Our Florida waterways have seen many historic events, some good, some not so good, that authors have written about. The Wakulla River, for example, in North Florida is only eleven miles long, but it flows from the famous Wakulla Springs, joins with the St. Marks River, and flows into the Gulf of Mexico. Because the water is so clear in the Wakulla, movie directors filmed some Tarzan movies there, even “Creature from the Black Lagoon.”
The river also witnessed a remarkable event in 1818: the saving of a white soldier by a Native-American princess. During the First Seminole Indian War (1817 – 1818) federal troops fought the Seminoles in order to recapture runaway black slaves living with the Native Americans. General Andrew Jackson led his troops into Florida, burned Indian villages, and captured Pensacola and St. Marks, all of which convinced Spain to sell Florida to the United States.
One of the soldiers from Georgia in the First Seminole War, Duncan McCrimmon, was stationed at a fort on the Apalachicola River during that war, and one day decided to leave its confines to go fishing. When Indians who were hiding in the woods near the fort saw him, they captured him and took him back to their village on the Wakulla. There a Creek woman, Milly Francis, the daughter of a prophet in his band of Native Americans, saved his life. The 15-year-old youngster, who had an English name from her Indian father, successfully pleaded with her father and the Indians who had captured the soldier, to spare his life. For that act of courage, many have called her “a new Pocahontas.”
McCrimmon (or McKrimmon) was eventually ransomed to the Spanish and freed by the Americans at Saint Marks. When he later learned that Milly was among those Indians captured by the American forces, he offered to marry her, but she refused. The U.S. Congress eventually awarded a medal to Milly for saving McCrimmon’s life, thus making her the first woman and the first Native American to receive such an honor from the U.S. government.
In the end, Milly and other members of her tribe were sent to Indian Territory in Oklahoma, where she died of tuberculosis in 1848. The location of her gravesite in Oklahoma is unknown, but small plaques at Florida’s San Marcos de Apalachee Historic State Park and Fort Gadsden Historic Site honor this great “Creek Pocahontas.”
Kevin McCarthy, the author of the forthcoming Melrose: An Illustrated History co-authored with Rosemary Daurer – 2017 – (available at amazon.com), can be reached at ceyhankevin@gmail.com.