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
I-ful-lo-ha-tco’s three houses are placed at three corners of an oblong
clearing, which is perhaps 40 by 30 feet. At the fourth corner is the
entrance into the garden, which is in shape an ellipse, the longer
diameter being about 25 feet. The three houses are alike, with the
exception that in one of them the elevated platform is only half the
size of those of the others. This difference seems to have been made on
account of the camp fire. The fire usually burns in the space around
which the buildings stand. During the wet season, however, it is moved
into the sheltered floor in the building having the half platform. At
Tus-ko-na’s camp, where several families are gathered, I noticed one
building without the interior platform. This was probably the wet
weather kitchen.
To all appearance there is no privacy in these open houses. The only
means by which it seems to be secured is by suspending, over where one
sleeps, a canopy of thin cotton cloth or calico, made square or oblong
in shape, and nearly three feet in height. This serves a double use,
as a private room and as a protection against gnats and mosquitoes.
But while I-ful-lo-ha-tco’s house is a fair example of the kind of
dwelling in use throughout the tribe, I may not pass unnoticed some
innovations which have lately been made upon the general style. There
are, I understand, five inclosed houses, which were built and are owned
by Florida Indians. Four of these are covered with split cypress planks
or slabs; one is constructed of logs.
Progressive “Key West Billy” has gone further than any other one,
excepting perhaps Me-le, in the white man’s ways of house building.
He has erected for his family, which consists of one wife and three
children, a cypress board house, and furnished it with doors and
windows, partitions, floors, and ceiling. In the house are one upper and
one or two lower rooms. Outside, he has a stairway to the upper floor,
and from the upper floor a balcony. He possesses also an elevated bed,
a trunk for his clothing, and a straw hat.
Besides the permanent home for the Seminole family, there is also the
lodge which it occupies when for any cause it temporarily leaves the
house. The lodges, or the temporary structures which the Seminole make
when “camping out,” are, of course, much simpler and less comfortable
than their houses. I had the privilege of visiting two “camping”
parties--one of forty-eight Indians, at Tak-o-si-mac-la’s cane field, on
the edge of the Big Cypress Swamp; the other of twenty-two persons, at a
Koonti ground, on Horse Creek, not far from the site of what was, long
ago, Fort Davenport.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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