LIVING HISTORY
Fort Christmas Historical Park in Orange County features a full-scale replica of the fort built during the Second Seminole War in late 1837. The structure
looks much like the fort along the Indian River in Fort Pierce would have looked in 1841.
Two warlords riding side by side not knowing that history
was watching — one present, one future — and more alike
than either could imagine. They had yet to learn where destiny
would take them.
Coacoochee spent the night in Fort Pierce, and in exchange
for the umpteenth promise of surrender he acquired his
needed supplies — except for bullets and gunpowder which
he reportedly tried to finagle from some of the privates.
Sherman noted that the famous chief got “regularly drunk”
on commissary whiskey. Then he rode off the next morning,
but some of his warriors returned repeatedly in the following
weeks to gather more supplies.
After a month, Coacoochee returned but not with the
promised numbers of his people. Instead, he brought 20
warriors with no intention to surrender. According to the
Charleston Daily Courier, he came to invite the officers into the
wilderness to celebrate the Green Corn Dance, the Seminoles’
most significant festival.
What he really had in mind, no one ever disclosed. But
Childs had his suspicions. He directed Sherman to wait until
the Seminoles were drunk and then seize them. The tension
of timing the double-cross just right and the suspense of possible
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reactions must have all melted away when the plan was
carried out with ease. They clamped them all in irons.
FORCED ONTO RESERVATION
That was the end of Coacoochee’s cherished years in the
land of his birth. Heavily manacled on a prison ship in Tampa
Bay and threatened with hanging, he sent for his followers.
To save his life they joined him on a forced exodus.
After they arrived out west, he was unhappy with the treatment
RICK CRARY
his people received on the reservation. So he traveled
with a delegation to Washington, D.C., to complain that the
government had failed to keep its promises. His first captor,
Jesup, who by then was quartermaster general, took up his
cause and lobbied on the Seminoles’ behalf to get their situation
improved.
Life under the federal government’s dominion was still
far from the great Floridian’s liking, so he moved his followers
down through Texas and into Mexico, where Mexican
authorities made him a better offer. In exchange for a bountiful
helping of territory placed under his control, Coacoochee
agreed to police the border with America. As leader of a colony,
he became an officer in Mexico’s military. The Mexicans
called him Capitán Gato del Monte another loose translation
of his name.
CONTESTED GLORY
And Sherman? Sherman languished in more lonely outposts
for what seemed to him like forever, according to his
many letters home. Itching for action, desperate for fame,
he finally gave up and tried to make a go of civilian life. He
mostly failed.
When America split in two, his political connections finally
came through. After a rocky start, he was given an endless
supply of forces for a scorched-earth war of attrition. The
grim, unyielding Sherman, more than anyone except for Gen.
Ulysses S. Grant, forced a divided nation back into its uneasy
alliance. But he never received the credit he should have
earned for reuniting America.
History stresses Gen. Robert E. Lee’s surrender to Grant
at Appomattox, but who celebrates the concluding event
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