LIVING HISTORY
day. Relentlessly, Brayton tried to persuade his wife, Marian,
to join him, but telling her about the mosquitos could not
have helped his cause.
“Tis true, four months in the year (from June to October)
they are almost unendurable here,” Brayton wrote, “but the
other eight there was never a more delightful place to live.”
SEMINOLE UPRISING
Then came the fateful day that caused a panic, which made
national news and helped set back development of South
Florida until well after the Civil War. It was Thursday, July
12, 1849. Lonely Caleb Brayton had spent the night with William
16
F. Russell and his family. Four Seminole Indians showed
up for breakfast. The Russells knew two of their impromptu
visitors as Sammy and Eli. A government Indian agent would
later identify all four by their Seminole names: Seh-tai-gee,
Kotsa Eleo Hajo, Hoithlemathla Hajo and Panukee.
As the day progressed, the Indians went to the nearby
house of D.H. Gattis, a 31-year-old farmer from Alabama.
Like Major Russell, Gattis was not a permit claimant. He
owned a grinding stone, and the Indians wanted to hone
their knives. After their blades were good and sharp, the
Indians returned to the Russells’ place and played with the
children. They laughed and gave them rings and other presents
made from beads. Nothing seemed unusual.
Russell looked off in the distance and saw his brother-inlaw,
John Barker, come out from his house to the field. He
walked away to chat with him. That’s when the Indians said
their friendly goodbyes to Susan Russell and her six kids.
They followed her husband out into the field.
According to depositions reported in newspapers, plus Caleb
Brayton’s account to his wife, the Seminoles suddenly and
inexplicably raised their rifles and fired from very close range.
They must have all been aiming at Russell, unless they were
terrible shots, because they hit him three times. One musket
ball broke the lower bone of the left arm he would lose to
a surgeon’s saw in St. Augustine. The other bullets merely
grazed his abdomen. Instantly, Russell ran toward Gattis’s
house for help. Barker raced toward home, but he couldn’t
run fast enough. All four Indians overtook him, and then they
stabbed him to death with their freshly sharpened knives.
PANIC AND EVACUATION
Pandemonium erupted after that. None of the settlers’ guns
were ready to shoot. Everybody ran in all directions. Wives,
kids, slaves. Some hid in the woods, others jumped into
boats. Those in the boats, like Caleb Brayton, felt like sitting
ducks. Indians took potshots at them. Brayton thought he
counted eight Seminoles firing from the shore. A black man
next to him was hit in the sleeve. Seminoles reloaded and
fired until the boats were out of range. Then the attackers
looted the houses and burned one of them down.
All that night, Brayton sailed up and down the settlement
warning the rest of the settlers of the Indian attack. Everyone
else was too scared to go near shore, so Brayton quietly
waded in from neck-deep water at each neighbor’s homestead.
The next day, the entire colony was evacuating up the
coast. By July 25, Brayton reached a sugar plantation called
Dunlawton near New Smyrna, from where he wrote a frantic
letter to his wife.
Seminoles struck again the next week on the other side
of the state near present-day Wauchula, killing two men >>
At Walton Scrub, a 33-acre
preserve in St. Lucie County,
part of the forgotten colony
has returned to wilderness.
RICK CRARY