You think, doctor Wickman, that you have spent more time looking for his head than anyone in history.
I would be willing to bet you that's the case.
Oh, you did it like a pro. This is not a hobby.
Oh No.
In this episode, we're talking about the tragic death of the Seminole War leader Osceola and the bizarre and gruesome treatment of his corpse after his death. Doctor Patricia Wickman will masterfully tell the story and the details of her
personal search for Osiola's head. Our first episode in this series was about Osiola's childhood, the second one was about his years in the Seminole Wars, and this one is about his death, though he still lives vividly in the American consciousness, and that's really what I'm interested in, trying to under stand. Why why are we still talking about this guy? And for the record, I do not take lightly talking about a man's death, no matter how long
ago it was. My intent is not to sensationalize this story, but rather just understand it the best I can, and to learn about Ostiola and really maybe learn something about ourselves. I really doubt that you're going to want to miss this one.
From there, most of the people, and there were two hundred and thirty seven Indians who had been gathered at Saint Augustine. From there they were to be taken straight to Indian Territory in the West. They would be put on ships, but Ostiola would never leave Fort Moultrie.
My name is Klay Nukem and this is the Bear Grease Podcast, where we'll explore things forgotten but relevant, search for insight and unlikely places, and where we'll tell the story of Americans who lived their lives close to the land. Presented by FHF gear, American made purpose built hunting and fishing gear that's designed to be as rugged as the place. As we explore, The Seminole War roared from eighteen seventeen
to eighteen fifty eight. That's over forty years. The US government was trying to remove all Indians from the newly acquired Florida territory. This would be America's most expensive Indian War, costing over fifty million dollars, with over two thousand American soldiers losing their lives. And remember to start, there were only four to five thousand Seminoles in Florida by eighteen thirty nine, more than half of them had been relocated to Oklahoma. So at most a couple thousand people staved
off the US army for almost two decades. That's some serious resistance. And to jump into our story about Osceola, we will start now in late October eighteen thirty seven, and Ostiola has been captured dishonorably under a flag of truce near Fort Peyton, seven miles south of Saint Augustine, Florida,
by US military General Thomas Jessop. Who'd pay for the mistake of treacherously capturing Ostola the way he did with the scrutiny and ire of the American public, who phariseically rooted for the Seminole leader in this David versus Goliath battle against the United States. Osceola was the face of the resistance, a cunning military strategist and assassin known as a master of guerrilla warfare in the swamps. To fail meant certain death or being exiled to Indian Territory in Oklahoma,
over one thousand miles to the west. The year prior, in eighteen thirty six, the first Seminoles were forcibly removed from Florida to Oklahoma under the legislative power of Andrew Jackson's Indian Removal Act of eighteen thirty, which erased all the previous treaties and erased the reservation that they had made for the Seminoles in Florida. The world of all the tribes in the East was crumbling. Doctor Patricia Whickman
of Tallahassee, Florida will now catch us up. Right after the capture of Ostiola, you guys remember, but she was the state historian of Florida. She lived and worked on a Seminole reservation in Florida from many years. Though she is not a Seminole, she loves them dearly and is an expert on their recorded history. I can't say enough about this lady. Here we go.
We are seven miles south of Saint Augustine at a tiny little stockade called Fort Payton, and now they're prisoners. The Indians are prisoners, and they're being marched all seven miles up to Saint Augustine to be put inside the Custigo Fort Marion in Saint Augustine. And while they are there, they're going to be held there. This is late, almost the end of October. They're going to be held there in November and in December, and while they're there, several
things happen. There is a post surgeon who's attached to the army, and he's a local doctor, and his name is Frederic Whedon. And Frederick Whedon gets to know Osceola. I certainly couldn't say they become friends, but they become friendly, all right. And doctor Whedon and his wife, Mary Wheden go over to the fort frequently and take gifts of food to Assiola.
Doctor Frederick Wheden is the name that you'll remember, because I promise you he's going to be living rent free in your head. His father fought in the American Revolution, and doctor Whedon himself fought in the War of eighteen twelve. He became a contract surgeon for the US military after his time as an enlisted man. Later we'll discuss if he was a man of science or a villain.
In the meantime, the Indians are in very sad circumstances. There are people from the town who are going in to see them. They want to see the Indians. Unfortunately, they begin to have problems with measles and it kills well thirteen fourteen people. Ociola does not get it. He doesn't seem to be bothered by measles. But I'm going to find out later on that he is bothered by one other thing, which is a very serious problem, and
that is lice, all right. And lice, I have learned, do not occur if you're living in the open, in the wild. They occur when you're in close confined quarters with other unsanitary people, in unsanitary concisions as a prisoner
inside a fort. And so Aciola knows that he's defeated, and he does not want to go to the West, and he says several times that he knows that that Charlie Imotola's people are already out there, they've already been sent to the West, and they'll have the right to take revenge on him.
This is the seminole that he killed, Yes, absolutely, for wanting to go out there to emigrate, right, And that's the trajectory, like when he gets capped. Sure, the trajectory is Oklahoma.
Oh, yes, absolutely.
Conditions in the Florida prison in eighteen thirty seven were rough. Ocola feared the retribution of members of his own tribe. He'd killed a seminole leader because that guy had planned to go and take some people to Oklahoma. He was burning bridges Osiola was he didn't have a backup plan and he had no plans to go to Oklahoma.
So he knows that there are people who are talking about escaping, and indeed, while they are there, there is an escape. And the soldiers themselves report that people from the among the Indians had been allowed to go outside the fort for four days in order to gather medicine
or to gather plants. That they're very specific plants that these Indians are going after, and the plants are what they needed to make medicine, because there is a story that circulated among the Indians that they told that they made medicine inside the fort and they watched the ants, and the ants were curling in and out through a crack in a wall that was thirteen feet thick at the base, and they made themselves with this medicine. They made themselves small enough to go out through the crack
in the wall. Another story that they tell is that they made medicine to make the water standing in puddles in the quadrangle rise up as steam, and it made it impossible for the soldiers who were guarding the Sallyport to see them, and they just literally marched right by them and ride out the Sallyport.
I'm fascinated by stories of supernatural activity. I'm not suggesting that I believe the Indians shrunk to the size of ants and crawled through the crack in the wall, or that they had power over the fog, but I can't say for sure that they didn't. You know, there's a supernatural prison break story in the Bible where an earthquake shook loose the doors of the prison where Paul was stayed. As I understand it, belief in the supernatural is the
key to unlocking any potential of its power. Point being your bias will be confirmed. If you believe in the supernatural, there's a high probability that you'll see it. If you don't, there's a high probability that you never will. It's like a self fulfilling prophecy. Most of humanity that has lived on planet Earth has had a more robust interaction with
the spirit world than today's average American. For me to think that I fully understand all the power, structures and laws of the universe with my eyes and my rational thought is absurd. Science has a lot of great answers. I am a man of science, but science does not answer all the questions that we have. But sometimes supernatural acts play out before us inside the predictable laws of physics.
Now, my personal feeling, after I've read all of this, I read the US Army report. On this military report, my feeling is that the soldiers who were on guard duty that night, and there really should have been only two or three. I believe that those soldiers were either drunk or asleep, or they were partisans who felt sorry for the Indians, and I think they let them walk out.
Captain Pittkiren Morrison was in charge of the guard of the Indians at the fort, and he made a decision that in order to put them in a more healthy place, he said, more healthy place, and in order to put them someplace where it would be harder for them to escape, he determined and got permission to take them from Saint Augustine, Florida,
to Charleston. And Charleston Harbor has Fort Moultrie sitting out in the harbor, and as a consequence, they set out on the steamer point set and on January first, eighteen thirty eight, they hit land at Fort Moultrie in Charleston Harbor. From there most of the people and there were two hundred and thirty seven Indians who had been gathered at Saint Augustine. From there they were to be taken straight
to Indian Territory in the West. They would be put on ships, but Osciola would never leave Fort Moultrie.
And the other two hundred and thirty six seminoles settled into prison life in South Carolina while waiting to be shipped to Oklahoma. The next story is one of the most bizarre things that you'll hear in this series. When I read it, I reread it to confirm what I thought that understood. It has to do with what the generals at Fort Moultrie allowed the prisoners to do while incarcerated.
There was a play while the Indians were held prisoners in Fort Moultrie in eighteen thirty eight. They were taken one night to the Dock Street Theater to watch a play. And there was a big deal made out of that, and the whole town turned out.
A lot of the town turned out.
It sounded like normal prison, does it no? Her incarceration, Oh no, It took them to a play. That's downtown Charleston. That's for Oscola into.
A play everybody wanted.
Think it was January sixth I read it just today January sixth, eighteen thirty eight.
Eighteen thirty eight, that's absolutely right.
Weeks before he died.
I went to New York to the Theater Arts Archive at Lincoln Center in New York and found a copy of the play and.
At any Moon the Honeymoon.
They wouldn't allow me to copy it, but I sat there and copied the whole thing out, the whole play out all right. And I found a theater company in Charleston that was willing to put on the play, to do a reading of it for us, And I took the Indians, the Seminoles to the dock Street Theater and we had a reading.
Of the Honeymoon.
Wow.
I am a.
Florist there very close to Fort Moultrie sent over buckets of white carnations for.
The Seminoles as a gift to them, which I thought was a very sweet thing to do.
That is hard to understand. It said that the people in the audience gave Ostiola a standing ovation when he walked into the play. Isn't that wild? And hey, I've told you before that doctor Patricia Whitman is next level when it comes to her devotion and expertise to her area of focus. But I got to say, I have never met anyone with any more passion, knowledge and the ability to articulate her area of studying more than her.
Here is another interesting thing that happened while Ostiola was in prison.
He became sicker, and at the same time he was besieged by artists who wanted to take his likeness. The US government contracted with George Catlan, who was the famous Indian painter, very famous, and sent him down to Fort Moultrie. And Robert John Curtis, who was a Charleston artist, were the two that I'm sure of who were there. And they set up in one of the casemates at either end of the room, and Osiola was between them, and
he dressed himself properly. He dressed as a full warrior with all his regalia, and he had some effect effectations that were different than all the other Indians. For instance, the black and white Ostrich plumes that he wore in his turban. Everybody else wore one or two on the front. He wore four or five on the back. He had a silver concho. He had a silver pen. He had a silver mirror, a silver looking glass.
If you remember our series on Daniel un starting at episode fourteen, and our episode series on David Crockett starting at episode one ten, you'll remember that I'm always intrigued by what the portrait painters said about people. Before photography, this was the medium of the day that translated the character in essence of a human to the world. In these portrait sessions, people would sit for hours with these artists. Catlin wrote about his time with Osceola, I want to
read what he said. Commonly called Powell, he is generally supposed to be a half breed, the son of a white man and a Creek woman. I have painted him precisely in the costume in which he stood for his picture, even to a string and a trinket. He wore three ostrich feathers in his head and a turban made of a very colored cotton shawl, and his dress was chiefly of calicos, with a handsome beadsat or belt around his waist and his rifle in his hand. This young man
is no doubt an extraordinary character. He has been for some years reputed and doubtlessly looked upon by the Seminoles as the master's spirit and leader of the tribe. Although he is not a chief in stature, he is about at mediocrity, with an elastic and graceful movement in his face. He is good looking, with rather an effeminate smile, but of so peculiar a character that the world may be
ransacked over without finding another just like it. In his manners, and all his movements in company is polite and gentlemanly, though all his conversation is entirely in his own tongue, and his general appearance and actions those of a full blooded wild Indian. End of quote. We haven't mentioned it, but Ostiola didn't speak much English. Some say that he spoke some, some said that he spoke none, But we
don't really know. I don't know what it is, but these descriptions by these painters always seemed to get to me. With Boone and Ostiola. Their portrait painters were some of the last ones to see these guys. Boone died in obscurity in Zuri, just months after the only portrait of him was ever painted. No Catlan was just one of many many artists who flocked to Fort Moultrie to paint Ostiola. The war leader, would only live three days after this
painting was complete. To be noted, if someone comes to paint your portrait, you better be ready to meet your maker.
And so he sat there for them in the heat, and then walked out into the cold, and then back into the heat, and does a consequence, he contracted what I think was called quinsy, and today we would call it strep throat. And one of the Indians who was with them, who was a medicine man, or as the whites called him, a prophet, told him that he must have nothing to do with white medicine, that they would
kill him, that this was white man's medicine. And he even said at one point Dr Whedon that he would have let doctor Whedon attend him because he liked him. But he knew that he couldn't afford to get the ill will of all the other Indians if they saw him letting a white doctor attend to him. And so at the end of January eighteen thirty eight, he was very very ill. At night the doctor went to see him.
Doctor brus This is just days after Catlin finished his very famous painting, the Bassola. I think Catlin finished on like January twenty sixth or twenty seventh.
It was only four or five days, yes, And Robert John Curtis, who's also has a very famous portrait that I used on the front of my book, all right. And he became much much worse Aciola did. And so the doctor went into him at six o'clock in the morning and found him almost totally unable to speak. He couldn't eat. Both of his wives were there with him, one on either side, and one of them had his head laying.
In her lap.
Slightly after six am, after the second time the doctor attended him, Osciola died in Fort Moultrie in Charleston Harbor.
At precisely six point twenty on January thirtieth, eighteen thirty eight, the Seminole War leader Osceola died. Death is such an interesting, sacred and bleak moment in a person's life. Riches nor poverty can separate you from its sting. We do not know what lies on the other side of death, but
we know there's something. I know there's something. Archaeological evidence of human burial rituals show us that man has always struggled with death, and the mysterious exit of the human spirit, leaving behind an empty cadaver like a locust shedding its exoskeleton, makes it clear that what was there a human is no longer there. But in the case of this story, Ostiola's death is really just the beginning of the whole news.
Now it would be almost twelve hours before he would be buried, and he is buried at Fort Moultrie. That decision was made, but there are several things that had to happen during that time. In the first place, there was only a very small skeleton staff of soldiers stationed at Fort Moultrie at that moment. Then one of them had to be sent across the bay to find a carpenter in Charleston, so they had to get the coffin
and take it back. Doctor Wheden also put out a call for doctor Staro, who was a teacher of anatomy in Charleston, and between them they were able to take a plaster cast of Osceola's face and torso. In order to do that, they had to remove his clothes and rigor was still setting was setting.
In called the death mask.
Well, I'm going to.
Show you his death mask in a minute, because I have it. I have one, I'll show you.
Wait a minute. You have a replica of the death mask of Osceola in your office? Yes, she does, Doctor Wickman would later take me there to see it. It's a white plaster cast of the chest, shoulders and face of the Seminole War leader. The features look strikingly similar to Catlan's painting, with cheekbones, smooth and almost feminine. I chose not to record any audio of our conversation while looking at it, or taking any photos. As fascinating as this is, it just didn't feel right to record it,
so I didn't. But I'll never forget it. The original death masks is now at the Smithsonian. We're leading up to the hours before his burial at Fort Moultrie.
And then at the last second, or very nearly the last second, Captain Morrison sent to them and said that he wanted all of Osiola's possessions to be taken from him and delivered to Captain Morrison. And this is the moment at which doctor Whedon decided to take the most important specimen that he could possibly take from this famous or notorious Indian, depending on what your point of view about him was he decided to take his head.
Remember when I told you doctor Whedon's name would be living in your head rent free for a while. This is why, without permission, hastily done in secret, before they nailed the lid on the pine coffin, doctor Whedon amputated Ostiola's head. And we're still trying to understand why.
This was not a new idea. As a matter of fact, there was a pseudo science that was prevalent in the late eighteenth century and the mid nineteenth century called phrenology, and it was a pseudo science that believed that by studying the bumps on a person's head, you could tell what their propensities were. You could tell if they were criminals or violent, or romantic, or anything else about them.
And there were books written about this, showing you how to look at ahead, all right, And we know that in at least one and possibly two other instances in Florida there were officers who had taken heads. So this was not new, and there were a lot of people who when word finally got out, and it took a while to get out on the United States, when they found out that doctor Whedon had taken his head. They were very unhappy about it. They thought that it was
a desecration. The Indians had to be kept out and kept away from the whole entire thing, because they never never would have allowed that. Never, they wouldn't even have allowed his clothing to be taken off, because it was important in their tradition that a warrior should be buried with all of his accouterments, everything that was his should go with him.
Doctor Whedon would take his head, and he and General Morrison would split up the material things that Osciola had when he died. Remember he was a prisoner, so his wives wouldn't have had any say over how things went down. Doctor Whedon took Osceola's car being, his powder horn, a lock of his hair, a sketch that he had, a brass pipe, silver concho, earrings, a garter, and a knife. These things would be passed down in Weedon's family for
many many years. General Morrison took the three ostrich plumes, a turban, a silk shawl, two belts, a garter, three silver gorgets, and a mirrored hairbrush. Most of these things have disappeared, a few are still in existence, including a braid or a lock of Osiola's hair that's still in existence. And you may remember doctor Wickman talking about lice in that Florida prison. Will modern analysis on that lock of hair revealed evidence of the larval casings of lice on
it pretty wild. Now we've got to have some discussion about doctor Whedon whereas actions nefarious, which it kind of seems like they were, or is there somehow an odd loophole in Weeden's notes He wrote that Ostiola before he died, said that he wanted his bones to go back to Florida.
Yes he did, Yes he did.
And it's an interesting scenario because Weeden this guy that would end up decapitating him, taking all his stuff, Ostiola's personal belongings, and would you know, be this like dishonest guy would be the one that would would be writing basically Ostiola's last will and testament.
See and I find it absolutely fascinating that we can see both of these sides of the mind of a nineteenth century person. And on the one hand, we've got all of Ostiola's fame, we've got all of his notoriety, We've got thousands of people across the United States who were sure that this noble Savage had been carried to the grave headless when they found out because of an act of treachery, because Jessup had taken him under a
white flag of truce. And at the same time, we've got doctor Frederick Whedon, a man of science and a man who was friendly friendly with Osceola, and he does something that most of these people who are honoring Ostiola
think is a total desecration. Doctor Wheden wrote he wrote a defense of this a few years later, about five years later, when the head was transferred out of his keeping, and he said that a man of science could do these things, that there was no desecration here, that he was doing this for science.
You don't think he had I mean, because it's really easy to be like, well, here's a bad guy. He No, he did this thing. You don't think he thought this was bad? No, So you don't think Wheden was a bad guy. No. Didn't he lie about it? Though?
Well it's hard to tell, and I've tried to track down a story on this and get something straight. There is a possibility that instead of coming home with that head, and we don't know how he preserved it. And this is why when I go to New York. I go to the McAllister School of Funeral Services and Embalming. Everybody else gets to go to plays.
This is why.
That's why you're on the Barkers podcast.
All right, this is it's a possibility that when he left, when Weeden left Fort Moultrie, that he went straight to New York and exhibited the head at New York and like, this was just this is science, this is science.
This is a great Native American leader. America is enamored with Native leaders.
But he found out that not everybody agreed with that idea of science as the motivating factor, because there was big pushback. And he came back to Saint Augustine. He owned a house on a street that is now called Weedon Street in Saint Augustine, not far from the house I grew up in, and he had an apothecary shop downstairs, or what was being called a drug store now then, and he put the head on display in the front window of his drug store.
That's well documented. Yeah, Now would there not have been a question of ownership? I mean that's that's where you know, like.
You just sat with me all the way through this war, and you actually think that the Indians get a say in this.
Come on now, yeah, no, I see your point. Okay, what about even amongst the US people? I mean, why would this guy, Like if the whole world is enamored with this guy, I get like, why would Weeden get to keep it?
Well, Wheden was the one who took it, and I think that Whedon took it very secretly.
Wouldn't that make it nefarious? Though?
Of course the action, the act of taking it and hiding it wasn't nefarious, all right, But he gated that by saying that it was an act of science. And you know, they are an awful lot of scientists to do an awful lot of things that the rest of us don't like.
This one twisted my mind into a pretzel trying to defend the god that secretly cut off the head of Osceola. But I would learn that wouldn't be the only head that he cut off. He also preserved the skull of the Seminole Uci Billy, who also fought in the Seminole Wars. I'd like to read a section of an essay for you, though written by Theta Purdue, published in the Florida Historic Quarterly in nineteen ninety one. What she said really gives
some interesting context to this kind of bizarre activity. She writes, The conviction that a native way of life could not survive in North America may help explain why Weeden and Morrison removed Ostiola's personal effects. These momentoes of savagery had an antiquarian value because most people presumed that Native Americans were about to vanish completely off the face of the earth.
Indians represented the past and a society that was beginning to pay particular attention to the material cultures of ancient peoples. Napoleon's armies had discovered countless treasure troves in Egypt, and by the eighteen twenties, Jean Francois Champollion had deciphered the Rosetta Stone, which unlocked the secrets of hieroglyphics. These events almost certainly did not motivate Weeden and Morrison, but they did contribute to the intellectual maliu that formed and shaped
scientific investigation and collection development. Weeden and Morrison may be seen as representative of the same kind of interest in material culture that led, in the eighteen forties to the founding of the Smithsonian Institution. Where Osceola's death mask now rests. Cosiola's possessions like those are the Pleistocene. The Egyptians and the Trojans belonged to history because savagery was passing from the scene. End of quote. Now that's pretty bear greasy.
By that, I mean interesting. You have to wash your hands with some bear grease lye soap to get that off. But it's still hard to stomach what Whedon did, but it does put it into context. However, I have a question, is this kind of gruesome stuff still going on today? You know, that's a weird question. So cutting a dead man's head off, Yes, in eighteen thirty eight and putting in a glass jar was not what that would be today. It just wasn't as big a deal. It was more common.
Well, do you know, I've been to Walter Reed, I've been to see their pathological collections, and I know that they're old. They're not to my not, they're not still doing this because you can take photographs today, you know, and you can do drawings today, or you can preserve specimens today. There are wet and dry methods for preserving specimens.
So they're still doing this today. So that's what you're.
Saying, I'm not quite sure. I'm not quite sure, but I know that up into the twentieth century, particularly in times of war, doctors have the opportunity to deal with things that they never get to deal with in times of peace. And as a teaching collection, it's important. What are you going to show people? How are you going to teach doctors? If they don't have something they can look at, something that's.
Amazing, maybe it's still happening, maybe more today than even then. I mean, because they're working on cadavers all the time. Yes, I mean people that are donating their bodies to sciences. And once there's consent, like once there's consent from a person, you can do whatever you want with my body. After I'm dead, then it's like everything's okay.
Yes, then you can take it. And I as I said, I've been in the collections at Walter Reed and there are things in jars that I would not like to have to deal with every day. But if you're going to be a surgeon or even a doctor, any medical doctor, you've got to deal with these things their reality, and this is how you learn. You know, there's a famous
pair of men in England. I think they were called Burke and Hare, if I remember correctly, who were finally caught in the early eighteen hundreds because they were digging up cadavers to supply the medical schools. They were going around, they were going to hangings, you know, and catching bodies because they were supplying medical schools, and they got paid, they were earning their living this way.
That's all pretty wild and not a justification, but it does put the time into context, and if we're being honest, revolutions in medicine and understanding of the human body that we all benefit from today came from this era of curiosity and learning, as macabre as it is. We'll now move through a timeline of what we know about Osiola's head.
Osiola's head stade remained in the possession of doctor Whedon in Saint Augustine for about five years.
Doctor Wheden would end up being the mayor of Saint Augustine and after having the head on display for five years, Weeden's son in law, doctor Daniel Whitehurst, would write a letter to a very prominent figure in the scientific community. Here's who the letter was written.
To, and the man's name was doctor Valentine Mott. Mott a very famous name. There is still today a Mott metal in science that's given out every year. There's Lucretia Mott, who was one of the great suffragettes in American history. There's Mott apple juice. And doctor Mott had two teaching collections. He had a collection that he kept of specimens that he kept in Manhattan, and he had specimens that he
kept specifically at his home. And he said quite clearly that when doctor Whitehurst wrote to him and said that he wanted to offer him Osciola's head, doctor Mott said that it was too important and too well known, too highly visible in society for him to place it in any public spot, and he would keep it in his home, all right.
And so he did.
And this is documented in a letter as we have today, Yes, that Whitehurst, Weeden's son in law writes a letter to this famous doctor Mott, doctor Mott up in New York and says and offers him and like straight up says, I'm going to give a deliver to you basically Ossiole's head, all right.
As a sign of my esteem for everything you've taught me.
And you're somebody that'll take care of this, and you should be the one that has this. Yep, this is in the early eighteen forties or so.
It's about eighteen forty two, maybe between five.
Four or five years after Oscio's Yes, yes, what happens after.
That, Well, the head is transported and it goes to him, and it goes to doctor Valentine Mott. And years later, several years later, several things happened all at once. There was a fire in the fourteenth Street Medical College. Doctor Mott's wife passed away, and doctor Mott created for himself a catalog of his entire collection, the collection that was in his home. The fire destroyed a good deal of what was held in the Medical College in New York.
So it's a very good thing that the head was not there, because I've seen a copy of the catalog that he created and had printed of all the specimens that were in his home, and the head of asceola undoubted, it says in parentheses, undoubted is there After I found that the next thing I went looking for was doctor Ballentine Mott's will, and I found out that not only was there a will, but as of course there should be, there was an inventory that was taken of all his
possessions at the time of his death. I got a copy of the will. I read the copy. He made his son, Alexander Brown Mott his executor. But the inventory was either misfiled or has disappeared. And as a consequence, I can't find what you might call the smoking gun. I can't find the piece of paper that would tell me for a fact that that head at the time of Valentine Mott's death was still in his home. I have visited the New York Historical Society. I've visited the
New York Medical Society. They have a cast of doctor Valentine Mott's hand because he was such a famous surgeon. They have some of his instruments, they have other documents, but they do not have Osciola's head.
So that's where the trail goes cold. That is where the trail, that's where the buck stops. Yes, But then that's where a wholenother big can of worms opens up.
Because because there are too many possibilities, you know, I've contacted Philadelphia. I sent out letters to about one hundred and fifty museums across the United States. Anything that had anything.
What kind of letter do you write, you say, hey, perchance, do you have the head of Osceola? And have not told anybody.
What The first thing I said was, I'm the senior historian for the state of Florida. And when you start with that, they answer you okay, And I said, I'm working on Ostiola. Is the story of Astola, and as you may well know, his head has never been located. And I am interested to know whether you have or ever have had anything relating to Ostiola in your collections, whether you have ever heard any stories relating to him or his head.
Just doing the widest net possible anybody. I could ask you think, doctor Wickman, that you have spent more time looking for his head than anyone in history.
I would be willing to bet you that's the case.
Oh you did it like a pro. This is not a hobby. Oh no, this was your job.
This was your But it's what the Seminoles want too.
Really, they sent you on task to do that.
Well, they allowed me to put the money in my budget to go to New York, to go to Chicago. I've been to the Brooklyn Museum because Henry Abbot had an Egyptiana collection, and I thought, well, it's possible. Henry Abbott was a doctor who knew Valentine Mott. Let's go find out if it could be.
There, how would you have Would it have just been like somebody saying, you know what, well, there's this one specimen over here, we don't really know what to do with it, and somehow you would look at it and be like, that's it. I mean, like, what did you expect to find.
There are two big possibilities, three big possibilities. One is that somebody has it, but they don't want the world to know it because of the attitude about Indians today. They wouldn't want the Indian tribe to be insulted.
Yeah, it'd be pretty and they wanted material to be haven't in your hands today.
They didn't want to fall into disrepute as an institution. And the other possibility is that they might have known that they had it and destroyed it or inadvertently destroyed it because they said, you know, this system, this series of specimens is not actually within the mission of our museum, and I don't know anybody else who wants it.
Let's just throw it on the pipe.
I wouldn't fess up to that today.
Well, they might not even know that it'd been among those things because they might not have the accession records.
And it's interesting. So there's actually when you really know the systems, you understand the way that things could actually happen, because I mean, in my mind it's like, well, how could you lose somebody's head that's in the jar? But there's actually a lot of ways to lose.
The whole job of ways to lose it.
Absolutely, do you do you think, after all your research, do you think it's still in existence?
Yes?
Do you?
Yes?
Why?
Because I can't find any reason not to believe it, Because I can't find anything that's even vaguely close to it that would lead me to believe that it could truly be gone.
I am grinting ear to ear as we're having this conversation. Mystery remains, and that's some serious gangster detective stuff, but also some very serious stuff searching for Osiola's head. I told you guys that doctor Whitman was legit. I don't know if you believe me, and she truly believes that the head is still in existence.
And one of the things that I did in that process of searching through other museums was look closely for specimens, wet specimens.
Because that's what it would be.
It would be preserved in alcohol, probably wet specimens that are older than Osiola's hit. Because I thought to myself, is it possible that it might have simply deteriorated over the years and that there's nothing left? Or if I found it, I couldn't possibly recognize it, And so I went looking for other collections.
And there are.
Collections in Europe, and the Hunterian Museum, and for which there is now a Hunterian in London, all right, have specimens that are far older than ossi Olda's head, that are still perfectly fine, that are well preserved. So could it be extant?
Yes?
Is it extant? I can't find any reason to believe that it's not. And I'm thinking of Harvard's collections. I'm thinking of Philadelphia. There are a couple of museums there that have had anatomical collections. The idea of anatomical specimen collections as a very big idea really only began to pick up speed during the American Civil War, and you can.
Imagine that years before that.
Yeah, So they weren't large collections. They were usually like doctor Mott's. They were in the possession either of a medical college where a man a certain person taught, or they were his own private teaching collection.
All right.
But once we got the American Civil War and so many people were dying, and there were so many bullet wounds and so many you know, legs and amputated and all these other things, then then collecting really got underway, and then the pathological collections at Walter Reed were begun.
All right.
So there are pathological collections that still exist in various places, and I haven't begun to cover all of them.
Wow, when you're in the deep dark corners of the Internet, you'll find a lot of wild ideas of where Ostiola's head is today. So what are the wild theories? Because I know there's a lot of unfound the wild theories of where Osiolas is.
Well, I'll tell you too, in particular that I have never forgotten. One of them was a woman in Texas who called me, and I no longer remember her name, mercifully, and she called me this is while.
I was still with the tribe.
She was absolutely sure she lived near a river in Texas, and she was convinced very strongly convinced that Osceola had lived in a house on that river bank and the house had collapsed on him and fallen into the river. And if I would send a dive team over to where she was, they could go into that river, and she was quite sure that we would find him.
We would find his skeletal.
Remains pretty off the wall. That was a good one, you guys may remember Semonole Creek. Jake Tiger from Oklahoma. I asked him if he'd heard any loud stories of where Osciola's head is.
I believe it's still out there. I mean, this is where I'll probably end up selling like a conspiracy theorist about Yeah, but I mean you'll hear his head is over in Redwoods in California, along with Sitting Bull and Geronimo as well at Bohemian Grove. If y'all ever heard about the Secret Society's that's over in California, you know where you know George Bush and Bill Clinton are part of. It's a really strange thing if you read about those guys. But to me, like I said, it sounds like a
conspiracy theorist. But I've talked to different people in the community and they said, Yeah, there's his head's over in California right now.
The Bohemian Grove is a twenty seven hundred acre private club in Monte Rio, California, founded in eighteen seventy eight. In every variety of wild conspiracies construed by man can be found about this place. Here's doctor Wickman with one more little story.
The other was that I got a call from a woman up in Jacksonville. She was on the city council, I think, and she had a contact on one of those shows on television. It might have been America's Most Pointed or something like that, and she wanted to get
the question of finding Osciola's head on that program. And the lady up in Jacksonville was really quite aggressive, and I tried really hard to explain to her that if that head were found, that there is no question nowadays that it would be only only within the purview of the Seminole tribe of Florida to decide what would happen to that head. And I know what would happen. I know what they would do, all right, And it's the
what they want to do. It's why they let me hunt for it so that they could put him back together, and he could sleep in peace.
I've learned a lot in this search for Osiola's legacy, having heard his name in John Anderson's hit song Simon Oldwind, and realizing that I didn't know much about him. It's been a fascinating story about this man, but also America. I want to conclude with an editorial in an American newspaper published just days after Ostiola's death on January thirtieth, eighteen thirty eight. It reads, we have heard within a day or two very bitter things said about Ostiola by
a few persons. In our humble opinion, he has been to the full as much sinned against as sinning treacherous he may have been, but we cannot forget that he was provoked by treachery and captured by treachery. We are fairly even with them. We now owe him the respects which the brave ever feel toward the brave, which the victorious cannot violate without brutality, towards the vanquished, which the commonest laws of humanity and civilization enforced towards prisoners of war.
We sincerely trust that no citizen of Charleston will so far forget the character of a Carolinian as to offer indignity to a fallen man, a tear of forgiveness and generous sympathy is much better due to the once terrible, now stricken warrior of the Seminoles. Here's doctor Wickman with one final thought.
Here's your bottom line. Here's your absolute bottom line. The entire might of this nation was thrown against these people, the entire might of the United States military well soon against these people. And here we are two hundred years down the road and they are still here.
And that is nothing short of a miracle.
I think that the least that we know them is to know their story and to tell it straight.
I'm really enjoying the story, and I can't thank you enough for listening to Bear Grease and Brent's This Country Life podcast. On the next episode, we're carrying on with this story. We're going to talk about the bizarre circumstances around the nineteen sixty seven zooming of Osiola's grave. No, this story is not over. Please leave us a review on iTunes and share our podcast with a buddy this week. Thank you, and keep the w wild places wild because that's where the bears live.
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