The Second Seminole War opened during the first week of December 1835 as Seminole people and their Black allies attacked and burned hundreds of farms and homesteads in the Payne's Prairie region, where most white settlement stood in the wilderness interior and where the former Seminole homeland had been. With most Seminoles agreeing to resist removal, Osceola and other war leaders launched assaults meant to settle old scores and signal resistance. On December 18, Osceola led a surprise attack on a Florida militia supply train headed toward Micanopy in the Battle of Black Point, where 8 militia troops were killed and 6 wounded, the survivors fled to Ft. Defiance, and the wagon train was sacked. On December 28, the same day as Dade's Massace, Osceola shot and killed General Wiley Thompson, the Indian removal agent, and others in his entourage outside Fort King, present Ocala. In the following months, the Seminole successfully resisted counterattacks by Generals Duncan Clinch and Edmund Gaines at the Withlacoochee River. After the evacuation of General Winfield Scott's grand army of 5,000 troops, the interior forts were left vulnerable, and attacks at Fort Defiance in the Battle of Micanopy and on an evacuation troop convoy at Welika Pond west of Micanopy showed the Seminole capacity and resolve to carry the war to the Army. After General Thomas Jesup captured hundreds of warriors and Black forces, and after years of warfare took a severe toll, more Seminole leaders considered surrender and removal. By 1842, although some action still occurred across Florida, the main body of Seminole was much reduced, some were imprisoned, and many had already been relocated west. The conflict was the longest, bloodiest, and most costly Indian War in United States history, with at least 1,500 U.S. soldiers dying in battle, disease, and service-related injuries, many civilians also losing their lives, and Native American losses never fully known because of starvation, disease, warfare, and the consequences of removal. In 1842, federal budget cutting and a new reservation line limiting white settlement in south Florida signaled that the end was near, and in the end the Seminoles remained unconquered. Osceola, born in Alabama in 1804 of mixed Creek and white ancestry, came from a family allied with the Red Sticks that became refugees in Florida after the Creek War. Many young warriors, including Osceola, followed a militant spirit associated with Tecumseh, and that larger struggle against white incursions, reinforced by Seminole prophets and spirit guides, helped sustain support for the war. Osceola's repeated early battlefield successes made him a celebrity, but General Jesup captured him under a flag of truce in 1837 and imprisoned him at Fort Moultrie in Charleston, S.C. The capture brought severe criticism of Jesup and sympathy for the Seminoles, and after Osceola died in prison on January 30, 1838, newspaper reaction made him the country's most famous Native American.
