The Historical Society of Avon ParkAVON PARK, FL · EST. 1886
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The Seminole population figures for 1842 and 1858 count different years

Two counts of the Seminole people left in Florida circulate side by side, and they look like a contradiction. The Seminole Tribe of Florida writes of fewer than a thousand remaining; the state and the army speak of one or two hundred. Both are right. They are separated by fourteen years and by a third war.

The 1842 and 1855 figure

The Tribe’s own history sets the larger number at the close of the Second Seminole War: “By 1842, the forced removal campaign resulted in the death and abduction of more than 3000 Tribal members. With less than a thousand remaining in the state,” the army declared victory and left.[stof-long-war] The same figure still stood when the Third Seminole War began in 1855 — the Tribe describes “less than a thousand Seminole present at the start” of that war.[stof-long-war]

That is the count for a people who had survived the removal wars of the 1830s and had then been let alone for a little over a decade.

The 1858 and 1859 figure

The third war ended the decade of quiet. Billy Bowlegs’s and Assinwar’s bands accepted removal terms on 15 March 1858, and on 4 May a total of 163 Seminole people were shipped to New Orleans. Colonel Gustavus Loomis declared the war over on 8 May 1858.[wiki-seminole-wars] The government then believed about one hundred Seminole people were left in Florida — an estimate that proved too low, because in December 1858 two further bands totalling seventy-five people were recruited for removal and shipped west on 15 February 1859.[wiki-seminole-wars]

The Florida Department of State puts the figure slightly higher and describes the same moment: by 8 May 1858, when the United States declared the conflicts at an end, more than three thousand Seminole people had been moved west of the Mississippi, leaving “roughly 200 to 300 Seminoles remaining in Florida, hidden in the swamps.”[dos-seminole-history] The Seminole of Florida call themselves the Unconquered People, descendants of the roughly three hundred who eluded capture.[dos-seminole-history]

Why both are correct

The larger figure belongs to 1842 and to 1855; the smaller belongs to 1858 and after. Between them sits the Third Seminole War, which removed several hundred more people from Florida — the 163 sent in May 1858 and the seventy-five sent in February 1859 among them.[wiki-seminole-wars] A population under a thousand before that war and a population of a few hundred after it are the same population at two different dates.

The federal count taken a generation later is consistent with the smaller figure and not with the larger. Clay MacCauley’s survey for the Bureau of Ethnology found 208 Seminole people in Florida in 1880, in thirty-seven families, four of whose camps stood along Fisheating Creek south of what is now Highlands County.[maccauley-1887]

References

Where this comes from

Evidence
corroborated — More than one independent source agrees.
Review
unverified — Drafted from sources but not yet checked by a volunteer.
Rights
society

Sources

  1. Seminole Tribe of Florida, The Long War (2026) · official
  2. Florida Department of State, Seminole History (2026) · official
  3. Wikipedia, Seminole Wars (2026) · secondary
  4. Clay MacCauley, The Seminole Indians of Florida (Fifth Annual Report of the Bureau of Ethnology, 1883-'84) (1887) · official

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