Florida Everglades

It is a land where everybody goes, but one that almost nobody knows. Part of the region is populous, and becomes host to thousands of health-hunters and play-seekers each winter.

The other part is a vast area, rich in natural beauty and wild life, which lies beyond the eye of the visitor or winter resident - lies there in the hot sunshine almost unchanged since four centuries ago when Juan Ponce de Leon penetrated its somber forests as a likely place to find the Fountain of Youth.

South Florida visitors follow a route skirting either coast, where they see streamlined cities and towns of white buildings, bright gardens, and streets ornamented with orderly rows of man-planted palm trees.

Throughout each year thousands speed along the Tamiami Trail, the only highway built across the wide stretch of wilderness between the two coasts, but seldom does one of the travelers wander more than a hundred feet north or south of the highway (map, page 118, and page 122).

Barred from the road by junglelike growth are vast cypress swamps, where wild orchids decorate the aisles of trees, and exotic water birds rear their young in huge rookeries; islands where pines and palms grow side by side, where panthers, bears, and wild turkeys are still found, and alligators dig caves in the soft soil (p. 138) .

Spreading out for mile upon mile are the Florida Everglades. To the south they extend all the way to Cape Sable and the mangrove islands at the spearlike tip of the peninsula. Beyond eye range of the visitor are vast areas strewn with the white skeletons of trees, torn and twisted by the power of the winds, and thousands of islands and wide prairies seeming more like a part of the South American pampas than a section of the United States.

To the north the Everglades stretch all the way to the Kissimmee Prairie and Lake Okeechobee, Florida's inland sea. The prairies are low, sandy, grassy, and comparatively treeless tracts, subject to occasional inundation in rainy seasons.

The human inhabitants of the interior of south Florida blend with its untamed atmosphere, for the Seminoles are the only American Indians who have never, since the end of hostilities, signed a formal treaty with the United States Government.

They constitute an independent remnant of a tribe which fought the United States Army in two of the most furiously contested wars ever waged by Indians (1816-18 and 1835-42).

Originally the Seminoles were a group of Creeks who left the main Georgia tribe about 1750 to make their home in the wild country of the Florida Peninsula. "Seminole" means "seceder" or "runaway."

By treaties in 1832 and 1833, some of the tribal leaders ceded their lands to the Government and agreed to be moved out to the Indian Territory in the West. This caused a split in the Seminoles; part of the tribe refused to be moved west and sought sanctuary deep in the swamps (page 130).

Efforts to force them to move brought on renewed warfare, which began in 1835, lasted for seven years, and cost the lives of nearly 1,500 American soldiers and millions of dollars.

More than 4,000 Seminoles and runaway negroes who had become their slaves were transported to the West in small groups during those seven years, but a small number held out to the last, protected by their knowledge of the swamps and their ability to live in them. The war ended in 1842 without a treaty. Today about 650 Seminoles still make their homes in the Everglades and the cypress swamps…”