerges as a primary figure and you focus on you might as well do this. Yeah you focus on Osciola, Yeah, you focus on Abraham. So can you give us some biographical sketch of these two like really different folks? 00:38:29 Speaker 2: Sure? 00:38:30 Speaker 3: Yeah, So, so I broke down a little what he came out of as a as a boy. He's Creek, he allies himself with a powerful mikazuki chief named Sam Jones or Abyaka. We called him Sam Jones, and he's a military enforcer figure for him. 00:38:56 Speaker 2: Uh, he's one. 00:38:57 Speaker 3: Of the most famous Native American in American history. I mean he's everywhere in the press, He's in European papers. 00:39:07 Speaker 2: He becomes in his day. 00:39:08 Speaker 3: In his day, in his day, he becomes this mythologized figure. His character is how would I describe his character? He's an angry young man. 00:39:25 Speaker 4: When we meet him in the book is when he's in prison for five or six I mean, that's a vivid. 00:39:33 Speaker 2: Yeah, anecdote, I could start there. It's a memorable introduction day. 00:39:36 Speaker 1: Yeah. 00:39:36 Speaker 3: So Andrew Jackson sends down this Indian agent, Wiley Thompson, down to Florida, down to this place called Fort King which is present day Okala, and Thompson's job is really to convince them to leave without. 00:39:49 Speaker 2: A war, because they don't want home, because they don't want to spend the money on a war. 00:39:54 Speaker 3: So it's cheaper to send someone down and kind of try to convince them I'm your friend, and if not, we'll fight a war. But we're really friends and I'm a nice federal guy, and these locals. Geez, these locials, they're kind of corrupt. 00:40:06 Speaker 2: Actually. 00:40:07 Speaker 3: At one point he says, you've been cheated in the past by these locals. But you know, all bad men are not yet dead, which I wanted for the title all bad Men. 00:40:15 Speaker 2: They wouldn't let me have it. All bad men are not yet dead. 00:40:19 Speaker 3: So anyway, he sends him down here and and Asciola, who knows who Jackson is, who knows American intentions, has to sit in these council meetings and listen to these letters written by Jackson, saying you know, yeah, so it's like I got to sit here and listen to this. So he storms into Wilie Thompson's office in I want to say April eighteen thirty five, it's before the war begins, by by eight months, and he cusses them out, and he says, you know, you say that we have to leave, like you have to leave. You say that it's going to be bad for us, It's gonna be bad for you. 00:41:02 Speaker 1: You know. 00:41:03 Speaker 2: There's a quote. 00:41:04 Speaker 3: I'm not sure if it's true because there's so much mythologized, but I put it in. But it appears in nineteen a little later after the wordy eighteen fifty three, and he says, I'm gonna I'm gonna kill you, and I'm gonna leave your body out in the rain and the sun is going to turn your skin black and the vultures are going to pick the flesh off of you. 00:41:22 Speaker 1: And yeah, which was as we're getting too, it is oddly. 00:41:28 Speaker 2: Prophetic, that's what happens. Not oddly prophetic, it's what happens. 00:41:34 Speaker 3: So this is the second time, or at least in Thompson's records, he says, I had warned him before, you can't talk to me that way. And so I see, oh that he doesn't do anything when I. 00:41:46 Speaker 1: Saw Thompson says, I've told you before, don't come and say this to me. 00:41:49 Speaker 3: In his records, he when he's explaining this incident, he said, I had warned him before, you can't insult me this way. You can't threaten me in this way. And then he said he did it again, So it had that happened before. He doesn't do anything. 00:42:03 Speaker 1: When yeah, so on this big well known tirade, Yes, and Thompson says, this isn't the first time. 00:42:10 Speaker 3: It's not the first time this has happened, and so he locks him up. He doesn't personally do it. 00:42:14 Speaker 2: He waits till Aciola leaves, and two hundred yards outside of the agency house, he has four guards wrestle him to the ground and they struggle, and they lock him up for six days and Asiola is stewing in what passes for a prison, they call it the guardhouse. And the next day he says, Okay, I've changed my mind. 00:42:35 Speaker 4: Yeah, yeah, well that's jumping. But yeah, he can't convince him that he's calmed down. So he's like, send this other guy. I'll convince him that I've calmed down, and then he'll convince you that I've calmed down. 00:42:51 Speaker 3: Because this is all just so Yeah, that's a good correction. I don't know, because that actually becomes important. 00:42:57 Speaker 4: This was a very memorable story for me. 00:43:00 Speaker 3: Yeah, that becomes important. So there's a there's a there's a Greek cattleman who's a chief, whose name is Charlie Amathla, and he's faced with the same decision everyone else is, which is you know, leave or it's war more or less? Do you want to put your family through that. He's got two daughters, he's got a seven year old kid. 00:43:17 Speaker 2: He's creak. 00:43:17 Speaker 3: He knows what happened in present day Alabama and Georgia. You know, what do you want to risk? Do you want to risk it? Are you gonna put your face? 00:43:25 Speaker 1: You know? 00:43:25 Speaker 3: So he decides to leave. Now some literatures call him a friendly chief. It's not the correct word. But but he's decided to leave. And so Aciola says, bring Charlie Amathla. You trust him. He's leaving, and I'll talk to him. 00:43:38 Speaker 2: And he does. 00:43:39 Speaker 3: He convinced that there's no record of what they said. But but Charlie A Mafler goes to Thompson and he says, you know, I'm sure he gets it. He just had a he just lost his temper. But he understands that he's going to go and you should release him. And he'll come back with eighty of his people and they'll they'll, you know, true to their professions. They will pledge that they're going to go west. They're gonna immigrate with the rest of us. And that's what happens. And not to jump not to jump ahead, but Oscila kills Amafla in front of at least one of his daughters as a warning to other leaders, not to break off, not to leave, because he doesn't want to happen what happened in Alabama and Georgia, What happened. 00:44:21 Speaker 2: To the Creek Confederates. 00:44:22 Speaker 1: How does he kill him? 00:44:23 Speaker 3: There are a few different stories, some of them seem to me to be clearly made up. The famous version, so he goes with Abraham, Chief Abraham, who's the chief of the Black Seminoles. 00:44:35 Speaker 2: All the stories put them together. They go to a Mathla. 00:44:38 Speaker 1: Either. 00:44:38 Speaker 3: One story is they meet him at a Mathla's house and Abraham says, you really shouldn't go. You want to stay, fight with us, keep your army with us. You can't have the army size cut in half, which is what would have happened. And eight of the thirteen chiefs, you know, at first, agreed to go. So you're gonna have your fighting force cut in half. So Abraham says to go. He's trying to convince him. Acola tries to convince him he's not going to change his mind. By one version, Aciola raises the rifle to him and Abraham hits the rifle in the air, preventing his murder. I don't know if that's true. Another version is he killed Imathla on the road. So one of the things that they were going to do before the immigration is they agreed to buy all the seminal cattle. So they arranged an auction and I think it was going to be December first, and we're going to have an auction of all your cattle. So you because you can't bring that with you. So the story goes, who would be just go ahead, sorry, not at all. 00:45:40 Speaker 2: Who's going to buy the candle? 00:45:42 Speaker 1: Locals? White folks? 00:45:43 Speaker 3: Yeah, okay, yeah, yeah, you got You have sixteen thousand white settlers there. 00:45:49 Speaker 1: Since we're making you all leave. Yeah, and you can't bring your cattle, give you your new neighbors. Yeah, these white folks buy your cattle, and they're at a reasonable press. 00:45:57 Speaker 4: And these people have been sitting there for you know, a decade or more, kind of rubbing their hands, waiting for the government to do something about the tribes. 00:46:08 Speaker 2: Yes, they have that's right. 00:46:10 Speaker 3: They're certainly ready for this, and they're ready to become a state and they want to settle the state. So in their minds, that means the native population has to go. So one of the stories is in Mathla was paid for his cattle he's taking gold back away from the auction, and Abraham is with and Aciola shoots him and takes the gold and scatters the gold over his body, and he goes to Abraham, who's in danger of being enslaved, and he says, see this as the price of your blood in a way, see this as the price of your freedom. The problem with that story is it happens five days before the auction. So yeah, So the story that I believe, and there's a it's a very mundane story, and it circulates, i want to say, in Jacksonville right afterwards, primary source, and it says that he shot him while he was gathering his cattle for the auction, in front of one. 00:47:08 Speaker 1: With the calendar. 00:47:09 Speaker 2: Yeah, it's more plausible. It's not as dramatic, guns him down, guns him down. 00:47:14 Speaker 3: And this becomes controversial, and I think it's to some extent controversial to this day in the Semino tribe of Florida, you know, and Mafla has ancestors too as descendants too. 00:47:27 Speaker 2: How are we supposed to look at this? On one hand, you understand where Aciola is coming from. 00:47:32 Speaker 3: He's trying, you know, he wants to fight. On the other hand, You're going to kill a guy in front of his daughter who's trying to avoid war. It's tough, but that's what happened. 00:47:44 Speaker 1: Should we take this up to let's finish up with Thompson? Sure, before we tell the story of Abraham. 00:47:50 Speaker 2: Yeah, do you do you want me to kill Thompson? 00:47:52 Speaker 1: Sure? Yeah. So we already kind of broke it by saying that. He says, here's what's going to happen. Yeah. 00:48:00 Speaker 2: So so Osciola gets out of jail. 00:48:04 Speaker 3: As soon as Thompson hears a body Mathla's murder, he knows it's game over, and he writes Washington and he says military force is going to be needed more or less. I failed, like, these guys aren't going to leave will Ford not happening. And now that now that he did that, it has the result that they know Ostila didn't do this alone. I'm sure that superiors to him told him Killy Mafla. In any case, this wasn't a rogue action. I don't think he had complete consensus, but it's not him out on his own. So yeah, And so that you have a number of the of the people who are going to leave, who are going to immigrate. 00:48:44 Speaker 2: They stay. 00:48:46 Speaker 3: So it does it does have the effect that he wants. So Thompson says, okay, I failed, and he's kind of waiting around to go back home to Georgia. And that's when you have I have a few of the most dramatic events of the war and in the book happen at the same time, one of which is the assassination of Wiley Thompson by Aciola and forty Mikazuki warriors, or the killing at Fort King. They have a war council and you have troops coming up from Tampa Bay, from Fort Brook. You have one hundred troops that are marching up what's called the Fort King Road. It's right through the heart of the Indian reservation, and they're planning to attack the Seminoles and the Black Seminoles. And they have a date for the attack December thirty first, And so they meet in council. 00:49:36 Speaker 2: They say, okay, we've got two priorities. 00:49:39 Speaker 3: We've got to get Thompson out of the way, and we've got to handle Daid and these one hundred and eight men who are marching up towards our reservation. And Aciola says, I'll take Thompson, he's my friend, and I will see to him. 00:49:55 Speaker 2: And so he goes up to you know, he's ordered to attack. 00:49:59 Speaker 3: The for only has fifty soldiers at the time, but he waits in ambush. 00:50:04 Speaker 2: He waits for over a day. 00:50:07 Speaker 3: He later says he lured Thompson's spirit to him. He waits in the woods near So there's the agency house where Thompson lives and works, and then there's a little Suttler store, which is a civilian like storekeeper guy, and he's got some clerks. And that's some yards maybe eight hundred yards or down away from the fort. So Thompson and the companion, I think an officer, they're having dinner. They decide to have a smoke after dinner, Let's have a little stroll with our cigar. And he walks down near the Sutler store near these woods where Aciola and forty warriors are waiting, and Aciola's war cry is heard. It's apparently a distinctive shrill war cry. There's two other chiefs there who are denoted by chiefs by their attire, but nobody knows who they are. Aciola has already gotten famous for killing Imatla in the American press. He's also gotten variety for being loud in council, so his fame starts off because he's the most vocal. So we sort of, you know, the records track him because he's put a target on his back and away in his own back. And Thompson is shot fourteen times. I believe there's a deep knife wound to his breast, he is scalped. There may be a club musket to his head. It's pretty pretty gruesome. The storekeeper also killed in the same manner. 00:51:46 Speaker 1: And they well, dude, he was having a smoke with. 00:51:48 Speaker 3: That guy dies too, so far, Yeah, whips no surprises in this story. Yeah, that guy dies too, and the troops are I think it's a faint. They think it's a distraction, and they fortify in the fort. They get one of the bodies the next day, and they bury Thompson at the fort temporarily and then and then his wife gets him back and his bones go back to Everton, Georgia, and she keeps his bones under her. 00:52:20 Speaker 2: Bed for a year. Yeah, but that's a different time period. 00:52:26 Speaker 1: Yeah man. 00:52:27 Speaker 3: Yeah, And that's the start of the war. And simultaneously, Abraham and Chief Miconopi who's the head of the us. He's the chief, he's a seminal chief, but he's also ostensibly the head of all of the tribes and bands. 00:52:41 Speaker 2: Attack. 00:52:41 Speaker 1: Daid tell us about before we get into that attack, which is fascinating, And what did you pick up with Ossiola steaking out to kill this guy and then the I know some people call it the Dade mask or the Dade fight. Whatever you gather. Man, these dudes are like one with the swamp. Yeah, I mean the ability to just vanish into like stake up and hide, yeah, and surprise people's astounding. 00:53:08 Speaker 4: Yeah, there's like a big parallel here, I think to a lot of stuff that I've read about slave rebellions in the Caribbean, where it's just the landscape and the ecology of that place is just sort of used almost as a weapon against the whites, you know, whether they're colonists or the army. 00:53:32 Speaker 3: In this case, one in fact Colonel Taylor, who later becomes president, but he later leads the forces in Florida, and he says the climate and the terrain are much more lethal than the enemy. One of the things that they say that he also says. He says, we tried to catch them. This is later in the war when they have fled from us. Not once have we been able to overtake them. There's one of your videos where you say, I think maybe you're in South America. We're like, there's no way that I could move through the bush as quickly as some of these indigenous from Yeah. Yeah, And and the soldiers are laden down. You know, they're carrying things. They're carrying they don't know how. You know, they've got rations, they've got they've got heavy ammunition they've got they're carrying. They've got their heavy uniforms. And the seminal forces are living off the land. They know where the food is, they know where the dry places are, they know where the crossings of the rivers are, which. 00:54:32 Speaker 1: They vanish into the water. Man they like eat alligators, They catch fish, they dig roots, they find oranges. 00:54:40 Speaker 2: They do all of that very successfully. 00:54:43 Speaker 3: And you know it's it's General Jessup who who's the main figure of the book. He says at one point, the nature of the country is such that an army of of you know, five hundred could hold it against an army of ten thousand or something like that. 00:55:03 Speaker 2: You know, if we call it a war. 00:55:06 Speaker 3: But if you're going to use the landscape against the enemy, that's. 00:55:11 Speaker 2: Not normally how we think of a war. 00:55:13 Speaker 3: We think of a war where I meet you on the battlefield, we are agreeing to fight. Well, what if I don't agree to fight, or what if I agree to fight on my terms? That is okay, I'm here in a perfect position for me to ambush. 00:55:26 Speaker 1: You. 00:55:26 Speaker 3: Come come over here, come walk into my ambush. And so they selected the battlefields and the army was forced to go into their chosen battlefields. 00:55:36 Speaker 1: Yeah, there's a comment someone makes in I don't know if you covered in your book or if I heard someone mention it in Clay's piece, but it would be that they would fight as long as it was going the way they wanted it to go. Yeah, but they were not beholden to sort of a battle plan. Yes, if things look good for an ambush, we'll do the ambush. If they don't, we're out of here. 00:56:00 Speaker 3: Absolutely, absolutely, And and what have you achieved if they if everyone gets away? You know, it's it's the use of the land and and the slow you know, they hire topographers, like how do we figure out where we're going? Where is everyone? And they disperse intentionally. There's a there's a general named Scott who is briefly uh in the head of the war in Florida, and he has like a Napoleonic handbook for like for you know, fighting in lines and fields and and this is bush fighting. They're not used to this. They're not used to guerrilla warfare. That's what this is. There's an early event in the war in which a male a mailman is killed. A messenger is killed, and he's going up the Fort King Road and it's a hit and run. It's boom. They take care of business and they're gone. And there's a moment where the general realizes he says, okay, I have seven hundred troops at max. 00:57:04 Speaker 2: That should be enough. Oh unless they use hit and run tactics. 00:57:09 Speaker 3: And then he sort of writes a panic letter like we might be in trouble here because if they're not going to meet us in a mass, that's a whole different kind of warfare. And one soldier calls it a hunt. M this has dissolved. This has devolved into a hunt. And and you know a lot of people quit because of that. There's no glory to be had in that kind of fight. 00:57:32 Speaker 1: Yeah, you quote different guys soldiers to get sent down there, and after a couple of days you're like, this ain't what I signed up for. You know, there's I signed up for a big gunfight that we win. 00:57:43 Speaker 2: That's right. Now, that's right. Where's my where's my gunfight? 00:57:47 Speaker 3: There's a sequence in which you know the war has started, and you you have in New Orleans reports in the newspaper of things that are not happening. It's like, oh, the the Indians are killing all of the settlers and they're slaughtering everyone, and it's a it's a war of extermination. This is not happening, but they're using it as recruitment. And so there's an American flag outside of the customs house and all the soldiers sign up and they take. 00:58:14 Speaker 2: Them like social psychology or there you go. There it is, Yeah, well that's what it is. 00:58:19 Speaker 3: So I mean, if somebody said that to me, I would sign up, like, okay, you know, let's go. 00:58:25 Speaker 2: Those are my people. 00:58:26 Speaker 1: When the truth is more like they're trying to get a stay away from you out in the swamps living a subsistence lifestyle. 00:58:33 Speaker 2: They just want to but you just go away. Mostly, yes, yeah. They you know, Abraham retreats into the COVID with Lakuchi along. 00:58:40 Speaker 1: Given, you gotta give Abraham's background. Sorry, yeah, the Daid fight. Yeah, yeah, because this is early. We got to back up to early in the war. 00:58:46 Speaker 3: There's yeah, there's a lot of exposition in this story. There's a lot of context. So Abraham is a I love it. I love Abraham. He's a diplomat, he's very poised. He is nominally Miconope's interpreter, so Miconopee is the seminole chief. The Whites think he's just the interpreter. He's more than that. He is also Miconope's sense bearer along with his chief named Jumper. 00:59:15 Speaker 2: The conciliers, yes, like the. 00:59:17 Speaker 3: Privy councilor or the Prime minister. He's the advisor. He's the keeper of the king conscience. So he's the interpreter and the advisor, and he is. The traditional story is that he escaped from an owner in Pensacola. I found evidence that from him directly. He can't say where he was born, but he was born among the seminoles in Florida. And there's several other pieces of evidence that to me, without a doubt say that he was born. 00:59:48 Speaker 1: Does his age line up like his age lines up with that potential. Yeah, absolutely, he was Maybe maybe his parents were escaped slaves. 00:59:56 Speaker 2: He would not surprise me. 00:59:58 Speaker 3: If his parents were pow was taken in preak grades during the Revolutionary War, that would not surprise me. 01:00:04 Speaker 1: So his parents are maybe brought into Florida by the Creek, and then he because it wasn't chattel slavery, hes to he was born among the seminole rolls to a position of prominence to where he's like a right hand man. 01:00:20 Speaker 3: Achieve he's formally adopted, and he's formally freed in eighteen thirty. There's maybe fifteen of this five hundred or maybe twenty who are formally free. 01:00:35 Speaker 2: What else can I say about Abraham. 01:00:37 Speaker 3: He's described by the army as having a continence which none can read. He's described as a real Martin van Buren, as a political animal. 01:00:49 Speaker 1: He is. 01:00:51 Speaker 3: He speaks softly with a gentil with a gentile emphasis. He is said to have a great deal of fun about him. 01:01:01 Speaker 2: He is said to be artful. 01:01:03 Speaker 3: He is said to have more wit in his left eye, because his right eye angles inward than most men. 01:01:10 Speaker 2: Do in both. 01:01:11 Speaker 1: He's a real he's a real Ben Franklin. 01:01:13 Speaker 3: Yeah, well he's he's a he's a strange character. Two observers. You know, the there's a there's a role going back to at least eighteen oh two where you have black interpreter advisors. So there's the in the core seminal line, you basically have Cowkeeper and then you have King Pain and Boleck and then Mikenopie. And there's evidence tying Abraham to Pain. Now Pain was and Pain had a black seminal advisor. I think his name was Harry, and he was involved and in colonial diplomacy. So I think Abraham had black seminal mentors who acted as translators and advisors for the tribe as early as eighteen o two. And he comes into this position. I find him again in eighteen twenty two working as an interpreter. It appears as an apprentice for another black seminal interpreter, and then he becomes the chief interpreter of the tribe. And he has also described in eighteen thirty eight in a New Orleans newspaper as the chief principal interpreter of the tribe and the chief of the iste luste, which in the Muskogi language of the creak and Seminole means chief of the dark people, chief of the black people. 01:02:27 Speaker 4: And he's and he dresses according to Seminole custom. 01:02:31 Speaker 2: He dresses in the Seminole way. 01:02:32 Speaker 1: Yeah. 01:02:34 Speaker 3: When there's a trip he later takes as a as an older man to New York and they say he looks like othello. 01:02:39 Speaker 2: Reborn, you got a kid, That's what they say. He has. 01:02:45 Speaker 3: He has less servility than is usually a parent in African south of the Potomac. 01:02:54 Speaker 1: Hum. You know, I want to get into a brief tactical thing. Yeah, we get in the day of the day Abraham. Yeah, because you're talking about seminal dress as much as they're slipping up on people and tomahawk and them unawares and everything. What's what the red turbans are running around in? 01:03:12 Speaker 2: Are they wearing red turbans? There are a few of them, not all of them. 01:03:15 Speaker 1: Yeah, but what like why that like Osciole's always portrayed like that with a red turbine, something like a like a what do you call it? Yeah? 01:03:23 Speaker 3: They I mean you can look on the cover there that's a little later. That's eighteen fifty two, and you can see Abraham has kind of a different style of turbine and they have this kind of a hard sorry for the mic side of a hard circular thing that they've got there. 01:03:38 Speaker 2: I don't know what it is, so maybe but I might have picked this up. 01:03:41 Speaker 1: I don't know where I picked up. So they didn't wear red. 01:03:43 Speaker 2: Headcloth, No, not uniformly. 01:03:46 Speaker 1: Okay, No, why do people use the word turban in describing them? What are they talking about? 01:03:52 Speaker 2: Headdress? 01:03:53 Speaker 3: I think it's probably the closest reference that we would have to it. 01:03:56 Speaker 2: Headdress is probably more appropriate. 01:03:58 Speaker 1: Got it. So someone had his own kind of cloth wrapped around, they might have described it as a turban. 01:04:04 Speaker 2: Yeah, Abraham's got it on right there in the picture at the top there. 01:04:06 Speaker 1: Yeah. 01:04:08 Speaker 4: For whatever reason, it strikes me as something that comes from African culture, like it's a blending of traditions. 01:04:17 Speaker 1: Yeah. 01:04:17 Speaker 3: So there's one good way to introduce Abraham and kind of give you a picture of the Black seminoles. Is this wonderful folk tale. It's a Black seminal folk tale. And so in there's a writer named Zorol Nearhurston. She was part of the Harmon Harlem Renaissance, and she goes down to Florida as part of the Federal Works Project, you know where they paid writers part of the New Deal to go and write things. And she goes down to Florida and she hears this story about Uncle Monday, which I found. I have her original document, and the story of Uncle Monday is, in short, this is a story that locals are telling her one hundred years after it happened. Uncle Monday was a great African metaice man of the crocodile clan that practiced kinship with the fierce reptiles. Not long after he was stolen from his home and taken to America. He escaped from Georgia or South Carolina and made his way down into the Indian country which is now Florida. He and others settled among the seminoles. This is the eighteen thirties, the days of that haughty Asciola, that's a quote. And when the white men attacked, he led some of the Indian African forces in battle. They fought as fiercely as they could, but were defeated in the end or succumb by the end by greater forces and weaponry. They met Abraham and the survivors met near the Blue Sink Lake to debate and decide what to do. 01:05:44 Speaker 2: He told the people what the deities had told. 01:05:47 Speaker 3: Him in a vision or dream, that it would no longer it's no longer of any use to keep fighting. Still, the medicine man would not yield to death or enslavement at the hands of the invaders. He promised that he would change himself into an alligator and reunite with his reptilian kin in the Blue Sink Lake until the trouble was over. And so there is a ceremony on the banks of the Blue Sink, where the people drum African and Indian beats on their instruments. As Uncle Monday danced, he began to shift in form. His skin grew rough, his face grew long and very terrible, and he cry, his voice became like thunder, and in response, a thousand alligators bellow and come out of the Blue Sink. And he is now the largest of the reptiles. And he strodes regally into the Blue Sink, and they disappear altogether, bellowing into the lake. It was said that for many years. It was said that he remained in the Blue Sink for many years, and that every so often he would transform back into a man and roam the land and cast. 01:06:52 Speaker 2: His spells on the people. So what does this story tell you? What is it preserve? 01:07:01 Speaker 3: Going back to your point about bringing African traditions in and melding them with indigenous traditions. Yeah, you know in Zambia they still have a crocodile clan in northern Zambia that may be too far east for the transatlantic slave trade, but a democratic Republic of Congo, Republic of Congo, Angola, central West Africa, the Congo River full of crocodiles. You have crocodile veneration. You have societies there that are matrilineal, like the seminoles, So the royal line descends from uncle to nephew, not from father to son. You have clans, you have a spiritual relationship with the land. And what is this story? 01:07:44 Speaker 1: Now? 01:07:45 Speaker 3: You liberate yourself and you come down and you find tribes that are matrilineal. 01:07:50 Speaker 2: That have a spiritual relationship with. 01:07:52 Speaker 3: The land, and there are alligators there, and so how do you survive? You trans form yourself. You're from the crocodile clan. You transform yourself into an alligator. I think that's the and it's a magical act. There's something called African semino Ethnogenesis. There's a paper by this guy, Anthony Dixon ethno Ethnic Genesis Birth, and it's about how do you rebuild culture. You're stitching together your culture from various African traditions that are inherited by your parents, grandparents, and you want to meld them with native traditions. And that's what you're doing and and you're it's a profoundly creative. I mean, it's a magical thing to do that. That's how you're going to survive. I think that's a beautiful summary of what they did. And and it was all about this cultural melding. 01:08:50 Speaker 1: What a do you to have on the podcast? Mans like I mean, I'm sorry, not me. Yes, you story the guy. 01:08:59 Speaker 2: Yeah, he's the guy, but you too. 01:09:01 Speaker 1: You're here, we invited you on, We came and found you. 01:09:03 Speaker 2: Abrahead would have been better. No, no, no, I'm. 01:09:05 Speaker 1: Not talking about even him. I'm talking about the dude. 01:09:08 Speaker 2: Uncle Uncle Monday. 01:09:10 Speaker 1: Be like picture, Okay, you're in Africa. You probably get captured by African slave traders, you get sold to whites. They send you to North America. They send you to what we become the United States. You get bought by another white guy, you get turned to plantation work. You escape, Yes, you go south, you meet up with Indian tribes. Then you turn around and start fighting the army of the people. Yes, that's a hell of a journey. 01:09:47 Speaker 2: What a story, What a story. 01:09:50 Speaker 1: And in meanwhile, people are being born in the United States and not going, not strand more than forty miles. A lot of people you're born, you know, stry more than forty miles from where you're born, and you die with a hole in your hand. 01:10:00 Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, that's right. 01:10:02 Speaker 3: There is an oral history that puts one of Abraham's fighters as coming from Africa. The Transatlantic straight Tit is officially banned in eighteen oh eight, but there is a record of this guy, and he remembers what it was like to be in Africa. 01:10:21 Speaker 1: Oh man, So we set up the dispersal of people out of Alabama and Georgia, the Creeks people being displaced, pushed into Florida. The United States starts eyeballing that landscape. Settlers are moving in. President Jackson's like, these guys gotta go. I'll send them out to Oklahoma. They're not cooperating. They send in an army under the command of this dude Dad, and Dade's gonna go up there and straighten them all out. Him and a hundred guys are going to straighten them all out. 01:11:01 Speaker 2: Nicely, set up, nicely, set up. 01:11:04 Speaker 1: Yeah. 01:11:04 Speaker 2: So after Charlie A. Mathla is killed, they send reinforcements. We need more troops. The problem is the troops are split. 01:11:13 Speaker 3: So you have Duncan Clinch with the main forest and it's to the north side of the Indian Reservation, and then you have troops gathering on the Gulf coast in what is Tampa Bay, that's Fort Brook and four companies, the full companies fifty men. So they send two hundred men down, not all at once, four companies down to back up the troops they have there. And the idea is they're going to march through the Indian Reservation and they're going to meet up with Clinch and they're going to attack. That's the plan. And Date is one of those troops coming over, got it. 01:11:44 Speaker 1: God, So the intention was never that. The intention was never that his one hundred guys are going to pull this off. It's all part of bringing a bunch of guys together. 01:11:52 Speaker 2: It's it's more interesting. 01:11:54 Speaker 3: It's so you're What happens is they're planning for a fight on the on December thirty first. They're waiting for the rest of the two hundred troops. They only have I think two of the four boats, two of the four companies are there, and you don't have many people in that garrison in Tampa Bay. So you're faced with a choice. You can march up the four King Road. Now that's right in the middle of the reservation. It's one hundred mile road, and you're going to go right through enemy territory. Do you want to do that with one hundred men? Do you want to wait for the other hundred men to come? But we could miss the deadline for the fight December thirty first. So Dade, bravely or foolishly, depending on how you look at it, he said, I got this. 01:12:37 Speaker 2: I'll march up, no problem. I'll go right through the reservation. 01:12:41 Speaker 3: All I need is one hundred people, and there are records of there are a few native families. I think there's three hundred people with one hundred warriors are who have chosen to immigrate and haven't changed their mind. Who are at Tampa Bay across the Hillsboro River waiting for ships to take them up to New Orleans and then to Indian Territory what becomes Oklahoma. And they're sure he's going to die, and they say and they say goodbye to him. I think it's December twenty third, and he's sure that they would never see him again. 01:13:12 Speaker 1: Huh. 01:13:14 Speaker 3: There's another guy there, Belton, and he says, I think you're crazy. I would rather resign if I were ordered to march up that road. There are people later who said, listen, why did you send troops down the Gulf Coast. You should have sent them down the Atlantic and you can go right down into Jacksonville and then they already would have met up. 01:13:32 Speaker 2: So this is a bone of contention. 01:13:33 Speaker 3: Why were troops sent to Tampa Because the only way to get to Clinch is to go right through the reservation. 01:13:39 Speaker 2: So they start this march through the reservation. 01:13:44 Speaker 3: And it's eerie, and their camps are harassed at night by seminoles, by scouts who are following them by gunfire. And you know, I think it's the fifth night or the fourth night. Dad has a bad dream he fought in the War of eighteen twelve, and he says, my fallen comrades came to me in my dream. This is apparently from a newspaper several years later, and they said their names. It's the most bizarre dream I've ever had in my life. 01:14:19 Speaker 2: It's strange. 01:14:20 Speaker 3: And they walk. They've gone sixty miles of the one hundred. They're nearing a place called the Wahoo Swamp, which is a perfect place to retreat to. And they're in between Abraham's town where he lived with about one hundred, maybe as many as one hundred and sixty black seminoles, and this swamp and his forces and Miconopie's and a chief named Alligator and Jumper is there set up an ambush, and there's a lake on the right side of the road, and their idea is we're going to pin them against the lake. They form a semicircle and Dad walks into this ambush and Mikonopie calls out his name or yells and shoots him in the. 01:15:06 Speaker 1: Neck like the first guy. 01:15:08 Speaker 3: Yeah, shoots him in the neck, and apparently he was eating a hard attack biscuit, and he yells, my God, and he falls off the horse and he dies, and then the first volley, half of the half of the command is falls to the ground. Half the command dies in the first volley. One hundred and five ultimately are killed that day. It's the largest loss of life on the US side in any fight with Native forces until Custer. 01:15:45 Speaker 2: The fight goes on all day. 01:15:47 Speaker 3: The survivors of the initial volley kind of build a triangular log breastwork, a couple of logs that they cut down and they stack them three logs high or it's two logs high, and they try to hide behind. 01:15:59 Speaker 2: It for some cover. 01:16:00 Speaker 3: The seminal forces are very patient. There is a little hand to hand fighting, but generally they're very patient. They're firing from concealed positions and they're not risking their lives. They lose three people, you know, they the one hundred and five US forces are killed. 01:16:16 Speaker 2: They lose three god man, Yeah. 01:16:19 Speaker 3: And you know, uh they finished them off in a sort of a brutal way with a knife work. 01:16:27 Speaker 2: And there's there's some screaming, and. 01:16:32 Speaker 3: Uh it's you know, this is fills the newspaper as a as a massacre. And and that night those forces in Abraham and Assio the meet in the in the Wahu swamp and they drink all night and celebrate and party. 01:16:47 Speaker 1: Yeah, because he's coming back from killing time. Yeah. 01:16:49 Speaker 2: They both missions were successful. Yeah. 01:16:53 Speaker 1: The thing that confused me in your book is what was up with the guys that they when they when they finally come to bury the bodies, they're not even get there for a while. 01:17:03 Speaker 2: Yeah, fifty four days. 01:17:05 Speaker 1: What was up with the guys in the little in the little fort they built, that's the breastwork. Yeah, what was up with the guys in the breastwork? The bodies in the breastwork? 01:17:13 Speaker 3: Oh goodness. So there's a description. There's a US soldier he says it looked like the bodies looked like they were toy soldiers arranged by a child in his play. 01:17:24 Speaker 1: Yeah. I didn't understand what that meant. And he said like some about right angles. 01:17:27 Speaker 3: So you think, imagine this triangular breastwork of logs, and you've got these bodies that are in various stages of decomposition. I think he's referring to the odd ways that the bodies were positioned. 01:17:40 Speaker 1: Yeah, the right angle. He said something like that, they're at right angles. I couldn't tell what the hell he meant by that. I mean it didn't sound it didn't look great. 01:17:47 Speaker 3: I think he's saying it was weird, like it was not natural. Got it, got it, you know. 01:17:56 Speaker 1: And and. 01:17:58 Speaker 3: The jaws have dropped because the muscles are deteriorated and the fingers are kind of clawed up like this. 01:18:06 Speaker 2: And some say they were scalped. 01:18:08 Speaker 3: Some say they weren't the most reliable what I thought that one person says there's too much deterioration to know if they were scalped, which seems probable. 01:18:19 Speaker 2: And they didn't rob them. 01:18:22 Speaker 3: And I think they were sending a message, you know, before before day before that ambush, they set out a cow in the road, a slaughtered cow in the road, and it's split wide open in the middle of the road. 01:18:35 Speaker 2: It's a warning sign, don't come in here. We don't want to do this. And even Mikonopi. 01:18:41 Speaker 3: Before he shoots him, there's there's evidence that he was hesitant and he knows Dade. Dade has been there before. Dade has attacked native villages before. Okay, we warned you. 01:18:55 Speaker 1: Now he's the damn county name Dad County. Now we got in Miami, right, that's right, Dade County County. Yeah, that's him, that's Day and you got. 01:19:03 Speaker 4: Custer County, is there. 01:19:07 Speaker 3: I heard that that there's new research that says it wasn't exactly a last stand. Do you know anything about that? That the fighting was more spread out, It wasn't in one location. 01:19:17 Speaker 1: Well, I wouldn't say now, but there was a Custer wasn't the last that his little hill area wasn't the last holdouts? Okay, yeah, it was, you know, it was earlier in the fight. It wasn't you know, he wasn't the last guy standing. Yeah, in the there was nothing that remarkable about his positioning, and it wasn't It didn't build up to that moment, right, It was just part of a broad part of a broader fight and was rather probably to the participants, was like an unnoteworthy little spectacle. 01:19:57 Speaker 2: Uh, okay, that makes sense. 01:20:00 Speaker 4: Now that we're in the fighting. The parallels between this conflict and Vietnam are just almost too much to get into, but on a very super official level, between the tactics and the strategy, and then the duration of the conflict and the cost of the conflict. 01:20:23 Speaker 3: Like yeah, and a feeling from the soldiers that they were maybe betrayed by Washington or not quite treat you know, this is what are we doing here? So if you look at there's some military organizations of veteran organizations in Florida and organizations that study the seminal war. And a lot of the guys that were interested in it before were Vietnam vets and then they were Iraq and Afghanistan vets. 01:20:50 Speaker 2: Wow huh. And I think they they see them, you know, they see the story as very similar. 01:20:56 Speaker 1: Yeah. So after this Daid fight, there aren't big there aren't big, definitive battles, to the point where I know that Clay had mentioned this that if you start walking us through the conflict, the conflict never formally ended. 01:21:19 Speaker 3: No, no, the so the survivors as many as six hundred in excuse me, in eighteen forty two, when the US sort of unilaterally withdraws. 01:21:34 Speaker 2: They never signed anything. 01:21:36 Speaker 3: The US says, oh, it's kind of over, and you know, we won mostly and the few survivors it's only three hundred, it's probably double that. 01:21:46 Speaker 2: You know, we should be nice to them. 01:21:47 Speaker 3: It's because it's just so few, and it's really a noble gesture of us to be to restrain ourselves and unilaterally withdraw. But that's why they call that's why they call them the unconquered people, because there never is a capitulation. Sam Jones, who is the Mikazoki chief who really led it, and there he's really the big hero of the war, for the for the survivors, for those who stayed in Florida, and Asciola is kind of his one of his warriors. 01:22:22 Speaker 1: You know. 01:22:23 Speaker 2: He he outwitted them, he outlasted them, and he did it by setting up these villages on these little islands, these hammocks in the Everglades, connected by canoes, and when the army came, he would just go to the next one. 01:22:40 Speaker 3: And so he had this network of refuges and just let the land. Let the land kill them. You know, there's a third conflict, there's a third seminal war where they try again and I think fifty five soldiers die and it's a three year war. 01:22:56 Speaker 2: So like you, what is that? How do you describe that you're wandering around and not fighting people? Yeah, yeah, there are some bigger battles, but the day the dade mask of the day defeat, that's the largest death count. 01:23:12 Speaker 1: Why do they break the wars into the why do they break it into the first Seminal War, the Second Seminal War, which we've been mostly discussing, like this Dade fight kicks off the Second Seminal War, Yes, and then the third Seminole War. Why because they're not as clean as like World War one, World War two? 01:23:32 Speaker 2: Yeah, the Seminar War three, you know, the Seminoal Trap of Florida would agree with you so well. 01:23:38 Speaker 1: They would agree that this whole breaking it up. It's like these aren't different things. It's all the continuation of the same thing. They object to it, Okay, I don't know. 01:23:46 Speaker 3: If you go on their website, they'll say we objected this. We call it, we call it the Long War. They call it the Long War, and they frame it as a you know, continuing colonial aggression trying to get them off the land, which it was. 01:24:01 Speaker 1: Yeah, but just for people's understanding, Yeah, when they hear this first second third, can you tell can you you explain a little bout what that means? Then I want to get into like Osciola's capture and how that fits into this chronology of these wars. But first of what does it mean when someone says first, second, third, absolutely. So. 01:24:22 Speaker 3: The formal dates are eighteen seventeen, eighteen eighteen, that's the first Seminal War. And that's when you have Andrew Jackson coming down into Spanish Florida. There's a few fights, he burns some villages, it's nothing crazy, and then he retreats, and it's really what he's doing there. He's pressuring Spain to relinquish the territory to the United States. It's like, look, I had to go and do this police action. You've got trouble in your borders. You can't control it. And then he retreats, claiming victory. The Second Seminal War is most as you say, it's the focus of this. It's eighteen thirty five, eighteen forty two. 01:25:03 Speaker 1: What's what happens in eighteen forty two. 01:25:05 Speaker 3: That's when the US I think it's Tyler President Tyler. He declares we're done. He says, the war is over. We're not We're not going to fight anymore. 01:25:14 Speaker 1: Got it? 01:25:14 Speaker 2: He claims victory and withdraws the truth. 01:25:17 Speaker 1: This is the Tippy Canoe and Tyler too? Is that the guy? 01:25:20 Speaker 2: Is that him? I don't know anything about Tyler. 01:25:23 Speaker 1: I just remember his name. You're probably right, Tippy Canoe and Tyler too. 01:25:27 Speaker 2: I'm sure you're right. Yeah, yeah, I'm not kind of addicted Harrison. 01:25:33 Speaker 1: You know it'll be your next book. 01:25:34 Speaker 2: Okay, good, I'll look into it. 01:25:36 Speaker 3: And then and then and then the third effort is eighteen fifty five to eighteen fifty eight, so. 01:25:42 Speaker 1: Thirteen years goes by. Yeah, and then someone's like, we're. 01:25:46 Speaker 3: Going to try again, get to root him out. Let's try again. And that's when they're down in the Everglades. 01:25:50 Speaker 1: And that's the long. 01:25:53 Speaker 4: In cat and Mouse. 01:25:54 Speaker 2: Yeah, it's cat and mouse. 01:25:56 Speaker 3: It's it's navy riverine warfare and uh in the ever Glades, in the Everglades, and it's not much action. They find empty villages, they burn the villages because. 01:26:06 Speaker 1: Then know they're common, and they just move out of the way. 01:26:08 Speaker 3: Well they find them, yeah, they exactly, exactly, and they have canoes and they'll just go to there another sanctuary. 01:26:14 Speaker 1: Okay. So so that's the third seminar, that's the third summer to the seminal, it's just the long war, yes, yeah, do the seminal view. I don't want you to put in your position where you're like, well you don't understand how they view it, yeah, or their officials stand tell you what, I know, the seminole do they view that they is there? Story that they were stood in one? 01:26:41 Speaker 2: Yeah, okay, yeah, because they're there. Yeah yeah, and there. And if you go to the I went down to Florida to see a lot of the sites that are in there. And if you go to the Asiki Museum, which is a seminal museum and what was the natural Everglades but it's been drained as you know, uh, you'll see. It's a great museum. You should go. 01:27:01 Speaker 3: And there's actually there's a wonderful kind of cypress swamp cypress dome attached to the back of it, which is sort of fun. 01:27:06 Speaker 2: You can go on a walkway through. 01:27:08 Speaker 3: And but you know, they're very rich. I think they may be the richest or they're one of the riches. They own hard Rack Cafe. They made a lot of money from casinos. 01:27:19 Speaker 1: I've I've been on the reservation. 01:27:21 Speaker 2: Dog cool yeah yeah, yeah. 01:27:23 Speaker 3: So all the cars in that parking lot or like you know, it's the Corvette, Porsche and the jet. The Chief of the Nation has a jet. It's named after Sam Jones, after Abiaka. It's called Arpieca. That's that's his own personal jet. So yeah, I mean they're proud. They should be proud. Yeah, they they stayed and and you know the the six hundred Mi Kazuki's and the eighteen hundred members of the Seminole tribe of Florida, that's that's their heritage. 01:28:00 Speaker 1: Do you remember you say it in your book if you remembered off top of your head, when Jackson was doing what was the name of his what was the name of his. 01:28:08 Speaker 2: Policy, his the Indian Removal Act of eighteen thirty. 01:28:13 Speaker 1: Can you remind me what they budgeted? They had a budget and it was like, it'll cost us like a buck seventy right or whatever. It was like a buck seventy or twenty seven bucks or something to move every Indian to Oklahoma. It'll like it'll be like they had it narrowed down to like a per head cost. Oh, it's in your book. 01:28:34 Speaker 2: It is. 01:28:34 Speaker 3: It's it's Jessup So Thomas Jessop Jessip was he's known as the father of the modern Quartermaster Corps. 01:28:41 Speaker 1: Yeah, he's a logistics key, he's a budget logistics Yeah. 01:28:45 Speaker 2: It makes sense. 01:28:46 Speaker 3: And he comes in in the end of eighteen thirty six, and in his records at the Library of Congress, I found this document in which he's laying out the mathematics of per head cost of removal. And I don't remember what it was. It was something like nine thousand a person that you had. You need this many wagons and this many rations over this many days, and you need these boats and that sort of thing. 01:29:13 Speaker 2: The Indian removal. 01:29:15 Speaker 1: It wasn't nine thousand bucks per person. 01:29:17 Speaker 2: How much was it. It's in the oh, it was like. 01:29:20 Speaker 1: Like twenty bucks or something. 01:29:22 Speaker 3: It may have been less than that. It could have been. It was far less than they paid. 01:29:27 Speaker 2: You know. The war effort was ended up being forty million dollars. 01:29:31 Speaker 1: Noh, yeah, hit no, I'm sorry. 01:29:32 Speaker 2: I hate to hit you with like a no, It's all good. 01:29:35 Speaker 1: It was like they had calculated per just when you move for the people you move for the people you were going to move to Oklahoma, it was going to cost you some surprisingly low amount of money, like just the trip. 01:29:49 Speaker 3: You know, I know exactly what page this is on. Okay, it's not in the Indian Removal Act. It's it's I found this in Jessp's files let's see what he says here. Transporting one even Indian removal to him was a numbers game. By his estimate, transporting one thousand Indians to west of the Mississippi necessitated to thirty you're right, I mean, it's not nine thousand, thirteen wagons for one hundred and twenty days, eighty thousand rations, two hundred ponies, and three hired hands. He calculated the cost to American taxpayers at twenty six dollars per head, a little less than nine thousands. 01:30:30 Speaker 1: Amazing man. 01:30:31 Speaker 3: Yeah, and it ends up being however, many multiple you know, it's it's the budget of the American government, the outlays of the American government in eighteen thirty five or seventeen point five million, and this war ends up costing thirty to forty million dollars. 01:30:47 Speaker 2: It's the longest part. 01:30:48 Speaker 1: That's part of the debate too, Like it's so similar to the ill defined wars that we've engaged in since then of at some point people are like, this is very costly, it's not working. There are morale issues, there are moral issues. This was supposed to be quick. Yeah, you'd all promise us that this is going to be over in a month. 01:31:13 Speaker 2: That's right, that's right. 01:31:15 Speaker 3: I mean at one point, Jessep says, the country, the country that we are quote unquote conquering, is not worth a tenth of the cost in lives and treasure m He said, any train. 01:31:26 Speaker 2: It's like, can I quit? This was a bad idea. 01:31:29 Speaker 3: And also after he starts losing sort of or he can't succeed. Can't we just allow them to stay in the south of Florida. We're not going to plant there, and they do stay, you know, Abiaca's people and Seminal and the Seminal people who stayed, they do stay in the south. It will cause anybody any problem, jes what I mean kind of right, He's like, do I have to do this? 01:31:52 Speaker 2: Can't we just let them stay in the south and I can come, I can go home to my farm. 01:31:58 Speaker 1: At what point does Assiola get There's a really gory detail about this whole thing, but like, how does Asiola get caught? 01:32:06 Speaker 3: Osciola is captured under a white flag? In I want to say, November eighteen thirty seven by Jessop. There's some Andrew Jackson letters in there that I haven't seen sighted in which he's writing He's out of office. But he's writing the Secretary of War points at and he says, Jessup should have captured Aziola, just take him. 01:32:26 Speaker 2: Why didn't he take him? 01:32:28 Speaker 3: There's six letters in which he mentions this, and I found in Jessop's files in the Library of Congress. Excerpt from Andrew Jackson. Twenty days before he takes Asiola, Jessop should have captured Aciola. Twenty days later, he captures him under a white flag. This is a controversial action. This is a violation of the sacred rules of war. 01:32:48 Speaker 4: And when you say he captured him under a white flag, you mean Jessop, Jessop's forces, they're flying the. 01:32:55 Speaker 2: I mean the meeting. 01:32:57 Speaker 3: So there's a meeting outside of I think it's near Saint Augustine. It is near Saint Augustine, and there's Acola, and I think there's Cohajo, and there's maybe seventy Mikazuki's there. I think it's a group of around seventy people. And Jessop had given them white fabric to be used as a white flag. And he says, anytime you want to talk to us and have a meeting, this flag will protect you. 01:33:20 Speaker 2: We won't capture you and it's your past. 01:33:23 Speaker 1: Yeah, because in this story there are a lot of parlays. 01:33:26 Speaker 3: For sure, and then sometimes they're talking while they're fighting at the same time. 01:33:30 Speaker 1: Yeah, which which you realize, like which now in our own current conflict, which now goes on. I mean, you always be reading news accounts of you know, like one minute, you know, you're on the well Maduro woman, they're on the phone. The next minute's in jail, like people are. There's conversations happening. 01:33:48 Speaker 2: That's right. 01:33:49 Speaker 3: So this was one of the many conversations, and it was protected under a white flag, and Jessop gave the order just to seize them, as Jackson had suggested. And now I don't know if he read that letter before he did it now later. 01:34:02 Speaker 1: To lure him in talk and then just grab them. 01:34:06 Speaker 2: Just grab. 01:34:07 Speaker 3: He gives various justifications afterwards, but those are pretenses. And they put him in the Costello de Saint Marcos, which is the big Spanish fort in Saint Augustine on the north side. Uh, they called it Fort Marion at the time. And Asila becomes a prisoner in this old Spanish castle on the Atlantic, and uh, at one point there's a very dramatic. 01:34:33 Speaker 2: He's he's sick. 01:34:34 Speaker 3: At this point, it's unclear what he had. Wickman talks about this in the in the in the Bear Greece podcast, he probably had malaria. When he's in captivity, he gets he gets head. 01:34:47 Speaker 2: Lies, the measles. I think it's what it is. Breaks out, people start to die. It's not a great place to be. 01:34:54 Speaker 3: I visited it, and I saw the room that they were in, uh and it's like, you know, it looks like the set of a Robin Hood movie or something, you know, stone and it's damp, and there's a little tiny window called a loophole. 01:35:06 Speaker 1: We go to the room he was in. 01:35:08 Speaker 3: You can go to the room they escape from. Now he didn't escape, so he may have been. And it's called a casement. These are like little rooms that are in kind of inside the walls. And there's a very dramatic escape of twenty including the Black Seminoal John horst Afro Indigenous heretics. He had a Semino father and a black Seminal mother. 01:35:27 Speaker 2: He's there. 01:35:29 Speaker 3: The Chief King, Philip, his son Wildcat is there. Two women escape and they escape out of the window, and Wildcat talks about it. You have a first person account from Wildcat. You have the report of the head of the fort the next day he says they went out the window. You have a formal board of inquiry the next day, and they said they went out the window. So all of the sources suggest that they took the forage bags that they were sleeping on. They were using them for beds. They stuffed hay in them, and they made ropes out of them, attached them probably to one of the bars that were outside of that window. It's the app The loophole is five feet high and at its narrowest it's eight inches. The story is as Wildcat tells it. Because they were sick at the fort, they convinced the guards to let them go out and get these special roots as medicine. What the roots were actually for was for them to lose weight. And so they fasted and they took these roots, and they waited for the dark of the moon. I guess the moment in which the moon has the least light. And they got it wrong by like one day, but they basically got it right, and they twenty of them escaped out of that window into the ditch. It would be a mope, but there was no water in it, and it's forty feet. 01:36:55 Speaker 2: Below the window. 01:36:57 Speaker 1: Dropped into that ditch. 01:36:59 Speaker 2: Dropped into that ditch and escaped. 01:37:02 Speaker 1: But not Aciola was sick, he tells. 01:37:05 Speaker 3: He writes jessup Or there's a letter which explains. The next day, he says, hey, by the way, last night they escaped, I could have, but I don't feel like it. I think he's ill at this point. And they take him to Fort Moultrie in South Carolina with others and he's sort of a national celebrity and everyone wants to come visit him, and everyone wants to paint pictures of him. And there's a description, you know, the crowds outside of the window, young and old and more especially female, come to wave at him, and we had to bring him to the window. So he's, you know, in some kind of a weird way, a star. 01:37:51 Speaker 1: And there's not there aren't equivalents to this today, Like if you go to the fact that the participates at the Battle of the Little Big Horn. So here's here's a group of people that I mean they kill right and in hand to hand combat, they kill US soldiers. But there's such a moral element to it. That participants at that fight become celebrities who go on tour with like wild West shows and you can go see and meet the people that killed the US soldiers, Like we don't have there's that that's not around anymore. Like at the end of World War Two, there weren't famous crowds that shot a bunch of Americans that you'd go and like pay money to shake their hand. 01:38:46 Speaker 2: Maybe von Braun. 01:38:50 Speaker 1: You know what I'm saying that what that went away, we don't have like al Qaeda dudes that do like tours. 01:38:58 Speaker 3: Yeah, so so how to explain this in a way Asiolia is a puzzle, you know. He so part of this is just capitalism, right, Newspapers want to sell copies of their newspaper. You know, if you're a painter, you want this is an important person, you want to. 01:39:12 Speaker 2: Go paint him. 01:39:15 Speaker 3: But there's also to a degree, you know, where what kind of story about the war do you want to tell? Do you want to tell this story like where there's not there many great engagements and or do you want to tell do you want to tell a story where they're being diplomatic? Do you want to tell a story where they're saying they don't want to fight. Do you want to tell a story where they're you know, at Fort Iszard. There's a meeting at Fort Izard where they have a siege of a thousand US troops and the and the mee Kazuki's and the Seminoles debate should we kill them? And the mee Kazukis say that we should and the Seminols say that we shouldn't. And the Seminoles win and they spare them. They say, do you want some tobacco? Do you want some? But that story doesn't get through. What we get is the warrior. What we get is the fighter. So that fighter is necessary for us to recruit people and to project an idea of the war, which is not exactly what I mean. 01:40:10 Speaker 2: Asiola is a real person. 01:40:11 Speaker 3: I don't want to overstate it, but to some degree he's amplifying him. I know that's not exactly what you said. You said they're selling people, and you can, but there's there's a way in which Aciola is amplified. You know, I'm in touch with the Seminole tribe of Florida, and to some degree they don't like Aciola's elevation over Sam Jones. You know they want Sam Jones to get more of the credit. Ociola worked for him. He's the one who outwitted him. He's the one who outfoxed him. But we get this warrior. Not to take anything away from Aziola, but part of the puzzle of his story was me trying to grapple this question. Why is he this famous? And even when he's dying, he's confused as to why the President doesn't want to wants to paint his picture on his death bet He says, all I did was kill General Thompson. He has a sense of his fame being disproportioned to his actions God, which is interesting in itself. 01:41:13 Speaker 1: Yeah, he just the press grabbed that name and he became a symbol of that conflict. So the people involved in the conflict wouldn't have named him as the primary. 01:41:23 Speaker 3: To take nothing away from him, Yeah, he's one of fifteen people who that could have happened to. 01:41:30 Speaker 1: Does he die of his sickness? He dies violently. 01:41:35 Speaker 3: He dies of sickness at Fort Moultrie, I think in January eighteen thirty eight, and he asks the doctor, uh, this doctor named Whedon, I would like my bones to be buried in Florida, and there's some account that they were friends. 01:41:53 Speaker 2: And he dies, he double crosses, and. 01:41:55 Speaker 3: He cuts his head off and takes his head home to I think Saint Augustine. What a piece of shit, man, you know, I agree with that. Yeah, there's a story you can find if you google it. I think it's called the Mystery of Osiola's Head or something like that. There's a PDF you can find in whish there's a description of how weed. 01:42:15 Speaker 2: And this is even worse. When his kids misbehaved, he would hang Aciola's embalmed head or preserved head on the bedstead of his children to punish them. Imagine that. 01:42:27 Speaker 3: But it was normal for people to take prizes. I think Isiola's missing a few fingers. Both sides took kind of you know, that happened. 01:42:34 Speaker 4: The past is a foreign country. 01:42:35 Speaker 2: The past is a foreign country. 01:42:37 Speaker 1: But the point is that they had this rapport. Yeah, he had a request. 01:42:42 Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, I agree, it's kind of you know, come on. 01:42:48 Speaker 1: Man, the past is a foreign country. Yeah, is that the quot country. 01:42:53 Speaker 2: The past is a foreign The original is the past is a foreign country. They do things differently there. 01:43:00 Speaker 1: Yeah, that's my new favorite quote. Yeah, that's even better than skepticism is the chastity of the intellect. 01:43:09 Speaker 2: Oh I like that. 01:43:11 Speaker 1: I'll trade you. 01:43:12 Speaker 2: Okay, you can have it. It's a famous line, cow Man. 01:43:20 Speaker 1: And it's never been found. 01:43:22 Speaker 2: It's never been found. 01:43:24 Speaker 3: At some point it's it's and this this document lays out it's he sends it maybe to a phrenologist at some point. 01:43:32 Speaker 2: You know where you're measuring, like the divots in the skull. 01:43:35 Speaker 3: You know this person has a very big bravery bump. Okay, there's actually a great story about Mark Twain visiting a phrenologist and he goes once like in disguise, and they say he's like the least funny person that they've ever met, like a great humor deficit. And then he goes later as Mark Twain. Oh yes, great sense of humor is so great, you can tell. 01:43:58 Speaker 2: Look at this. 01:44:01 Speaker 1: Is what is Abraham's What is Abraham's death? 01:44:08 Speaker 3: Abraham dies as an old man. I found or there are locals in Oklahoma who knew of his grave. It's never been published in a history before I found one of them, and I found his grave. 01:44:23 Speaker 2: I haven't seen it. He dies in Oklahoma, dies in Oklahoma. 01:44:26 Speaker 1: Why did he go to Oklahoma when. 01:44:29 Speaker 3: Indian Territory where they shipped them west of Arkansas became Oklahoma. 01:44:33 Speaker 1: Yeah, but I mean when did he go eight? 01:44:36 Speaker 3: He goes most Black Semos go in eighteen thirty eight. He still has to finish some service with the army. They let him go in eighteen thirty nine. Yeah, So he's there and then there's a trip the last chapter in the book, he kind of comes back to Florida and with the Chief of the or the soon to be chief of the Nation in Oklahoma, who's Jumper's son, who's like his friend, and William bow Legs Flato Miko, who's one of the most powerful people in Florida, with Sam Jones with the Byaka, and they go up to New York and kind of have a junket together and see New York. You know, it's sort of how do they see us? But he dies on April tenth, eighteen seventy four, as an old man. He's you know, he sees the Emancipation Proclamation. His son fights with the Union. 01:45:22 Speaker 2: Really yeah, and they celebrate a day August fourth, which they call Emancipation Day, which is the day in which their Creek rivals admitted all people of color as full citizenships, and their Creek rivals ended slavery in eighteen sixty five, and they would celebrate that day and have a barbecue and invite all the white people and invite the Indians, and they would ride on horseback down to a flag and a cannon would go off and they would circle the flag and then you know, have a party. So his life is a success. 01:45:58 Speaker 3: He shepherds his people to the west successfully, they build a new life. He's got a big family, you know. I think dying as an old man surrounded by loved ones, like, that's as good as you can get. 01:46:11 Speaker 2: Yeah, you know how old was Asie older when he died young thirties, mid thirties. You know, I think he's. 01:46:21 Speaker 3: Depending on you when you have If you have his birthday at like eighteen oh four, then yeah, he's early. 01:46:27 Speaker 2: Thirties, thirty three, thirty four. 01:46:31 Speaker 1: Mm. Yeah, dude. It is a great story, man, Thank you. Yeah, I appreciate it. I'm pretty far now. I don't know halfway in. 01:46:40 Speaker 3: I had so much fun writing it. It was such a journey. It was like traveling. It was like going somewhere else. 01:46:49 Speaker 1: What do you work on next? 01:46:52 Speaker 3: I'm toying around with a few ideas I'm thinking of doing. You know, this is cool Bill Bryson book. Maybe I'll stay in this, John, or maybe I won't. This is cool Bill Bryceon book called a short history and nearly everything. I thought that could be fun to do. If I could find a cool twist. 01:47:07 Speaker 2: Short history of everything else, like a big history, but. 01:47:10 Speaker 3: Do it differently. If it was a new way to do it differently, that could be fun. You know, I'm interested in everything, you know, like what were the Neanderthals? 01:47:18 Speaker 2: Like, what was it like before the before agriculture? 01:47:22 Speaker 3: You know, Homo sapiens go back to three hundred thousand years up until the Neolithic agricultural revolution twelve thousand years ago. They're hunting, they're fishing, and so there's just so many great stories. 01:47:35 Speaker 1: I don't know. 01:47:35 Speaker 2: I'm toying around with a few ideas. 01:47:37 Speaker 1: You know. The thing that has evaded us for years is a guest to come on and talk about the Neanderthals. You can't find them, dude, Can you not know? I've even gone on other podcasts trying to find them. 01:47:54 Speaker 2: I'll give you a suggestion. 01:47:56 Speaker 4: I know of one. 01:47:57 Speaker 3: There's a book that's called Kindred. Kindred does that ring about? I didn't read it, but it came across my radar. 01:48:06 Speaker 1: All due respect, Yeah, I'll do a writer. I didn't want a writer. I wanted a researcher. 01:48:10 Speaker 2: But I'll take a writer. 01:48:11 Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah, you you made me like writers. 01:48:13 Speaker 2: Okay, little research research, you know. 01:48:17 Speaker 1: I was on THEO Von's podcast, and on THEO I was like, he's got a huge audience, and I'll say like, hey, just by the way, if you're a great Neanderthal guest, let me know nothing. Yeah nothing, No, We've we've found all the ones and gone to try to get them. 01:48:31 Speaker 4: Yeah, I mean people want actual Neanderthal guests would be good, that would be ideal. 01:48:36 Speaker 1: Yeah, he's like, what do you all think about? 01:48:39 Speaker 2: Yeah, we need to phrase this ask very precisely. 01:48:43 Speaker 5: No, we need to get with the genetic testing companies and if anyone has like by outsize proportion, come in with I have right, we know that. 01:48:56 Speaker 4: But like the I think the red hair is a marker? 01:48:59 Speaker 1: Do you you have do you have heavy duty? 01:49:01 Speaker 4: No, I've never stuck my I've never I've never dipped my toe into the water of genetic. 01:49:07 Speaker 1: It's you know what, there's there's a book about this, and it's a very very sore subject in academia to talk about what parts of the globe have people that have much greater representation of Neanderthal genomics or whatever. Yeah, it's just it's like this guy in this book. I think it was in the Seven Daughters of you know, I don't want I don't want to say what book it was that maybe the Seven Daughters of Eve. I can't remember what book. Not forget that, I don't know that that's the book. There's a book about human history that and he talks there. He's like, this is this is a thing you do not discuss. 01:49:51 Speaker 4: I think just the implications of certain you know, being underdeveloped, like the commercial. 01:49:58 Speaker 1: Yeah, exactly, you don't talk about what parts like when you look at however it worked with the human diaspora. As the diaspora is occurring, certain branches and arms carried heavy Neanderthal representation. Yes, and it's just become a taboo subject. 01:50:18 Speaker 2: Yeah, it's not normal because there's. 01:50:20 Speaker 1: The old idea that it was bad. But then the reason I'm interested in the subject is everything we find out about them makes them seem smarter. 01:50:28 Speaker 3: Yeah, they were advanced they liked art. And then there's the Denisovans. It's like, I think I read maybe this two percent what is it neanderthal? Two percent of people have Neanderthal DNA? 01:50:42 Speaker 2: Is it more? Then there's a trace of it. 01:50:46 Speaker 3: Yeah, And then there's like a ghost species that I was reading about, where like there's this you know, it's it's not normal to be the only species left in your genus for most animals, it wouldn't wrong horns in us, right, So it's so it's weird that we're the only ones that made it. 01:51:01 Speaker 2: It's kind of a mystery, a mystery to itself. 01:51:04 Speaker 1: But oh no, there's a point I make. I think it's in our in our Outdoor cookbook. Weird place to make at this point. And then forward the introduction to our Outdoor Cookbook, I talk about there was a time when you could be in Spain, you could be in northern Israel, all kinds of places, and you would see a fire. Yeah okay, yeah, fifty thousand years ago, sixty thousand years ago, you would see a fire burning, and you'd have to ask yourself what kind of people, not what tribe, m h, what what kind of what human species? Might that be up there at that fire. 01:51:48 Speaker 2: Yeah yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. 01:51:50 Speaker 1: The same way like a mule deer can roll up on a white tail and you're like, for too, like an outside either like, oh yeah, they are a little different. You there would be dudes running around yeah something like an outsider might be like, oh yeah, they are kind of different. Yeah. 01:52:06 Speaker 3: And there's like you know, and then there's interspecies like love affairs, right. 01:52:09 Speaker 2: And they know when that was happening, ad mixing. 01:52:12 Speaker 1: Because mule deer would get it on with white tails, and so I want to get a great knee and a tall person on man. But yeah, I guess the writer. I don't know. 01:52:23 Speaker 2: I see come back in three four years. 01:52:25 Speaker 1: How long is it taking into the book? 01:52:27 Speaker 2: I'm game, I don't know. 01:52:29 Speaker 1: Three years. We didn't get into your personal life. What's going on? Are you married or anything? 01:52:32 Speaker 2: Like? Single? 01:52:33 Speaker 1: Sing? Yeah? 01:52:34 Speaker 2: Old, I'm forty five? All right, ladies, Yeah, tell you got any ideas? 01:52:44 Speaker 1: I don't. I mean, you just just bade the trap. 01:52:46 Speaker 2: Cool, yeah, right right on my install which I don't have. 01:52:53 Speaker 1: Yeah yeah cool. Well here if someone wanted to meet them, yeah yeah, they need to wait, like for his Neanderthal book to come out. And you go to the book event old, No, go to the book. 01:53:05 Speaker 2: End for this, Yeah, February third, The Free and the Dead. 01:53:09 Speaker 1: And then ask him out to dinner. The Freeing the Dead, The Untold Story of the Black Seminal Chief, the Indigenous Rebel, and America's Forgotten War by Jamie Holmes. Thanks for coming on. Can't wait to have you back on with your next book. 01:53:23 Speaker 2: That was so much fun. Thanks appreciate it.