It didn’t take long for Nathan Jarvis to figure out South Florida was not a nice place to be.
On Jan. 24, 1838, he and 1,500 other men had just finished one of the nastiest marches in military history. Slogging 200 miles from central Florida, they hacked roads through swamps and dense hammocks and waded at times through waist-deep water. Saw palmettos sliced their feet.
“Our privations have not been less than our fatigue, the men being nearly naked, and one-third of them destitute of shoes,” Jarvis wrote in his diary that day. “All I can say is that it is a most hideous region, in which nothing but serpents and frogs can exist.”
Capt. Jarvis, a surgeon, and his fellow soldiers had been sent to Florida to fight Indians. Around noon that day, they surprised about 200 Seminoles along the banks of the Loxahatchee River, west of Jupiter Inlet in what is now northern Palm Beach County.
After a fierce skirmish, the soldiers chased the Indians across the river. The Seminoles escaped into the woods; it was their last organized stand against the white intruders in Florida. Seven white soldiers and at least one Seminole brave died.
The battle cleared the way for the establishment of Ft. Jupiter, Ft. Lauderdale and Ft. Dallas (later Miami).
Now archeologists think they have found the site where Jarvis and his comrades fought the Seminoles, on the site of the county’s still-undeveloped Riverbend Park just west of Interstate Highway 95 at Indiantown Road.
They are doing all they can to make sure nothing is lost.
“Palm Beach County has the responsibility to Broward and Dade County to preserve this,” said Mike Daniel of Jupiter, a deep-sea treasure hunter and a student of the Battle of Loxahatchee. “A lot of people in this country would be angry with us if we let them bulldoze on this site and lost something.”
“You have the last standing battle of the Second Seminole War,” said Richard Procyk, an amateur archeologist familiar with the site. “That’s a part of American history.”
If the battle site is there, it is not the park’s only treasure. Jerald Kennedy, an archeologist with Florida Atlantic University in Boca Raton, has found evidence of at least one prehistoric Indian camp there. He thinks there are others.
The park also includes the remains of a pioneer home and groves that produced what were judged to be the world’s best oranges at the 1904 World’s Fair in St. Louis.
“This is one of the things anyone interested in preservation dreams about,” Kennedy said.
The park site is considered so important that it prompted a special meeting in August of the Historic Resources Review Board, which the County Commission created to enforce its new historic-preservation ordinance.
Several historians grew upset earlier in the year when they saw Parks and Recreation Department workers using heavy equipment to pull up nuisance Brazilian pepper trees at Riverbend Park. They feared uprooting them might turn over the soil and bury stray bullets, buttons or other artifacts.
“It’s an absolutely gorgeous site,” said Steve Carr, an amateur archeologist who has explored it. “I’d hate to see it become a ballfield.”
Parks and recreation officials protested that they were disrupting the dirt as little as possible and working only in places that already had been badly disturbed.
Two professional archeologists checked out the county’s work and were reassured it wouldn’t cause harm. The board agreed to let the limited clearing continue, and parks and recreation officials agreed to spend up to $125,000 on a yearlong archeological survey of the 600-acre park.
Susan Clark, former director of the Loxahatchee Historical Society in Jupiter, said the best thing about Riverbend is that it shows a place where humans have lived continuously for thousands of years.
“That continuum is what’s important for us to understand,” Clark said. “We don’t live in a vacuum. We live with our past every day.”
Still, it is the relatively recent Battle of Loxahatchee, which actually encompassed two battles fought nine days apart, that fascinates most people. An astonishing cast of young men who went on to fame in the Civil War fought there.
Joseph Johnston, who commanded the Confederate forces until Robert E. Lee took over, was a hero of the smaller first battle on Jan. 15. Two bullets grazed his skull, and seven others pierced his jacket. He organized a retreat that saved his troops from a Custer-style massacre.
Still, five men died, including Dr. Frederick Lightner, one of the United States’ foremost naturalists. He had joined the expedition in search of plants for use in medicines.
In the better-known fight that Jarvis described, the combatants included future generals Joseph Hooker, J.C. Pemberton, Jubal Early, J.B. Magruder and Robert Anderson.
The Seminole War is a part of American history only dimly remembered. The Indians moved on after the battle; some were captured in roundups during the next several months and taken to Arkansas, while others survived as a tribal remnant hidden deep within the Everglades.
“It was sort of the centerpiece of the whole campaign,” said Rodney Dillon, coordinator of the Broward County Historical Commission. “It opened up South Florida.”
For the rest of America, the second Seminole campaign of 1835-42 was an unpopular one. It stirred up abolitionists because the Seminoles harbored runaway slaves, allowing them to blend into the tribe. Recovering those slaves was a big reason for rounding up the Seminoles, who then numbered about 4,000.
And many people thought chasing Indians off the Florida peninsula was a waste of time and money.
“It was sort of a Vietnam. It was a war the American people thought was terrible,” Procyk said.
Even Gen. Thomas Jesup, who led the Seminole campaign and commanded the U.S. forces at the Battle of Loxahatchee, argued to President Martin Van Buren that the Indians should be allowed a reservation in the Everglades. He recommended the plan “as the only means of terminating, immediately, a most disastrous war, and leaving the troops disposable for other service.”
His suggestion was rejected as giving false hope to other tribes not yet conquered.
Steven Bowers, a Seminole who serves on the Governor’s Council on Indian Affairs, said the war marked a little step in changing the attitudes of white Americans.
“We received a lot of public sentiment,” Bowers said. “That’s when a lot of non-Indians started looking at us as human beings.”
Bowers said the Seminoles are deeply interested in saving sites such as that of the Battle of Loxahatchee. He said tribal culture teaches them a deep respect for their ancestors’ burial places.
That is one thing whites and Indians can agree on.
