Seminole canoe trade and camps on the Miami River, and the drainage that pushed them into farm labor (Miami River, 1870s to 1960s)

SUMMARYSeminole canoe trade and camps on the Miami River, and the drainage that pushed them into farm labor (Miami River, 1870s to 1960s) [Connections: Miami & Lake Okeechobee, Nov 5, 2026]

RECORDThe Brickells ran a trading post at the river mouth from the early 1870s, and the 1892 Ingraham expedition texts describe their trade with the Seminoles (UF Libraries). Florida Seminole Tourism (the Seminole Tribe's tourism site, citing Patsy West, The Enduring Seminoles) records that Seminoles came into Miami from the Everglades by Wagner Creek; that in 1919 Willie Willie leased part of Musa Isle and set up a trading post and Seminole village; that Seminoles stayed involved in Musa Isle into the 1960s; and that dredging of the Miami Canal (from 1908) destroyed the river rapids and cut off trade routes, so that Annie Jumper Tommie's group "picked crops for white farmers on land they had once farmed themselves."

PATTERNState drainage turned free Indigenous traders into farm laborers on their own land, the same fields later worked by Black and Caribbean migrants

LENS (WW9)First they drained the water, then they put the people of the water to work in the fields

OPENFind the Ingraham expedition diary entries (April 1892) on what was traded; check West, The Enduring Seminoles, pp. 40-48

SOURCECruise Through Seminole History on the Miami River (Florida Seminole Tourism); Brickell Point (UF Libraries, Ingraham Expedition).