Left Flank

Gary Cooper was never a role model for me, and I had to restart watching Distant Drums after first feeling annoyed. Something about the Creek war paint, or Monk's talk about shaking hands with Indians, set me off the wrong way. I'm not sure about the language, supposedly Muskogee or Hitchiti. But, I sat down to watch it again.

Why, oh why, can't Hollywood leave history alone? In addition to war paint - clothing was satisfactory - there were no African-Americans anywhere on screen! Hollywood eliminated a major cause for the events in the film, a fictitious battle during the Second Seminole War (1836-1842). African-Americans and Seminoles fought together, and African-American slaves often vetoed peace offers. But, alright, it's just a movie!

Gary Cooper plays Captain Quincy Wyatt, a character vaguely similar to Colonel Walter Kurtz. His Creek wife murdered by drunken soldiers, Wyatt goes native and sets up base near Lake Okeechobee with his half-Creek son, another Creek, a scout, Monk, and his veteran guerrillas. His unit specializes in fighting Indian-style, which from appearances means they don't shave or march in formation. It's an aspect of the Seminole Wars the screenplay leaves unexploited. General Zachary Taylor signs off on Wyatt's plan to attack a fort where (Osceola) lurks by crossing Okeechobee with the assistance of the U.S. Navy (another military aspect of the Second Seminole War), which assigns Lieutenant Richard Tufts to provide a launch. Wyatt assaults the fort and rescues some hostages, but Oscala forces him to retreat into the Everglades. The plot is suspenseful, if not accurate, humorous, if not corny, and soaked with alligator-ridden water. A climactic underwater duel between Wyatt and Oscala is well-filmed and entertaining.

I hesitate to call the screenplay's treatment of the Seminoles racist. I would call them props, because no Seminole character is developed beyond a screeching savage. I doubt most of the actors were even Native American. What is racist, though, is complete silence about the role slavery played in the war. Unfortunately, I've had no luck downloading any of other Florida westerns about the Seminole Wars.

Sorry, but Gary Cooper's not for me.

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Between July 15 and August 1816, a battle fought on the Apalachicola River in northwestern Florida at Prospect Bluff eliminated a unique and very real impediment to American expansion westward. The Negro Fort was a stubborn legacy of the Creek War, abandoned in the summer pf 1815 by renegade Red Sticks, Seminoles, and their British allies, but still garrisoned by the remaining Maroons, or Black Seminoles - the offspring of Seminoles and escaped Georgian African-American slaves. A porous border and the example of independent Black Seminole towns and accomplished chiefs and advisers encouraged even more slaves to escape. The Creek War had ended with the Treaty of Fort Jackson on August 9, 1815, but a few British entrepreneurs, backed by marines and local Caribbean governors and their Spanish ally waiting for another chance to pounce on the United States, had kept the American-Florida border hot with Native raids. Major General Andrew Jackson, observing the Negro Fort's strategic importance, saw a way to rid the United States of a few problems all at once.

The Negro Fort was impressive,and the battle to subdue it underhanded. Generals Jackson and Edmund Gaines planned to send American vessels, two schooners and two gunboats, commanded by Sailing Master Jairus Loomis, up the Apalachicola to force the Maroons to fire first, necessitating a honorable response by a detachment of the US Fourth Infantry, commanded by Colonel Duncan Clinch. Inside the Negro Fort, three African-American leaders, Garzon, Cyrus, and Prince, each with military experience leading or assisting Red Stick or Seminole war parties, commanded 250-300 African-Americans, and also 1,600 Seminoles, Choctaws, and Creeks, and a schooner patrolling the river. The eight-sided earthen fort sported 10 guns, including four 24-pounders atop walls 15 feet high and 18 feet thick. Near the Negro Fort lived about a thousand men, women, and children growing crops. The bombardment of the Negro Fort on July 25 went well for the defenders until a freak accident when one American shell, which were now fired «red-hot», was lobbed from Loomis' gunboats and rolled through the door of the magazine. The explosion was terrific, and the slaughter devastating. In addition, Clinch allowed his Creek allies to slaughter survivors. Clinch acquired 2,500 rifles, 50 carbines, 400 pistols, and 500 swords, and destroyed the countryside. Clinch's own recollections were conveniently less barbarous.

«The explosion was awful, and the scene horrible beyond description. You cannot conceive, nor I describe the horrors of the scene. In an instant lifeless bodies were stretched upon the plain, buried in sand and rubbish, or suspended from the tops of the surrounding pines. Here lay an innocent babe, there a helpless mother; on the one side a sturdy warrior, on the other a bleeding squaw. Piles of bodies, large heaps of sand, broken guns, accoutrements, etc, covered the site of the fort. The brave soldier was disarmed of his resentment and checked his victorious career, to drop a tear on the distressing scene.»

Yet, the impressive display did not mollify the Seminoles for long, and the British returned to sow rebellion. In the next year, the First Seminole War commenced. Sean Michael O'Brien, from whose book, In Bitterness and Tears: Andrew Jackson's Destruction of the Creeks and Seminoles, sums up the the political and economic consequences of the Creek War and First Seminole Wars as «the most disastrous conflicts in Native American history.» The Battle of Horseshoe Bend, the decisive end of the Creek War, resulted in more Native deaths than any single other conflict, and the Treaty of Fort Jackson forced the cession of half of the Creek state, opening up the Alabama and Mississippi for white American expansion. The British and Spanish missed an opportunity to block American expansion by creating a Native border state along the Georgia-Alabama-Florida borders.  And, Southern slave owners' fears of a slave insurrection lost one major manifestation. As DKos' gjohnsit argues:

A consistent theme in the history of slavery is the fear - the fear that the people you are doing wrong are going to learn enough to realize the wrongs being done to them and make you pay for it. It's the manifestations of this fear that are interesting.

What I find compelling is the alternative the Negro Fort offers of another America.