Page 240 - American Stories, A History of the United States

common, owned large herds of livestock, and paid their “owners” only an annual trib-
ute, similar to what Seminole towns paid to the micco, or chief. 9.1
During the 1820s and 1830s, the estelusti and the Seminoles were allies in wars
against the Americans; however, their alliance came under increasing strain. In 1823,
six Seminole leaders, including one of some African ancestry known as “Mulatto King,” 9.2
signed the Treaty of Moultrie Creek, removing the tribe from their fertile lands in
northern Florida to swampland south of Tampa. The signers took bribes and believed
unfulfilled promises that they would be allowed to stay on their lands. The treaty also 9.3
required the Seminoles to return runaway slaves and turn away future runaways.
During the 1830s, black Seminoles were some of the staunchest opponents of Indian
Removal, and they played a major role in the Second Seminole War, which was fought
to resist removal from 1835 to 1842. General Thomas W. Jesup, the leader of the U.S.
Army, claimed, “This, you may be assured is a negro and not an Indian war.”
Treaties like the one signed at Moultrie Creek in 1823 reduced tribal holdings;
the federal government used deception, bribery, and threats to induce land cessions.
When this did not yield results fast enough to suit southern whites who coveted Indian
land for mining, speculation, and cotton production, state governments began to act
on their own, proclaiming state jurisdiction over lands federal treaties still allotted to
Indians within the state’s borders. The stage was thus set for the forced removal of the
Five Civilized Tribes to the trans-Mississippi West during the administration of Presi-
dent Andrew Jackson in the 1830s (see Chapter 10).
Farther north, in the Ohio Valley and the Northwest Territory, Native Americans
had already suffered military defeat in the conflict between Britain and the United
States, leaving them only a minor obstacle to white settlers and land speculators. When
the British withdrew from the Old Northwest in 1815, they left their former Indian

coMPEtinG lanD claiMS view of the Great Treaty Held at Prairie du chien (1825). Representatives of eight
Native American tribes met with government agents at Prairie du chien, Wisconsin, in 1825 to define the boundaries
of their respective land claims. The United States claimed the right to make “an amicable and final adjustment” of
the claims. Within 25 years, most of the tribes present at Prairie du chien had ceded their land to the government.

207