Archaeology at Edward Ball Wakulla Springs State Park
How does one pick a site to look for clues to the past? At the vast Wakulla Springs
Archaeological and Historic District this becomes particularly challenging.
IN 1998 THE LATE STATE ARCHAEOLOGIST
CALVIN JONES FOUND THIS EXTREMELY LARGE
STONE BIFACE ADJACENT TO THE LODGE.
BY 2008 JIM DUNBAR BEGAN ANOTHER
PROJECT NEAR THAT SITE, DEMONSTRATING
THAT PEOPLE LIVED AT WAKULLA SPRINGS FOR
AT LEAST 14,500 YEARS.
Clues to previous habitations are
seen in Spanish maps from the 19th and
early 20th century. Could anomalies in
the water provide other evidence of life
15,000 years ago?
Since 2015 archaeologists have been investigating
large areas throughout the park.
These efforts are a catalyst to open up a dialog about the situation of the large Creek
nation in 1818.
Toward the anticipated conclusion of these projects in 2019/2020 there will also be
reports about the demise of mastodons and other megafauna and the people who lived
along the Wakulla River 14,500 years ago.
!1
Archaeology at Edward Ball Wakulla Springs State Park
Many of the persons providing glimpses of what occurred are associated with the
Wakulla River. They include a young adult, Milly Francis, her father, Josiah Francis, a Red Stick
Creeks chief, two Lower Creeks chiefs or headmen William and John (Jack) Kennaird, and a
British loyalist called William Augustus Bowles with dreams of a separate Indian Muskogee
nation.
William Augustus Bowles
After 1783, at the end of the American Revolution, Creeks and Seminoles followed
the most colorful of these characters at least for a decade or so. This incurable dreamer tried
to wrest the Florida Indian trade from the Panton, Leslie Company trading house on the
Wakulla River. He pomised cheaper prices with goods he hoped to obtain from British
traders in the Bahamas.
William Augustus Bowles had grandiose plans for an independent Indian nation. He
convinced hundreds of Indians to reject the idea that the U.S. could provide a good future.
Bowles managed to obstruct treaties between the Creeks and the newly established
United States of America. He interfered in the commerce of the powerful Panton, Leslie and
Company. Their trading houses had a monopoly arrangement with Florida’s Spanish
government, serving as the wholesale distributors for goods to the Indians in return for their
allegiance.
One of these Panton trading posts was on the Wakulla River. By 1792 Bowles had
plundered the store. The Spanish did punish him, sending him all the way to the Philippines
into an exile that was not to be. He returned via Africa and London, and was met on his way
from Nassau by his Creeks wife Merry Perryman. She was the daughter of Miccosukee Chief
Tom Perryman (Kinache).
!2
Archaeology at Edward Ball Wakulla Springs State Park
The 11-mile (18 km)-long Wakulla river was well protected. A Spanish fort at the river’s
confluence with the St. Marks River provided Indians a place to congregate, and to meet
with Spanish officials. There was no other port on the northern Gulf Coast until Pensacola,
and it was a beacon to all who lived in the Spanish borderlands after 1783.
The successor to the Panton store (William Panton died in 1801) was John Forbes. He
did not forget the debt Bowles owed after he attacked the Wakulla store in 1792. Nor that
Bowles had laid siege to the Spanish fort in 1800, successfully evicting the Spanish
commandant for five weeks and again plundering the Panton trade goods for the Muskogee
Nation.
Bowles’s flag of the
Muskogee Nation
In 1803, Bowles, 42, was captured at a Creeks/US conference at Hickory Ground (in
present-day Alabama). And there, at Fort Toulouse (today’s Fort Jackson) John Forbes, with
some misgivings, gave way to his curiosity about the tenacious interloper.
“I was anxious to see the Villain and hesitated wither I should satisfy my curiosity… He
was standing with his hands tied behind him and Brian Motlon with a Spanish flag some
distance in front. At our approach he turned pale and said he supposed his hour was come.”
Downhearted, with irons (hand cuffs) put on his wrists, his decades-long efforts to
create a Muskogee Nation faded and he remarked he’d been a prisoner before “but never
was tied.” Bowles ended up in Havana and after a hunger strike died in the infirmary of
Morro Castle in 1805.
While Bowles escaped from exile in the Philippines and returned via London by 1799,
the United States and Spain continued their convoluted diplomatic talks regarding the
southern border of the United States. The subsequent running of boundary lines on Creeks
lands was useless in holding back the advancing white and largely lawless settlers.
!3
Archaeology at Edward Ball Wakulla Springs State Park
Fleeing into Spanish Florida
The loss of native lands to United States expansion became increasingly inevitable. A
new southern boundary between Spain and the U.S. along the 31st parallel was negotiated
in 1795.
Many native people moved south across the border, abandoning ancestral lands and
the advancing white U.S. population. Among them were slaves who found temporary safety
and freedom in Spanish Florida.
After 1804, on a strategic bluff overlooking the Apalachicola River,Forbes established
another trading post complying with the Indians’s request at the 1803 conference. The year
was significant because Forbes obtained the signatures of 22 tribal chiefs who agreed to
give up their land in today’s Alabama and along the western shore of the Wakulla River to
satisfy debts. Bowles’s plundering of Wakulla Panton stores in 1792 and 1800 provided the
basis for Forbes to swap the $173,000 that Indians owed the company for land. But not all
agreed to the cession.
Prosperity in the Creeks Nation
John and William Kennaird and the headman of the Miccosukees, Chief Kinhage
(Kinache) objected to a land cession in 1803 and 1804. All three were excluded from the
land swap based on the fact that they owed nothing to the Panton, Leslie and Company.
The exclusion from the land cession was based on their considerable wealth. They
had been keeping cattle and growing corn along the Wakulla River since the Bowles
plundering of the Panton Leslie store in 1792.
According to the Kennairds, they had obtained Robert Leslie of the Panton, Leslie
firm’s permission to trade from their Wakulla River location. There, the two brothers had
located cattle, slaves, and horses in advance of the U.S. Indian civilization program.
Who were the Kennairds who wielded so much influence as to have their land
excluded in what was to become the first land surveyed along the Wakulla River in Spanish
Florida? This survey is known as the Hartsfield Survey in the Forbes Purchase and still exists
today.
Jack Kennaird, according to British military records, was born around 1772. His father
was Noble Kennaird, married to a Hitchiti woman. They had seven children. Historian Lee
Formwalt describes Jack Kennaird as a colorful Scotch-Creeks mestizo character who
divided his time between the lower Flint River region and Wakulla Spring.
Kennaird and many other Creeks sided with the British in the War for Independence.
When, after the revolution, the U.S. decided to civilize the Creeks west of the established
!4
Archaeology at Edward Ball Wakulla Springs State Park
boundary, the Kennairds grabbed the opportunity to provide trade goods to the Indian
agency that was to be located on the Flint River.
The Kennairds, prior to following the U.S. agent Benjamin Hawkins west to the Flint
River area, had often assisted the Panton, Leslie and Company’s retrieval of stolen cattle and
goods. That trading post was located on the St. Mary’s River in East Florida, bordering
Georgia north of today’s Jacksonville.
Less than a decade after moving to Hitchiti (today’s Albany) Kennaird owned more
than 1,200 cattle. His black slaves numbered around 40 and he also kept enslaved Indians.
He was illiterate but employed in his compound a scribe who maintained records.
It appears that Jack Kennaird made a fortune trading and selling cattle to the U.S.
Indian agency. One brother, William, was a horse breeder and complained often that he
wanted his stolen horses returned. According to one American officer who used the
Kennairds’ place near today’s Albany to rest on his way to the Flint River, it was not unusual
to have five to six thousand Spanish dollars in the house.
And when the opportunity came to move some of their operations to the Wakulla
Spring area before the boundary line was established, the Kennairds had no problem
obtaining permission from a Panton, Leslie partner to do so. Robert Leslie, John Leslie’s
brother, was keeping some of the trading accounts at the Fuerte San Marcos de Apalachee,
on the Wakulla River.
The Kennaird settlement on the lower Flint River provided guns, ammunitions, and
other manufactured goods. It would not be unreasonable to say that at Wakulla Spring, the
trading posts, skin houses, outbuildings and homes overlooked the bottom land next to the
river, close to fertile soil for crops and cane brakes for the cattle.
The Kennairds are representative of Lower Creeks who understood the importance of
trade to the process of American expansion. The drama of archaeological discoveries of any
artifacts they left behind leaves untold the story of philosophical and political decay during
the last decades of Creeks Indians in Spanish Florida.
If you enjoy our projects, please visit us at the Campfire programs on
Saturday,Feb. 25, Saturday, March 25 from 11:30-1:30 for “Lunch With the
Archaeologists.” Free with park admission. Bring a lunch and learn about foodways
10,000, 4,000 and 200 years ago.
Also bring your kids to the program and to the Wildlife Festival on April 15
where they can find and learn about artifacts at “Digging the Park.”
And visit our booth at Springtime Tallahassee, April 1. See you all there!
!5
Archaeology at Edward Ball Wakulla Springs State Park
Read More About It
William Augustus Bowles:
Din, Gilbert C. War on the Gulf Coast (The Spanish Fight against William Augustus Bowles).UP
FL., 2012
Douglass, Elisha P.The Adventurer Bowles; The William and Mary Quarterly, Third Series, (6;1,
Jan., 1949), pp. 3-23
Wright, J. Leith, Jr. William Augustus Bowles: Director General of the Creek Nation. Athens, UP
Ga, 1967
Milly Francis:
Cox, Dale Milly Francis: The Life and Times of the Creek Pocahontas. Old Kitchen Books, Bascom,
FL 2013
Scots-Irish Names for Creek Indians:
Doan,James E. How the Irish and Scots Became Indians: Colonial Traders and Agents and the
Southeastern Tribes. New Hibernia Review / Iris Éireannach Nua Vol. 3, No. 3 (Autumn, 1999), pp.
9-19
Panton, Leslie and Company:
Brown J. A. Panton, Leslie and Company Indian Traders of Pensacola and St. Augustine, The
Florida Historical Quarterly, Vol. 37, No. 3/4, Pensacola Quadricentennial Issue (Jan. - Apr., 1959), pp.
328-336
This project is sponsored in part by the Department of State, Division of Historical
Resources and the State of Florida, Friends of Wakulla Springs State Park and Aucilla
Research Institute.
!6