In March 1836, General Winfield Scott campaigned to surround the Seminole in the Cove with approximately 5,000 men, and while marching to Fort Brooke in Tampa his troops stopped here to leave their sick and wounded under Major Mark Anthony Cooper, who quickly built a hilltop fort of pine picket walls. A few days after Scott departed, several hundred Seminole warriors led by Osceola attacked and besieged the fort for sixteen days. Cooper's men, protected by the walls, launched several counterattacks, but as provisions ran low and the Seminole had stolen most of their cattle, the soldiers survived on hard biscuits, bacon, dried beans, and some horse meat, while water from a nearby spring had to be fetched outside the fort and the sick and wounded were treated in a tent hospital with limited medicine. The Seminole needed no fortification, relying instead on their knowledge of the forests and swamps of the Cove, where they could hide, travel undetected, hunt, and return to nearby villages. A relief column finally arrived and forced the Seminole to withdraw, and after Scott's campaign the post was used intermittently as an observation and supply station during the war. The Seminole who remained in Florida later continued to resist relocation to western reservations, and that refusal led to the Third Seminole War beginning in 1855 and lasting more than two years; although the war was declared over after the most dangerous warriors were removed and fewer than 200 Seminole remained hidden deep in the Everglades, no peace treaty was ever signed. In the 1900s, as drainage and road building reached south Florida, the Seminole adapted by joining the tourist trade, and in the 1950s and 1960s two groups gained federal recognition: the Seminole Tribe of Florida and the Miccosukee Tribe of Indians of Florida, while the Independent Seminoles were never federally recognized. Today, 4500 Seminole in Florida are descendants of those who refused to give up their homeland.