220 THE GEOEGE CATLIN INDIAN GALLERY. 



nation, who have celebrated themselves in the war that is now waging with the United 

 States Government. 



There is scarcely any need of my undertaking in an epistle of this kind to give a 

 full account of this tribe, of their early history, of their former or present location, or 

 of their present condition, and the disastrous war they are now waging with the 

 United States Government, who have held an invading army in their country for four 

 or five years, endeavoring to dispossess them and compel them to remove to the West, 

 in compliance with treaty stipulations. These are subjects generally understood 

 already (being matters of history), and I leave them to the hands of those who will 

 do them more complete justice than I could think of doing at this time with the little 

 space that I could allow them, in the confident hope that justice may be meted out 

 to them, at least by the historian, if it should not be by their great Guardian, who 

 takes it upon herself, as with all the tribes, affectionately to call them her " red 

 children." 



For those who know nothing of the Seminolees it may be proper for me here just 

 to remark that they are a tribe of three or four thousand, occupying the peninsula 

 of Florida and speaking the language of the Creeks, of whom I have heretofore 

 spoken, and who were once a part of the same tribe. 



The word Seminolee is a Creek word, signifying runaways, a name which was 

 given to a part of the Creek Nation who emigrated in a body to a country farther 

 south, where they have lived to the present day, and continually extended their 

 dominions by overrunning the once numerous tribes that occupied the southern ex- 

 tremity of the Florida Cape, called the Euchees, whom they have at last nearly 

 annihilated and taken the mere remnant of them in as a part of their tribe. With 

 this tribe the Government have been engaged in deadly and disastrous warfare for 

 four or five years, endeavoring to remove them from their lands in compliance with 

 a treaty stipulation, which the Government claims to have been justly made and 

 which the Seminolees aver was not. Many millions of money and some hundreds of 

 lives of officers and men have already been expended in the attempt to dislodge 

 them, and much more will doubtless be yet spent before they can be removed from 

 their almost impenetrable swamps and hiding places, to which they can for years to 

 come retreat, and from which they will be enabled, and no doubt disposed, in their 

 exasperated state, to make continual sallies upon the unsuspecting and defenseless 

 inhabitants of the country, carrying their relentless feelings to be reeked in cruel 

 vengeance on the unoffending and innocent. 



MUSKOGEE— SEMINOLES. 



At the close of the Seminole war, " Coo-coo-chee," or "Wild Cat," 

 one of the most distinguished of their chiefs and warriors, gives this 

 view of the white man's policy toward his tribe : 



I was once a boy. Then I saw the white man afar off. I hunted in these woods, 

 first with a bow and arrow, then with a rifle. I saw the white man, and was told 

 he was my enemy. / could not shoot him as I would a wolf or a bear ! Yet HJce these he 

 came upon me. Horses, cattle, and fields he took from me. He said he was my friend. 

 He abused our women and children, and told us to go from the land. Still he gave 

 us his hand in friendship. We took it. Whilst taking it he had a snake in the other. 

 His tongue was forked. He lied, and stung us. I asked but for a small piece of these 

 lands — enough to plant and to live upon— far south, a spot where I could lay the 

 ashes of my kindred, and even this has not been granted to me. I feel the irons in my 

 heart. 



THE SEMINOLES. 



The Isti-Semole (wild men) who inhabit the peninsula of Florida (1836) are pure 

 Muskogees, who have gradually detached themselves from the confederacy, but were 

 still considered members of it, till the United States treated with them as with an 



