Fort King: Where the Second Seminole War Began
Near Ocala, Florida
The wooden stockade that stood on this hill in the eighteen thirties was called Fort King, named for Colonel William King of the Fourth Infantry Regiment. It was a small post, poorly supplied, strategically critical. From here, the United States government tried to enforce one of the most contentious policies in its history: the forced removal of the Seminole people from Florida to reservations west of the Mississippi River.
The Indian Removal Act of eighteen thirty had set that policy in motion. By eighteen thirty-two, soldiers had returned to Fort King along with a federal Indian agent named Wiley Thompson, whose job was to persuade Seminole chiefs to sign removal agreements. Most chiefs refused. One young leader named Osceola, a man of Creek and possibly some European heritage who had grown up in Florida, refused most forcefully of all.
Thompson had Osceola arrested and shackled at Fort King after one confrontation. Accounts say Thompson forced Osceola to sign a removal document under duress. Osceola was released, but the humiliation festered.
On December twenty-eighth, eighteen thirty-five, Osceola moved. While Chief Micanopy's warriors ambushed Major Francis Dade's column of one hundred eight soldiers marching up from Fort Brooke near Tampa, killing all but three men, Osceola led a separate party to the gates of Fort King itself. He killed Wiley Thompson with his own rifle shot. The two attacks were coordinated, executed on the same day, and together they launched what became the Second Seminole War, the longest and most expensive war the United States ever fought against a Native American people.
The war lasted seven years, cost the federal government forty million dollars, and killed an estimated sixteen hundred American soldiers. The Seminoles were never fully defeated. A few hundred retreated deep into the Everglades and never surrendered. Their descendants are the Seminole Tribe of Florida today.
Fort King is now a National Historic Landmark. The stockade has been reconstructed, and the site interprets this complicated ground where two nations drew their lines.
