Legacy of Osceola reaches beyond football fame
Since 1978, Florida State University’s home football games in Tallahassee have begun with a riveting ritual: an Appaloosa horse named Renegade charges onto the field, bearing a rider clad as a Seminole warrior who hurls a flaming spear into the ground at midfield.
A decade ago, ESPN’s SportsNation voted the performance the best NCAA football tradition. Described as a tribute to the Seminole Tribe of Florida, it has continued, because of the tribe’s support, while other sports teams abandon symbols linked to indigenous peoples.
The spear-throwing rider pays tribute to a historic figure who, at his death in 1838, was probably the most famous American Indian of his day. He also remains a candidate for history’s most famous Floridian. Yet, it’s likely that most Floridians know little about the real Osceola.
It’s a complex story of a man who grew up between two cultures — one increasingly bent on destroying the other — and spent his short life walking “a fine and tenuous line between the two,” as his biographer Patricia R. Wickman has noted.
Enduring legacy
Osceola’s fame sprang in part from his betrayal and capture by Gen. Thomas Jesup under a white flag of truce during the Second Seminole War and his death soon afterward, all of which fueled a mystique that proved enduring. Danish author Karen Blixen, who later used the pen name Isak Dinesen when she wrote “Out of Africa,” wrote her first stories under the name Osceola, for example.
In Florida, besides the county and the national forest that bear Osceola’s name, it’s a good bet that more schools, streets, lakes, even shopping centers, are named for him than for anyone else.
It’s a legacy few would have imagined for the child born Billy Powell in Alabama in 1804. He came to Florida with his Creek mother, Polly Copinger, as a refugee when he was about 10. His father (or stepfather, in some accounts) was a British trader, William Powell; his mother’s ancestry included Scottish and African strands.
Perhaps influenced by boyhood lessons from his great-uncle, the powerful Creek leader Peter McQueen, the teenage Billy Powell adopted the name Asi-yaholo. “Osceola” is an Anglicized pronunciation. The words signify something like Black Drink Crier or Black Drink Singer. “Asi” meant the dark, caffeinerich tea brewed from yaupon holly and long used in ceremony and preparation for war.
And Billy Powell would indeed become a warrior. In late 1835, he led the attack that killed U.S. agent
Wiley Thompson, the man in charge of removing the Seminoles to the West, on the same day as the ambush of Maj. Francis Dade’s forces near Bushnell — events that ignited the Second Seminole War. He also killed Charley Emathla, a Seminole who had chosen to accept the government’s terms and leave Florida.
After Osceola’s capture in October 1837, he and other warriors were imprisoned briefly in St. Augustine before being moved to Fort Moultrie in South Carolina. He was already ill with malaria. In one of several surreal aspects about his last days, artists descended on the fort to capture his likeness, with the permission of the War Department. The best-known painter of American Indians, George Catlin, arrived on Jan. 17, 1838, and completed the famous portrait of Osceola that now belongs to the Smithsonian just days before the warrior’s death on Jan. 30.
Osceola was buried at Fort Moultrie — without his head — a long-rumored fact that was confirmed by archaeological excavations in the late 1960s. His doctor, Frederick Weedon, a brother-in-law of the slain agent Thompson, secretly removed his patient’s head before burial, according to Weedon descendants. Wickman’s 1991 book, “Osceola’s Legacy,” cites documents suggesting that ownership of the head may have passed in the 1840s to the then-famous Dr. Valentine Mott of the Medical College of the City of New York, where he maintained a museum — much of which was destroyed in a fire in 1866.
Today, except among students of the Seminole Wars, “Dr. Weedon is a forgotten man, as is
General Jesup,” the late Florida historian Stuart McIver once noted — “but the name Osceola lives on.” No doubt we have a great deal more to learn and understand about him and his people.
To learn more
The Orange County Library System has slated a variety of programs for Native American History Month, many of them online. For details, visit ocls.info/native-american-heritage-month. Highlights include a Cuisine Corner program on Nov. 16 at 7 p.m. with Chef Aimee Osceola-Jones; a talk on Nov. 17, also at 7 p.m., by Dr. Andrew Frank of Florida State University on the enduring myths about Osceola; and, on Nov. 20 at 2 p.m., a program with Dr. Jeremy Carnes about Betty Mae Jumper, the first woman to become chief of the Seminole Tribe of Florida.