The Second Seminole War / The Third Seminole War

After years of conflict between American settlers and Native Americans along the east coast, the United States government passed the Indian Removal Act of 1830 to relocate Native Americans to Indian Territory west of the Mississippi River, and in Florida this meant the Seminole were again to be displaced. Tensions rose into the Second Seminole War when the Seminole attacked Major Francis Dade and his troops en route to Fort King and, almost simultaneously, Wiley Thompson and others were killed at Fort King in December 1835. Fighting continued for seven years and eventually resulted in the removal of most of the Seminole population to Oklahoma; during the conflict, Osceola and Micanopy were captured by the U.S. Army under a false flag of truce, and when the war ended in 1842, a few hundred Seminole were allowed to remain in South Florida. Settlers then kept pushing farther south, increasing pressure on the Seminole and making survival increasingly difficult, and in December 1855 the U.S. Army destroyed a Seminole plantation west of the Everglades. The Seminole retaliated with an attack near Fort Myers, beginning the Third Seminole War, which consisted mainly of minor raids and led to the relocation to Oklahoma of many more Seminole who had surrendered or been captured. Those who remained lived deep in the Everglades and the Big Cypress Swamp, land white settlers did not want, as a long conflict marked by broken promises and failed negotiations stretched across more than four decades.

Ocala, Florida · United States