27 Feb Tequesta, Muspa and Calusa: South Florida’s Indigenous Residents
The first time I flew over the matrix of tree islands scattered across the Everglades’ famous grasslands, I was struck by how low and wet the environment was. Star bursts reflected up at me from what appeared to be standing water underlying the vast stretches of sawgrass prairie. I couldn’t imagine South Florida without this central jewel – its meandering marshlands. And yet when the first humans arrived in Florida roughly 12,000 years ago, there was no Everglades. It was a cool and dry landscape much broader in size and populated by now extinct giant sloths, saber-toothed cats, woolly mammoths, and Pleistocene horses. It wasn’t until after the climate warmed roughly 7,000 years ago, after Florida’s landmass shrank, and after the current sub-tropical climate stabilized 5,000 years ago, that the seasonally flooded conditions yielded today’s Everglades. From above on that first flight, it appeared to me as uninhabitable, and indeed, it is a landscape that defied permanent residency, but as I’ve learned in my research for my upcoming pictorial history book on Everglades National Park, it is also a landscape that co-evolved alongside Florida’s original human inhabitants.
I first arrived in Miami in 1998, the same year an important archeological break-through was discovered along the banks of the Miami River – the remains of a Tequesta structure, now preserved as the Miami Circle. Even after that discovery, and others found on the opposite shore of the Miami River years later, very little evidence of the Tequesta Indians remain. As I learned while working on my Key Biscayne and Biscayne National Park history books, most of what we know is through Spanish accounts from the 1500s. Centered upon Biscayne Bay, Tequesta influence ranged from southern Palm Beach County down into the Florida Keys, and along the northern edge of Florida Bay to Cape Sable, seasonally utilizing off-shore keys and the Everglades to supplement their marine-based diet with native plants and terrestrial animals such as deer.
Like all of Florida’s original inhabitants, the Tequesta derived from Mound-building ancestors that populated eastern North America, likely part of the reason for their success in this low-lying country. Many of those tree islands I’d seen flying over the Everglades had not only been utilized by Indians, but had also been augmented by soil and other mound-building materials added by the Indians to maintain these patches of high-ground that they relied on for hunting camps. Similarly, Tequesta built shell mounds on Sands Key and other islands in Biscayne Bay to serve as bases for seasonal camping during the peak of mosquito season on the mainland. I’d tried unsuccessfully to spot this off-limits site from the shoreline and had come to believe that South Florida largely lacked both information and archeological sites for its endemic Indians and their Paleo-Indian precursors. But that was before I spent time studying Florida’s southwestern coast, the domains of Muspa Indians in the Marco Island area and the Calusa further north along the coast.
Like the Tequesta, the Muspa were Glades Culture Indians. They were adept fishermen, canoed vast distances, and seasonally hunted in the Everglades. Being a smaller tribe only 50 miles or so south of the powerful Calusa kingdom capital in Estero Bay, they eventually succumbed to Calusa influence and are largely overlooked today in popular accounts as an independent tribe. But some of the earliest archeological explorations were conducted in the center of their civilization on Key Marco, and some of South Florida’s most impressive surviving Indian artifacts belonged to the Muspa. As with the Tequesta though, there’s little evidence of the Muspa available for public viewing. And so it was with great delight that I turned my attention toward the former Calusa kingdom and discovered Pine Island, Mound Key and Mound House.
With likely double the population of the Tequesta, the Calusa people were of the Caloosahatchee Culture and their domain stretched along the coast from east of Lake Okeechobee south into the Ten Thousand Islands area of the western Everglades. Like the Tequesta and Muspa, they too had no agriculture, relying primarily on fishing supplemented by foraged plants and the occasional hunted land animal. As I strolled down the Calusa Heritage Trail at the Randell Research Center north of Matlacha on Pine Island, I couldn’t help but be impressed by the towering mounds and deep canal that the Calusa had engineered to accommodate their canoe-based lifestyle in what was once one of their largest villages. It housed nobles, their families, commoners, and slaves; the latter providing much of the manual labor to build homes, ceremonial structures and to dig canals using nothing more than shell and shark’s teeth tools.
The Calusa had a politically and socially complex society ruled by a king-like cacique, a top military commander and a chief priest from a ceremonial base several miles south of Pine Island on Mound Key in Estero Bay. As I tucked my boat into a small gap in the mangroves alongside the Mound Key trailhead, I tried to imagine what it might’ve looked like when it served as the seat of power for the Calusa some 500 years ago. The Grand Canal that served as portal to the town is no longer visible, yet I sensed the location’s grandeur as I emerged from the interior maritime hammock to find myself standing 30+ feet above my surroundings, a veritable mountain by South Florida standards.
It was the rich estuaries of Estero Bay that I could see from atop the mound that allowed the Calusa to flourish. They utilized cleverly designed “watercourts”, rectangular structures placed on shallow oyster reefs, to hold fish within their natural environment until needed for food. Estero Bay and Charlotte Harbor also provided ample shellfish, which the Calusa ate and used as tools, dishes, personal ornaments and the basis for their impressive mounds.
I wanted to see firsthand what the interior of a midden looked like, so I headed to Fort Myers Beach where a home had been built atop an ancient shell mound in the early 1900s. As the first structure on the island, the builders no doubt gravitated to this piece of land for its height, possibly unaware of its historic origins, though surely the private owners who added a swimming pool in the 1950s noticed they were atop a shell midden as they dug. Whatever their thinking at the time, it has proven a gift to current generations. The town of Fort Myers Beach has turned the site into Mound House, a museum and archeological gem that’s open to the public.
As I entered the below ground viewing room, I was greeted by a giant mural of a Calusa village on one wall and a bisected view of a shell midden on the other. The swimming pool wall removed; a 2000-year-old story written in shells can now be read by all. I found myself intrigued by seasonal and annual contours – a line of horse conch here, oyster shells there – and all so tightly packed beneath the earth to have supported a home here, forests in the Everglades, and the enduring hills I’d seen in Pine Island and on Mound Key.
Thinking back to Mound Key, I tried to imagine how Pedro Menendez de Avila, Spain’s first governor of Florida, might’ve felt upon his arrival there in the 16th century. Reports suggest he anticipated impressing the Calusa with his 500 armored soldiers. How surprised he must’ve been to find these natives, well fed on a high protein diet, to be taller than his own men. And to be invited into the cacique’s quarters, a structure large enough to hold his entire squadron four times over. To the cacique, Menendez de Avila likely represented little more than a leader from another tribe. Their first meeting went well with the cacique agreeing to have Spain build a fort on Mound Key and offering his sister’s hand in marriage to confirm the alliance, but relations deteriorated.
The Spanish brought hoes, expecting the Calusa to pay agricultural tributes, but they didn’t farm and it was others that paid food tributes to the Calusa, not vice versa. The Spanish expected to convert the Calusa to Catholicism, but the Calusa had their own deeply engrained beliefs with elaborate ceremonies that included intricately carved wooden masks and human sacrifice. It didn’t help relations when Spanish priests destroyed their idols and Spain refused to contribute sacrificial victims. When it also became clear that Menendez de Avila had no intention of consummating the wedding with the cacique’s sister and that Spain would not help the Calusa defend against neighboring tribes, the alliance ended three short years later. The Calusa burned everything on Mound Key and abandoned the site, only re-establishing it as their capital after Spain had left.
The Tequesta too had thwarted Spanish missions and other attempts at control. For more than 200 years, South Florida’s Indians resisted Spanish domination. By the 1700s though, the Tequesta people had disappeared. The Calusa persisted for another century in isolation, but eventually succumbed to slave raids by Creek Indians from the north and exposure to diseases they brought. It seems a sad demise for such a powerful people. Yet their legacy lives on. Those tree islands I saw on that first flight might not have been so prominent had South Florida’s early Indians not helped shape these lands. I look forward to learning of other Tequesta, Muspa and Calusa contributions to South Florida and its landscape as I continue working on my Everglades National Park history book.
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