Learn more History on our Links page, see the History heading in the Index
HERITAGE OF THE ANCIENT ONES
ANCIENT
NATIVE VILLAGE LIVING HISTORY MUSEUM
Located at Camp Bayou Nature Preserve, Ruskin, FL
The following was prepared by John W. Bakas, Jr.
Riverview
Roots
Riverview,
Florida
BEFORE the birth of Christ...
BEFORE the Romans built the Coliseum...
BEFORE the Egyptians built the Pyramids....
There were
small tribes of Indians living in and around
Riverview and the Lake St. Charles area.
Hillsborough County, Florida
The Riverview of 10,000 years ago was very much like the Riverview of today. The neighborhood that we now call home has not changed its identity, or lost its flavor, in 10,000 years. Ancient Riverview established its sense of self, its identity, way back in time. The relationship that the local Indians had to surrounding Indian tribes in Florida is comparable to the relationship modern Riverview has to its Big City neighbors. Throughout the millennia Riverview remained as it had always been, a close, but separate, rural neighbor.
The Indian story, all 10,000 years of it, is revealed in part by the handful of artifacts and remains that have been unearthed.
Much of what is known about the Florida's "modern" Indians has also passed down to us by the Spanish who arrived in the early 1500s, beginning with the voyages of men like Narvaez, Ponce de Leon, and Hernando de Soto.
The Big Three aborigine Indian groups in Florida at the time the Spanish arrived were the Apalachee, the Timucua, and the Calusa.
The fighting Apalachee lived in the Tallahassee area. It might be that they were upset knowing that the Florida legislature would soon move into their neighborhood.
Although they never lived there, the Apalachee Indians, in one of those interesting misunderstandings of geography by the earliest explorers, also gave their name to that famous mountain range known as the Appalachian Mountains.
The more peaceful and largest of all the Indian groups were the Timucua. They occupied a large area from Ocala to Jacksonville (they must have loved vacations at Daytona Beach) and even had scattered groups as far south as Tampa Bay. The Timucua had a more permanent farming-based lifestyle.
Some historians think that the Timucua did not arrive in Florida by walking in from the north like the other ancient Indians had done beginning in about 10,000 BC. Instead, the similarities of the Timucuan language to that of the Indians in the Caribbean islands, cause some historian to believe that the Timucua arrived by boat from the south.
The third largest Indian group were the Calusa who lived around Ft. Myers and who were fierce, brutal people who lived by hunting and fishing. During his second voyage to southwest Florida in 1521, Ponce de Leon received a mortal wound from a Calusa arrow to his thigh.
The number of Indians in Florida when the Spanish arrived is not known with any precision, but the experts generally say there were about 300,000 which is the population of the City of Tampa.
In the early 1500s, when the Spanish came to the West coast of Florida they encountered Indian cultures that had been in place for about 500 years, (the Indians had progressed through time too) the entire Tampa Bay area had fewer concentrations of Indians than other areas of the state. The Indians around Tampa Bay lived in groups of maybe less than 50 people each although the larger tribes had more.
By examination of the mounds created by the Indians either as shell piles from dinner, burial mounds, temple mounds, or mounds for the chief's house, modern researchers recreate a picture of the Indians of this area:
"...a thousand years ago, scores of tan, nearly naked, tattooed bodies scurried about this same neighborhood. They fished and collected shellfish from the bay, throwing the empty shells upon a ridge along the shore. They bundled the bones of their dead in a charnel house [a house where dead bodies were placed], then buried them in circular mounds with thousands of broken pieces of pottery. They built palm-roofed homes on the shell mounds for protection during tidal surges.. [raising the elevation of homes near the beach was not a common practice among us newcomers until 460 years after our arrival!]. They fashioned dugout canoes and collected roots and berries and made tools from shells. And they built a huge temple mound, sixteen feet high, for their chief. The temple mound has a ramp that descended to a plaza where the Indians danced. ... That's our neighborhood in A.D. 1000."
Perry, I. Mac, Indian Mounds You Can Visit, St. Petersburg, Florida: Great Outdoors Publishing Company, 1993. [At Riverview Library, the cover of the book has a picture of this written description.]
In the Tampa Bay area at the time the Spanish arrived there were four groups of Indians. Starting on the north side of Tampa Bay, these four Indian tribes lived around the bay, mostly near the water at the mouth of the rivers.
First, the Tocobaga were the largest tribe and lived on the north side of the bay near Safety Harbor. You can still visit one of their mounds at the Philippie Park.
Second, the Pohoy are thought to have lived on the bay east of the Tocobaga and toward the Hillsborough River.
Third, the Mocoso lived on the east side of the Hillsborough River and south to the mouth of the Alafia River. The Alafia River, (pronounced AL-uh-fi, and not AL-uh-FI-uh) gets its name from an Indian term meaning "River of Fire" because of the flashes of light that could be seen in the river at night. Those sparkling streaks were caused by the phosphorus in the water.
Fourth, the southern group of Indians were the Uzita who lived from the Little Manatee River south to Sarasota Bay. De Soto landed in the territory of the Uzita.
The Story of the Mocoso
and Juan Ortiz
Nearly a hundred years before the Pocahontas of John Smith fame, a true Pocahontas story unfolded in the Riverview area. It involves the Mocoso Indians, one of four groups around the bay, a member of an expedition to this area before de Soto's, and Hernando de Soto when he landed in 1539.
In the Spring of 1539, Hernando de Soto’s expedition (Map) encamped at the Little Manatee River in Uzita territory, the Indians just to the south of the Mocoso. De Soto sent scouts to the Alafia area to obtain translators and guides. The scouting party saw some Mocoso Indians and then chased after and shot at the Indians in an attempt to capture them. Suddenly one of the escaping Indians shouted back in Spanish, “Sirs, for the love of God and of St. Mary, do not kill me; I am a Christian, like you, and I am a native of Seville, and my name is Juan Ortiz.”
Ortiz proceeded to explain that he had been living with the Indians for eleven years, originally having been captured by the Uzita in 1528 while he was on a rescue mission to find remnants of the shipwrecked Narvaez expedition.
In Uzita custody, Ortiz’s fate was to be burned alive. An Indian maiden, Ulele (also known as Hirrihigua), begged her father, the chief, to spare Ortiz’s life. The chief was moved by his daughter’s plea. Granting her wish, Ortiz was put to work guarding a burial house. One night while on guard duty, Ortiz fell asleep and a wolf carried off the body of a young child. Infuriated, the chief ordered another death sentence, but again Ulele intervened, this time helping Ortiz to escape to the neighboring Mocoso chief who was also the man Ulele was engaged to marry. The marriage never took place, but Juan Ortiz survived and continued to live with the Mocoso in the Alafia area until 1539 when Ortiz became de Soto’s translator.
The Mocoso chief had promised Juan Ortiz that if the whites ever returned, Juan could return to the Spanish. The Mocoso chief=s words were preserved in the original records of de Soto=s expedition:
AI appear before your Lordship (de Soto) with as much confidence of receiving favor as if, in fact, this my Agood will@ were manifest to you be deeds C not for the small service which I did you of the Christian (Juan Ortiz) whom I hold in my possession, by giving him his liberty freely, for I was obligated to do that in order to keep my honor and what I had promised him....@
Interestingly, the Mocoso were the only group of Indians not mistreated by Hernando de Soto when he came in 1539 and the only tribe that welcomed the Spanish with hospitality.
It also quite probable that Juan Ortiz was the first permanent European resident in the continental United States of whom there is any written record.
Residents in the former Mocoso territory should honor the memory of Riverview’s first European resident, Juan Ortiz, the real Pocahontas who lived by the Alafia River — the River of Fire, and the noble Mocoso chief.
Ships brought the Europeans to Tampa
Bay
and ships took the last Indians away
The last record of any of the aborigine Indians in the Tampa bay area comes from records of the Cuban oyster fishermen who built a shell fishery near the Hyatt Regency on S.R. 60 in 1710. These Cuban fishermen, who were the descendants of the sometimes cruel Spanish explorers who had first come here 200 years earlier, lived in a small village near Rocky Point (SR 60, by Tampa International Airport) during the cooler months and harvested the oysters.
The notion that the Cubans arrived in Tampa in 1886 to begin making cigars is a myth. Both Cubans and cigar making were here long before Ybor City or the Seminoles (Creek Indians from Georgia and Alabama) who came to live in this area in the early 1800s). We might say that the Spanish have been here since the early 1500s.
The shell-fishing Cubans of 1710 lived and fished in Tampa Bay and their oyster shells were tossed out Indian-style along the shoreline of the upper Tampa Bay.
These Cubans also employed the small number of Tocobagas who were the remaining members of the Indian groups living in the Tampa Bay area. The Cubans now worked side-by-side with Indians, ate the same food, and may have even helped place the final shells on the Indian shell mounds in the area --- a fitting irony and last direct link to this area's 10,000-year old Indian way of life.
For over 50 years, from 1710 until 1763, (just 13 years before those fierce 13 far-off English colonies revolted from their chief) the Cubans continued to return each year in peace to the home of the Tocobagas.
But in 1763, the dreaded English acquired what is now Florida from Spain. In another one of the twists of history, the Cubans and the Tocobagas left the area together and moved to the Caribbean Islands. The thought of English control caused the remaining Indians and Cubans in Tampa Bay to flee.
For the Cubans leaving the area in 1763, it would not be a final goodbye. They would soon return as part of the Second Spanish Period in Florida. But as the last few Tocobagas sailed out of the same bay that had drawn in Narvaez and Hernando de Soto 230 years earlier, we might watch as these Indians turned for a look at a land now totally abandoned and virtually depopulated, a land that had always been the home of the Indian, not the Spanish or the English. As the Tocobagas passed by the Alafia River, the Indians whose life had been determined by the sea and sky for 10,000 years, quietly let themselves be taken away by the wind and the tide.
[Prepared by John Bakas, Revised July 25, 2004]