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Lake City, Florida: A Sesquicentennial Tribute (2009) H. Morris Williams, Dr. Kevin M. McCarthy

Chapter Three: 18th Century

Chapter Three: 18 Century
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Spain controlled Florida from the time of the early Spanish
explorers like Hernando de Soto and Pedro Menéndez de Avilés,
but ceded it to Great Britain in 1763. The British controlled it for

twenty years (1763 – 1783), but did not develop it much. It was
during that two-decade time when the Bartrams, John and his son
William, traveled through Florida collecting plant samples for sale to
a botanist back in England. William, who did much of the traveling,
went up the St. Johns and walked over to present-day Alachua County,
but he did not get up to the Lake City area.

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By the late 18 century, so many Native Americans had died
from European diseases or slavery or attacks by Indians from Georgia
and the Carolinas that the peninsula was mostly devoid of people,
especially outside the one major settlement, St. Augustine. Into that
breach came a group of Native Americans who split off from the

Lower Creek Indians in Georgia, a group that were called “Cimarone,”
meaning “runaway,” a word that would evolve into “Seminole.” Their
battles with the whites, especially during the Second Seminole War
(1835 – 1842), would cause many whites to stay away from Florida,
but in the end the whites dominated the Indians, who were either
killed, shipped west to the Oklahoma Territory, or escaped south to
the Everglades.

Some time in the 18 century the Seminoles settled in the
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area of what became Columbia County. One of their communities
was called Alpata Telophka, a name that honored the local chief,
Halpatter Tustenuggee. The word Tustenuggee meant “Alligator.”
The community on the shores of Lake Desoto was doing well, perhaps
because of its central location in north-central Florida. Dirt paths led

from Alligator to a smaller settlement on the north shore of Alligator
Lake.

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