Comte de Paris, History of the Civil War in America. Vol. 1.
Henry Coppee , LL.D., Ed.

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[60] after a desperate struggle, left more than one thousand warriors on the battle-field. The tribe which offered the longest resistance was that of the Seminoles, once a powerful nation, always haughty and warlike, gradually driven by the whites into the low lands which form the peninsula of Florida, in the south-eastern portion of the United States. There, under a tropical sun and amidst impenetrable thickets, two enemies, both alike invisible and unrelenting —the fever and the Indian—awaited the American soldier, who, bending under the weight of his arms and his provisions, had exhausted all his strength in contending against the obstacles of Nature. The Florida war, often rekindled after deceitful attempts at pacification, was long and cruel. The Indians, exasperated by repeated instances of bad faith on the part of the whites, gave no quarter. Reduced in number by the unequal contest, they sought shelter among the inaccessible recesses of the Everglades—vast woody swamps where the cypress, the magnolia, and the palmetto preserve an eternal verdure—and at the approach of the whites they would disappear with their light canoes in a labyrinth of channels of which they alone knew the secret. The Americans, taking advantage of their divisions and the exhaustion of all their resources, went at last to find them in this last refuge. It was a trying campaign for the soldier. Water and the forest interposed a double obstacle to his progress. The ground gave way under his feet, and he was alternately obliged to creep slowly across the swamps, or to get into some fragile canoe and open himself a passage between the trees, each of which might conceal a foe. He had nothing to guide him but the track left on the muddy bottom by the Indian in his flight towards his secret place of refuge. This refuge generally consisted of an elevated piece of ground called a hummock, covered with thick vegetation, in the midst of which the indigenous families were sheltered in a rude village. This islet was usually surrounded by open lagoons, and the moment the whites emerged from the forest they were exposed to a well-sustained fire from a concealed enemy, who was determined to die rather than give up his possessions. Finally, however, tracked from islet to islet, abandoned or betrayed by their allies, deprived of arms and ammunition, the most determined