John Horse
At that time he and Juana were probably living with their mother in one of the black settlements affiliated with, and under the jurisdiction of, the Alachua band of Oconee Seminole along the Suwannee River (see Bolek's "old town").
[11] John Horse spent his formative years among the Oconee Seminole,[12] living like other Indian boys, learning to hunt and fish and developing tracking skills.
Unlike many of his fellows, however, he also learned to read and write and acquired linguistic skills in English, Spanish and the Hitchiti tongue spoken by the Oconee and many other Seminole bands.
The First Seminole War (1817–1818) occurred during Horse's childhood and the youngster, along with his sister and mother, was probably among those displaced blacks who fled south of the Suwannee River toward Tampa Bay.
[15] There young John grew into adolescence and came into contact with American soldiers who had established an outpost, Fort Brooke, in the region[16] with the formal annexation of Florida after the success of Jackson's incursions.
Discovering the young boy's fraud, Brooke opted for leniency and let John go on condition he make good on the missing turtles which he apparently did.
The Army, responding to their concerns, demanded and got Factor's release but neither they nor the Creek tribal council pursued charges of kidnapping against the suspected slavers.
Failing to secure the backing they needed, they returned to Indian Territory, but Horse traveled once more to Washington, this time on his own (acting as servant to an officer's brother) to lobby General Jesup to live up to his earlier promises.
Once the work was done, however, the blacks chose to remain because of the ongoing predations of Creek, Cherokee and so-called half breed slave catchers, creating yet another flash point of contention with the army and the slaver gangs.
John Horse, himself, was attacked by unknown assailants at one point, thought to have been members of the pro-Creek Seminole faction and came close to death from the bullet he took, but the would-be assassins were never located.
The tensions extended to the Seminole Indian sub-agent, Marcellus Duval,[45][46] an Alabamian[47] with land holdings back east and connections in Washington.
[48] He also began objecting to what he deemed the army's unauthorized protection of the Seminole blacks,[49] including allowing them to remain in their makeshift settlement under Fort Gibson's walls.
Their increasing poverty, due to the poor land they had been given and their own farming inexperience also made regaining a source of slave labor attractive to them (since the blacks were generally better farmers and craftsmen than their "owners").
A new open season by the raiders from nearby groups and towns was about to commence as more than 280 Black Seminoles, including John Horse's own family, were now at risk again.
Duval, who had slave interests of his own, then effectively procured a decision from Washington that would force the blacks living under the army's protection at Fort Gibson to return to the settlements of those Indians who were now deemed their legal owners.
[57][58] He and his brother apparently hoped to turn a profit by claiming so many of the new slaves, either to work on their family holdings back in Alabama or for sale on the open market.
The stage was thus set for a major crisis as the army received orders to evict the blacks then sheltering under Fort Gibson's walls and force their return to enslavement under the Seminole, now headed up by the pro-Creek faction who supported the institution of chattel slavery as practiced back east.
Eventually, however, Micaonopy's death ended the stalemate and the army could no longer delay evicting the ad hoc black settlement around the fort and sending its people back to certain enslavement.
John Horse and Barnet settled on a plan which involved getting Marcellus Duval out of the way by inducing him to head off to Florida on a temporary mission which he thought would redound to his interest.
While Duval was gone with Barnet, John Horse speedily concluded a pact with his old friend Coacoochee (disaffected because of his failure to be selected to replace Micanopy) and the two of them led an exodus from Wewoka, and Indian Territory in general, in the dead of night.
They led over a hundred blacks including men, women and children, and at least as many fleeing Seminole, out of the lands they had been placed on by the government, heading south across the Red River into Texas.
[65][66] After a pitched battle with the Comanche, the fleeing party had to cross a desert region, meeting up with an old adversary, Major John T. Sprague, at the springs of Las Moras just north of the Mexican border.
[67] That encounter is described in Sprague's own journals which he compiled to document an expedition of supply wagons he led across southern Texas to resupply the outpost at today's El Paso (then the town of Franklin).
But some time in the early morning hours the Indians learned that someone from the army camp had secretly gone to a nearby town to alert the Texas Rangers of their presence.
In the pre-dawn hours John Horse and Coacoochee woke their people and secretly departed the camp at Las Moras to make a last desperate dash to the Rio Grande.
[71][72] John Horse was getting too old for that kind of active service although he remained titular leader of his people, still captaining their fights against the various raiding parties which descended on Mexico from the north.
In one famous incident he returned with his men to find that a large Indian raiding party had attacked his settlement and captured many of his people in retaliation for his actions against them in his capacity of providing border security.
John Horse's men had only single load rifles, mostly of vintage type, and when they had discharged their first volley it failed to turn the Indians who just kept coming at them.
