The Spanish fishermen hired Native Americans who lived along the coast as guides and to help with catching and curing the fish, and with sailing to Havana.
The Native American workers lived year-round at the ranchos, or moved to the nearby mainland during the off-season to hunt and raise crops.
The 1823 Treaty of Moultrie Creek required all Native Americans in peninsular Florida to move onto a reservation that had boundaries well inland from the coasts.
The Native Americans associated with the fishing ranchos, and others who lived in southwest Florida, called Muspas or Spanish Indians, did not move to the reservation.
The fishing season along the Florida coast was late fall and winter, October or November until February or March.
[8] Emisaries from the Lower Towns of the Muscogee Confederacy (which the Spanish called the Province of Coweta, or referred to the Uchise people), traveled by fishing boat to Havana as early as 1766.
In 1769 the British withdrew from the old Spanish fort at St. Marks, which was then seized by Tunape, chief of the Tallahassa Taloofa, a Muscogee-speaking town of the Muscogee Confederacy located at San Luis Talimali (in today's Tallahassee).
Tunape proposed an arrangement with the Spanish, in which his tribe would hold St. Marks and all of the Florida coast between St. Augustine and Pensacola against the British in exchange for trade with Cuba, including guns and powder.
Tunape also told the Spanish that another faction of the Muscogee Confederacy in Florida, the Cimarrones (the Alachua Seminoles, who were primarily Hitchiti-speaking), were allied with the British.
The Spanish began supplying arms to the Muscogee Tallahassee in 1779, after Spain entered the American Revolutionary War against Britain.
They lived in palmetto-thatched huts, raised food in mainland farms, traded with Havana, and were in communication with other Seminole bands.
[16] William Whitehead, customs inspector in Key West, wrote in 1831 that the women at the fishing ranchos were all Indians, and that the color of their children's skins indicated that many were fathered by the Spaniards.
He said that they worked for the Cuban fishermen from August until March, cultivated small plots and fished in the off-season, but did not hunt.
[17] An 1838 petition by Spanish fishermen and sailors claimed that Indian and part-Indian wives and children had been "unjustly" removed from the ranchos, that they were an entirely separate group that had intermarried with Spaniards for decades, and were not part of the Seminole nation.
John Worth has stated that the Spanish Indians of the ranchos were neither Seminole nor Calusas, but a creole community that emerged in the 18th and early 19th centuries, consisting of Spanish Cuban fishermen and people predominantly descended from Muskogean-speaking people who were present in southwest Florida decades before the Seminoles.
A large Maroon settlement on Tampa Bay known as "Angola" was attacked in 1821 by 200 Muscogee warriors sent by Andrew Jackson and led by William McIntosh.
[24] William Bunce, originally from Maryland, began operating a fifth fishing rancho at the mouth of the Manatee River on Tampa Bay sometime in the early 1830s.
[25] Colonel George Mercer Brooke was ordered to stop illegal logging in the Tampa Bay and Charlotte Harbor areas in 1822.
Jesse Willis, customs collector at St. Marks, visited the area in 1830 and found between 400 and 600 Spaniards and Indians living at the ranchos.
Deputy customs collectors were appointed in 1830; Augustus Steele for Tampa Bay, and George Willis for Charlotte Harbor.
[28] William Whitehead said that the Cuban fishermen paid import duties and tonnage fees at the port of entry in Key West and that some of them had considered becoming American citizens, but held back because they did not speak English.
He also noted that article 15 of the Adams-Onís Treaty gave equal protection to Spanish and American vessels for 12 years.
Willis, unhappy with the low pay for a hardship position, resigned, and Henry Crews was appointed as customs collector for Charlotte Harbor in 1833.
[15] By 1835, American officials had become concerned about the number of Indians living at or near the fishing ranchos instead of on the reservation that was established by the Treaty of Moultrie Creek.
[25] Augustus Steele wrote to Wiley Thompson in 1835 concerning the legal status of the Indians attached to fishing ranchos.
In April, Henry Crews was murdered at Charlotte Harbor, and a party of 25 Seminoles led by Wyhokee raided the Useppa Island fishing rancho.
[39] Thomas Lawson, then Surgeon General of the United States Army, led an expedition along the southwest coast of Florida in 1838, looking for Indian settlements.
John Worth reports that Chakaika had been baptized as Antonio, and that his entry into the war was a response to the destruction of the Spanish rancho system by the US Army in 1836–1839.
[18] A fishing rancho owned by a Cuban is reputed to have operated in southern Pinellas County from 1843 until 1848, when it was destroyed in the 1848 Tampa Bay hurricane.
Some Seminole families in Oklahoma claimed Spanish ancestry in 1932, but it is unclear whether they derived from Chakaika's band or from rancho Indians.