Indian Temple Mound Museum looks back on America's longest Indian war

Want to go? The museum is open 10 a.m. to 4:30 p.m., Monday to Saturday, at 139 Miracle Strip Parkway in Fort Walton Beach. Admission costs $5, less for seniors, active-duty military, teens and children.


“I say, let ‘em have Florida,” the recorded voice says. “It’s worthless land, anyway.”

So wrote a 19th-century soldier in a letter home from Florida’s Seminole Wars — a letter captured in a modern-day recording for an exhibit at Fort Walton Beach’s Indian Temple Mound Museum. “Seminole Wars: The Fight for Florida” will run through Aug. 11.

“I enjoy the summer exhibit the most,” Museum Director Laura Bessinger-Morse told The Log. “We bring something new into the community.”

The three Seminole Wars were the United States of America’s longest war with Native Americans. The Seminoles formed from a mix of tribes, such as Creek and Apalachee, that had retreated to Florida from Indian wars to the north, with escaped slaves added to the mix. In the 19th century, the American government, starting with an attack on Florida by General Andrew Jackson, began efforts to crush the Seminoles that ran from 1817 to 1858.

The exhibit says the seven years of the Second Seminole War were particularly brutal, the Seminoles using guerilla tactics that the American military wasn’t prepared to deal with.

“We’re here to fix the Indian problem,” the soldier’s letter said. “They have a better idea of how to get rid of us.”
Bessinger-Morse said the recorded letter fits the goal of the event: Not just to tell the story of Jackson, or the great Seminole chief Osceola, but what the wars were like for the foot soldiers.

One display shows a couple of 19th-century style knapsacks, each weighing more than 30 pounds, so that visitors can heft one and get a feel for what a typical soldier carried on his back. Other exhibits showcase military uniforms or the contents of an Army supply wagon.

The new floor covering in the display room shows a 19th century map of Florida with the major town and battle sites identified on it.

At the May 30 opening-night reception, John McGee of First City Bank, which sponsored the exhibit, said he was pleased by the crowd that filled the museum: “The city manager’s going to have to add onto the back of the building!”