Unconquered: Roadside Reservations 

When Museum of the Everglades manager Thomas Lockyear gives a talk, he usually draws a crowd. His recent talk, Roadside Reservations: Seminole Tourist Camps Along the Tamiami Trail, played to a packed house at the Museum of the Everglades. Attendees seem to appreciate Lockyear’s preparation, presentation, and sense of humor.

During his hour-long presentation, Lockyear talked about the famous Buckskin Declaration of Independence. Miccosukee leader Buffalo Tiger brought the declaration by train to President Dwight Eisenhower’s office in 1954. The words of the declaration are burned into a deer buckskin.

“A group of elders from down here stretched a buckskin,” Thomas Lockyear said, "wrote on it, sent it to President Eisenhower and said, ‘We're still at war. And we just want you to understand that we're not going along with any of this.’ It's pretty intense, but a pretty amazing history, because the Seminole and the Miccosukee - who eventually would split from the Seminole—are the only tribes in the United States that never signed a treaty. They are the unconquered people.”

The crux of Lockyear’s presentation is what he terms Roadside Reservations, tourist camps set up along the Tamiami Trail. The Tamiami Trail, which stretches from Tampa to Miami, opened in 1928, providing an east-west passage from Naples to Miami. Alligator wrestling was a key component of the Roadside Reservations.

"Chestnut Billy was considered to be the best of the alligator wrestlers,” Lockyear said. “You would buy your postcard and then you'd get the autograph of the wrestler. They got paid about $6 a week, and they got another $7 as a stipend for food. It was a decent living. And they were there about five months out of the year. Most of the Indians that came and worked at these tourist camps came from Collier County.”

In addition to alligator wrestling, souvenirs were created and sold to the tourists who visited the roadside reservations. 

“This evolves to the idea that there is stuff that they can sell and the handicrafts begin to evolve,” Lockyear said. "At this time, it was not something that was a predominating part of the culture prior to the existence of the tourist camps. They had done patchwork, but as far as creating complicated designs and projects they certainly went to the next level because there was a market for it suddenly. It also meant they didn't have to spend their days in subsistence living, growing vegetables, getting fish, cleaning hides, things like that."

Lockyear entertained the audience with stories of Buffalo Tiger, Charley Tigertail, and Corey Osceola. Charley Tigertail operated a store in the Everglades. Tigertail traded furs, skins, and feathers, according to Charlton W. Tebeau in his seminal book Florida’s Last Frontier: The History of Collier County.

"It's the first trading post store run by a Native American in this area,” Lockyear said. "It's in Chokoloskee. I have no idea where.”

Lockyear also tells of Buffalo Tiger who eventually became the first elected tribal chairman from 1962-1985.

“In the 1930s and 1940s the average American's concept of what a Native American is came from Western movies,” Lockyear said. "They wear war bonnets. They hit people with tomahawks. Neither of those things are part of the Seminole culture. But people wanted to buy that kind of stuff. So Buffalo Tiger becomes very adept at painting images of Western Indians. Buffalo Tiger goes on to become chairman of the Miccosukee Tribe. He knows how to speak English fluently, incredibly well, knows how to do business with people, knows exactly what motivates these people, and it serves him very well in later life.”

Lockyear also touches on the opening of Everglades National Park and its impact.

“In 1938 an act of Congress determines we're going to have Everglades National Park,” Lockyear said. "It's not dedicated until 1947, but we know this thing is happening, and the Indians know that it's happening, too. And there's discussion. And anybody who heard my talk called In the Path of the Park, heard me talk about how it was always referred to as the Indian Problem. How are we going to get the Indians out of Everglades National Park? And the reason they wanted to do that is because of what is known as the myth of pristine wilderness. They wanted to return it to its pristine state. There never was a pristine state. People always lived there. There's always been human inhabitation of these regions. Before the Seminole there were Calusa, there were Paleo-Indians before that. Returning it to its natural state is with native people living in it. In 1947, Truman comes down here and dedicates the park. From all outward appearances, everybody's getting along really well. He's given gifts by leaders from the Seminole Tribe. But as the next administration comes in, things are starting to change.”

Lockyear references the Policy of Termination and Relocation from 1953-1969, when over 100 tribes were terminated from federal assistance.

"It was decided that we had too many tribes on the rosters,” Lockyear said, "and all we're doing is sending them money and they're not doing anything, and we need to just start taking them off there and tell them that they need to go get their own houses and start their own businesses. There's no free lunch in the United States, and you guys are done. And there are a whole bunch of tribes that were removed from the federal rosters during that time. The Seminole were on that list, but the Seminole already had a deal with the state of Florida, and there were a lot of negotiations about what was going to happen. In 1955, the head of the Bureau of Indian Affairs, Glenn Emmons, comes down and meets with the Seminole. Buffalo Tiger is there translating and is working with them and saying, 'I'm not sure we want to buy what this guy is selling us.’ A lot happened at this point that really had tremendous impact on what would be happening with the camps along the trail. People were trying to modernize a little bit and assimilate, but the leadership in the Seminole Tribe decided that they're going to make a preemptive strike. They file suit against the federal government in 1957 for $50 million for the land in the Everglades that had been stolen from them. Sounds reasonable, except a bunch of these Miccosukee elders said, ‘Whoa, whoa, whoa. No one asked us about this $50 million. If we take that, we just sold the Everglades. We're not doing this.' This was the Buckskin Declaration. We're still at war. This is our land, and we're going to continue to live in it until you remove us. It's so powerful. The end result of this is the Miccosukee split. They leave the Seminole Tribe and the elders appoint as their leader Buffalo Tiger because he knows both worlds. The actual Buckskin Declaration disappeared for years, then somebody found it in the Eisenhower Library.”

Lockyear said the Museum of the Everglades is unable to host the Buckskin Declaration of Independence.

"Neither this museum or even the Miccosukee museum have the facilities from a security standpoint,” Lockyear said. "You also have to be able to maintain proper temperature and humidity and things like that.”

The Buckskin Declaration of Independence was on display at the Ah-Tah-Thi-Ki Museum in Big Cypress in 2015.

Lockyear is immersed in learning about the Miccosukee.

 "It's a project that I'm working on,” Lockyear said. "It's humbling to be working together with a sovereign nation and learning their history and understanding their history. It's also very challenging because there are a lot of different beliefs. I'm working with somebody who's in the Tribal Business Council, who's young, and who's also an educator. He's worked for the last ten years at the Miccosukee School, and he said, 'I'm so glad that we're doing this because my people don't believe in writing down their history. History is something you tell. It's a story, and only certain people are empowered to tell the story. We're losing our history because of that.’”

But Lockyear got permission to for his Roadside Reservations exhibit.

"We got permission from the Tribal Council,” Lockyear said. “Now it's written down. One of the cool things about this is I’m able to help them preserve and share their history. It is more than enough for me."