The first colony of Muskogee-speaking Upper Creek Indians from Alabama was established nearby in 1767. British surveyor and naturalist Bernard Romans identified the settlement as New Yufala, planted in a beautiful and fertile plain. It later became known as Tcuko tcati, or Chocochatti, meaning Red House or Red Town. Here the Upper Creek Indians were transformed into Florida Seminoles. The Chocochatti Seminoles were prosperous commercial deer hunters, traders, farmers, and cattlemen, and Chocochatti town and prairie was their home for nearly 70 years. The Brooksville region, historically known as the Big Hammock, possessed rich soils for their crops, an abundance of game, and prairies ideal for grazing cattle. Turbulent times came with war in the early 1800s, culminating with the passage of the Indian Removal Act of 1830. By 1836, the Chocochatti Seminoles, under the leadership of Fuche Luste Hadjo, Black Dirt, chose to emigrate to present-day Oklahoma at the outbreak of the Second Seminole War. Others chose to resist and were eventually forced into South Florida, where they prosper today as an unconquered people, the Seminole Tribe of Florida.