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5.0 out of 5 stars
Serious Historical Fiction at its Best, August 12, 2008
This iUniverse POD reprint of the Ballantine edition of LIGHT A DISTANT FIRE is a welcome find since the original version has gone out of print. Lucia St. Claire Robson has here given us a stirring retelling of the legend of Seminole war leader ("tastanagi thloko" or "great warrior") Osceola. Born to a Creek mother in the Muskogee nation (called Maskokee by the author) and a possible white father named William Powell somewhere in Alabama among the Upper Creeks, young Powell was part of the rebellious Red Stick exodus to Florida after the devastating defeat of the Red Sticks by Andrew Jackson at Horseshoe Bend.
Robson gives us Powell or "Cricket" (the childhood Indian name she has assigned him, absent full knowledge of those times) being rescued by Indian kinsmen at Horseshoe Bend and, later, by a sympathetic white trader of English or Scottish extraction at the Negro Fort, an abandoned British stronghold from the War of 1812 which was taken over by a fugitive slave community and their Indian allies for a few years and destroyed, on Jackson's orders, in order to remove a refuge for Africans fleeing the chattel slavery of plantation life in the states bordering the Florida territory.
Young Cricket grows up in the wild areas of the Florida peninsula where his clan and fellow tribesmen have fled for safe haven after Jackson destroyed their prosperous settlements on the Alachua Plain and along the Suwannee River to the north in what is known to history as the First Seminole War around 1817. Residing in the western coastal region along the Withlacoochie River and the Great Wahoo Swamp, Cricket grows to manhood and gains his manly name, Asi Yahola ("Black Drink Singer"), denoting his role in certain of the Maskokee rituals with the purgative elixir they called the asi or black drink. His name would later be corrupted by the whites to "Osceola" of course.
Also known as Talassee Tastanagi ("Great Warrior of the Talassee"), Osceola ultimately became instrumental in the decision by the various Seminole bands (including the Hitchiti-speaking Mikasuki, the refugee Maskokee Red Sticks and the Hitchiti-speaking Oconee) to refuse to accept the decision of the federal government to relocate in accord with the Indian Removal Act passed in 1830. By 1835, the white authorities in Florida had already forced one treaty on the Seminole bands which confined most of them to a reservation on land in the south central part of Florida (the Treaty of Moultrie Creek) and then, reversing that agreement, a second which required them to accept relocation to Indian Territory in what is today's Oklahoma, west of the Mississippi (the Treaty of Payne's Landing).
Osceola led the early resistance to the whites and, for the first two years of what turned out to be a seven year struggle, had a string of remarkable successes against an unprepared U.S. Army. Fighting a guerrilla war in the harsh jungle environment of central and south Florida, the Seminole defeated the whites at the engagement that became known as the Dade Massacre, at the Battle of the Withlacoochie, the Battle of Camp Izard (near the Withlacoochie) and at the Battle of the Great Wahoo Swamp, all the while raiding and wiping out plantations along Florida's eastern coast and in the north. But eventually the greater resources and manpower of the American Republic overcame the barely 5,000 Seminole and their fugitive slave allies, whittling them down in a relentless war of attrition. In the end, the Second Seminole War became the most costly to America in blood and treasure in its history, to that time, and the most expensive Indian war in constant dollars.
Osceola, though he remains the best known hero of that conflict and is revered today as a freedom fighter and noble antagonist, only led the fight for two years, succumbing in 1837 to a fever (probably malaria) which forced him to parley with the American Army's General Thomas Sydney Jesup. But Jesup, believing himself betrayed by the Seminole after an earlier peace agreement had collapsed, used the flag of truce, which brought Osceola in, as cover to grab the war chief and his supporters in the midst of a peace conference. Taken to St. Augustine's Fort Marion (the former Spanish Castillo de San Marco), Osceola's fever worsened and, after a spectacular prison break by some of Osceola's fellow inmates, the Seminole war chief was taken north to Fort Moultrie, South Carolina, where he died while still a prisoner of the Americans. The war raged on for another five years and ultimately ended when most of the Seminole and their black allies had been captured or surrendered, accepting forced transport to Oklahoma. In the course of the conflict, many hundreds of blacks were re-enslaved or enslaved for the first time (if they had had the good luck to be born into freedom while living as allies with the Seminole in Florida).
Robson's story recounts how Osceola grew from a boy fleeing the enemy Creek allied with Jackson's army in Alabama to become the native American Floridian hero of American legend. She does a superb job of recreating that long lost time and place and the people who lived in that era. Relying on the extensive historical record, including numerous eyewitness accounts, and plugging her own very plausible reconstructions in to fill the inevitable gaps, she gives us a whole range of vivid and believable characters we can't help caring about. From Osceola's fiercely outspoken grandmother, Fighting in a Line, to the historical composite character of John Goode, a young American soldier who is befriended by Osceola's people, to a cameo by the very real Englishman John Bemrose (who actually recorded, in later life, his observations during the first two years of the Seminole War when he served in the American army), to the vivid if only lightly limned characters of Aury's Black (a free African who joins with the Seminole) and Mink, the African-born second wife of Osceola, there is a rich array of living and breathing people here moving against a vividly drawn backdrop of Floridian flora and fauna.
The story is both moving and visually enchanting and holds the reader every step of the way. If it seems a little thin in places, that's because Robson obviously felt compelled to go by the historical record and follow the actual pace of events.
She's probably mistaken, though, when she places John Horse and Wildcat in Osceola's presence as young warriors around 1823 since Fort Brooke on Tampa Bay wasn't built until around 1826 and John Horse is reported there as a 14 year old boy. In 1823 he would probably have been only about eleven years old, too young to be a full fledged warrior. John Horse, of course, is the half African, half Seminole Indian warrior who, with Coacoochee (Wildcat), went on to keep the fight going after Osceola's death. Although John Horse gave up in the spring of 1838 for unknown reasons (perhaps he just saw the futility of fighting on as the Americans relentlessly whittled away at Seminole resistance), Coacoochee continued to lead the fight until around 1841 when he, too, was finally persuaded to cash it in. The war, itself, ground to a somewhat anti-climactic halt in 1842 when most of the few remaining Seminole had gone to ground deep in the Everglades and the American Army decided to call it a victory and stop pursuing them.
Despite such small errors as placing Coacoochee and John Horse with Osceola too early in their careers, which probably can't be helped when there is so much historical material to reconcile and keep straight, this is a fine work of historical fiction and I can't recommend it enough.
SWM
author of
The King of Vinland's SagaP.S. The cover art is a bit off, I'm afraid, by the way, as it depicts a more primitive Seminole people than actually existed at the time. Most of the Seminole were refugees from the Creek nation (either from the mainly Hitchiti speaking Lower Creek or the Upper Creek Muskogee speakers) who came to Florida over a hundred year period before and after the American acquisition of that territory. They were already heavily acculturated by this time to European ways, dressing in forest leggings, loose fitting tunics and high mocassins, and wrapping their heads in turban-like scarves. Their economy was one of land cultivation and animal husbandry. Only the necessities of war, which forced them to abandon their settled villages, forced them into a more primitive lifestyle in the swamps and hammocks of semi-tropical Florida. The cover art suggests the Seminole were a less sophisticated and more savage race of warriors than the historical record actually seems to give us.
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