Read Online Carl Hiaasen by Nature Girl - Free Book Online

thought.
    Flowers just don’t cut it.

Five
    From 1835 to 1842, the United States government for the second time directed its military might against a small band of Indians settled in the wilderness of Florida. During those years the Seminoles were pursued by almost every regiment of the regular army, and more than fifty thousand volunteers and militiamen. By the time it was over, the Second Seminole War had cost the United States an estimated thirty million dollars, a mountainous sum in that era, and more than three thousand lives.
    The toll was all the more astounding because, at the peak of its strength, the Seminole tribe had no more than a thousand warriors.
    Absurdly outnumbered, braves would lure the white infantry deep into the boggy swamps and pine barrens, then attack in lightning flurries. The strategy proved highly effective at first, but in the end the Indians were overrun. Their home camps were razed, hundreds of families were wiped out and nearly four thousand tribal members were deported to Indian Country, the bleak plains of Oklahoma. Nevertheless, the small numbers of Seminoles who remained in Florida refused to surrender, and to this day their descendants have never signed a peace treaty with Washington, D.C.
    In late 1880, the Smithsonian Institution’s Bureau of Ethnology dispatched the Rev. Clay MacCauley to Florida “to inquire into the condition and to ascertain the number of Indians commonly known as Seminole.” MacCauley spent the winter of 1881 traveling to tribal settlements at Catfish Lake, Cow Creek, Fisheating Creek, the Miami River and Big Cypress. His account, published six years later, was praised for its rich descriptions and perceptive commentary.
    Sammy Tigertail’s father bought him a copy for four dollars at a used-book sale at the big public library in downtown Fort Lauderdale. The volume became one of the boy’s most treasured belongings, and it was not exaggerating to say that it changed his life.
    “They are now strong, fearless, haughty and independent,” MacCauley wrote in summary of the Indians he met, then added:

    The moving lines of the white population are closing in upon the land of the Seminole. There is no farther retreat to which they can go. It is their impulse to resist the intruders, but some of them at last are becoming wise enough to know that they cannot contend successfully with the white man. It is possible that even their few warriors may make an effort to stay the oncoming hosts, but ultimately they will either perish in the futile attempt or they will have to submit to a civilization which, until now, they have been able to repel and whose injurious accompaniments may degrade and destroy them.

    From the moment he first read those words, Sammy Tigertail had dreamed of shedding his plain life as a Chad and disappearing into the Big Cypress, hideout of Sam Jones and Billy Bowlegs and other heroes of the second war. Above all, the great-great-great-grandson of Chief Tiger Tail would not allow himself to be degraded and destroyed by the white man, a process he feared had already commenced during his suburban childhood. He planned grandly to recast himself as one of those indomitable braves who resisted the intruders, or died trying.
    But then he was only a teenager, stoked with idealism and newfound native pride.
    Now, re-reading MacCauley by firelight, Sammy Tigertail struggled to envision the noble and fiercely insulated culture so admiringly documented in those pages. He wondered what the journalist-preacher would say about the twenty-first-century clans that eagerly beckoned outsiders to tribal gambling halls, tourist traps and drive-through cigarette kiosks. For not the first time the young man contemplated the crushing likelihood that the warrior he aspired to become had no place to go.
    As much as Sammy Tigertail cherished the Mark Knopfler guitar, embracing it made him think of the casino from whose garish walls it had been lifted. The great Osceola