Battle of Lake Okeechobee: Christmas Day, Eighteen Thirty-Seven

The ground south of here holds one of the most consequential and painful battles of the Second Seminole War. On Christmas Day, eighteen thirty-seven, Colonel Zachary Taylor led more than one thousand soldiers into a dense sawgrass swamp on the northern shore of Lake Okeechobee, expecting to crush a Seminole force and end the war. What followed exposed the limitations of conventional military tactics against a people defending their homeland.

A coalition of Seminole and Miccosukee fighters, somewhere between three hundred eighty and four hundred eighty strong, had chosen their ground carefully. Their commanders, including the warriors Alligator, Wild Cat, and Sam Jones, positioned their men in a hammock of dense live oaks and palmetto scrub at the edge of the lake. The sawgrass in front of them was nearly chest-high and razor-edged. Approaching soldiers would have to wade through it in the open, fully exposed, before they could reach the tree line.

Taylor sent volunteer Missouri infantrymen across the sawgrass first. The results were catastrophic. The Seminole marksmen held their fire until the soldiers were close, then opened with devastating accuracy. The volunteers broke and retreated. By the time the regular infantry finally pushed across, the Seminoles had completed an orderly withdrawal into the lake's vastness, leaving their position intact and their people safe.

The final count: twenty-six United States soldiers killed, one hundred twelve wounded. The Seminole suffered eleven dead and fourteen wounded. By any military measure, it was a Seminole tactical victory.

Yet Taylor received a brevet promotion to brigadier general and the nickname Old Rough and Ready. He rode that reputation to the White House in eighteen forty-eight. Meanwhile the Second Seminole War ground on for five more years and cost the United States forty million dollars and the lives of fifteen hundred soldiers, the costliest Indian war the country ever fought. A small group of Seminole never surrendered and never left. Their descendants remain in Florida to this day.