What Animals Were Important To The Seminoles
- Dwelling
- Everglades
FLORIDA EVERGLADES
PAST, PRESENT and Future
Oct 4, 2021
The Florida Everglades are a unique ecosystem and cultural setting. This website isyour guide through the by, present, and future of the Florida Everglades.
Everglades National Park
It volition take you on a trip through the aboriginal and modern history of this unique identify.
This website was originally organized around the viii geographic regions of Florida.
As the site evolved, however, it became evident that the Everglades are an important office of at least iii Florida regions:
Key, Southwest and Southeast.
The economic bear upon of Everglades developers, especially Hamilton Disston, also affected St. Petersburg and Tarpon Springs in Cardinal Due west Florida.
Okeechobee Waterway Map
The Okeechobee Waterway connects the Atlantic Ocean and the Gulf of United mexican states right through the eye of the Everglades.
The Everglades map below is courtesy of Wikipedia. The map shows the boundaries of the Everglades and the locations of urban areas, parks and preserves that influence the environment.
THE HISTORY OF THE FLORIDA EVERGLADES
The history of the FloridaEverglades can be divided into 5 general periods. Click on the links below for more than detailed information.
- ANCIENT HISTORY
- SEMINOLE WARS
- RECLAMATION AND AGRICULTURE
- FLOOD CONTROL
- RESTORATION
Florida Everglades Ancient History: 13,000 BC to 1565 Advertisement
Humans were living in the Florida Everglades area as long as 15,000 years ago.
Two major tribes - the Calusa Indians and the Tequesta Indians - lived as hunter-gatherers on the edges of the rich Florida Everglades ecosystems.
At that place may have been about iv,000 to 7,000 Calusa at their peak. The Tequesta were much smaller in number and occupied a smaller territory.
The Calusa were the largest and nigh powerful tribe in Florida, and lived in 50 settlements from Lake Okeechobee to the Gulf in Southwest Florida and the Florida Keys.
The Tequesta lived in several small-scale settlements in Southeast Florida including one at the mouth of the Miami River at Biscayne Bay.
These Native Americans were hunter gatherers, and lived off seafood from the Gulf of United mexican states and the Atlantic Ocean, and animals and plants from the nearby Florida Everglades.
The Tequesta and Calusa have disappeared from Florida.
Castilian and British Times 1565 to 1817
The Spaniards settled Pensacola and St Augustine in 1565, and owned Florida for almost of the next 256 years until Florida became a U.Southward. territory in 1821, with a brief period of British ownership from 1763-1784.
During their ownership, the Spaniards and British didn't pay much attention to the Florida Everglades.
They considered it a god forsaken worthless state full of miserable animals and a few insignificant Indians.
The Everglades were first mentioned in writing on Castilian maps made by map makers who had never seen the country.
Their name for this mysterious area betwixt the Atlantic Bounding main and the Gulf of Mexico was"Laguna del Espiritu Santo", which ways "Lake of the Holy Spirit".
The Spaniards had express contact with the Calusa and Tequesta who lived on the outer fringes of the Florida Everglades at the mouths of rivers and streams and littoral ridges and hammocks.
Like most ethnic populations in the Americas, the Indians in Florida did non prosper nether Spanish rule. The Indian populations began to reject until by the mid 1700'southward nearly of them were gone.
TheSeminoles, a tribe of Creeks who assimilated other peoples - including escaped slaves - into their own, were slowly forced into migrating to Florida past development in the Carolinas and Georgia.
The Seminoles made their living in Due north and Central Florida until later years when they were squeezed into the Florida Everglades past the U.South. military in the Seminole Wars.
Florida Everglades and Seminole Wars 1817 to 1858
The Florida Everglades had a turbulent and violent history in the years from 1817 to 1881.
Spain still owned Florida in 1817, but the U.S. government was fighting Indians who were feuding with American settlers in Florida and due south Georgia.
The First Seminole State of war was from 1817 to 1818. The United states of america acquired Florida from Spain in 1821, and information technology became a territory. Florida became a state in 1845.
Not much was happening in the Everglades when Florida became a state. The remote region had almost no settlement, agronomics, development or industry.
Equally white settlers began to motility into North and Key Florida, conflicts and violence between them and the Seminole Indians became a problem that the government tried to solve by moving the Seminoles to western reservations.
The Indians didn't always desire to move, so threeSeminole Warstook place on Florida soil.
- The Start Seminole State of war: 1817 to 1818.
- The Second Seminole State of war: 1835 to 1842.
- The Third Seminole State of war: 1855 to 1858.
These wars saw most of the Seminoles either killed or transplanted to reservations in the western United states.
The Seminoles never surrendered, and those that survived escaped into the Florida Everglades where their descendants still live.
Many Florida identify names engagement back to the sometime primitive fortifications of the Seminole Wars.
Some of these include Fort Lauderdale, Fort Pierce, Fort Myers, Fort Drum, Fort Ogden, Fort Meade, Fort Brooke (Tampa), Fort King, Fort Basinger and many others.
Chief Micanopy
The boondocks ofMicanopy nearly Gainesville was named in honor of the great war chief of the 2nd Seminole State of war.
The name is pronounced MICK-UH-NOPIE that rhymes with Opie, Sheriff Andy'southward son in Mayberry.
Another neat leader in the Second Seminole War wasOsceola. Even though not a tribal primary, he had great influence with Micanopy and the other Seminoles.
Osceola was built-in Billy Powell in 1804 in Alabama. Billy was evidently native American, English, Irish gaelic, Scottish and African American.
He was a one human United Nations, and his heritage may take helped him get such a swell leader.
Many surnames of Seminole origin still survive in the areas effectually the Florida Everglades. Some typical ones include Osceola, Billie and Bowlegs.
The Seminoles are the merely Indian nation never to sign a peace treaty with the U.Due south.
Their legacy of never surrendering is proudly carried on by the Florida Country Seminole athletic program. One of the greatest of all higher football game traditions takes place at dwelling games in Doak Campbell stadium.
Osceola
A student portraying Osceola charges downward the field riding an Appaloosa war equus caballus named Renegade and plants a flaming spear at midfield to begin every abode game.
Even this old Gator fan admits to loving the spectacle.
Click on this link for cracking information most the Seminole Tribe.
The U.Due south. Civil War took identify from 1861 to 1865, and Florida was a southern land whose role was mainly providing food and other agricultural products to the battling Confederate armies further due north.
The State was consumed by the War and the painful Reconstruction that followed until 1877.
The Florida Everglades remained pretty much as information technology had for thousands of years except for the Seminole Indians who lived off the land and waters.
The waters continued to catamenia in the Everglades as they had historically washed and as shown on this map from Wikipedia.
All of that historic flow that had nurtured the Everglades for thousands of years was about to change.
Florida was about to enter into several economic booms that featured the Everglades as a star actor.
Click on the map below to encounter a short video of the celebrated flow.
Florida Everglades Reclamation/Agriculture 1881 to 1930
This period in Everglades history was all about"drain infant, bleed".
In 1881 Florida was still suffering from the economic ravages of the Civil War and the Reconstruction years that followed.
Florida, along with other states of the old Confederacy, was just about broke.
The Land was looking for means to heighten coin for its routine operations, and for ways to encourage development and agriculture and increase its tax base of operations.
They saw an respond in the millions of acres of "worthless" swampland it owned in the Everglades and in other undeveloped properties it owned on the west declension of Florida.
In those days, most people felt that a swamp was just a useless slice of real estate that had no value until it was tuckered, developed and cultivated.
Hamilton Disston
In 1881, the State sold 4,000,000 acres - an surface area larger than Connecticut - to a northern industrialist namedHamilton Disston.
He paid 25 cents per acre, and it was plain the largest land purchase by any unmarried person in the history of the earth.
Disston tried very hard to drain the northern Florida Everglades south of Orlando. He piled a fortune on pinnacle of his million dollar country purchase price.
He congenital canals and dredged rivers and opened the interior of cardinal Florida to steamboat navigation.
He dredged the Kissimmee River south to Lake Okeechobee, then connected the big lake to the Caloosahatchee River so that steamboats could make the trip from Fort Myers to Kissimmee.
Central Florida was now connected to the earth via the Gulf of United mexican states.
Disston Land Visitor Certificate
Disston'south efforts started the beginning land boom in Florida history. He was responsible for creating or growing Kissimmee and St. Cloud in Central Florida, and Gulfport, Tarpon Springs and Petrograd in Central West Florida.
He also started the successful growing and harvesting of rice and carbohydrate cane near Kissimmee.
Most of the drainage systems installed past Disston nearly 130 years ago are still functioning today in the Kissimmee-St. Cloud expanse. All of these efforts to drain the Everglades, however, vicious brusk.
He was unable to significantly lower the surface water around Lake Okeechobee and in the Everglades, but his activities were the beginning of development and agronomics in the area.
Vintage Postcard Everglades Dredge
His achievements made it possible forHenry Flagler to build his railroad down the eastward coast of Florida, forHenry Plant to build his railroad to the west coast at Tampa, and for the two railroads and their hotels assist Florida develop its tourist and agronomics industries.
Another of import figure in the reclamation menstruation wasRichard J. "Dicky" Bolles. In 1908, the State of Florida sold him 500,000 acres in the Everglades for $ii/acre.
Every bit part of the purchase, the Land promised to spend one-half the auction proceeds for drainage and reclamation.
Bolles founded theFlorida Fruit Lands Company to sell 180,000 acres in Dade and Palm Embankment Counties.
The company subdivided the state into 12,000 farm sites of various sizes and designated a site for a new town named "Progresso".
They had plans for streets, factories, schools, churches and infrastructure.
This created some other of Florida'due south famous land booms. For $240, buyers could purchase the right to bid on a farm and boondocks lot through a scheduled auction.
He also used the aforementioned sales technique to sell his remaining 420,000 acres through some other company of his,Okeechobee Fruit Lands Company.
His salesmen fanned out throughout the country promoting the Everglades as a "Garden of Eden", a "Tropical Paradise" and a "Promised Land".
His promotions even had the endorsement of State and Federal officials who touted the fertility of the Everglades land.
Richard Johnson "Dicky" Bolles
Bolle's deals began to fall apart by 1911. He held a behemothic auction in Fort Lauderdale, and it was only then that holders of the $240 options found out there would be no genuine auction.
Instead, they were required to buy country that had been picked out for them. Almost of the land was however under water.
There were huge lawsuits, and the court permit Bolles keep the deposits but wouldn't permit him sell any state until the Land had washed its part in draining the Everglades.
In 1913 Bolles was arrested, only was found innocent. He maintained that he believed what State and Federal officials had told him about the Everglades, and that he was merely interim on that information.
Bolles died in 1917, and along with him the dreams of his Everglades land buyers also died. There is no town of Progresso, the country contracts expired and most of the land Bolles sold went back to the Land for nonpayment.
Florida Everglades Flood Control From 1930 to 1971
The Florida Everglades grew in population as a consequence of the drainage improvements completed from 1881 to 1928. Many new communities were formed in the vicinity of the Everglades in those years.
Ii of the worst hurricanes in Florida history stormed ashore in 1926 and 1928 and caused Lake Okeechobee to burst through its levees, drowning thousands of people. The 1928 disaster was the worst in Florida hurricane history.
The Federal and State governments began to concentrate at present onflood command rather than drainage. The Okeechobee Overflowing Control Commune was created in 1929.
Between 1930 and 1937,the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers built a 66 mile long dike around the southern edge of Lake Okeechobee.
The 20 pes loftier embankment was named for President Herbert Hoover. The Corps also set the legal limits of surface water elevation on the lake between 14 and 17 anxiety higher up ocean level.
At the same time, an lxxx pes wide half-dozen human foot deep culvert was built along the winding path of the narrow upper Caloosahatchee River.
Whenever the lake levels got too high, the excess water was released through the canal and went on down to the Gulf of Mexico.
This project was part of the 1937 completion of theOkeechobee Waterway.
Sugar cane product soared after these flood command improvements, and the populations of the small towns around the lake tripled by the finish of World War Two.
As before long as the Hoover dike was completed, all the same, people began to notice detrimental effects in the Everglades.
An extended drought in the late 1930's highlighted the trouble.
The Hoover dike prevented water from leaving the lake into the surrounding lands by canvass flow. The peaty soils stale upward and turned into dust.
Salty salt water from the bounding main intruded into Miami's wells because the Everglades water wasn't getting in that location.
In 1939 a million acres of Everglades burned and the black clouds of soot from the peat and sawgrass fires made it hard to breathe in Miami.
The depression ground water levels caused the peaty soils to shrink and subside and many homes had to exist put on stilts and raised up as much equally eight feet to get back to the elevations that their homes were before the dike was congenital.
Everglades Flood Control Structure
More than hurricanes in 1947 caused severe flooding, and theCentral and Southern Florida Flood Command Project (C&SF) was formed to construct flood control improvements in the Everglades.
Virtually this same time, Everglades National Park was officially defended in 1947.
Information technology was a good thing for the long term protection of the Everglades, only to understand the impact on some of the local residents read Totch: A Life In The Everglades.
The C&SF congenital 1,400 miles of canals, numerous inundation gates and pump stations and levees up until 1971.
The final project was the 22 miles long C-38 canal, which straightened the natural meandering course of the Kissimmee River on its way to Lake Okeechobee.
The C-38 project almost immediately started causing serious impairment to brute and plant communities and negatively impacted the water quality in the region.
Florida Everglades Restoration: Undo What Man Has Done
The Florida Everglades was being destroyed by all of the drainage, development action and agronomical fertilizer and wastewater runoff.
It became horrifyingly evident to thoughtful Americans that something drastic had to be done.
The issue came to a caput in the early 1970'due south.Miami International Airport was jammed upwards with traffic and didn't have much room for expansion in its urban Miami location.
A proposal was submitted to construct a huge jetport in the Big Cypress Swamp.
Studies before long showed that the jetport would destroy the Due south Florida ecosystem and Everglades National Park.
Local governments, environmentalists, other activists and fifty-fifty nationally prominent politicians mobilized intense opposition to the project.
From this pivotal event, local, country and federal governments began to cooperate in finding means to residuum the needs of urban and agronomical Florida with the Everglades natural environment.
The C-38 Culvert (Kissimmee River) became the kickoff C&SF project to be restored. In the 1980's, the regime began to backfill the canal. In many cases they used the original soils excavated from the river.
In 1986 high levels of phosphorous and mercury were discovered in the Everglades waterways after years of fertilizer runoff from agricultural operations. Now Florida Everglades h2o quality quickly became a focus.
Many legal battles were fought between various governments to make up one's mind who was responsible for monitoring and enforcing h2o quality standards.
Finally, in 1994, theEverglades Forever Human actionwas passed. Since then theSouthward Florida Water Direction District (SFWMD) and theU.Due south. Regular army Corps of Engineers accept cooperated in programs that have greatly reduced phosphorous levels.
Other authorities and private studies, even so, showed that the quality of life in South Florida was in decline and that the region could not sustain its growth.
The studies predicted serious environmental pass up, water shortages and a devastated tourist economy.
Finally, in 2000, after years of study and legal battles, a strategy called theComprehensive Everglades Restoration Programme (CERP) was passed into law to restore portions of the Everglades, Lake Okeechobee, the Caloosahatchee River and Florida Bay.
CERP is a joint venture of the Federal and State governments, and is managed by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and the South Florida Water Management Commune.
Information technology is estimated that the over lx major projects that contain CERP will take 30 years to complete and cost nigh $eight billion.
The objective of CERP is to restore as much as possible of the original water flows that historically fabricated the Everglades the treasure it was.
The program likewise has to provide flood protection for people and belongings.
Everybody fervently hopes that CERP will get a long way toward reversing the turn down of the Everglades that has been taking place since Hamilton Disston first started his drainage projects almost 130 years ago.
The Florida Everglades is a huge subtropical wetland of sawgrass marshes in a circuitous system of interdependent ecosystems.
These ecosystems include cypress swamps, the estuarine mangrove forests of the X Thou Islands, tropical hardwood hammocks, pine rockland, and the table salt h2o marine environment of Florida Bay in the Keys.
The complication and uniqueness of its history and ecology made it axiomatic that information technology deserved to be treated equally its own region on our website. There will exist some overlap on this website, of course.
For example, the western parts of the extremely urban southeast Florida counties of Martin, Palm Beach, Broward and Miami-Dade are in the Everglades.
The rampant development in this megalopolis has created new problems for the Everglades and aggravated quondam ones.
Also, although Naples, Fort Myers, Labelle, Immokalee and Everglades City are in southwest Florida, the Everglades touches their very dorsum doors and is part of their history.
The Florida Everglades sprawls across 16 counties, all the way from Orlando in the northward to Monroe County in the due south. It was the terminal region of Florida to encounter significant development, only when it did information technology happened with a vengeance.
The centerpiece of the Everglades is shallow Lake Okeechobee, the second largest freshwater lake completely within the boundaries of the 48 continental United states of america. The largest is Lake Michigan.
Historically, the areas n of Lake Okeechobee drained into the lake via natural waterways including the Kissimmee River.
When the h2o levels in Lake Okeechobee built upwardly, the overflows traveled slowly southward through the marshes and sloughs to Florida Bay, the salt water body that separates mainland Florida from the Keys.
This area southward of Lake Okeechobee, about 60 miles wide and 100 miles deep, was coined "The River of Grass" by Marjorie Stoneman Douglas in her volume of the same proper noun.
This sheet flow moved south at about i/2 mile per day. Sometimes it would take two summer rainy seasons before the h2o would make it to Florida Bay.
This long journey was essential to the balance of the Everglades environmental, and to the purification of storm h2o earlier it soaked back into the ground or found its way to the bay.
Almost of south Florida relies on the Everglades and its recharged water for their drinking water supply.
One of the oldest and virtually active Everglades advocacy organizations is Friends of the Everglades.
Florida Towns Influenced past the Everglades
Many towns and cities in south Florida are influenced by the Florida Everglades and Lake Okeechobee.
This influence is felt by towns not just in the Everglades, but along the southeast and southwest coasts of Florida.
These towns, if not quite in the Everglades, are close to information technology, bear on it and are afflicted by information technology.
A low ridge separates the Everglades from the Atlantic Ocean, and the areas between the body of water and the ridge were adult get-go.
Henry Flagler built his Florida East Declension Railroad along this ridge. As the areas grew in population, they sprawled west into the Everglades.
The southwest Florida declension developed afterward because at that place was no easy way to cantankerous the Everglades from southeast Florida. The Tamiami Trail, completed in 1928, opened upwards southwest Florida to development.
Towns that didn't exist or showtime growing until the draining of the Everglades include:
Belle Glade, Culvert Point, Clewiston, Everglades Urban center, Lakeport, Moore Oasis, Okeechobee, Pahokee, Port Mayaca, St. Cloud and South Bay.
Everglades Urban center City Hall
Many southeast Florida towns accept had their western suburbs carved out of the Florida Everglades. West Palm Beach, Fort Lauderdale and Miami are notable examples along with most of the towns in between.
If yous are interested in learning more about the Florida Everglades, its past, present and future, I recommend reading"THE SWAMP: The Everglades, Florida, and the Politics of Paradise" past Michael Grunwald.
Things To Exercise In The Florida Everglades
There are many things to do in the Florida Everglades towns including ecotourism, fishing, gambling at the Indian casinos, airboat rides, watching alligator wrestling and a host of other activities that will exist expanded as this website continues to grow.
The The Okeechobee Waterway provides one of the nigh interesting side trips in this role of the country. Yous can enjoy it by boat or at the several recreational areas side by side to the locks and dams along the road.
A fun place is Big Cypress Loop Road and Lucky Cole's place. Lucky Cole is the well known Everglades photographer who specializes in nude photos of women in tropical settings.
Here are some recommended Everglades twenty-four hours trips and adventures.
Ervin Rouse playing the Orangish Flower Special
Another famous resident of the Loop Road back in the solar day was Ervin Rouse, the composer of the classic country fiddle tune,"The Orange Blossom Special".
If yous desire to hear an unusual and beautiful rendition of this classic, click on the video above. It was performed on Ocean Avenue in Due south Beach, but an hour or then e of Loop Route.
Many artists take been inspired by the Florida Everglades and tried to capture its magic on canvas.
This one is by artist Lauren Graham Cunningham of Mount Dora, Florida.
I like her capture of the vast marshes, the blue skies, the blueish h2o, the distant hammock, and the lonely bird enjoying the solitude.
The bird is alone in its dwelling house.
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