182 BUREAU OF AMERICAN ETHKOLOGY [Bull. 137 



serves equal condemnation. The greater part of the Seminole were 

 removed to Oklahoma, where they were given a separate strip of 

 territory and separate government just west of the Creeks, in what 

 is now Seminole County. Those who remained behind consisted, 

 and consist, of two main bands, one Muskogee (Cow Creek Indians), 

 the other Mikasuki (Big Cypress Indians). There were some smaller 

 elements, but they have now lost their identity in the general body. 

 The Seminole in Oklahoma speak Creek for the most part, but a very 

 few also understand the Hitchiti tongue. 



Mikonopi, chief of the Seminole during the first part of the 

 Seminole War, is shown in plate 43, figure 1, from McKenny and 

 Hall. Three different paintings of Osceola are reproduced in plates 

 43, figure 2; 44; and 45, figure 1, from Catlin, Robert John Curtis 

 (preserved in the Charleston Museum), and McKenny and Hall, re- 

 spectively. Most of the Seminole shown in plates 45, figure 2; 46; 

 and 47, figure 1, figured prominently in that most expensive and 

 disastrous of all southern Indian wars. 



Seminole population. — In 1774 Bartram says that all of the Semi- 

 nole together were probably not as numerous as the inhabitants 

 of a single Creek town, but before the Creek War they must have 

 numbered at least 1,500. Estimates made after that event are of 

 two or three thousand, but in 1823 there was an attempt at an actual 

 census, which returned 4,883 and cannot be far wrong as it checks 

 well with the number of Seminole afterward captured and sent west. 

 In 1836 the United States Office of Indian Affairs reported 3,765 in the 

 west. In 1837 it returned 5,072, but this must be a blunder as the 

 year following the figure had fallen to 3,565, and it fell to about 3,000 in 

 1845, since which time it has varied between 2,000 and 3,000 down to 

 the present. To these must be added the Seminole in Florida, 

 estimated during the same period at between 350 and 550. Exclu- 

 sive of freedmen, there were in 1919, 2,141 Seminole in Oklahoma 

 and 573 in Florida. The census of 1930 returned 1,789 in Oklahoma, 

 227 in Florida, and 32 scattered in other States. 



SEWEE 



The first appearance of this tribe is possibly under the name 

 Xoxi (Shoshi), given as one of the provinces on or near the coast of 

 what is now South Carolina by Francisco of Chicora, who was 

 taken from this region in 1521. It is certainly mentioned by the 

 Spanish Captain Egija in the narrative of his voyage along the 

 South Atlantic coast in 1609. In 1670 the colonists who were 

 shortly to establish themselves in Charleston met a band of Indians 

 on Bull's Island who were probably Sewee, since the tribe is known 

 to have occupied Bull's Bay, also called Sewee Bay, and the lower 



