The Seminole Indians of Florida: Fifth Annual Report of the Bureau of Ethnology to the Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, 1883-84, Government Printing Office, Washington, 1887, pages 469-532MacCauley, Clay
History
The Seminole Indians of Florida: Fifth Annual Report of the Bureau of Ethnology to the Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, 1883-84, Government Printing Office, Washington, 1887, pages 469-532
MacCauley, Clay
Seminole Indians -- History; Seminole Indians -- Social life and customs
The ornaments worn by the men which are most worthy of attention are
crescents, varying in size and value. These are generally about five
inches long, an inch in width at the widest part, and of the thickness
of ordinary tin. These articles are also made from silver coins and are
of home manufacture. They are worn suspended from the neck by cords,
in the cusps of the crescents, one below another, at distances apart of
perhaps two and a half inches. Silver wristlets are used by the men for
their adornment. They are fastened about the wrists by cords or thongs
passing through holes in the ends of the metal. Belts, and turbans too,
are often ornamented with fanciful devices wrought out of silver. It is
not customary for the Indian men to wear these ornaments in everyday
camp life. They appear with them on a festival occasion or when they
visit some trading post.
Me-Le.
A sketch made by Lieutenant Brown, of Saint Francis Barracks, Saint
Augustine, Florida, who accompanied me on my trip to the Cat Fish Lake
settlement, enables me to show, in gala dress, Me-le, a half breed
Seminole, the son of an Indian, Ho-laq-to-mik-ko, by a negress adopted
into the tribe when a child.
[Transcriber’s Note:
The picture described does not appear in the printed text, and is not
included in the List of Illustrations.]
Me-le sat for his picture in my room at a hotel in Orlando. He had just
come seventy miles from his home, at Cat Fish Lake, to see the white man
and a white man’s town. He was clothed “in his best,” and, moreover, had
just purchased and was wearing a pair of store boots in addition to his
home-made finery. He was the owner of the one pair of red flannel
leggins of which I have spoken. These were not long enough to cover the
brown skin of his sturdy thighs. His ornaments were silver crescents,
wristlets, a silver studded belt, and a peculiar battlement-like band of
silver on the edge of his turban. Notice his uncropped head of
luxuriant, curly hair, the only exception I observed to the singular cut
of hair peculiar to the Seminole men. Me-le, however, is in many other
more important respects an exceptional character. He is not at all in
favor with the Seminole of pure blood. “Me-le ho-lo-wa kis” (Me-le is
of no account) was the judgment passed upon him to me by some of the
Indians. Why? Because he likes the white man and would live the white
man’s life if he knew how to break away safely from his tribe. He has
been progressive enough to build for himself a frame house, inclosed on
all sides and entered by a door. More than that, he is not satisfied
with the hunting habits and the simple agriculture of his people, nor
with their ways of doing other things. He has started an orange grove,
and in a short time will have a hundred trees, so he says, bearing
fruit. He has bought and uses a sewing machine, and he was intelligent
enough, so the report goes, when the machine had been taken to pieces in
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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