Civil War Articles by Julian WilliamsGeneral Willcox Hears Osceola-Gen. Thompson Details
This article was compiled by Julian Williams.
The General (Mark Willcox) was seeing a whole lot of things he didn't care to tell his grandchildren about. What he wasn't seeing he was hearing. The settlers were doing everything imaginable to drive out the Seminoles and the Seminoles were doing everything imaginable to resist removal. They even hid out in the Okefenokee Swamp and it was around those parts that General Willcox encountered "the wily savage." We don't know how close he ever came to Osceola but we know a family acquaintance, General Wiley Thompson, came much too close.
The Seminoles, no more than anyone else, didn't want to try to share the hostile dry plains of the West with the Indians who were already out there. Those western Indians weren't very nice to company, be it red man or otherwise. They weren't even nice to their long-tolerated neighbors. The Seminoles didn't want to die - period - but it appears they preferred the Old Jacksonville, Georgia, Jail (when they were brought there wounded and dying), or other places of imprisonment in Georgia and Florida, to the environs of the Sioux, Comanche and Osage, out in some dry gulch canyon. It was hard enough surviving on briar root and cabbage palm. They sure didn't want to try cactus or tumbleweed.
But the Seminoles could be pretty hostile themselves, as we see below. Now The General (Mark Willcox) was getting the details of the death of his contemporary and family acquaintance, General Wiley Thompson. And the details were not pretty. Florida was not the place to be in 1835. Tourism came later.
It seems a good bit of the trouble between Osceola and General Thompson started when Thompson tried to get the Indians to sign a treaty. It is said Osceola plunged his knife into the treaty, pinning it to the table. He made a few uncomplimentary comments and later laughingly insulted General Thompson. Thompson, being about as vain as Osceola, and with a quick temper to boot, had the young war leader thrown into shackles and put him in "the cooler" for a few days. Even if Thompson possessed any sense of joviality he was hard put to find humor in these words of Osceola: "I will make the white man red with blood. I will blacken him in the sun and the rain, where the wolf shall smell of his bones and the buzzard live upon his flesh."
It is at this point that this whole story takes a puzzling but deadly turn. Here we have General Wiley Thompson, the Indian agent, a transplanted Georgian, doing his assignment at Fort King (present-day Ocala, Florida). He was an able man it would seem, having served in the Congress, reviewed the Georgia-Florida boundary line with General Blackshear and General Floyd, and now a general, assigned as Indian agent to the Seminoles by Andrew Jackson.
But, in spite of all this, he was lonely. Perhaps he felt a need to seek some sort of peace with the Seminoles. Perhaps he felt it his duty as Indian agent to try to make friendly overtures with his red charges. Perhaps he even admired the magnetism and natural aura possessed by the strong young brave named Osceola. Whatever, he made an effort to befriend the young Indian warrior. Whether he sought him as a friend or whether he sought to appease him, or bribe him, we will probably never know.
But, in spite of his own outbursts, Osceola would from time to time visit Wiley Thompson at the fort. He was friendly enough, saying little, and exuding a bland smile. If you looked closely you would probably decide that it was a cold bland smile. Wiley Thompson had swept a lot of things under the rug. Forgotten them. Like, according to some historians, selling Osceola's wife and child to slave traders. Osceola had not forgotten. Like humiliating Osceola by putting him in chains. Osceola remembered. But he smiled the bland smile and Wiley Thompson thought all was well. It was not.
Thinking all was well, General Thompson ordered a nice gift for his young brave Seminole friend. All the way from Savannah, in fact - the finest hand carved stock (attached to a rifle) you ever saw. When General Thompson presented the fine gift to Osceola, it is said that Osceola remarked, "Thank you - I will use it well." Folks, now somehow, that just doesn't have a nice ring to it.
From there, things got worst. Just as everybody was trying to enjoy the Christmas season, Osceola and sixty hand-picked warriors crept up on Fort King and Wiley Thompson. Osceola was about to live up to his name.
His name was Asi-Yahola - Black Drink Singer. It is said that the Seminoles drank a strange strong concoction of boiled herbs (and what else they threw in only who knows). It seemed to give them strength and cunning for war. Tribal leaders even drank it before convening councils and entering into treaty-making. Obviously, it hadn't helped much in the treaty-making area. The Americans, stone sober, could tell more lies with straighter faces than the Seminole wisdom and sagacity could ever overcome.
The Black Drink was very strong and an excellent purgative. It had such an effect on its user that he would cry or sing a blood-curdling yell that would put the later cry of Johnny Reb to a fair test. All the while this was going on the user would orally spew these liquid projectiles some eight to ten feet through the air. Besides being medicinally invigorating, the exercise, with wild dancing thrown in, probably also caused weight loss (this, too, came in handy, as we shall see later). Strange it seems, but this ceremony gave the Seminole warrior the spirit and stamina to do battle.
And as Osceola and his warriors crouched down around Fort King, a slight drizzle gave way to a sunny Florida sky, and down the road a good piece toward Tampa Bay, the comrades of Osceola were about to do mischief there along the edge of a swamp. Micanopy, Jumper, and Alligator, renowned Seminole chiefs, were about to lead an attack which would utterly destroy the forces of Major Francis Langhorne Dade. Major Dade and his forces were on the way to reinforce General Thompson at Fort King (Ocala). Just before the attack, Major Dade was in good spirits and trying to lessen the uneasiness of his men and promise them a good but belated Christmas, he shouted back to them, "Have a good heart; our difficulties and dangers are over now, and as soon as we arrive at Fort King you'll have three days rest and keep Christmas gaily." But it was not to be.
We'll look more at the details next week but can't you just see General Willcox saying, "Now, why in tarnation would you give an Indian a rifle?" He had too many memories of Breakfast Branch. And sometimes when the rain came down in drizzles, just as it was doing today at Fort King, the old wounds would hurt enough to remind him that he was a lucky man to be alive. And he knew that the sun would shine once more. But Wiley Thompson had seen his last day of sunshine and we will tell about that next week.
Credits:
C.T. (Chris) Trowell for Exploring The Okefenokee Letters And Diaries From The Indian Wars, 1836-1842;
Alvin M. Josephy for Patriot Chiefs and The Death of Osceola;
Vernon Lamme for Florida's Seminole Indians - The State's Most Colorful Son;
The Trail of Tears by Gloria Jahoda;
Ann Carswell for letters of and notes on Gen. Mark Willcox;
Willcox Family History by Martha Albertson;
Pioneer Days Along the Ocmulgee by Fussell Chalker;
Telfair History (1807-1987);
info furnished by Gertrude Wilcox Williams and Diane Williams Rogers and others.
