Osceola
While many Indians were given an Indian name at birth and became known to the Americans under an anglicized version, Osceola was the opposite. He was given the name Billy Powell when he was born near what is Tallassee, Alabama, in a Creek village. His father was an American of Welsh ancestry. Osceola was raised as a Creek of the Red Stick faction which was crushed at the Battle of Horseshoe Bend by American forces under Andrew Jackson during the War of 1812. Many of the Creek chose to surrender to Jackson, others fled to the lands of the Seminole. Osceola was of the latter.
In 1819 and 1821 a pair of treaties transferred Spanish Florida to the United States and American settlers soon poured into the newly acquired lands. The Seminole pushed back against the loss of their territory and there were several raids and skirmishes against settlers, military, and Seminole villages. In 1823 the Treaty of Moultrie Creek brought an end to this conflict and established the boundaries of the Seminole lands in central Florida. Osceola was by then a prominent warrior and tribal leader, and he moved his family into the Seminole Territory.
For the rest of the decade and into the next there was a drive among the settlers to remove the Seminole from Florida to the Indian Territory established west of the Mississippi. The Seminole resisted this movement and withdrew their settlements deeper into the swamps. In 1832 several Seminole chiefs accepted the lands set aside for them west of the Mississippi in exchange for their Florida lands. Osceola did not accept the Treaty of Payne’s Landing in which the agreement was set down, though there is no evidence that he stabbed the treaty with his knife as legend suggests.
In all, five Seminole leaders refused to accept the treaty and Wiley Thompson, the Supervisor of Indian Affairs, briefly placed Osceola in custody in response to the defiance. Osceola was released when he promised that he would abide by the treaty, along with his followers. Instead, in December 1835, Osceola attacked and killed Thompson and his party while other bands of Seminole simultaneously attacked US troops elsewhere. The Second Seminole War thus initiated would rage for the next seven years, and it would be the longest of all the Indian Wars fought on the North American continent by Americans.
Osceola would not live to see its end. In the fall of 1837 he went to St. Augustine to take part in peace talks and he was arrested and imprisoned. Though there was public outcry against the violation of a flag of truce the army ignored the criticism and sent the prisoner to Fort Moultrie, outside Charleston, South Carolina. The transfer was done, in part, to prevent a raid attempting a rescue. While in Fort Moultrie Osceola developed quinsy, a throat infection easily treatable with antibiotics which did not exist at the time. He died from the infection in January 1838, and was buried at Fort Moultrie.