through natural necessities, that any friendly intercourse of white man and Indian has been secured. The Indian has become too weak to contend successfully against his neighbor and the white man has learned enough to refrain from arousing the vindictiveness of the savage. The few white men now on the border line in Florida are, with only some exceptions, cattle dealers or traders seeking barter with the red men. The cattlemen sometimes meet the Indians on the prairies and are friendly with them for the sake of their stock, which often strays into the Seminole country. The other places of contact of the whites and Seminole are the settlements of Myers, Miami, Bartow, Fort Meade, and Tampa, all, however, centers of comparatively small population. To these places, at infrequent intervals., the Indians go for purposes of trade. The Indians have appropriated for their service some of the products of European civilization, such as weapons, implements, domestic utensils, fabrics for clothing, &c. Mentally, excepting a few religious ideas which they received long ago from the teaching of Spanish missionaries and, in the southern settlements, excepting some few Spanish words, the Seminole have accepted and appropriated practically nothing from, the white man. The two peoples remain, as they always have been, separate and independent. Up to the present, therefore, the human environment has had no effect upon the Indians aside from that which has just been noticed, except to arouse them to war and to produce among them war’s consequences. But soon a great and rapid change must take place. The large immigration of a white population into Florida, and especially the attempts at present being made to drain Lake Okeechobee and the Everglades, make it certain, as I have said, that the Seminole is about to enter a future unlike any past he has known. But now that new factors are beginning to direct his career, now that he can no longer retreat, now that he can no longer successfully contend, now that he is to be forced into close, unavoidable contact with men he has known only as enemies, what will he become? If we anger him, he still can do much harm before we can conquer him; but if we seek, by a proper policy, to do him justice, he yet may be made our friend and ally. Already, to the dislike of the old men of the tribe, some young braves show a willingness to break down the ancient barriers between them and our people, and I believe it possible that with encouragement, at a time not far distant, all these Indians may become our friends, forgetting their tragic past in a peaceful and prosperous future. INDEX