Mission Unaccomplished
by Michael Gannon, Ph.D.

In February of 1872 Father Peter Dufau took a ship southward to the small fishing village of Miami. He carried a letter from Augustin Verot, first Bishop of Saint Augustine, addressed to the Great Chief of the Indians living in the Everglades.

The bishop mistakenly thought that the Everglades tribes were descendants of the native people once served in the Franciscan missions of north Florida during the 17th century. In fact, the Everglades Indians were survivors of the Seminole nation who had never been exposed to the Christian Gospel. Nonetheless, it is instructive to read these two sentences from the bishop’s letter, since they exhibit his strong missionary impulse:

“We are willing to send you Sisters of Charity, who will teach your children how to read and write, and how to please the Great Spirit, and obtain eternal happiness for them after the present life. A Priest, or Black Gown, will accompany the Sisters, and you will enjoy in this a great consolation. May the God of Heaven bless you.”

Arriving at his destination, Father Dufau searched for a guide who would take him to the Great Chief, “but at any price,” he wrote back to the bishop, “I could not find a man, either white, black, or red, who dared or wished to take me in a canoe through the Everglades to the Chief.” The Seminoles who lived on the borders of the glades, he reported, were under the strictest discipline not to introduce white men into the heart of the Indian Territory. Those Indians he did succeed in meeting evidenced no interest whatever in Christianity, Father Dufau wrote:

“They have been so unjustly and so shamefully deceived and robbed of the fruits of their labors by unprincipled men that they fear to be deceived again. [When a white man] meets them for the first time by chance, they stand before him with studied and well-composed, almost freezing, coldness, answering questions without opening their lips by inarticulate sounds.”

Dufau judged that the Indians had some knowledge of fundamental morality and justice. They professed to believe in a Supreme Being, “who rewards the Indians in a place they call the happy hunting ground,” and chastises the wicked in the bowels of the earth. It was unclear what kind of worship, if any, they practiced.

They believe in witches, sorcerers, and evil spirits, wrote Father Dufau. Such spirits reside in rattlesnakes, which they refuse to harm, even if they slither around their houses or “coil themselves under their clothes. May the Almighty God deliver them from these superstitions.”

Father Dufau learned eventually that these were not former mission Indians, but Seminoles, who had suffered “disasters in the late war [the second and third Seminole wars] and the [forced] departure of more than 1,000 of their fellow Indians for the [trans-Mississippi] West.”

No further missionary approach to the Seminoles would be made until the 1940s, when Baptist ministers built churches among them.

Michael Gannon, Ph.D.