ccompaniments may degrade and destroy them. Hitherto the white man's
influence has been comparatively of no effect except in arousing in the
Indian his more violent passions, and in exciting him to open hostility.
For more than three centuries the European has been face to face with
the Florida Indian and the two have never really been friends. Through
the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the peninsula was the scene of
frequently renewed warfare. Spaniard, Frenchman, Englishman, and
Spaniard, in turn, kept the country in an unsettled state, and when the
American Union received the province from Spain, sixty years ago, it
received with it, in the tribe of the Seminole, an embittered and
determined race of hostile subjects. This people our Government has
never been able to conciliate or to conquer. A different Indian policy,
or a different administration of it, might have prevented the disastrous
wars of the last half century; but, as all know, the Seminole have
always lived within our borders as aliens. It is only of late years, and
through natural necessities, that any friendly intercourse of white man
and Indian has been secured. The Indian has become too weak to contend
successfully against his neighbor and the white man has learned enough
to refrain from arousing the vindictiveness of the savage. The few white
men now on the border line in Florida are, with only some exceptions,
cattle dealers or traders seeking barter with the red men. The cattlemen
sometimes meet the Indians on the prairies and are friendly with them
for the sake of their stock, which often strays into the Seminole
country. The other places of contact of the whites and Seminole are
the settlements of Myers, Miami, Bartow, Fort Meade, and Tampa, all,
however, centers of comparatively small population. To these places,
at infrequent intervals., the Indians go for purposes of trade.

The Indians have appropriated for their service some of the products of
European civilization, such as weapons, implements, domestic utensils,
fabrics for clothing, &c. Mentally, excepting a few religious ideas
which they received long ago from the teaching of Spanish missionaries
and, in the southern settlements, excepting some few Spanish words, the
Seminole have accepted and appropriated practically nothing from, the
white man. The two peoples remain, as they always have been, separate
and independent. Up to the present, therefore, the human environment
has had no e