530 SEMINOLE INDIANS OF FLORIDA. 
possible want or decadence of the moral strength needed to maintain 
them in a vigorous use of their powers. This moral strength to some 
degree they have, but in large measure it had its origin in and has 
been preserved by their struggles with man rather than with nature. 
The wars of their ancestors, extending over nearly two centuries, did 
the most to make them the brave and proud people they are. It is 
through the effects of these chiefly that they have been kept from be- 
coming indolent and effeminate. They are now strong, fearless, haugh- 
ty, and independent. But the near future is to initiate a new epoch in 
their history, an era in which their career may be the reverse of what it 
has been. Man is becoming a factor of new importance in their environ- 
ment. The moving lines of the white population are closing in upon the 
land of the Seminole. There is no farther retreat to which they can go. 
It is their impulse to resist the intruders, but some of them are at last 
becoming wise enough to know that they cannot contend successfully 
with the white man. It is possible that even their few warriors may 
make an effort to stay the oncoming hosts, but ultimately they will 
either perish in the futile attempt or they will have to submit to a 
civilization which, until now, they have been able to repel and whose 
injurious accompaniments may degrade and destroy them. Hitherto 
the white man’s influence has been comparatively of no effect except 
in arousing in the Indian his more violent passions and in exciting him 
to open hostility. For more than three centuries the European has 
been face to face with the Florida Indian and the two have never really 
been friends. Through the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the 
peninsula was the scene of frequently renewed warfare. Spaniard, 
Frenchman, Englishman, and Spaniard, in turn, kept the country in an 
unsettled state, and when the American Union received the province 
from Spain, sixty years ago, it received with it, in the tribe of the 
Seminole, an embittered and determined race of hostile subjects. This 
people our Government has never been able to conciliate or to conquer. 
As different Indian policy, or a different administration of it, might 
have prevented the disastrous wars of the last half century; but, as all 
know, the Seminole haye always lived within our borders as aliens. It 
is only of late years, and through natural necessities, that any friendly 
intercourse of white man and Indian has been secured. The Indian 
has become too weak to contend successfully against his neighbor aud 
the white man has learned enough to refrain from arousing the vindic- 
tiveness of the savage. The few white men now on the border line in 
Florida are, with only some exceptions, cattle dealers or traders seek- 
ing barter with the red men. The cattlemen sometimes meet the In- 
dians on the prairies and are friendly with them for the sake of their 
stock, which often strays into the Seminole country. The other places 
of contact of the whites and Seminole are the settlements of Myers, 
Miami, Bartow, Fort Meade, and Tampa, all, however, centers of com- 
paratively small population. To these places, at infrequent intervals, 
the Indians go for purposes of trade. 
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