John Horse

John Horse (1812 – 1882), also known as Juan Caballo and Gopher John, was a military advisor to Osceola and a leader of the Afro-Seminole contingents against American troops during the Seminole Wars. He later became a scout for the United States Army and led a number of Black Seminoles across the Southeastern United States to first Indian Territory (now Oklahoma) and later to Mexico, where he died.

1


[edit] Early Life and war
Horse may have been born and raised as a slave in

Micanopy, Florida. The year he was born, the War of 1812

Contents [hide]
broke out between America and the British. Young John Horse was probably

living in one of the black towns under the jurisdiction of the Alachua band of Oconee along

the Suwanee River at the time when Andrew Jackson invaded the area and scattered the tribal

peoples and their black allies/dependents. John Horse was the son of a Seminole Indian

named Charlie Cowaya (or Coheia), a surname which may have been a Seminole corruption of

the Spanish word for horse, "caballo", hence John's English last name. His mother was

apparently an African slave who had either escaped or been purchased by his Indian father. Not much is known about Charlie Cowaya but it looks like he cared about his African "wife" and her two children, John and his older sister Juana (also "Wannah" or "Warner" in some sources), because John was apparently not raised as a slave. Charlie Cowaya apparently desired his children to be free, a fact later confirmed in Oklahoma Indian Territory when the exiled Seminole leadership voted John his freedom from the tribe in the early years of the Oklahoma exile (around 1843), confirming the wishes of Charlie Cowaya. Chief Micanopy (Mico Nuppa) had nominal ownership over John at the time and led the way in officially granting him his freedom. John also had his freedom from General Worth for his service to the U.S. in the latter days of the Second Seminole War in Florida (even before the exiled Seminole tribal council acted) and because he initially surrendered under General Thomas Sydney Jesup's promise of freedom to escaped slaves who quit fighting and accepted relocation to Indian Territory west of the Mississippi. Unfortunately, his wife and children in Oklahoma were not covered by these terms and this would be a source of a great deal of trouble in later days.

Slaves to the Seminole Indians weren't treated the way the whites treated their slaves because they weren't needed to labor on massive plantations for the Indians and mostly had to fend for themselves along with their Indian "masters" in a subsistence economy that relied on small scale farming, hunting and gathering. Though nominally a slave while among the Seminole in Florida, John, like other Black Seminole, could come and go as he pleased, bear arms and fight and shed his blood alongside the Indians. The Seminole slaves were thus more like vassals in a feudal tribal society than their fellow blacks who were little more than human chattel in nearby states to the north such as Georgia. The First Seminole War (1817-1818) occurred during John's childhood when Jackson invaded and destroyed Seminole and African villages in western and northern Florida, driving the dispersed population farther south toward the swamps and western coastal regions of Florida as far as today's Tampa Bay.

As a young man, John Horse distinguished himself as a fighter among the Seminole and may have been involved in a number of early engagements of the Second Seminole War (1835-1842), including the Battle of Dade's Massacre, the Battle of the Withlacoochie, the Battle of Camp Izzard and the Battle of the Great Wahoo Swamp. But he is not recorded as taking a leading part in any of the fighting until the Battle of Okeechobee against Zachary Taylor shortly after his notorious escape from Fort Marion (Castilo de San Marcos) in St. Augustine which he effected with Indian ally Coacoochee (Wildcat), the eldest son of Mikasuki chief King Philip Emathla of the St. Johns River region on the eastern coast.

John Horse and Wildcat had been taken by General Joseph Hernandez in a trap set by commanding U.S. General Thomas Sydney Jesup which also netted Seminole war chief (tustenuggee thloko) Osceola (Asiyaholo) and Coahadjo, a sub-chief to King Philip. (King Philip and a large part of his band had been taken not long before when one of his black slaves, John Philip, had changed sides and led the military to his hideout.)

John Horse served an interpreter for a number of the Seminole chiefs, most especially for Micanopy who was the leader of the Alachua Oconee at this time and primary chief of all the Seminole bands. He also interpreted for Osceola and Chief Alligator (Halpatta Tustenuggee). His most dramatic role prior to the remarkable escape from Fort Marion involved his collaboration with Osceola, Arpeika (known as Sam Jones, a Mikasuki medicine man), Coacoochee and others the previous June 1837 in freeing over 700 Seminole and Black Seminoles from a relocation camp near Fort Brooke near Tampa Bay where they had gathered to accept deportation after Jesup had forced the Seminole to terms.

When Jesup failed to prevent white planters and slavers from the surrounding region from showing up at Fort Brooke to try to gain possession of many of the surrendering fugitive slaves, Osceola and the others secretly led them out of the camp in the dead of night under the very noses of Jesup's soldiers. Later, outside Fort Peyton, John and Coacoochee were seized along with Osceola in the middle of peace talks under a white flag of truce. Osceola, who was ill (probably from malaria) at this time, did not recover and grew weaker and weaker during his subsequent imprisonment, eventually dying in U.S. custody. But John Horse and Coacoochee found a way out of their prison cell with some 16 fellow inmates in late November on a moonless night and made their way south to rejoin those Seminole who were still at large. They eventually fled to Okeechobee and fought the last major engagement of the Second Seminole War there, at the end of December 1837, against the army of Zachary Taylor. There were other battles afterwards, including the Battle of Lockahatchie near Jupiter Bay on the eastern coast of Florida, where Jesup himself was slightly wounded, but the fighting thereafter would be on a smaller scale. Nevertheless the war dragged on until 1842.

John was ultimately persuaded to surrender to US troops in the spring of 1838 after becoming dispirited, perhaps relating to the loss of his first wife, a Seminole woman who was said to have been a daughter of Chief Holatoochee (a brother or nephew of Micanopy) but about whom hardly anything else is known. He was shipped from Tampa Bay to New Orleans and settled in Indian Territory with other Seminole and Seminole Blacks who had accepted removal. Once there, his role as a primary leader of the Seminole Blacks began in earnest.


[edit] Life in Oklahoma
Once in Indian Territory, he accepted a job as an interpreter for the Army, which needed interpreters to convince the remaining insurrectionists in Florida to surrender and relocate to Indian Territory, and returned to Florida in 1839. He returned to Indian Territory in 1842 along with some 120 other Seminole who were captured and forcibly expelled. However, the pro-slavery Creek people were already settled in the lands that were promised by the Army to the Seminoles. This led to tensions with the Creek, who tried to kidnap several Black Seminoles, and succeeded in capturing Dembo Factor, a war veteran. Coacoochee, a traditionalist who opposed the idea of living with the Creek, protested the possible selling of Factor to the Territory as a slave. He was joined by Horse, and while the Army recovered Factor to the Seminole, no criminal charges were filed against the suspected slavers by the Creek Nation. Coacoochee and Horse then traveled to Washington, D.C. in 1844 to seek a separate land grant for the Seminole. They failed to secure a treaty and went home empty-handed, and an unsuccessful attempt was made on Horse's life by a Seminole man. Horse traveled again to Washington, and lobbied his old enemy Gen. Jesup, for a separate land for Seminole settlement; Jesup then granted Fort Gibson as a place of residence to the Seminoles. However, during his time in Washington, then-Attorney-General John Y. Mason ruled that the Black Seminoles were functionally fair game for slave raiders. This meant that over 280 Black Seminoles, including members of Horse's own family, could be sold into chattel slavery under the whites and Creeks by their informal Seminole masters.


[edit] Migration
To that end, John Horse and Coacoochee led a group of Seminoles from Fort Gibson to modern Wewoka. During this time, Coacoochee and Horse thought of constructing an alliance of plains Indians, eastern Indians and fugitive slaves in an uprising against the federal government. The two waited until the notorious Indian agent, Marcellus Duval, finished his tenure and returned to Washington. Then they immediately led a migration across Texas and the Rio Grande into Coahuila, Mexico. They presented themselves to the Mexican commander at Piedras Negras on July 12, 1850.


[edit] Later life
Horse eventually secured land for the migrants, but returned with a number of Black Seminoles after the American Civil War to work as Indian scouts for the US Army. However, he returned to Mexico after a number of years, and then died en route to Mexico City while trying to gain more land rights for his people in northern Mexico. A community of Black Seminoles still resides in Coahuila to this day.


[edit] External links
John Horse website
Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Horse"
Categories: People of the Seminole Wars | Black Seminoles | Americans of Native American descent
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