Salish

• The ancients all had greater powers and cunning than either animals or people. Besides the ancients, real people lived on the earth at that time. Old One made the people out of the last balls of mud he took from the earth. They were so ignorant that they were the most helpless of all the creatures Old One had made.
  
  The difficulty with the early world was that most of the ancients were selfish, and they were also very stupid in some ways. They did not know which creatures were deer and which were people, and sometimes they ate people by mistake.
  
  At last Old One said, "There will soon be no people if I let things go on like this." So he sent  Coyote to teach the Indians how to do things. And Coyote began to travel on the earth, teaching the Indians, making life easier and better for them, and performing many wonderful deeds.-Salish creation story.
  
• The Salish inhabited mostly the area of the now state of Washington. They were north of the Columbia River and south of the Kwakiutl and Bella Coola tribes. To their soutwest lived the Chinook , Tillamook and Coos tribes. Blood ties linked the Coast Salish communities with the other surrounding groups, encircling the waters esat and south of Vancouver Island.
  
• A 2,000 mile ribbon of misty, forested seacoast runs along the continents northwest margin, from the Gulf of Alaska to northern California, unfurling a landscape of astonishing beauty and abundance. A wall of snowcapped uplands-the Coast Mountains-rises abruptly on the landward side, its highest peaks cresting at more than 15,000 feet above sea level. Rivers cascade down the slopes, past majestic stands of cedar, hemlock, spruce, and fir. The climate is mild and moist; rainfall can measure more than 200 inches a year in the wettest sections. Deer, elk, mountain goats, and grizzly bear graze the high meadows.
  
  To the west, deep ocean currents flood in from the Pacific, spilling past a long chain of barrier islands into a labyrinth of bays, inlets, reefs, marshes, fiords, and estuaries and generating one of the richest concentrations of marine life anywhere in the world. Vast quantities of fish inhabit this coast, including flounder, cod, rockfish, 400-pound halibut, and enormous schools of herring and smelt. Seals, sea lions, and sea otters swim in-shore to feed. Clams, mussels, crabs, and sea urchins litter the beaches, along with thousands of seabird eggs. A procession of whales and porpoises cruises offshore.
  
  But from earliest times, the main resource was salmon in five different species. Beginning in late spring, the first huge runs would move inland, swarming over sandbars, battling river rapids, to spawn and die by the countless thousands. In just a few months, a Northwest Coast fisherman could spear or net enough salmon to sustain his family throughout the year. So massive was the influx, and so predictable, that some people came to think salmon were immortal. According to legend, a tribe of salmon people spent the winter in houses beneath the sea. Then, when the season warmed, they changed into fish and swam upriver to offer their bodies for human consumption. Their souls, released from the flesh, would return to the ocean.
  
• From the rain forest came the wood of the majestic red cedar-strong, aromatic, and resistant to rot. Massive cedar logs formed the framework of native houses, and split cedar planking sheathed their sides. The hull of each canoe began as a single cedar trunk, which the boat builders felled, scooped out with stone tools, then steamed to shape. Cedar boxes, intricately carved, served as storage space, household furniture, and containers for food and fish oil.
  
  Clothing and blankets were woven from cedar bark, which Northwest Coast women softened by pounding, then cut into strips. Split cedar root (along with spruce root and grasses) became the raw material for the region's superb basketwork, with mesh so tight that the baskets held water. And a cedar-root raincoat kept the wearer dry in any weather.
  
  This bounty of sea and forest gave rise to a way of life unique in all the Americas. Here such peoples as the Tlingit and Tsimshian, Nootka, Nuxalk and Chinook fished, feasted, and vied among themselves for power and prestige. Some were ferocious warriors-like the Haida, whose 60-foot battle canoes sped south as far as present-day Vancouver to take booty and slaves from the more peaceable Coast Salish. All the region's people placed great importance on generosity, holding lavish ceremonies in which they gave out food, blankets, weapons, and other valuables.
  
• A visitor approaching a coastal village anywhere north of Puget Sound would find a row of large cedar houses above the beach of a sheltered cove or riverbank. The village might include only 3 or 4 extended families, each in its own house. Or it might stretch a mile or more along the waterfront and contain as many as 800 or 900 people. On some houses the facades would be painted with intricate totem figures-semiabstract shapes of birds and animals that proclaimed the family's clan affiliation. Carved cedar totem poles marked the dwellings of the most important families. To the rear, behind the beach front living quarters, were smokehouses, drying racks for fish, storage sheds, and the like.
  
  In each community the social order was built on family status. Centuries ago, as the coast people's forebears settled in, certain families gained control of the best fishing grounds, berry patches, and cedar groves, thus appropriating most of the wealth. In time,as the rights to these assets passed from one genaration to the next, a complex social hierarchy developed that contrasted sharply with most other cultures in native North America.
  
  At the top stood a handful of aristocratic families-the taises, or chiefs of the wealthiest lineages and their close relatives. Some might be warriors, others powerful shamans, and still others trade chiefs who controlled the lines of commerce with other tribes or villages.
  
  Below these elite families were their more distant relatives-the michimis, or ordinary people. Unlike their rich cousins, who almost never soiled their hands in labor, the nonelite relatives did much of the community's physical work. They felled the cedars, built the houses, hunted the game, repaired the fish weirs. On occasion, an aritsan of unusual skill might rise above his normal station. But as a rule, rank was dictated by birth.
  
  Except for the slaves. Up and down the coast, slavery was the bitter consequence of defeat in battle. Ambitious nobles would raid distant villages, looting valuables and seizing hostages. High-ranking prisoners might be sent home in exchange for a ransom payment, but all others remained the property of their captors. They were generally well treated. Slaves lived in the houses of their owners, ate the same food, and performed the same day-to-day tasks as other villagers. But their lives were always in jeopardy. When erecting a new family house, for example, some chiefs observed a custom of burying the body of a freshly killed slave under each corner post.
  
  Within each village the more powerful lineages took precedence. But the chief of every household automatically held noble rank. He presided from a raised platform along the rear wall, opposite the door, where he lived with his wife and younger children; an elaborately carved screen often separated this private space from the rest of the building. Other families in the household, all related to the house chief, lived along the two side walls in order of rank. Slaves laid their blankets near the entrance.
  
• Social standing only told half the story, however. Each household chief belonged to one of several hereditary clans-Owl, Whale, Sea Lion, Beaver, and others-in which everyone was presumably descended from a common ancestor. Additionally, communities were divided into two groups of roughly equal size. Every individiual in a Haida village, for example, besides having a regular clan affiliation, also came into the world as either an Eagle or a Raven.
  
  The distinction between the two sides was a s basic as the difference between day and night. All Ravens, no matter how distant their blood relationship, felt a sense of spiritual kinship and commonly addressed each other as "brother" or "sister." At the same time, neither side could get along without the other. When a Raven chief wanted to build a new house or erect a totem pole, he would appeal to his Eagle counterpart, who then sent workmen to do the job. The very survival of the tribe depended on such cooperation, since marriage could occur only across group lines: Ravens wed Eagles, never other Ravens.
  
  Social structures tended to be more relaxed along the coast's southern reaches. For example, the Chinook and Coast Salish, a person's status depended in large part on individual merit. But among most coastal groups, family heritage was a matter of great consequence.
  
• The most dramatic celebration of family pride was the potlatch, an elaborate ritual of feasting, dancing, storytelling, and gift-giving that was a vital part of every Northwest Coast society. Whenever an important family moved into a new house, the occasion demanded a potlatch. So, too, did any dynastic event-a birth or a marriage, the death of a chief, the succession of an heir. Sometimes a clan leader would host a potlatch to repay a debt or erase a shame. No honors or titles were deemed valid until the recipient gave a potlatch "to make my name good," as the saying went.
  
  The festivities could last for days or even weeks. There would be formal speeches recounting the family legends, dance performances, a display of heirlooms and family emblems-all certifying the right of the host to his titles and privileges. Finally, he would hand out presents, divesting himself of blankets, animal pelts, carved boxes, shell necklaces, cartons of fish oil, weapons, and-most valuable of all-engraved metal slabs called coppers. The more lavish his generosity, the more honor he gained for himself and his lineage. Some truly great chiefs were said to have distributed all they owned, then burned down their houses and executed their slaves. Such willful extravagance was the ultimate social gesture, worthy of enduring praise and esteem. (In practice, at least some of the wealth given out at potlatches came back to the owner, since the principal guest was honor bound to host a potlatch in return.)
  
  Potlatches were generally held in winter, when the coastal people turned from hunting and fishing to a virtually nonstop round of festivals and ceremonies. It was the season of spirits and demons, of mythic beings from distant worlds who arrived in the villages to the accompaniment of rattles, drums, and eerie whistles, inspiring awe and terror among viewers. Secret dance societies marked the occasion with ancient and sacred rites.
  
• During the fur trade era, most whites came only briefly to Northwest Coast, conducting their business and then departing. As a tiny minority dependent on the goodwill of their native hosts, the white traders tended to treat the local population with a certain respect. Bonds of genuine affection gradualyl took hold.
  
  However, the governments of Canada and the US settled a long-standing boundary dispute in 1846, in effect opening the region to settlers. Before long, shiny yellow nuggets began showing up at the trading posts. By 1858,Fort Victoria grew from 300 to 3,000 permanent inhabitants, with another 6,000 transients camped nearby. And as was always the case, diseases took a dreadful toll.
  
  Malaria, influenza, scarlet fever, whooping cough, and the like had struck periodically since the early days of the fur trade. Now came a small pox epidemic that raged through the Victoria slums in 1862. In the crowded conditions of the native shantytowns, it spread like an invisible, poisonous fog. The authorities seized the opportunity to evict the inhabitants and burn their houses.
  
  The refugess fled up the coast to their old villages, bearing the infection with them. Travelers reported seeing bodies festering along the shoreline, with canoes, blankets, and guns scattered nearby. The disease touched almost every village on Vancouver Island and on the mainland opposite. The death count among the Nuu-chal-nuth, Kwakiutl and Coast Salish reached one in three.
  
• Decimated by illness, reviled by white settlers, their community life disrupted by alcoholism and other social problems, native people increasingly found consolation in another alien intrusion: Christianity.
  
  In some areas Christianity merged in surprising ways with native beliefs and ceremonial practices. Among the Salish tribes of the interior mountains, holy men in the late 1800's regularly borrowed from the sacraments of Roman catholicism, urging their followers to observe the Sabbath and make the sign of the cross before meals. Then one day in 1881 a Coast Salish laborer named John Slocum, a Catholic convert, fell into a deep coma. As his grief-stricken family went off to buy a coffin, he felt his soul transported to the gates of Heaven. When it returned, Slocum awoke and began to preach a gospel of clean living and spiritual renewal. At first his message won few adherents. But again the miracle occurred: Slocum went into a trance, was left for dead, then arose to resume preaching.
  
  During this second ordeal Slocum's wife, Mary, was seized with a fit of shaking, which everyone interpreted as yet another sign of divine visitation. So was born Tschadam, the Indian Shaker religion. Along with its Christian God-and stern prohibition of drinking, gambling, and other vices-it added the spirit power of certain traditional beliefs and the healing effects of a dancelike shaking ceremony. The religion spread from Seattle, where the Slocums built their first church, up and down the coast, from California to British columbia, and there it survives to this day.
  

Sauk

• A part of the Great Lakes nations, the Sauk main abode was on the southwest portion of Lake Huron, south of the Potawatomi, north of the mascouten and Kickapoo. Though separated by myriad differences in local customs, all the Great Lakes region were part of the same larger social order. Except where the growing season was too short, they all raised the storable staples: corn, beans, squash, and gourds. The Sauk and Huron raised thousand of bushels of surplus corn to use in trade. The spring and fall fish runs and the sap from the sugar maple were as important as a corn patch; dried blueberries would last through the winter. Wild rice was especially abundant along the Wisconsin-Minnesota border.
  
• The people of the Upper Country loved children, and the villages teemed with them. Clan affiliation remained a primary source of personal identity-though everyone had his or her own given name and sometimes several others acquired over a lifetime.
  
• Pampered by their parents, indulged by a sprawling network of more distant relatives, children learned by storytelling and example rather than physical punishment. Grandparents were the principal teachers. Among the lessons of the elders was the value of generosity and sharing. Hoarding was deplored, and status was measured by how much a man gave away rather than how much he could accumulate.
  
• At puberty every young woman knew she must begin retiring to the women's hut during her menstrual cycle. And every young man, after proper preparation, moved off to a secluded spot for fasting and prayer in hopes of receiving a vision that would become his guardian spirit for the rest of his life. Religion permeated daily life in every realm. Althugh the languages differed, people throughout the region believed in a higher power, called the Master of Life or the Great Spirit or the Creator. Other spirits or beings were available to intercede with the higher power on behalf of earthly people. There was a spiritual essence in rocks, trees-everywhere in the physical environment. All Great Lakes peoples (among others) told and retold the adventures of mythical figures who gave humans many valuable lessons.
  
• The Ojibwa developed an institution of great importance called the Grand Medicine Society, or Midewiwin, and initiated members into the knowledge and rituals of the Mide religion. As part of the initiation ceremonies, a leader recounted stories of the origin of the people near the salt seas who had been guided west by a sacred shell. Mide priests kept birchbark maps of the migration route with symbolic markings that indicated the songs and procedure for stages of the initiation rites. The Midewiwin promoted the knowledge of herbal medicine and advocated balance in all aspects of life.
  
  The religion spread among other Great Lakes tribes: Potawatomi, Ottawa, Sauk, Winnebago, Fox, Kickapoo, and Shawnee. Great Lakes Indians, like others, developed an extensive knowledge of plant medicine. There were medicines to attract animals to traps and snares and to lure fish; love medicines, cures for respiratory problems and a whole catalog of human ailments, as well as contraceptive and abortion-inducing medications, insect repellents, and cures for poison ivy and snakebite. No great domains or chieftains controlled the Upper Country; each village was an independent community. A village leader was selected, usually by a council of elders, on merit alone. Proven ability in hunting and warfare, courage, stamina, and generosity-these were the valued traits. So, too, was skill as an orator. Since no village leader could force a path of action, he often needed to exhort, inspire, and cajole. Decisions were made by consensus, with a highly formalized (and time-consuming) system of debate. On quesions of war and peace, talks could consume days on end. A minority faction might move to another village or even join a different tribe.
  
• A Sauk warrior, Winnebea, was known to state this: "We value our medicine bags so highly that we would not part with them while life endures. Some of us did, and this proved to be the source of many heavy calamities."
  
• Villages usually had a separate war leader, and joining a war party was a matter of choice. Even so, warfare was the bone and sinew of life in the region, deemed essential for sharpening the survival skills of the entire society. The ball games and running competitions of peacetime trained the young men of the village in attack and rapid retreat. Even small children were periodically deprived of food and water in order to inure them to the rigors of forced marches. Having decided to go to battle, the warriors would set out after spring fishing or planting. They might be gone a few weeks or sometimes the entire summer, usually breaking up into war parties of six or ten-groups small emough to test their bravery and skill by penetrating enemy territory and returning unharmed. Most commonly, they attacked an enemy hunting party away from its village; captured warriors were subjected to ritual torture and death-although a very lucky captive might be saved for adoption. Alternately, the raiders might seize women and children out gathering wood and either adopt them or hold them for ransom. In either case, the number of victims was never large.
• But one thing was essential: an enemy. Every tribal group had a traditional opponent. And since the motive for battle was usually revenge and retaliation, the bloodshed could perpetuate itself for generations.
  
• As the middle of the 17th century approached, the struggle for new fur sources prompted the Iroquois, who already dominated from the Hudson River to Lake Erie, to reach for more. Starting around 1640 and for the next six decades, Iroquois raiders struck and struck again, battling to take over the trade routes and rich trapping grounds around the Great Lakes. So began the spiral of bloodshed known as the Beaver Wars that would change forever the world of the Upper Country.
• French military posts sprang up all across the region, from the forests morth of Lake Superior, along Lake Michigan, to the rivers of central Illiois. Green Bay became a major trading psot. The surrounding native population may have reached as high as 20,000 as refugee bands poured in from the eastern battlegrounds.
  
  As the tribes converged around the French installations and the number of refugees increased, so did the frictions between competing trade groups. The large band of Ottawa at Michilimackinac became the principal middlemen for the Ojibwa in suppying furs to the French. In Green Bay the Potawatomi distributed lavish gifts in hopes of achieving the same end. The Fox, deeply concerned that European rifles were being traded to their arch-enemy, the Sioux, joined forces with the Iroquois in order to disrupt that deadly flow of merchandise-and at the same time they hoped to obtain a larger share of beaver profits for themselves.
  
  Then, little by little, the balance began to shift. When Iroquois raiders thrust into Illinois in 1684, combined native forces from Ft St Louis turned them back. In the Lake Huron area a French garrison at Ft St Joseph, at the lake's southern tip, became a focal point for multitribal counterattacks against nearby Iroquois settlements. Across the river the Ontario peninsular was being reconquered by Ojibwa people from the north, who claimed it had belonged to their forefathers before the Iroquois came.
  
  As the bloodshed abated in the Upper Country, the governors of New France took advantage of the lull to consolidate their position. Ambassadors went out from Montreal, inviting all the tribes to gather for a mass celebration of friendship and peace. Prisoners would be exchanged, and all remaining quarrels put to rest. Most of France's Indian allies readily agreed, and a large delegation of Great Lakes leaders met with the French governor general "Onontio" to pledge their loyalty. The Iroquois councils deliberated in their unhurried, consensus-building manner for a full two years, weighing the pros and cons with their English patrons. Then they, too, decided to accept the proposed French accord.
  
  In midsummer of 1701 the canoes started landing on the beach at Montreal-Sauk, Fox, and Winnebago, Potawatomi and Miami, spiky-haired Huron and feathered Ojibwa, buckskin-clad Kickapoo, and Sioux in their eagle feathers and buffalo robes...and the Five Nations of the Iroquois League.
  
  Close to 1,300 people attended, representing 39 separate tribes, and together they feasted and parleyed and smoked the calumet. The delegates worked out some last-minute details. The Iroquois received the right to hunt in Ontario country, and western Indians were given free access to trade in New York. Then on August 4 everyone assembled in a newly built courtyard just outside the city to hear the final orations and witness the signing of a treaty that officially ended decades of intertribal war in the Upper Country.
  
• The Fox, being disturbed by the treaty, ultimately enhanced their battle prowess by making alliances with the Ojibwa and Sioux in the 1720's. But the question of a new truce with the Grench opened a rift that could not be closed. Montreal enlisted its Indian allies, including most of the Great Lakes and Illinois tribes, and in 1728 sent a massive force into Fox country.
  
  The Fox by this time had split apart. One faction dispersed to continue waging war; the larger group headed east, hoping to find refuge with the Iroquois in New York. But in the prairies of central Illinois, they were seen by a band of Illinois hunters, who alerted the French. The Fox hastily fortified themselves in a village and soon came under attack. Among their opponents were the Sauk, who gave sanctuary to the Fox children, but of the adults remaining in the village, only 50 escaped death or capture. In the next decade, Fox survivors found refuge among the Sauk and negotiated another truce with the French-which the French again violated.
  
• American veterans of the War of 1812 were sometimes paid in land warrants instead of cash, and when land agents began buying up plots along the Wabash and Illinois rivers, the local Kickapoo fought back. In the 1820's a mining boom on the Galena River sparked a stampede into northwet Illinois, which in turn sparked a Winnebago uprising.
  
  Most of the attempts flared briefly, then failed. The story of one man, the Sauk leader Black Hawk, illustrates a rare kind of persistence in the face of continuous betrayal. Deceived into signing a treaty he did not understand-like so many others who were tricked or bribed or threatened-Black Hawk led his people west across the Mississippi to new territory. Then in 1831 he returned to his village, Saukenuk, to plant crops. What he found appalled him. Not only had white families arrived-some of them moving into the abandoned Sauk lodges-but they had fenced in the cornfields and they were plowing up his ancestors' graves. Black Hawk responded by settling in for the summer with 300 warriors and refusing to budge. The next year he returned, this time with 600 men.
  
  This brazen defiance startled the federal government into sending out a large expeditionary force. It arrived at Saukenuk in May of 1832, and Black Hawk, duly noting the Americans' strength, decided to parley.  His envoys approached the US encampment under a flag of truce. The militiamen on guard, inexperienced and jittery, opened fire. Three Sauk men fell dead. The war had begun.
  
  In the first large skirmish, 40 Sauk warriors repelled an attack by 275 militiamen under Isaiah Stillman and sent them fleeing (earning the episode its nickname Stillman's Run). Over the next three months, several thousand federal and state troops chased Black Hawk and his people north across Illinois and Wisconsin. The Americans floundered through swamps, and fell ill with cholera, and still Black Hawk eluded them. The Sauk were traveling with their wives and children, moving fast with little food and no time to hunt; they suffered badly from hunger and fatigue.
  
  On the first of August, the refugees halted at the Bad Axe River in Wisconsin to make canoes and rafts, planning to float downstream to the Mississippi and then on to safety. The next day a US gunship steamed into sight, loaded with troops. Again Black Hawk raised a flag of truce. Again the Americans opened fire, killing 23 Indians.
  
  The final blow came the following morning, when the main American force arrived. Some 1,300 troops swept through the Sauk encampment, firing indiscriminately at en, women, and children. The death toll in the Bad Axe River massacre (to the army it was a "battle") reached as high as 300. Black Hawk led a band of survivors north to seek refuge with the Winnebago-who betrayed him to white authorities in return for $100 and twenty horses. The war was over.
  
  "You have taken me prisoner with all my warriors. I am much grieved...I expected to hold out much longer and give you more trouble before I surrendered. Black Hawk is now a prisoner of the white man. But he can stand torture, and he is not afraid of death. He is no coward. Black Hawk is an Indian."-Black Hawk, Sauk

Seminole

• North of the Calusa, the Seminole inhabited the areas in the peninsula of Florida. They spoke the Muskogean language.
  
• As De Soto bullied and looted his way across the Southeast in th 1500's, he passed through a succession of towns whose names have all but vanished from memory. Their most striking features were great earthworks and ceremonial mounds, some small enough for a man to jump over, others enormous structures with flattened tops standing more than 50 feet tall, complete with walkways and staircases.
  
  De Soto did not know it, but his men were the last Europeans to see the great chiefdoms of the ancient Moundbuilder societies. By the time French and English explorers returned to the area in the 1700's, it was a scene of desolation, scoured by wave after wave of European disease. Sacred mounds had long since fallen into disrepair; clearings once used for villages were covered with a thick growth of forest. Nevertheless, the Moundbuilders' legacy endured in tribal traditions. When Oklahoma Muskogee and Seminole gather for the Green Corn Ceremony, singers and dancers perform on small square mounds reminiscent of their ancient predecessors'.
  
• The fate of several tribes in the Florida region, if not as cataclysmic as that of the Natchez, was just as bleak. Many of those who had endured De Soto's marauding-the Calusa, Timucua, Apalachee, and others-were dealt blow after blow in the following years by disease and the slave trade. The toll was staggering: by the 18th century much of the land they had occupied was empty.
  
  During the early 1700's various bands of Muskogean-speaking people-many of them Creeks displaced by wars with white settlers in Georgia and Alabama-filtered south to take refuge in the deserted Florida territory. The refugees adapted to living in the tropical flatlands there, and gradually the separate bands coalesced into a new, larger tribal grouping-in effect repeating the process that had produced most of the major tribes and confedereations of the Southeast. By about 1775 traditional Creek communities were using the term seminole-"runaways" or "untamed people"-for this new coalition.
  
  Some Seminole groups retained their own language or dialect, and most continued to follow their own customs under local village leaders. Each town grew its own communal corn crop, in which every individual shared, with a portion set aside for the mico, or local chief. Europeans who inquired about this practice learned to their surprise that the corn did not serve as a tribute rather as a sort of public treasury, which any needy citizen could dip into when times were bad. The communal cache might also be shared with neighboring villages whose crops had failed.
  
  As farmers, the Seminole, like other Southeastern peoples, annually celebrated the new year with the Green Corn Ceremony. They were also hunters and fishers, as their predecessors in the region had been. But it became harder and harder to pursue those activities in traditional ways. Extensive deerskin trade with Europeans periodically depleted the deer herds, which limited the annual winter supply of venison. Dams built by colonists along the coast restricted the spawning runs of of saltwater fish. By the late 18th century, the Seminole were turning more and more to the whites' farming methods and to the domestication of cattle, pigs, and other alien livestock.
  
  It was not an easy adjustment. Many were loath to eat pork: somehow pigs reminded them of opossums, ugly beasts long deeemd unfit for human consumption. There was also a reluctance to raise cattle-the "white man's deer," unworthy of a hunter's skill.
  
  In time, declining populations of deer and other game forced most tribes to come to terms with the demands of livestock raising. The results were mixed, to be sure. In many places tribal cattle were allowed to roam semi-wild in the woods, where it was difficult to round them up. Also, domesticated cattle became reservoirs of microorganisms that contributed to periodic outbreaks of sickness in native communities.
  
  Among the Seminole another traditional pattern was undergoing a remarkable change. During the 17th and 18th centuries, many Southeastern Indians had looked with a certain disdain upon the region's African blacks. Plantation owners often hired Indians to catch slaves who had fled to the frontier forests, offering trade goods and other prizes as bounties. But in Seminole country, which from the start had been a sancturay for runaways and the dispossessed, the climate was different.
  
  The Seminole, themselves victims of the white man, shared their refuge with escaped African slaves, who supplied the villages with part of their crops in return for the right to work the land. Shared hardships, a common enemy, and intermarriage brought the two cultures together. By the early 19th century, former slaves (called Seminole Negroes or Indian Negroes by white Southerners) frequently served as interpreters when Seminole leaders parleyed with whites, and when negotiations broke down, as they often did, the Africans and Indians fought side by side to defend their common interests.
  
• The largely peaceful existence of the Seminole was shattered in 1817 when Gen Andrew Jackson led 1,700 American troops into Spanish-held Florida, ostensibly in search of escaped slaves. His campaign, the first of many brutal US sorties into the region, savaged both blacks and Seminoles, and it ended with the US taking possession of Florida. It also confirmed Jackson's reputation as a no-holds-barred Indian fighter.
  
• Directly after the removal of many tribes in the 1830's, the Seminoles were next to leave, and they did not all go gently. After Andrew Jackson's earlier foray into Florida, the region had enjoyed a period of relative calm. Then in 1831 a drought struck Seminole crops in central Florida, and by the spring of 1832 many were going hungry.  US agents swiftly moved in with offers of food and clothing to any Seminole who would emigrate west; land was available in Indian Territory alongside the Creek. Dispirited by the drought, a small group of chiefs reluctantly signed two treaties agreeing to removal of the Seminole by 1835. But one refused to budge.  His tribal name, which meant "black drink crier," was Osceola.
  
  When the army came after him, Osceola took his warriors into the Florida swamps. There they abandoned guns in favor of bows and arrows so that they could hunt without being detected. Seminole fighters attacked government forces when they least expected it, harassing and frustrating the toops with resourceful guerrilla tactics. At one point the army even tried using specially trained Cuban bloodhounds to roust the Indians from their hiding places, but without success.
  
  In the fall of 1837, Gen Thomas Jesup asked Osceola to meet him under a flag of truce. When the Seminole came to talk, Jesup arrestd him and threw him into a federal prison in South Carolina. Csceola died three months later. This act of treachery only deepened Seminole resolve, and the conflict dragged on for seven years, until at last in 1842 a series of treaties officially ended it.
  
  About 4,000 Seminole survivors were duly moved west to Indian Territory, where US authorities, citing their Creek heritage, settled them in Creek lands-among people some Seimonles regarded as enemies. Before long, Creek slaveholders in Oklahoma charged that the Seminoles were luring Africans from Creek farms with promises of freedom. When news of this was received back East, some of the Seminoles still in Florida refused to move. Like Osceola's warriors, they retreated into the Everglades and the Big Cypress Swamp and eluded the federal troops that came for them. Several thousand of their descendants live in Florida to this day, unmoved and immovable.
  
  The Seminole at length were recognized as a tribe and in 1856 given territory separate from the Creeks.
  
• Between 1830 and 1842, the Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Creek, and Seminole had been forcibly removed from their homelands in the Southeastern US and resettled in Indian Territory, part of what would become the state of Oklahoma. Overcoming that trauma-and the internal divisions it aroused-the exiles began to recreate their communities with remarkable speed and get on with their lives.
  
  The allotment system created by the Dawes Act of 1887 did not apply to the Five Tribes or to others in Indian Territory living on reservations created by earlier US government treaties. But unrelenting pressure from non-Indian land seekers forced Congress to act.  In 1889 it opened "Oklahoma Country"-an area of unassigned land in the center of the territory-to the first land rush by white settlers. Then in 1893 it opened the just-purchased Cherokee Outlet to an even larger wave of so-called boomers. Then, to clear the way for Oklahoma's eventual statehood, it established the Dawes Commission to negotiate terms and timetables with the Five Tribes and others for allotting their reservation lands and dissovling their tribal governments.
  
  The Five Tribes and others fought back by attempting to form their own separate state of Sequoyah. Congress responded with the Curtis Act of 1898, which abolished their tribal governments and effectively cut them off from the statehood process. When Oklahoma finally became a state in 1907, Indians throughout the area were soon swamped by a massive new influx of boomers. Native communities survived, but their reservations were not preserved and the tribal land base disappeared almost completely. The impact was greatest on the Five Tribes-inevitably, since they had the most land to lose. Of their 19.5 million acres, 15.8 million were allotted, with much of the remaining land-nearly 4 million acres-sold off at public auction.