The same Egmont Key that holds the lighthouse and the ruins of Fort Dade holds a graver history beneath its sand. At the close of the Third Seminole War, the island was used as a guarded stockade for captured Seminole people awaiting forced deportation to the West, among them the famous leader Billy Bowlegs. The Seminole people remember it as “The Dark Place” and “Our Alcatraz.” Many who were held here never left Florida alive; they died on the island and lie buried beside the lighthouse. It is, in a real and terrible sense, the last act of the Trail of Tears, and it happened within sight of Mullet Key.
For four decades, across what the United States divides into three Seminole Wars but the Seminole people experience as one long war of survival from 1812 to 1858, the government waged a campaign to drive them out of Florida and force them west to Indian Territory in present-day Oklahoma. The third and final phase, sometimes called the Billy Bowlegs War, ran from 1855 to 1858, a grinding pursuit of the few hundred Seminoles who still refused to leave their homeland in the southern interior. As bands were captured or pressured into surrender, the Army needed a secure place to hold them before the transports came, and the isolated island at the mouth of Tampa Bay was ideal: easily guarded, impossible to flee on foot, out of sight of the mainland.
Egmont Key became that place. Captured Seminole men, women, and children, by the accounts as many as three hundred at a time, were confined in a guarded blockhouse and stockade on the island, sometimes for weeks, awaiting the ships that would carry them to New Orleans and up the Mississippi to the West. The newspapers of the day, as far away as New York and Chicago, reported on the camp; the people inside it endured a misery the records barely captured. Many, already broken by war and flight, sickened and died of disease on the island, and there are documented cases of despair and suicide, and a persistent account of warriors who walked out into the bay to drown rather than be carried from their homeland. The Egmont light, built to guide ships to safety, looked down on what the Seminole Tribe's own historians do not hesitate to call a concentration camp.
The most prominent person held on Egmont was Billy Bowlegs, whose Seminole name was Holata Micco, one of the last great leaders of Seminole resistance, a man so well known nationally that he had been taken to Washington and given a medal by President Fillmore in 1852. He surrendered at Fort Myers on 4 May 1858, was brought to Egmont with his band, and his removal west was trumpeted across the country as the end of the war; he died of smallpox not long after reaching Indian Territory. But the figure who has come to embody the camp is Polly Parker, whose Seminole name was Emateloye. Captured in 1856 at Fisheating Creek, held at Egmont in 1858, she was loaded with about a hundred and twenty-five others aboard the steamer Grey Cloud bound for New Orleans and the West. When the ship put in at St. Marks, south of Tallahassee, to take on fuel, Parker, allowed ashore to gather medicinal plants, slipped away with a small group and walked some four hundred miles back through the Florida wilderness to the Okeechobee country. Her escape and survival made her an enduring symbol of Seminole resilience, and she is honored as a foundational ancestor of the Seminole Tribe of Florida that endures today, descended from the remnant who never surrendered and never left the Everglades.
The dead of the camp were buried on Egmont, most in unmarked graves near the lighthouse, in what is now called the Lighthouse Cemetery. Their treatment did not end with death. In 1909, when the Army wanted the ground for a Fort Dade parade field, it dug up the cemetery; a surviving bill of lading records twenty-five bodies disinterred, boxed in pine coffins with metal liners, and shipped to the Tampa rail station at a cost of $271.30, to be reburied at the St. Augustine National Cemetery. How many Seminoles truly died and were buried on Egmont, and where, is unknown, lost to poor records and to the relentless erosion that has eaten away more than half the island since the 1850s; some graves, like some of Fort Dade's batteries, may already be under the Gulf. In 2016 and 2017 the Tribal Historic Preservation Office of the Seminole Tribe of Florida, with archaeologist Dave Scheidecker, surveyed the island and recovered mid-nineteenth-century artifacts, belt buckles and rivets, the material traces of the camp, and tribal members have come to Egmont to honor ancestors who, in a councilman's words, fought very dearly to be free.
The internment leaves Egmont Key, and this archive, with one of its darkest ironies. A generation after captured Seminoles were held and buried on the island, the United States built a coastal fort there and named it Fort Dade, for Major Francis Dade, the officer whose death in an 1835 ambush had begun the Second Seminole War. So the island that served as the final waystation in the removal of the Seminoles was given, as its permanent name, the name of the man whose killing had launched the wars that produced that removal. The layers sit in the same patch of sand: the first peoples driven out, the camp where they suffered, the graves dug up for a parade ground, and the fort named for the war that drove them, all of it now slipping quietly into the sea.