The First Spanish Period
1565-1763
The
first successful attempt at a mission in Florida started with the founding of St.
Augustine in 1565, and with the establishment of presidios. Governor Pedro Menendez wrote a letter to King Philip II
on September 8, 1565, “I have offered to Our Lord all that He may give me in
this world…in order to plant the Gospel in this land for the enlightenment of
its natives.” Besides converting native populations to Catholicism, the mission
system also helped Spain keep better control over Florida, and the people. It also helped prevent foreign powers from
establishing basses on Spanish territory. At first the missions in Florida were
staffed by Jesuits but they soon abandoned the missions due to the increasing
hostility of the natives, which lead to the deaths of some of the priests.
Mission San Luis de
Talimali
Starting
in 1573 with only two missions remaining, Franciscan friars took over for the
Jesuits. At first they stuck to the vicinity of St. Augustine, then around 1587
they began to spread south down the Atlantic coast taking their mission to the
Guale and Timucua peoples. The Spanish had not had any real contact with the
Apalachee to the west of St. Augustine since the time of the Hernando de Soto expedition.
Fray Martin Prieto was the first Spaniard to try to renew contact with the
Apalachee. In the early 1600s, the Franciscans expanded their missions westward
across Timucua territory and built El
Camino Real, or the Royal Road, between St. Augustine and the Apalachee
Province. Franciscan friars established small missions and villages along the
Royal Road.
While
in the Timucuan province, Fray Prieto learned of a great war that had been
waged for years between the Timucua and the Apalachee. He wanted to end this
war in order to bring Christianity to the Apalachee. Fray Prieto secured the
release of two Apalachee prisoners that the Timucua were holding and sent them
back to Apalachee with a message that the Spanish were coming on a mission of
peace.
Fray Prieto arrived in the Apalachee province with a group of Timucuan chiefs,
as well as one-hundred-and-fifty Timucuan warriors. There he found what could
have been the entire population of Apalachee, led by seventy or so chiefs. The
friars and the Timucuan received a friendly greeting from the Apalachee, as a seventy-year-old
Apalachee chief from a place called Ivitachuco, an important village that was located
in present-day Jefferson County, spoke at great lengths in favor of peace. Fray
Prieto then supervised a meeting between the chiefs of these two peoples, in
which peace was established.
The
Apalachee then requested a mission of their own but it would be twenty-five
years before they received one. There simply were not enough friars to go
around at that moment, but in the meantime the Apalachee and the Spanish
continued to have a good relationship. Spain finally sent friars to Apalachee in
the 1630s to start a permanent mission. This may have been done because the
Spanish authorities believed the Apalachee province could solve their food and
labor shortage problems. By 1633, two Franciscan friars, Pedro Munoz and
Francisco Martinez, founded the first two missions in the Apalachee area, and
it is believed that Mission San Luis de Inhayca was one of them. In 1638, the
first group of Spanish soldiers arrived, to stay and protect the mission. In
1656, for reasons we do not know, the chief of the Apalachee agreed to move San
Luis de Inhayca about two miles west, to the second tallest hill in the area,
and renamed it San Luis de Talimali. He also allowed the building of a blockhouse
surrounded by palisade walls to house the Spanish soldiers.
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| Mission San Luis |
The
village of San Luis looked much like a traditional Apalachee village with
Spanish buildings mixed in. In the central plaza the Apalachee played ball
games and conducted rituals. The Apalachee’s largest building was the council
house which could hold up to three thousand people and was used by them to
conduct tribal business. The last main public building that surrounded the
central plaza was the church with its detached kitchen. By request of the
Apalachee chief as a sign of respect, the Spanish agreed to build the church
with its door facing the entrance of the council house, which was across from
it on the other side of the central plaza. The blockhouse and palisade, a
protective wall around the blockhouse made of logs, was built not far from the
church. The Apalachee lived in small, circular, palm-thatched dwellings away
from the central plaza in clusters near the fields they were farming. The
Apalachee would travel to the central plaza for prayer groups, Sunday services,
and for entertainment such as the ball games.
Wattle-and-daub,
or wood planking with thatched roofs, were the preferred way to build the
residences that the Spanish families lived in, who began arriving in larger
numbers after 1675. These two-room, small cottages, were built closer to the
central plaza than the Apalachee dwellings. Just like in many Spanish colonial
towns, the native peoples lived on the outskirts of town, while the Spanish
lived in town. San Luis, besides St. Augustine, was the only settlement where
large numbers of Spanish and native peoples lived close together. Over 1,400
residents lived at San Luis, for three generations, and the town became the
western capital of Spanish missions and the Apalachee nation from 1656 to 1704.
San
Marcos de Apalache
The
Governor of Florida, Luis Horruytiner (1633-1638), stated that the mission
effort could not survive or progress unless a suitable port was established on
the Apalachee coast.
Besides San Luis, the Apalachee Province had ten smaller missions and
twenty-five satellite villages. The mission system was flourishing, especially
in the Apalachee Province because the land there is so fertile and was
providing large numbers of food, mostly corn, to the people of St. Augustine.
The produce was transported south from San Luis to what the doomed Panfilo de Narvaez
called the “Bay of Horses”, at the confluence of the San Marcos and Guacara
rivers, (the Spanish also called the Suwannee River the Guacara River, but in
this case I am referring to the Wakulla River) then out to St. Augustine, or
Havana from a port they called San Marcos de Apalache. The Spanish may have
been using this port as early as 1639, and developed a small settlement there.
The inhabitants of Mission San Luis traveled to and from San Marcos de Apalache
by canoe. They paddled down Munson Slough from the mission then portaging to
Wakulla Springs and paddled down the Wakulla River until they reached San
Marcos.
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| Map showing Mission San Luis to the north and the port village of San Marcos de Apalachee to the south |
Sometime
in 1677 a band of pirates attacked the port village, sailed up the San Marcos
River, and made their way to San Luis where they kidnaped a few priests to be
used as ransom. After that horrific event the governor of Florida at the time,
Hita Salazar, demanded that San Marcos de Apalache be fortified. To
the governor’s displeasure, there was not enough money in the royal treasury to
fund a strong stone fort, so the Spanish erected a small, wooden fort, and
coated the logs with lime to give the appearance of a formidable stone
structure.
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| Artist interpretation of one of the wooden forts at San Marcos de Apalachee |
Around
midnight on March 20, 1682 another pirate ship entered the mouth of Apalachee
Bay, probably to obtain fresh water. The brigands spotted the fort. From about
four miles out, the fort at San Marcos de Apalache looked very formidable. The
pirates decided not to try their luck until one of them noticed a vessel
anchored near the fort. The swashbucklers felt that attacking the fort was a
worthy risk after all, if it meant they could seize that ship for themselves.
The captain of the targeted vessel, which was a merchant ship that had just
arrived from Havana, was inside the walls of the wooden fort, as well as three
priests from Mission San Luis. San Marcos de Apalache was only garrisoned by
six men at the time, Lieutenant Pedro de los Arcos and five soldiers he had at
his command. Outside the walls of the fort in small, thatch-roofed huts where a
detachment of troops from San Luis, under the command of Lieutenant Perez, and
a large group of native Apalachee that they brought with them.
In the early hours of the morning,
around four-o’clock, a sentry at the fort spotted three small boats, carrying
about twenty-five men each, sailing towards them. One boat went to the merchant
ship, the other two came ashore to attack the fort. The sentry barely had time
to warn the small garrison before the pirates stepped foot on dry land. The
soldiers and the Apalachee from San Luis ran away without a fight and the huts they
were staying in were put to fire. The pirates realized that the fort was not as
formidable as they originally thought, and the captain ordered it burned to the
ground. The Spaniards tried to put up a fight, but one of the fort’s cannon
broke when fired, and the other one could not seem to hit its target, which was the
merchant ship that the pirates were trying to commandeer. Lieutenant Arcos went to
retrieve more gun power when somebody opened the gates to the fort. The
pirates swept in and took the small garrison hostage. They then took everything that would be of use to them and burned what was not. They sent a
few of the hostages to San Luis to collect a ransom. In the meantime, the pirates
took their prisoners back to their ship anchored in the harbor. The pirates
hung around for ten days, waiting for their ransom, coming ashore a few times
to re-light the fort when the flames went out. The ransom never came. The
pirates gave up and took everybody back ashore, setting them free, except for Lieutenant de
los Arcos and one other soldier. The pirates later dropped them off on a beach in
Cuba. They eventually made it to St. Augustine, where the lieutenant was
court-martialed and dismissed from the military for surrendering San Marcos de
Apalachee to pirates. Within the next year, the wooden fort was rebuilt.
In
the minds of the Spanish authority, Florida encompassed the entire present-day
continental United States, but they had been fighting for control over it with
the English and the French since before the founding of St. Augustine. This was
a losing battle as Spain did not have the resources to protect the entire
continent. The English began encroaching from the north, and in 1670 they
established Charles Towne (present-day Charleston, South Carolina), the capitol
of its Carolina colony. One of Charleston’s biggest economic
engines was the slave trade. In 1693, Carlos II, King of Spain, declared that
any slaves belonging to Englishmen that escaped into Florida would be given
their freedom if they convert to Catholicism and declare allegiance to Spain.
This greatly angered the English as their slaves began to run away south to Florida,
mostly to the vicinity of St. Augustine.
The
English demanded their “property” back, but the Spanish refused to send the
newly freed men back into English captivity. War was declared in 1701, and the
North American theater is referred to as Queen Anne’s War. In 1702, English
militiamen and their Creek allies, about 800 total, invaded Florida and
attacked St. Augustine. Most of the Spanish and native allies were able to
escape death by fleeing into the formidable Castillo de San Marcos, which was
completed in 1695, as the town of St. Augustine was burned by the invading
English. The second biggest Spanish settlement of the time, Mission San Luis,
was not attacked immediately, but other smaller missions and villages between
Apalachee and St. Augustine were destroyed by the invading English. They killed
or enslaved most of Florida’s native peoples.
In
1703 through 1704, the English and their native allies invaded the western
portion of Florida and many Apalachee were killed or enslaved. By July 1704,
the leaders at Mission San Luis, fearing the arrival of the English, who were
getting closer, decided to destroy the village rather than let the English have
it. The Spanish abandoned San Luis, and San Marcos de Apalache, and fled back
to St. Augustine. Some of the Apalachee went with them, but the rest fled to
Fort Louis de la Louisiane, present-day Mobile, in the newly founded French
colony of Louisiana. The English raids into Florida left former towns and
villages, other than St. Augustine, desolate. Most of the natives were killed
or enslaved, and the rest were scattered about.
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| Artist interpretation of one of the wooden forts at San Marcos de Apalachee |
After the invading English and Creek Indians of 1703-1704,
and the collapse of the Apalachee missions, the area of present-day Wakulla
County was virtually empty of any European or native people until after 1716,
when the Spanish leadership decided to re-establish a presence in the area.
They wanted to resettle the Apalachee Province and invited the native peoples
to return as well. The Spanish decided to rebuild the fort at San Marcos de
Apalache in order to offer protection to the area and the new settlers. Early
in 1718, the governor of Florida sent Captain Jose Primo de Rivera with fifty
soldiers to build a blockhouse where the old fort was. Instead he built a
square stockade, each side being seventy-two feet long, with an elevated
platform in the center for three cannons to be placed.
Primo also brought with him a group of natives who were there to help extend
friendship to other native peoples whose allegiances were wavering between the
Spanish and the English. It did not take too long before new Indian villages
began popping up along the Wakulla and St. Marks rivers, mostly Creek, in close
proximity to the Spanish at San Marcos de Apalache.
Native American Refugees Enter Wakulla- The
Seminoles
There
were a series of wars to the north of Florida that greatly impacted the future
of the Spanish colony. Native American refugees from those northern wars, such
as the Yuchi and Yamasee, after the Yamasee War in South Carolina (1715-1717),
migrated into Florida in the early 1700s. More arrived in the second half of
the 1700s, as the Lower Creeks, part of the Muscogee people, began to migrate
from several of their towns in Alabama and Georgia into Florida to evade the
dominance of the Upper Creeks and the pressure of English colonists. They spoke
primarily Hitchiti, of which Miccosukee is a dialect, the primary traditional
language spoken today by the Miccosukee Tribe of Florida.
In Florida, the Creeks intermingled with the Choctaw and other few remaining indigenous people. In a process
of ethnogenesis, the Native Americans formed a new culture which the Spanish
called "Seminole", a derivative of the Mvskoke' (a Creek
language) word simano-li,
an adaptation of the Spanish cimarrón which means
"wild", or "runaway.” There was a powerful tribe called the Miccosukee,
who lived northeast of present-day Tallahassee around Lake Miccosukee, and
another group lived around the Alachua Prairie, near present-day Gainesville.
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| Creek Village |
For almost the next fifty years, the Spanish occupied San
Marcos de Apalache, which mostly served as a base for communications and diplomatic relations with
the natives and to hear gossip about French and English relations with them.
The Creeks and Seminoles were becoming more dependent on European goods such as
muskets, pots, needles, scissors, and cloth. They came to the fort to receive
these goods and gifts, the Spanish basically buying their loyalty. However, the
Spanish believed that some were beginning to turn to British suppliers for
their goods, so it was important that the Spanish give them as many gifts as
they could in order to keep good relations.
Native Americans, however, slowly began to drift away from
San Marcos, with numbers falling from around 1,000 in 1726, to less than
400 by 1739. In 1745 the Spanish government authorized a trading post
to be established at the fort to entice the Creeks and Seminoles to build
villages nearby to maintain and strengthen their alliance. Often times, at San Marcos de Apalache, the Spanish did not
have much to give, and the Indian population near San Marcos continued to
decline. To make matters worse, in 1758, a powerful storm surge created by a
hurricane entered Apalachee Bay and engulfed the tiny peninsula on which San
Marcos was located and drowned forty men inside the wooden fort.
This situation continued in the remote Spanish fort in the backwoods of the
former Apalachee Province. But, around the 1760s, on a site a little north of
the wooden fort, the Spaniards began construction on a permanent stone fort.
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| Plan for Fort San Marcos de Apalachee |
Across the Wakulla River from the fort, the Spanish quarried
limestone. To protect themselves while quarrying the rock the Spaniards
constructed a watchtower by their quarry. Building the stone fort was a very
slow process, which was never fully completed to the plan’s specifications. While
the Spanish at San Marcos de Apalachee were still working on completing the new
stone fort, and maintaining good relationships with the local natives, the
French and Indian War, or Seven Years War, broke out in 1754. Spain sided with
the French, against the British, but the Spanish were becoming weaker as Great
Britain was getting stronger. British forces seized Spanish and French colonies
in the Caribbean, including Cuba, in which Havana was a major port for the
Spanish. By 1763, French and Spanish diplomats began to seek peace with Great
Britain. The end result was the 1763 Treaty of Paris, which ceded all French
territories east of the Mississippi River to Great Britain. Spain received Cuba
back, but lost Florida to Great Britain. Nearly the entire Spanish population
left Florida, taking along most of the remaining native population with them to Cuba,
except the refugee Creeks, Miccosukees, and Seminoles.
The British government divided the territory into
East Florida and West Florida, the border being the Apalachicola River, putting
present-day Wakulla County in East Florida.
The British soon constructed the King’s Road, connecting St. Augustine to
Georgia. The British government gave land grants in Florida to officers and
soldiers who fought in the French and Indian War in order to encourage
settlement. People began publishing reports in England and the rest of the
American colonies of East and West Florida’s natural wealth and beauty. A large
number of British colonists began to enter the Floridas, mostly coming from
South Carolina, Georgia, and Great Britain.
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| Artist interpretation of stone fort |
Boyd, M. F. (1936, July). The Fortifications of San Marcos de Apalache. The Florida Historical Quarterly, pp. 3-34.
Hann, J. H. (1988). Apalachee: The Land Between the Rivers. Gainesville: University Press of Florida.
Din, G. C. (2012). War on the Gulf Coast: The Spanish Fight Against William Augustus Bowles. Gainesville: University Press of Florida.
