Fort Pierce, built from readily available palmetto logs on a high bluff along the Indian River’s western shore, was a significant U.S. military post of the Second Seminole War from 1838 to 1842. Constructed during General Thomas S. Jesup’s winter campaign of 1837-38 and named for Brevet Lt. Col. Benjamin K. Pierce, it briefly served as headquarters of the Army of the South after Jesup arrived with his staff and more than 1,000 mounted troops on January 14, 1838. A nearby fresh water spring and the river’s bounty sustained the post as troops took part in the unsuccessful effort to force Florida’s Seminole Indians to relocate west of the Mississippi River. After the first battle with the Seminoles on the Loxahatchee on January 15, 1838, Lt. Levin Powell and his Navy force, having suffered four casualties including their doctor, retreated north to Fort Pierce, where the wounded were treated by the fort’s doctor. The fort was never engaged in battle, was deactivated in February 1842 at the end of the Second Seminole War, and was destroyed by fire in December 1843. The mound at Old Fort Park contains human remains and was the centerpiece of an Ais Indian culture dating back 500 to 1,000 years. Before first contact with Ponce de Leon and the Spanish in 1513, the Ais, once one of Florida’s largest indigenous groups, numbered several thousand people in east central Florida, with territory stretching along the coast from Cape Canaveral south to Jupiter. They lived by hunting, gathering, fishing, and collecting, relying heavily on the Rio de Ais and the Atlantic Ocean, collecting oysters, setting fish traps, fishing with hooks made from deer toe bones, gathering sea grapes, coco plums, sea oats, and palm berries, hunting deer and other small game, living in thatched huts of wood and palm fronds, and traveling mainly by dugout canoes made from pine trees. The Ais did not have a written language, and knowledge of them comes from early Spanish explorers and the journal of Jonathan Dickinson. By 1740 they were all but wiped out after invasions and enslavement by the Spanish and other European nations, like other early Florida tribes.