Osceola
Osceola, named Billy Powell at birth, was an influential leader of the Seminole people in Florida. His mother was Muscogee, and his great-grandfather was a Scotsman, James McQueen. He was reared by his mother in the Creek tradition. When he was a child, they migrated to Florida with other Red Stick refugees, led by a relative, Peter McQueen, after their group's defeat in 1814 in the Creek Wars. There they became part of what was known as the Seminole people.
In 1836, Osceola led a small group of warriors in the Seminole resistance during the Second Seminole War, when the United States tried to remove the tribe from their lands in Florida to Indian Territory west of the Mississippi River. He became an adviser to Micanopy, the principal chief of the Seminole from 1825 to 1849. Osceola led the Seminole resistance to removal until he was captured on October 21, 1837, by deception, under a flag of truce, when he went to a site near Fort Peyton for peace talks. The United States first imprisoned him at Fort Marion in St. Augustine, then transported him to Fort Moultrie in Charleston, South Carolina. He died there a few months later of causes reported as an internal infection or malaria. Because of his renown, Osceola attracted visitors in prison, including renowned artist George Catlin, who painted perhaps the most well-known portrait of the Seminole leader.
Early life
Osceola was named Billy Powell at his birth in 1804 in the Upper Creek village of Talisi, which means "Old Town". The village site, now the city of Tallassee, Alabama, was located on the banks of the Tallapoosa River about upstream from Fort Toulouse where the Tallapoosa and the Coosa rivers meet to form the Alabama River. The residents of the original Talisi village and of the current city of Tallassee were a mixture of several ethnicities. The Muscogee Creek were among the Indigenous peoples of the Southeastern Woodlands, and some of them held enslaved black people. Powell was believed to have ancestors from all of these groups. His mother was Polly Coppinger, a mixed-race Creek woman, and his father was most likely William Powell, a Scottish trader.Polly was also of Muscogee and European ancestry, as the daughter of Ann McQueen and Jose Coppinger. Because the Muscogee had a matrilineal kinship system, Polly and Ann's children were all born into their mother's clan. They were reared by their mothers and their maternal male relatives following Muscogee cultural practices, and they gained their social status from their mother's people. Ann McQueen was also mixed-race Muscogee Creek; her father, James McQueen, was Scottish. Ann was probably the sister or aunt of Peter McQueen, a prominent Muscogee leader and warrior. Like his mother, Billy Powell was raised in the Muscogee Creek confederacy.
Billy Powell's maternal grandfather, James McQueen, was a ship-jumping Scottish sailor who in 1716 became the first recorded white person to trade with the Muscogee Creek Confederacy in Alabama. He stayed in the area as a fur trader and married into a Muscogee family, becoming closely involved with these people. He was buried in 1811 at the Indian cemetery in Franklin, Alabama, near a Methodist missionary church for the Muscogee.
In 1814, after the Red Stick Muscogee Creeks were defeated by United States forces, Polly took Osceola and moved with other Muscogee refugees from Alabama to Florida, where they joined the Seminole. In adulthood, as part of the Seminole, Powell was given his name Osceola. This is an anglicized form of the Creek Vsse Yvholv, a combination of vsse, the ceremonial black drink made from the yaupon holly, and yvholv, often translated "shouter" but referring specifically to the one who performs a special whoop at the Green Corn Ceremony or archaically to a tribal town officer responsible for offering the black drink.
In April 1818, during the First Seminole War, Osceola and his mother where living in Peter McQueen's village near the Econfina River, when it was attacked and destroyed by the Lower Creek allies of U.S. General Andrew Jackson that were led by William McIntosh. Many surviving Red Stick warriors and their families, including McQueen, retreated south into the Florida peninsula.
In 1821, the United States acquired Florida from Spain, and more European-American settlers started moving in, encroaching on the Seminoles' territory. After early military skirmishes and the signing of the 1823 Treaty of Moultrie Creek, by which the U.S. seized the northern Seminole lands, Osceola and his family moved with the Seminole deeper into the unpopulated wilds of central and southern Florida.
As an adult, Osceola took two wives, as did some other high-ranking Muscogee and Seminole leaders. With them, he had at least five children. One of his wives was black, and Osceola fiercely opposed the enslavement of free people. Lt. John T. Sprague mentions in his 1848 history The Florida War that Osceola had a wife named "Che-cho-ter", who bore him four children.
1830s resistance and war leader
Through the 1820s and 1830s American settlers continued pressuring the US government to remove the Seminole from Florida to make way for their desired agricultural development. In 1832, a few Seminole chiefs signed the Treaty of Payne's Landing, by which they agreed to give up their Florida lands in exchange for lands west of the Mississippi River in Indian Territory. According to legend, Osceola stabbed the treaty with his knife, although there are no contemporary reports of this. Donald L. Fixico, an American Indian historian, says he made a research trip to the National Archives to see the original Treaty of Fort Gibson, and that upon close inspection, he observed that it had "a small triangular hole shaped like the point of a knife blade."Five of the most important Seminole chiefs, including Micanopy of the Alachua Seminole, did not agree to removal. In retaliation, the US Indian agent, Wiley Thompson, declared that those chiefs were deposed from their positions. As US relations with the Seminole deteriorated, Thompson forbade the sale of guns and ammunition to them. Osceola, a young warrior rising to prominence, resented this ban. He felt it equated the Seminole with slaves, who were forbidden by law to carry arms.
Thompson considered Osceola to be a friend and gave him a rifle. Osceola had a habit of barging into Thompson's office and shouting complaints at him. On one occasion Osceola quarreled with Thompson, who had the warrior locked up at Fort King for two nights until he agreed to be more respectful. In order to secure his release, Osceola agreed to sign the Treaty of Payne's Landing and to bring his followers into the fort. After his humiliating imprisonment, Osceola secretly prepared vengeance against Thompson.
On December 28, 1835, Osceola, with the same rifle Thompson gave him, killed the Indian agent. Osceola and his followers shot six others outside Fort King, while another group of Seminole ambushed and killed a column of US Army, more than 100 troops, who were marching from Fort Brooke to Fort King. Americans called this event the Dade Massacre. These nearly simultaneous attacks catalyzed the Second Seminole War with the United States.
In April 1836, Osceola led a band of warriors in an attempt to expel U.S. forces from Fort Cooper. The fortification was built on the west bank of Lake Holathikaha as an outpost for actions against the local Seminole population. Despite running low on food, the U.S. garrison had enough gunpowder and ammunition to keep the Seminoles from taking the fort before reinforcements arrived.
Capture and death
On October 21, 1837, Osceola and 81 of his followers were captured by General Joseph Hernández on the orders of General Thomas Jesup, under a white flag of truce, when they went for peace talks to Fort Peyton near St. Augustine. He was initially imprisoned at Fort Marion in St. Augustine, before being transferred to Fort Moultrie on Sullivans Island, outside Charleston, South Carolina. Osceola's capture by deceit caused a national uproar. General Jesup's treacherous act and the administration were condemned by many congressional leaders and vilified by international press. Jesup suffered a loss of reputation that lasted for the rest of his life; his betrayal of the truce flag has been described as "one of the most disgraceful acts in American military history."That December, Osceola and other Seminole prisoners were moved to Fort Moultrie. They were visited by various townspeople. The portraitists George Catlin, W. M. Laning, and Robert John Curtis, the three artists known to have painted Osceola from life, persuaded the Seminole leader to allow his portrait to be painted despite his being gravely ill. Osceola and Curtis developed a close friendship, conversing at length during the painting sessions; Curtis painted two oil portraits of Osceola, one of which remains in the Charleston Museum. These paintings have inspired numerous widely distributed prints and engravings, and cigar store figures were also based on them.
Osceola, having suffered from chronic malaria since 1836, and having acute tonsillitis as well, developed an abscess. When he was close to death, as his last wish he asked the attending doctor, Frederick Weedon, that his body be returned to Florida, his home, so that he might rest in peace. He died of quinsy on January 30, 1838, three months after his capture. Rather than honoring his last wish, Weedon cut off Osceola's head and buried his decapitated body, displaying the Seminole leader's head in his drug store. During the time Weedon had the head in his possession, he would often place it in the bedroom of his three sons as punishment for misbehavior. Weedon would later give the head to his son-in-law, Dr. Daniel Whitehurst, who gifted the head to Valentine Mott in 1843. Mott placed it in his Surgical and Pathological Museum, where it was presumed destroyed in a fire in 1866.