The Rich Indigenous History of Gainesville
Our area deserves a place among the most storied native areas in US history, and it's a shame we don't talk about it more
The indigenous history of Gainesville1 is one of the most interesting, violent, and impactful native histories in the United States. It has long been a pet peeve of mine how much this fascinating part of our story gets glossed over in the telling of Gainesville, or the United States in general.
The fact is that inland Florida and the Gainesville area deserve a place among the most storied areas of Native history. The Gainesville area was the location of one of the earliest inland European missions in the United States, if not the first. We were the birthplace of the Seminole Indian Tribe. We were where the most expensive and longest Indian war in American History, the Second Seminole War, was started, and where the most blood was shed.
Today is Indigenous Peoples Day so I wanted to highlight these incredibly important events that happened in our history over hundreds of years. It’s important we remember these, that we honor them, and I wish more people knew about them, because this history matters.
The First Inland Settlements and the Potano/Spanish Alliance
The story of Florida gets glossed over a lot in the story of the United States, because it’s a complicated story that complicates the simple American history we are taught in school. The “first colony” of Jamestown in Virginia was founded in 1607, 40 years after the Spanish had already been in Florida. An entire generation of Europeans had been born and raised in Florida by the time the traditional “founding” of America took place.
In fact, Europeans were in Gainesville one year before Jamestown was founded. In 1606 the catholic friar Fray Martin de Prieto set up the first Catholic Mission in the interior of Florida in the city of Potano.2 It was perhaps the first European mission to ever be built in the inland United States, and it was in north-west Gainesville. The exact location of the three missions he created in north-west Gainesville is a secret, but it’s well known that it is in the “Fox Pond” area near Blues Creek and Devil’s Millhopper.
The Potano Indian tribe was a powerful, warlike tribe that held control over critical land between Pensacola and St. Augustine. They had fought with Hernando De Soto during his expedition, had fought numerous wars with both the French and the Spanish over the decades, but in 1606 they agreed to have catholic missionaries live in their principal city of Potano in north-west Gainesville. This decision would begin a long, complicated, and violent history that would end in the extinction of the Potano nearly 100 years later at the hands of English-allied Indian tribes.
The long and curvy history of Potano and Spanish is a story of complicated politics, alliances, and violence. It also resulted in the first cowboys in America3. At a low point in power within the Potano tribe they ceded land along the rim of Paynes Prairie to a treasurer in Florida to raise his cattle. It was called “Rancho De La Chua”, which historians believe is near the current “La Chua Trail”. Here the Spanish raised cows, and they became wealthy off of this industry.
The Great Timucuan Uprising of 1656
Eventually, the careful balance of power between the Timucuan caciques and the Spanish would end violently in Gainesville in 1656, the year of the “Great Timucuan Uprising”.
The lead cacique (chief) of the Potano, Lucas Menendez4, was a long-time supporter of the Spanish crown. But a new governor, Diego de Rebolledo, was appointed by the Spanish to take over, and his new policies pushed the Potano too far. Over decades the Timucuan were slowly becoming more subservient to the Spanish, doing work in their haciendas and coming to St Augustine to do menial labor. But new labor demands from Rebolledo were pushing them into what the natives were now decrying as “slavery”. This led to the uprising, from John E. Worth’s book:
Lucas Menendez, principal cacique of Timucua, ordered the murders of all secular Spaniards in the province, and while only seven deaths resulted from his command, the trial following the pacification of Timucua province led to the execution of nearly the entire aboriginal leadership of Timucua, paving the way for massive political and geographical restructuring of the province. The Timucuan Rebellion thus swept away many of the last vestiges of aboriginal political and settlement structure, accelerating the full integration of the Timucua province into the developing colonial system of Spanish Florida.
The focal point of this uprising was the La Chua Ranch, a symbol of Spanish power in the swamps of inland Florida. Here’s how historian John E. Worth describes what happened there, based on testimony from the trial that occurred shortly thereafter.
Early one night, Don Juan was visited at his house on the hacienda (The La Chua Ranch) by the cacique Lúcas Menéndez, along with the caciques of San Francisco (Juan Bauptista) and Santa Fé, and some fourteen to twenty Indians. . . The Spaniard watched helplessly as the rest of the Indians entered the house, and he heard the screams of his companions as they were murdered within; one or two were killed outside as they fled. Ultimately, the soldier Juan de Osuna and the two black slaves at the hacienda were murdered, while two Indians in Don Juan's employ successfully fled the carnage. Testimony from Juan Pasqua, later imprisoned in the fort at St. Augustine for one of the murders, detailed that while in San Francisco Potano, he had been commanded by the cacique Lúcas Menéndez, under penalty of punishment, to accompany him to La Chua, and there had ordered him to go to a hut outside the main house of the hacienda, to which one of the slaves had fled, and kill him. After the raid, not a single person was left alive in the hacienda beyond Don Juan; even the cattle had been killed by the Indians.
As John E. Worth points out in his study of the uprising, which you can read here, this decision didn’t end well for the Potano, and the caciques of the tribes were subsequently hung in a public ceremony in St. Augustine. This would be the final nail in the coffin for both a strong Spanish state and the Timucuan. Without a strong Indian presence in interior Florida there was no protection from the English, who came down to kill and enslave the remaining Indian tribes in Spanish Florida over the successive decades.
The “Cimarrones” Take Over
After the fall of the Potano, this swampland between the coasts became a refuge for all who were hoping to escape the coming white supremacist English. The English were slowly but surely taking over everything north of Spanish Florida, in modern-day Georgia. The Spanish had a lot of flaws, but they were welcoming and accepting of freed slaves, native tribes, and anyone else who wanted to escape the English colonies, so long as they converted to catholicism and pledged to fight on the Spanish crown’s behalf.
Alachua County in the 1700’s became home to these refugees. Free slave colonies propped up in the swamps, as did the refugees of Native tribes in the North who did not want to make peace with the English colonies.
This mix of refugee Indians and freed slaves would be called “cimarrones” or runaways in Spanish. This slowly morphed into the modern word of “Seminole”. This title was essentially referring to the fact that no amount of treaties with established tribes would suffice to bring peace to these areas. They were not under any recognized tribe, they were just runaways. These were an ungovernable people in the swamps of inland Florida, and by far the most famous and important was the “Cowkeeper” and his nephew, “King Payne”. They set up their city on the edges of Paynes Prairie in the early 1700’s, refugees of Creek Indians in Georgia. The Seminole raised the cattle and pigs left behind by the Spanish and Potano and became incredibly wealthy in the meantime as they traded the cattle with settlers and the Spanish crown. Walking the trails of Paynes Prairies you’ll be near their main city of “Cuscowilla” or later “Paynes Town”.
This tribal leader, “Cowkeeper”, also known as “Ahaya”, was the origination of the “Seminole” Indian tribe. Every tribal leader after them, from Bolek to Micanopy drew a direct lineage to this line. It was this line of leaders that led the Seminole through decades of war with the United States. Through these wars they were pushed further and further south, which is where we associate the Seminole with today, along with their reservations in South Florida. But for over 100 years Paynes Prairie was their home, and it was their ancestral homeland.
But Native Seminole weren’t the only ones that made up these “cimarrones”. For over 100 years freed slaves and and natives lived side-by-side, intermarrying and creating a unique blended culture of African-Americans and Indians unlike anything else in American History. Multiple generations of black people were raised in the lands around Gainesville, eeking out a life far removed from the slavery to the north. These “black Seminoles” or “Maroons” had many villages dotted along the Gainesvile area, though it’s impossible to know exactly where. It was in the Gainesville area that one of the most famous Black Seminole, John Horse, would be born and spend his childhood, before becoming a freedom fighter in the Second Seminole War.
The Second Seminole War
Like many tribes in American history, the beginning downfall of Seminole came from a terrible, one-sided treaty. In 1823 the Treaty of Moultrie Creek pushed the Seminole south to a reservation in Ocala National Forest. Times were hard in the National Forest, with little food to eat and the government refusing to assist them with food or support. The Americans were happy to make life miserable for the Natives, in an attempt to force them west, away from Florida.
It was at this time Americans really started to buy land and settle in Alachua County, taking advantage of the rich soil we have here. The Gainesville area was a wild frontier, and the men who moved here were rough people with little regard for the Indigenous who lived just to their south.
In June 1835 a group of Gainesville men named the Spring Grove Guards from the “Hog Town Settlement” ventured out to Hickory Sink just West of Gainesville near Haile Plantation to look for Indians who had ventured off their reservation in the Ocala National Forest. They found two, began flogging and whipping them, when two other Seminole came behind the Guards and started shooting. Three whites were injured, one Indian wounded, and one Indian killed.
These would be the first shots fired in the largest, most expensive Indian war in American History, the Second Seminole War. It was a war that was much larger than just Indians, it encompassed the large community of freed blacks and led to a mass escaping of slaves from across Florida to join the hostilities. It was, essentially, a war by BIPOC people to fight for their freedom against a white supremacist government, in the last refuge they had in the Eastern United States. The historian Anthony E. Dixon argues it was “the largest slave uprising in American history” in his book “The Negro War”
Here’s how Michael Grunwald described the Second Seminole War in his incredible history of Florida - The Swamp.
The Second Seminole War was America’s first Vietnam—a guerrilla war of attrition, fought on unfamiliar, unforgiving terrain, against an underestimated, highly motivated enemy who often retreated but never quit. Soldiers and generals hated it, and public opinion soured on it, but Washington politicians, worried that ending it would make America look weak and create a domino effect among other tribes, prolonged it for years before it sputtered to a stalemate.
The Second Seminole War was a war that revolved largely around the Seminole’s ancestral homeland of Paynes Prairie. Alachua County loomed large: it was where leading black Seminole like John Horse were raised, and it was the original land where the Seminole leadership was first based. The first battle of the Second Seminole War was fought here, and many people were killed within our area.
The first, the Battle of Black Point, took place a few months after the flogging and killing of a Seminole Indian at Bolen Bluff. In the battle a group of Seminole, led by Osceola, attacked a wagon cart delivering goods from Boulware Springs to Micanopy, killing six Americans. Walking the trail of Bolen Bluff you’ll be in the area of that first battle.
Ten days later Osceola and his men ventured just south, massacring two American army companies and assassinating the Indian agent stationed in Ocala. These events, called the “Dade Massacre” are traditionally how the start of the Second Seminole War is told. These were massive events that shocked Americans and brought the war to a national audience. So the story of Black Point tends to get lost in the telling of the Second Seminole War, but it was here that the war really began.
Eventually, the Second Seminole War would encompass all of Florida, from Tallahassee to Okeechobee, but throughout it all Alachua County served as a focal point. It was here, in Newnansville, that much of the logistics and shipping for the war would be planned and moved. We were the furthest South you could go before reaching the impenetrable swamp, and that grew our economy exponentially.
But it also meant that Alachua County was a dangerous place. The Seminole knew this land, it was stolen from them, and they knew Americans would be here to attack. And so they did. More blood was shed here than in any other area of Florida, mostly by small, guerilla assaults.
But it was not entirely small assaults. One of the larger battles was the “Battle of San Felasco Hammock” in San Felasco State Forest. In that battle over 200 American troops and 425 Natives and Blacks fought with artillery and multiple charges. It ended like most battles of the Seminole War did - in a stalemate, where neither side could claim a clear victory or loss. This battle is reenacted every year at the Alligator Warrior Festival at O’Leno State Park.
Creating Modern Alachua County
This history is more than just trivia, this history built the foundation of what we have today. While now most of this history is forgotten, relegated to a small group of historians, or hobbyist history dorks like myself, Alachua County was widely known as "Seminole Country” through most of our early history. It comes up again and again in old tourist brochures.
And the aftermath of these events set the stage for our area becoming what it is today. Just after the Second Seminole War ended it became a top priority to settle Alachua County, to fend off any leftover Seminole from coming back.
The Armed Occupation Act of 1842 split North Central Florida up into little squares that could be owned simply by moving into Alachua County, clearing five acres of land, and living on it for five years. These squares still make the basis of the plats and lots our city is built on, and once you see them you’ll notice them on most of the old maps. Hundreds moved to our area to take advantage of this, where they either stayed or sold to wealthy southerners who would build plantations, creating an enormous cotton, slave economy in our area.
Unlike other areas of Florida, the land was ready to be cultivated, thanks to thousands of years of agriculture and livestock rearing from the Potano and later the Seminole.
It was veterans of these wars that first settled Gainesville. They knew the land and were willing to risk it all on cheap, fertile property in the frontier of America. That’s why, in 1853 when a group of men met at Boulware Springs to decide what the name of their new county seat was to be called, they named it after Edmund Pendleton Gaines, a general who fought here during the Second Seminole War. It would be called “Gainesville”.
Driving around you’ll see references to our native history everywhere. Daniel Newnan of Newnan’s Lake fame fought the Seminole in the “Patriot War of 1812”, where his men shot and killed King Payne, of Paynes Prairie fame. Cities like Ft. Clarke and Ft. White underscore the frontline military history of our area. The city’s nickname “Hogtown” comes from Seminole rearing pigs, which were then passed to the Americans who came and took the land. The word “Alachua” came from a Spanish interpretation of a Timucuan word for “big jug”, which slowly morphed as the language moved from Timucuan to Spanish to English back to Spanish and back again to English.
Further Reading
This article is very different than what I normally write on this blog, but I love Gainesville history, and over a few years of amateur historian sleuthing I’ve picked up a lot of history about Gainesville that I love sharing. I think it’s really important to know our history, particularly our native history.
What I love about knowing history is how it makes an area come alive when you go through it. I can’t walk La Chua Trail without thinking about the Potano uprising, or see the marker for the Hogtown Settlement at Westside Park without thinking of the start of the Second Seminole War.
The hardest part about writing articles like this is glossing over these histories, which are rich and interesting in their own right. The story of the Potano uprising is amazing and deserves far more than the few paragraphs I gave it. Alachua County during the Second Seminole War is fascinating, as is the leadup to it. I would highly recommend reading more if you find this at all interesting.
On the Seminole War history the best book is “History of Second Seminole War, 1835-1842” which you can pick up at the Alachua County Library. It’s the definitive book on the subject, is very readable, and written by a University of Florida historian so it features its fair share of local history.
If you’re interested in the African-American history of the Seminole, Kenneth W. Porter’s book “The Black Seminoles: History of a Freedom-Seeking People” is the best option. Or check out this great video about the history of Gainesville’s most accomplished resident, John Horse.
There aren’t a lot of books specifically on the Potano or Timucuan. Lars Anderson’s “Paynes Prairie: The Great Savanna: A History and Guide” is a good overview of the prairie, which includes a lot of these anecdotes. The only historian I can find that focuses on this is John E. Worth who wrote a very in-depth series called “The Timucuan Chiefdoms of Spanish Florida”. These books can get academic, but if you really want to know this history it’s the best place to find it.
If you like this kind of content let me know and I’ll keep putting it out. There’s plenty to talk about with early Gainesville history.
Gainesville proper wasn’t a specified location during this time, so I’m using “Gainesville” and “Gainesville area” interchangeably throughout this, which refers roughly to Alachua County proper today, with more focus on the immediate area surrounding modern Gainesville. Expanding out to Micanopy or the areas near Santa Fe River are their own fascinating history, but I try to avoid those if I can.
I’m skipping the pre-Colombian history of the indigenous tribes, as we don’t have many records from that and I know next to nothing about it, but we know that humans have been in our area for 12,000 years before Europeans made contact.
How do you like them apples, Texas
Potano chiefs would adopt Spanish names which the Spanish referred to them as. If Lucas Menendez also had a proper native name I can’t find that cited anywhere, but he was not Spanish, he was full-blooded Timucuan.
Loved it, Bryan! Thank you for taking the time to write and share it.
I love this history lesson, Bryan. I grew up here, but we sure didn’t learn this in school. Thank you for sharing your knowledge.