THE LEAST KNOWN WILDERNESS OF AMERICA

TOGETHER WITH THE STORY OF THE RED INHABITANTS

Would you see the Land of the Seminole? Then visit the Everglades of Florida and in the heart of this mystic region—a very uncharted wilderness—you will find a thrilling beauty, and yet a lurking terror; the dark, cypress, laden trees are massed together, now swaying, now quivering, as the Gulf winds circle around them, and they seem like human things, crowding together like shuddering people, frightened by ghosts.

This is the “Big Cypress”—the last foothold of the vanishing red man of America.

This tropic jungle of islets, lagoons and cutting saw-grass prairies is an unexplored treasure house for the man of research—a virgin field for the adventurer, in short a tropic mimosa, with its secrets closely held against the disturbing exploiter—yet awaiting, with sphinx-like calmness, the intrepid traveller, who would dare to explore this Least Known Wilderness of America.

Then why should the American go to the land of the Vikings or to “Darkest Africa” for themes? Florida has the Everglades—grey, misty, water covered.

Scientists have crossed these “weird drowned prairies” as a ship crosses the ocean, yet no well defined lines have been made, and no flagstaffs mark the trail of the adventurous explorer.

The Everglades, properly christened with the red man’s name—Pay-hay-o-kee, or “Grass Water Country,” comprise a territory of more than 5,000 square miles, and, while considered a swamp, the region is more of a shallow sea or lake, thickly studded with thousands of islands, which are covered with thickets of shrubbery and vines. Aquatic flowers, brilliant butterflies and the flutter of bird life add color and animation to the scene.

Here and there in the mysterious depths of the great Florida jungle live the descendants of the bravest, purest blood American Indian—those patriots who refused, nearly a century ago, to desert their country, and, escaping capture by bloodhounds and bullets, hid themselves in the wilds of this tangled Everglade wilderness, and were for years lost to the historian.

All aboriginal history holds much interest, but none is more replete with the tragedies and romance that go to make up life wherever it is lived than the shadowy history of the self-exiled Seminoles about whom so little is known and who have lived this jungle life as lords of a conquered race—proud heroic, with blood as pure as the race who governed the territory long before Columbus sailed from Palos. Monarchs of America’s primeval continent, mystery envelops the Seminoles’ past and the historian can only catch glimpse of the fleeting figures of the ancestors of this peculiar people, who wrote no history, except by deeds.