They believe that spirits when they die, should be buried facing the east because when the sun comes up and the milky way comes out in the morning, just before the sun is full, the spirit needs that milky way to walk across to the spirit world where he's going to live. And if they don't bury him properly, And this is why they want Oziola's head, because he's buried in pieces and he can't rest until he's back together.
And the critical thing about that story, and I'm going to tell you now and I'll tell you again later on, is that the only people who have the right to make disposition of his head, if and when it is ever found, and I have worked hard looking for it, are the Seminole people in Florida, the only ones.
In the history books. When a person dies and is buried, aside from the rippling impacts of their life on society, their story usually fades to an end. Their physical and material impact evaporate at death. That is, unless you're a Ostiola. The story continues the life of this war leader, the
mastermind of the Seminole resistance to his tribes. Remove a lot of Florida stretches one hundred and twenty nine years post burial, when they decide to dig up his body in search of some unanswered questions, which really only give us more questions. My friends, mystery remains, and the truth
is sometimes more wild than the myth. I really doubt that you're gonna want to miss this last episode on Ostiola on Thanksgiving Week, and as a bonus at the end, we're going to talk with the Florida Seminole about their
partnership with Florida State University. It's pretty unique. My name is Klay Knukem, 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 live their lives close to the land, presented by FHF gear, American made purpose built hunting and fishing gear as designed to be as rugged as the place as we explore.
I've gotten letters from people who are sure that Osciola has appeared to them in dreams, that they know where he is, that he's speaking to them, that if I would go out into my yard at the full moon, Osceola would speak to me and tell me where to find him. I've had every well, you know, I don't want to say mean things about him. Maybe they cared, maybe they were interested, or maybe they only wanted the notoriety for themselves, you know, maybe they wanted to be
able to say I did it, I found him. But these were not rational possibilities.
The search for Osceola's head has been going on since the trail went cold when famous surgeon doctor Valentine Mott died in eighteen sixty five, inventory of his personal collections of medical specimens were accounted for and the head wasn't there. Since then, people have been trying to reunite Oceola's head and body, and we know where his grave is, or at least up until the nineteen sixties we thought we did.
This story is wild and in case you missed it, on January thirtieth, eighteen thirty eight, Osciola died in Fort Moultrie Prison in South Carolina, within sight of the Atlantic Ocean. He was buried within twelve hours of his death, but not before being decapitated by doctor Frederick Whedon, his attending military contracted doctor. His head was stored in a glass jar in the name of science. If you remember, Osceola was one of two hundred and thirty seven seminoles captured
awaiting removal to Indian Territory in Oklahoma. He'd been captured in late October eighteen thirty seven. While in prison, he was allowed to attend to play in downtown Charleston, and numerous portrait painters flocked to paint his likeness. Remember the thirty four year old Osceola, also known as Billy Powell, was a controversial national celebrity. In the last episode, we were scant on the details of his burial. Here are the deats from none other than Osceola authority, doctor Patricia
Wickman of Tallahassee, Florida. Let's go.
It was about six or seven o'clock in the evening on the same day when he died, when he was finally transported outside of the fort, and a hole had been dug, a grave had been dug in the angle of the fort, right out in front of the next to the sally Port gate, and he was lowered into the ground. And there are two more intra points that occurred then that have given rise to miss two stories
about Assiola. There were four soldiers who were assigned to take the coffin and It was an old style what was called a towpincher coffin, and they were assigned to carry it out, and they did that by slinging ropes underneath the head and the feet, and four of them each one two on each side held the ropes. And as they walked out to the grave in the front.
We found out later quite obviously the man who was up at the head of the coffin on what would be Osciola's right hand side, wasn't quite paying attention, and he dropped his rope and the body slid forward all the way up to the head of the coffin.
How do we know that the coffin was dropped like that? Did they review the prisons surveillance videos or did we learn this by some other old school method. Regardless, the burial appeared to be an unceremonial moment. It wasn't written about recorded in any way. It's likely his wives were there watching them lower his body into the ground, but we really don't know that. They may have been permitted to conduct traditional ceremonies of a seminole burial, but it's
really unknown. We do know they didn't let the seminoles see his headless body. Remember the decapitation was done in secret. But again, how do we know that the coffin was dropped?
If his head had been in there at that time, the body never would have been able to go all the way to the head of that coffin. So it wasn't until later when we get to the archaeological story and why there was an archaeological evaluation of that grave and the evidence, the skeletal evidence.
Doctor Wickman has brought up the big question of why in nineteen sixty seven there was an archaeological dig into Ostiola's grave. I mean, how wild is that? Were they trying to move him back to Florida like Ostiola wanted or was it something else.
The most interesting part of this latter story, that what we might call the epilogue of the Asciola story, had to do with a man in Miami who was a part of the Milk Board and he was running for public office and he had decided that he wanted to bring Osceola back to Florida. Now, as you mentioned earlier, Osceola told doctor Whedon very close to his death that his only wish was to be brought back to Florida to rest in his homeland in Florida, but doctor Whedon
ignored that nobody ever tried to do that. And ever since then there have been intermittent attempts by the state of South Carolina, by the state of Florida, state of Alabama to get these remains. There have been letters between governors. Then there have been letters from people here in Florida.
There was one group who wanted to start a visitor attraction at Rainbow Springs over on Florida's near Florida's west coast, one of our many natural springs, and they were going to build a memorial to Asciola there and they were going to put his place's remains there. And each time the National Park Service, which later became the proprietors.
Of Fortosophia Culture became a National park.
Yes, absolutely, and the National Park Service took it over. And the National Park Service said, now.
In nineteen forty eight, the US military based Fort Moultrie would become a national park. And you can imagine what a touchy subject it would be to remove the body of a Native American. So it never happened. Also, this is coming into the time period when America had won World War Two, was becoming prosperous and influential in the world, and we started to become very interested in our history and the colorful American characters that filled in those spaces.
If you remember, David or Davy Crockett was pretty much an obscure, forgotten character until he was rebirthed by Disney in nineteen fifty five. It's interesting that the world was starting to get interested again in Osceola during this time.
All right, Now, there's been some vandalism to his grave over the years. There have been these arguments back and forth between governors and states to try to bring him back to Florida. But the most serious attempt, let's say, was this man from South Florida who was running for office down there. I think he wanted to be on
the city commission. And he went up to Charleston at one point in the nineteen sixties and he dug at went out in the middle of the night and dug at Osceola's grave, and then he put out a press release saying that he had Osciola's bones.
He vandalized, he dug under a gate or a fence or something.
He dug well, he dug at the pailing that was around the grave because there's a pailing that had been constructed there, and there's a tombstone, and part of the tombstone has fallen into disrepair, and people have taken pieces of at home as souvenirs. I don't know what they do with it when they get it.
The man was from Miami and his name was Otis Shriver. He was a con man like Feller who vandalized the grave in nineteen sixty six and claimed that he had Ostiola's bones and that he'd reef buried them at a place called Rainbow Springs in Florida. If your last name is Shriver, you shouldn't feel immediate shame. But I'd suggest going back and making sure that you're not blood ken to this man, and if you are, you should keep
it to yourself. I'm just glad it wasn't a nucom or a Reeves that pulled this stunt.
And he put up such a fuss about it. He made it so public, and there were so many stories circulating from the Miami Herald to the Charleston Courier and back again that the National Park Service finally called their chief archaeologist for the Southeastern region. All right, whose name was John Griffin, and they said, come down. We want you to come down and do a complete dig, or we want you to dig in se whether he has actually gotten into the grave or not. Could he be
telling the truth? Has he really found these bones? And when John saw the site, and I say John because he was a good friend of mine and because I've I've looked through his records with him and visited with him and discussed this topic with him, he went there and looked at it, and he said it didn't look as if they had gotten into the grave. But he thought, as long as I'm here, and as long as we have this opportunity, and it may never present itself again, let's take a look.
Let's take a look. The archaeologist said, I've bet a lot of archaeologists would have said that, But I'm not sure that I would want to be digging up the bones of Ostola. But holy cow, I'd like to have been there when they did it. But are you surprised that doctor Wickman knew the archaeologists that exhumed Osciola's grave, not me. You remember I've said this like one hundred times. But she was the state historyan of Florida and at one time worked for the Seminal Tribe of Florida. She
wrote books about Ostiola. She's straight up legit. But this wasn't the first rumor that Osceola wasn't in that grave.
There was also a rumor that had circulated over the years that Osciola's bones had been dug up, that his grave had been desecrated all right, And as a consequence, John said, let's put the lie to all of this. Now, let's get some answers, and so he did a dig and it was John and that crew. The first thing they found was that the water table was very, very high.
They wound up having to get help from the City of Charleston and sink well points at the corners in order to dry out the site before they could get into it. The next thing they found out was that the coffin the sides of the coffin had fallen in on top of the skeletal remains, and then the top of the coffin had fallen down when the sites fell in, so it was all collapsed.
When John Griffin of the National Park Service got down into the grave, they found something they weren't looking for, something completely unexpected. Just take a minute right now, if you're riding down the road in your truck, you might probably got dogs barking in the tailgate. But ask who you're riding with what you think might be down there, because we're about to find out. Boy, would I like to have been a National Park landscape or rubbernecking when
they found this. But to understand it, we're going to need to go back to just before Osciola's death. So right now, doctor Wickman is going to recount like a sliver of his death and tell us something important.
He was very ill, He could hardly speak or talk. Both of his wives were there with him, all right. Interestingly enough, this is another mystery that attends the Asciola story. One of the people who was there said that one of his wives seemed to be more in favor with him than the other. All right, but it's highly possible, as we shall see in just a moment from the end of the story, it's highly possible that she was pregnant.
It wasn't that she was in disfavor. It's just that she was sequestering slightly, because a seminole woman would do that when she was pregnant. That we also find out that Asceola was not the only person who was buried either that day or very soon after that day, because there were actually two coffins buried there, and the other one was the coffin of an infant, not a neonatal probably, but a very young infant. And we have no way
of knowing anything about this child. There's no notation in the military records that I've ever found of whose child this was or why it was buried. Literally touching the side of Asiola's coffin they were buried.
And we wouldn't know this for one hundred and fifty years.
We wouldn't know this until the mid twentieth century, all right, absolutely, and we'd only know it from the skeletal remains that were examined as a result of the continuing saga of Osceola.
This infant is a complete mystery. But here are the data points that we have. The child was buried in a military graveyard with a military prisoner of war. They're only two types of people here, American soldiers and seminole Indians, so the options are pretty clear. I assume that the child of an American soldier wouldn't have been buried there, so we have to assume that it was a Seminole prisoner's child that died within a few hours of osceola coincidence,
I don't know. But in this next section, doctor Wickman shares her personal thoughts on where the child came from. I want to reiterate that this is speculation, but she's an authority, so I want to hear her thoughts.
All right. And we have no records from the fort, from the soldiers who were there, from Pittgaren Morrison Noble, complete mystery, but I am I feel certain knowing Indian tradition and knowing that one comment about a wife who
was less in favor than the other. All right. There is a tradition among the Seminole people and their ancestors, the Mushkogi people of the Southeast that in times of war or famine, a mother will kill a child, and they do it because of desperation, if there's no meanness, if there's if her husband has gone off to war and he gets killed in war and she's not going to have a man to hunt for her and protect her and bring them food. If she's in time of famine and they can't get what they want to eat
to survive. You know, if there's disease, if there are any kinds of problems that mean that that child would be crippled or disempowered in its in its life, then they will stop it. They will not allow that child to have to go through that.
Doctor Wickman believes the child was Osceola's after his day, the mother, knowing the imminent, dangerous and grueling move to Oklahoma that was coming, perhaps she ended the child's life. I really don't think it's fair to make that big of an assumption. We don't know where the child came from, but the timing of their deaths and burial is unusual. But as I understand it, and fanticide is fairly common
in the hunter gatherer tribes of the ancient world. And not to bring up an incredibly controversial topic, but the elephant in the room is a comparison to the modern equivalent practice of abortion. This reminds me of Solomon's statement that there is nothing new under the sun. Here's doctor Wickman on what the excavation confirmed.
So any rate John did the dig, he found out the first thing he found out was that there was no head in the coffin for sure, all right. The next thing he realized was that the head had gone, had had moved all the way up against the head of the coffin in the story that I related to you earlier.
Right, So they when they put the coffin in, it kind of tipped and the body crumpled up towards the front.
It did, it just slid down toward the front. And we know the from the work that John did. If you have a body that's laying on its back, and whether it's in rigor or not doesn't actually matter, all right, All the blood will begin to pool to the lowest extremities when when a prison dies, and if the head is laying there, the chin will begin to tilt downward. And if you make an incision to take off the head right at the bottom of the chin, you're going
to take the head off. You're going to encounter the spine and take the head off at the fifth cervical vertebra. And that's exactly what happened here, all right. So they took the head and everything below that, pretty much everything below that was still in the coffin. There were flanges missing, fingers, fingers, there were toes that were missing, digits that were missing,
all right. So the old myth or the old story, the rumor about Osceola have been having been wounded in battle may have been true, and it could have been a wound only to his hand, But it also could have been a source of much of his illness and much of his debilitation in eighteen thirty seven. You know, he could have he could have been just too sick to lead, and that could have been true, all right.
So the bones were examined by two physical anthropologists from the Smithsonian Institution, t. Dale Stewart and Stewart and Red all Right. And I spoke with t DL Stewart not long before he passed away, and I asked him about the remains and what he was able to glean from the remains. The part that would have been most important for telling whether showing us whether there was any non Indian admixture, genetic admixture in him, was the part that
was missing. You needed the cranium, all right. But there was some torsion, he called it, torsion in the long bones of the legs that at that time anthropologists thought might be a concomitant of black admixture in a person. Now, since then that has been disproven. It's no longer used. For instance, in a court of law, you wouldn't accept that,
So that endsize. Yes, I have no way of knowing whether that Coppinger, that coping here was a slave of the Coppinger family who had run away and taken refuge for the Indians, or whether it was a Cuban all right, or who it was, I don't, I don't know. And the bones, several of the bones were actually molded, modeled, They made models of them, and they put all of the bones back into the coffin properly, and they sealed the top of the coffin. So nobody's going to dig into that coffin anymore.
His resting places is in Fort Moultrie, South Carolina. But I always tell people that if you go to the gray Side over there, that's always telling them there's a headless corpse and then the casket in there. If you always say that weren't paying the respects I saw, You're gonna be up talking to a headless you know body in there. Except that that story is not really talked
about a lot. You know, people will just you know, hear the story that he's buried but they don't ever hear that story where in his head and his body parts were removed.
This is Jake Tiger. He's twenty six years old and a member of the Seminole tribe in Oklahoma, and he works in historic preservation. I have a question for him, and I was surprised by his answer. How do the Seminold people feel about oscil of being buried in South Carolina?
So working in historic preservation and dealing with ancestral mains, you know, of course, you know there are certain certain circumstances where we would like to have our people buried in the traditional homelands. But if he was buried there, and if they're you know, the right ceremony was conducted to bury him, he should not be moved. That would would waken his spirit. And you know, he was put to rest for a reason. So if he's there and
that's final resting place, we should leave it there. So that's at the traditional way to look at it, really, yeah, is you know, once that that body has been put in into the ground, and we we have certain ceremonies that allow us to rest in our final resting place. If as done, that's a done deal. You don't mess with the body.
The location isn't as critical as the ceremony. According to to Weeden, the doctor to cut his head off. He wrote that Oscila wanted to want to how do you reconcile.
That at that time period? If you know, I think his wishes could have been conducted back then when he was was buried. But since his is he was put in the ground in South Carolina, you know, it would be hard for a lot of us to to take them and move them once again.
So it could have you're saying, like, best case scenario, his wishes would have been honored at the time and the in his only would have been in Florida. That didn't happen. He was a prisoner of war. The circumstances just it just happened that he was buried in South Carolina there on the fort. And as long as the ceremony was correct, you're okay.
With that, Yeah, yeah, And that's always one of the taboos we have in my department and historic preservation is you know, some people think that, you know, we are archaeologists, and we're do the exact opposite archeologists. We're trying to get stuff off off of off of shells and universities and museums. You know, you know, these are the bones of our ancestors, and you know we're telling them if you put it back where you found it, it should
have been never moved. You know, that's not our belief system. We don't you know, move our our ancestors around so you can studium mm hm. And so that's that's what
really our whole offices has been founded on. That's why we have nacra Is through repatriot all these ancestral remains, and so that that's the way of United States trying to follow our our wishes now finally of having funery objects on museum displays, and these universities finally, you know, handing over these ancestral remains that were used by anthropology departments and archaeology departments, and I mean these universities they got you know, hundreds, you know, thousands of remains, and
so it's really astonishing. And if you look at different museums and universities that have these remains and objects that belong to our ancestors and there on display, and it doesn't happen to any other ethnic group, but only American Indians and in that mass number, which is to me, it's always seems strange why anthropologies and archaeologist wanted to
study us so bad. But but at the same time, if you look at it, there was there was some you know, someone will always you know, get entitled and say, well, it's for educational purposes, and you know, y'all should get over it and always tell someone to us as well, how would you feel if we went to Arlington National Cemetery and dug up all these vets and that fought for your independence. How would you feel if we did
that and so and then they always get quite after that. Yeah, and that's no way of looking at it.
NAGPRA is an acronym NAGPRA for the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, which was enacted in nineteen ninety and basically funded agencies to return Native American cultural items to the tribes. This is the final segment of our time on Bear Greece with the Osceola story. I'd now like to talk with a member of the Seminole tribe of Florida, which we've not up until this point. We've talked with Seminoles in Oklahoma. I'd like you to meet this guy.
My name is Chandler Demayo. I'm a member of the Seminole tribal Florida. I grew up on the Hollywood Reservation in Hollywood, Florida, and I am a museum educator at our att the Gee Museum, located on the Big Cypress Reservation.
Something that I think is interesting and we haven't yet talked about, is the Florida State University using the Seminoles at what most would understand to be a mascot. I wanted to see what Chandler had to say about Osceola and Florida State. I was surprised by his answer.
We're going to.
Jump in mid convo and he's talking about Ostiola standby.
I'd say as a Seminole, he's a controversial figure, but I'm glad that he did what he did, and I'm glad that we have that name to look up to. You know, some people don't like him for whatever reason. I know some people don't like the fact that the tribe has him as FSU's mascot. Some people are happy that we have presentation that works with the tribe. I like the fact that they not only work with the tribe. They have a whole procedure and everything is made by
tribal members. The outfit is historically accurate, they go through training. I'd much rather that because I remember asking my late grandpa about it, and I asked him, I said, you've grown up in Florida all your life on the res what was FSU's mascot before? And He's like, oh it, Sammy Seminole was a white guy in a loincloth with face paint who ran around with a hatchet and a
head dress, you know. And he said when they were changing that they were thinking about changing the school's entire theme, and the tribe got with them and said, would you be willing to, you know, work with us on this and we would help you out. And I'm not sure exactly how that deal was made, but I know that out of that, we now have correct representation and they use our name and they don't use it in a bad way. You know.
Is the sound of seventy nine thousand people doing the Florida State War chant while a Seminole warrior riding bareback on an apples a horse named Renegade ride onto the football field with a flaming spear it's really quite powerful, and that's a dang good horse. In the time of political correctness, it's refreshing to see a relationship between the tribe and the university, which FSU seems to take really serious. They have written on their website quote FSU pays tribute
to the resilience and courage of the Florida Seminoles. When it refers to and represents the Seminole name and other symbols such as osceola and renegade, the Florida Seminoles are our partners, not our metastonts end of quote. I think that's pretty cool. I want to close with Chandler talking about the unconquered people.
So whenever you hear us talk about or say we're the unconquered Seminoles or we're the unconquered, it refers to the fact that we never signed away a treaty and moved from our homeland. Once we all came down to Florida, we were already here in Florida. Depending on what group
you're from, they kind of all said it. You know, the ones coming from up north, they were like, they're kicking us all out, and you know, they're throwing us out out west, and they even came down here and met with some of our elders at the time, the older generations. We joke about it. They kind of wind and dined them. They took them on train cars out west to Oklahoma and you know, fed them steak and lobster and showed them all the lands that they were
to receive. And they came back and they said, all right, well you sign and they said no, but you know, thanks for the free trip. And the ones that did say that they were going to sign, when they came back to get their signature, they asked us and they said, where was you know, this older man. Where was this guy? You know, we took him out there he said he
was going to sign. Where'd he go? Oh, he's over there, and you know, they point towards the tree line and it would just be, you know, a hole with him in it. You know, anybody that we found out was going to take money and sell away our land or sell out our people, if they were the leader of say a you know, a group of five hundred and all of a sudden, yeah, I think I'm going to take the money and sign my people away. If they
found out about it. They'd kill him and replace him, and they would explain, they would tell him exactly what happened. You know, Hey, he was going to sell us out. We killed him. Osciola was one of those ones who never really did that. He was always the voice against that. He was always you know, I've come from somewhere where they've taken everyone out. I've been to battles all throughout my whole life. We're not going from here. This is this is it for everyone, you know, this is the
last stand. I like that as a seminole. That makes me proud, and it's something that I know. When I was growing up, they talked about it more, and they're starting to more with the younger generation, which I like they're letting them know even from a young age, there's a reason that we use this word, and there's a reason why you guys are still here and everyone else is gone on the East Coast for the most part.
You know, the ones who are here are the ones in even all the ones who like we have a group of us in Oklahoma, a lot of them were the ones who signed away, and some of them were, you know, unfortunately taken from here during the war. You know, put in chains and forced to walk, and we talk about that, we talk about losing people and you know, the things that we had to do to survive. And we always try to make sure that everyone in the tribe knows that there's a reason why we're still here.
It's those sacrifices that were made people like Osteola, people like all these other historical figures throughout our history that sacrificed and died and paid the ultimate price for you guys to be here in Florida still, you know, still enjoying the home that we that we have.
The Seminole Tribe of Florida was officially recognized in nineteen fifty seven. Today there are over forty two hundred members on six reservations that span over ninety thousand acres. The unconquered people is such a powerful descriptor, and it's clear that they take a lot of pride in that the Seminoles was stood the entire mit of the US military for over forty years. They weren't beaten and never signed
a treaty given over their lands in Florida. The story of Ostiola is tragic, inspirational, and such a wild history. Lesson on the early years of America. I'm always kind of bummed out when we end these series. I feel like Ossiola has just been on my mind for the last several months, and I'm always so grateful to be able to tell these stories, to meet these wonderful people, and to learn. I find myself always rooting for the underdog, the overlooked, the gritty, rough cut ones that had the
internal resolve to stand for something. I can't thank you enough for listening to Bear, Grease and Brent's This Country Life podcast. I hope you have a great Thanksgiving with friends and family. Please leave us a review on iTunes and share our podcast with a friend. Over the holidays, maybe you'll be chowing down on a big old obbler turkey, maybe some deer. But keep the wild places wild, because that's where the bears live.