[
Obviously their pagan war gods were blessing them Seminoles. :grin:
If this thread started with the likes of a Daniel Boone claiming that shot, prob'ly there'd be far less skepticism.
There's a major misconception pertaining to the technology of the Indians all across the Frontier period.
Go clear back to King Phillip's War in New England (1675), the first major bloodletting, half the towns in the colony attacked, hundreds of colonists thousands of Indians dead before it was all over.
The tools of choice of the Indians? Knifes, hatchets and muskets. A major cause of the war?
Hogs.
Yep hogs, there were so many feral hogs that the Indians had largely switched over to a hog-based economy and a major source of friction was Indian hogs underselling the competition in local markets.
Not yer stereotypical Indian War.
Jump forward nearly 100 years to the F&I War. Robert Rogers and his famous raid on the Abenakis (the baddest guys on the block at that time) at their town of St. Francis.
St Francis had a church and houses of sawn timber, a school, and the Chief and his wife were both White, adopted tribal members.
'Nother generation the Rev, War. Iroquois towns on a technological parity with their White Frontier neighbors. Sawn timbers, stone chimneys, cabins, fences, livestock, ploughs, and in the case of the Oneidas, Samuel Kirlands famous church.
Ten years later 800 Americans under St. Clair wiped out on the Wabash by an Indian confederation led by the Miami Chief Little Turtle. The place where the American army was heading to burn was the Miami "Indian Town" of Kekionga.
According to Alan W. Ekhert Kekionga at that time had sawn plank sidewalks, trading posts, a smithy two saloons and a whorehouse. Little Turtle hisself lived in a two story sawn-timber house and entertained guests on fine china while someone played his piano.
A generation later Andy Jackson invades Creek country after a bunch of Indians killed a bunch of White people at Ft Mims. Except the leader of the Indians, William Weatherford, was 7/8th White and Mims, whose land the fort was built on, was half Creek. In fact there was prob'ly as much Indian blood inside Fort Mims as there was outside it, the leading Creeks at that time living on plantations, keeping slaves, and breeding fine race horses, while STILL showing up tattoed and in elaborate native garb in contemporary paintings.
Twenty years after that, the Cherokees got a constitution, schools, courts, jails a written language and their own newspaper, the Creeks not far behind. Worth noting that possibly the richest man in America at that time was a Cherokee Chief “Crazy James” Vann, after his death in a bar fight came his son “Rich James” Vann, who eventually blew himself up racing his steamboat on the Ohio (only part recovered was his arm, in a tree, identified by his diamond ring.
Meanwhile the Seminoles, essentially Creeks, down in Florida derived income to buy their clothing, tools and weapons by trading deer skins, cow hides, honey and agricultural produce. Worth digressing on the volume of the Indian trade and why it was important in our history. In the 1740's the Cherokees were trading around 140,000 deerskins a year to the British at Savannah, twenty years later the Indians on the Ohio collectively trading nearly 300,000 deer skins a year at Fort Pitt (if they really did apologize to everything they killed, they musta spent a bunch of time doing so) TONS of trade goods, including weapons going inland, passing through the hands of Indian middlemen.
Likewise, Bent's Fort, 1840's.... TONS of trade goods on flatboats going upstream in exchange for hundreds of thousands of buffalo hide collected by Comanches, Cheyennes and others. As as with Indians elsewhere, profound changes in society if only to accumulate the labor to dress all those hides.
I dunno the religious habits of the Seminoles in 1836, I do know by that time that the Eastern tribes must have been about the most heavily evangelized people in America.
But, specific to this battle, as will be seen, General Gaines likely weren't expecting to be shot at by people armed with sticks and stones, in fact he would know better than MOST Americans exactly who he was dealing with.
Birdwatcher
atriot: 
:stir: :shake:
