The Southern Frontier: A road-less, watery wilderness, uninviting and intimidating to all but the most stouthearted and adventurous. As great cities were springing up in places with names such as St. Louis, Denver, and San Francisco, the lower peninsula of Florida endured. Here, the panther, the alligator, and the bald eagle remained safe from the restless, meddlesome hands of civilization, continuing as they had for eons past. Renegade Indians, pirates, hurricanes, and man-eating animals - not to mention poisonous snakes and bloodthirsty hordes of mosquitoes - reigned supreme. It took a...

Three men in a boat, a tiny boat on a raging sea.

In war people die, and they kill. The Second Seminole War would be the longest and most costly of all Indian conflicts in the United States in both lives and national treasure. In 1842, Colonel William J. Worth, commander of the Florida Campaign, declared hostilities at an end. Although as many as 3,000 Seminole and Miccosukee had been relocated to the Oklahoma Territory, several enclaves remained in the extreme southern portions of the peninsula at Big Cypress, Fisheating Creek, Catfish Lake, and New River. A census taken three years later accounted for 120 warriors, (70 Seminoles, 30...

Tales of loss, remembrance, and what might have been.