Dade Massacre

In 1835, a disastrous clash left the United States Army reeling in what became known as the Dade battle, sometimes called the Dade massacre. The confrontation grew out of federal efforts, authorized by the Indian Removal Act of 1830, to push the Seminoles off lands guaranteed to them in Florida under the Treaty of Moultrie Creek, a document that followed the American annexation of Spanish Florida through the Adams-Onis Treaty. Washington sought instead to send the Seminoles to Indian Territory, as dictated by the Treaty of Payne's Landing.

As two companies of the U.S. Army, totaling 103 men and commanded by Major Francis L. Dade, made their way from Fort Brooke on Tampa Bay toward Fort King in Ocala to provide reinforcements, roughly 180 Seminole and Black Seminole fighters sprang an ambush upon them. Of the soldiers caught in that assault, only three lived through it, along with their guide, Louis Pacheco, and one of the survivors succumbed to his injuries the next day.

This clash ignited the Second Seminole War, a conflict that would not conclude until 1842. By its end, the majority of Seminoles had submitted and been removed from Florida altogether, though a small band stayed behind in the central part of the state, as seen with Chipco's band, while others retreated southward toward the fringes of the Everglades in the Big Cypress region, a group associated with Abiaka and Holatta Micco. No formal treaty ever brought this particular war to a close, and it stands as yet another episode in the extended history of the Seminole Wars.

Background

Two companies of American troops, 110 strong and drawn from the 2nd Artillery, 3rd Artillery, and 4th Infantry Regiments, set out from Fort Brooke, on the site of modern Tampa, on December 23, 1835. Major Francis Langhorne Dade led them up the Fort King military road, their task being to resupply and reinforce Fort King, near what is now Ocala. Unseen by the column, groups of Seminoles and their warriors had gathered quietly at various spots along the way. It was said that scouts tracked the soldiers in their sky-blue coats throughout the journey, carrying word of their movements back to the chiefs.

Anger among Florida's Seminoles had been building steadily over the Army's efforts to drive them from their homes and force them onto a western reservation. Dade understood that his men could face an attack from the Seminole Indians trailing his march, yet he judged that any strike would most likely come while crossing rivers or passing through the denser woods to the south. Once his column had cleared those danger points, he considered the threat past and pulled in his flanking scouts so the troops could pick up their pace. The open pine and palmetto country he now entered offered no hiding place for anyone on horseback or on foot, yet it proved more than adequate for warriors lying low in wait, crouched or stretched flat upon the ground.