The Timucua and Apalachee, The Northern Half

If the Calusa owned the south, two other nations shaped the north. The Timucua covered a territory stretching across most of northeastern and north-central Florida and into southern Georgia, an area of roughly nineteen thousand square miles. The Apalachee held the rich agricultural country of the Tallahassee Hills in the northwest, where well-watered red clay soil produced the finest corn harvests in the entire Southeast.

The Timucua were not a single unified people but a loose confederation of perhaps two hundred thousand individuals, speaking related dialects and sharing ceremonial practices, living in circular palisaded villages surrounded by planted fields. French Huguenot explorers who arrived at the mouth of the Saint Johns River in fifteen sixty-two described Timucua ceremonies in vivid detail, the ritual consumption of the black drink, a caffeinated holly-leaf brew that induced vomiting as spiritual purification before councils and hunts. The Apalachee built larger, more permanent towns.

Their ball game, called simply the Apalachee game, was played on a field sometimes two hundred yards long, and matches between towns could last for days, drawing crowds from across the region. Spanish missionaries arrived among the Apalachee in the sixteen thirties and found a people willing enough to hear the new religion, as long as it came with trade goods and did not immediately demand an end to the ball game, a negotiation that took years. The end of both nations came swiftly and violently.

In seventeen oh four, the English governor of Carolina dispatched James Moore with an army of English soldiers and Creek allies in a series of raids that swept through the Apalachee mission towns, killing or enslaving most of the population. Estimates of Apalachee killed or enslaved in a single winter run as high as four to five thousand people. The Timucua, already devastated by epidemic disease since the fifteen hundreds, nearly vanished in the same decades.

By the time Spain ceded Florida to Britain in seventeen sixty-three, the original peoples of the Florida interior were effectively gone.