“The Archeologists Made Observations That Conjured Up Interesting Mental Pictures”: De Soto, Narrative Scholarship, and Place

Abstract

In 1980 the diary of Henry Prince, a military topographer from the Second Seminole War, surfaced in a Minnesota attic. Prince mapped the sites where Osceola led a resistance against the United States in the Cove of the Withaloochee, a swampy stretch of river in west central Florida, and his diary allowed archeologists to reconstruct the region’s early history. Scholars concluded that the Withlacoochee served as a boundary between coastal Safety Harbor and more agricultural Alachuan cultures to the North. The manuscript also provided compelling evidence about maroon communities from the early nineteenth century. After disease decimated Florida’s first people, escaped blacks from the British colonies sequestered themselves here, first farming freely along the river then moving deeper into this watery maze of hardwood hammocks, cypress, and middens. The maroons taught later arriving Seminoles how to negotiate the swamp. Osceola adopted the mounds for ceremonial purposes, which explains why the Prince map would become an important source on precontact groups.2