The last Florida ground that Billy Bowlegs and his people stood on was an island at the very mouth of Tampa Bay. His surrender in 1858 ended the last of the Seminole wars, and the boat that carried him into exile took on the final group of his band at Egmont Key, in sight of Mullet Key across the channel.
Holata Micco, a Muscogee title meaning roughly “Alligator Chief,” was born around 1810 on the Alachua savannah of north-central Florida, into the ruling Cowkeeper dynasty of the Seminole; he was a nephew of the head chief Micanopy. Known to Americans as Billy Bowlegs, he fought through the long and ruinous Second Seminole War of 1835 to 1842, and when that war ended with most of the great Seminole leaders dead or exiled, he emerged as the most prominent chief of the few hundred who remained in Florida.
For a decade after, Bowlegs and his people lived quietly on their own lands in the southwest of the peninsula. The peace ended in 1855, when a U.S. Army survey party pushed into his territory and, by several accounts, deliberately destroyed his crops, including a prized banana grove, in what many historians read as a calculated provocation. It worked. Bowlegs led his warriors in the guerrilla campaign that became the Third Seminole War, and for three years the Army, hunting him through the Big Cypress and the Everglades with dogs and ever more men, could not defeat him. Neither side could win outright.
What force could not do, money and exhaustion did. In early 1858 the government brought the western chief Wild Cat back from Indian Territory to persuade Bowlegs to leave, and offered him a substantial sum, reported as ten thousand dollars, with lesser amounts for his subchiefs and people. Worn down, Bowlegs and roughly a hundred and twenty of his followers accepted, surrendering near Fort Myers in May 1858. The site, Billy's Creek, still bears his name.
The defeated Seminoles were taken to the coast and put aboard the steamer Grey Cloud. At Egmont Key, the small island at the entrance to Tampa Bay, the ship took on a final group of captives, some forty more Seminoles who had been held there. The island had served through the war as an internment camp, where the army confined captured Seminoles in a guarded blockhouse to await removal; by some accounts more than three hundred passed through it, and a persistent and sorrowful tradition holds that some prisoners walked into the bay to drown rather than be carried west. From Egmont the Grey Cloud sailed for New Orleans, and from there Bowlegs went on to Indian Territory, in what is now Oklahoma, where he died barely a year later, in 1859. His name was later taken up by another Seminole, a Union captain in the Civil War, a coincidence that has tangled the two men's stories ever since. But the chief who fought the last Seminole war passed his final hours on Florida soil on the island that guards the mouth of this bay.