The History of La Florida
The heroes of La Florida represent a group of individuals who lived during Florida's first Spanish period, from around 1565-1763. These individuals – Spaniards, Africans, and members of various Native American groups – hold in common that they lived lives of incredible dignity and courage during a time of dramatic change and horrible danger.
A mission
Even after Juan Ponce de Léon first sighted the land he called La Florida, many years passed before the Spanish could establish a lasting settlement in the land that the Guale, Timucua, Apalachee, Tocobaga, Calusa, and many other people called home. Although explorers and seasoned soldiers were the driving force of Spanish development on Floridian shores, many of those who came did so for altruistic reasons. Many priests, for instance, left their homelands forever to spend their lives in service of Florida’s indigenous people. They suffered cold, went hungry, and gave their possessions to the poor. They learned new languages, experienced loneliness, and walked unarmed into hostile villages. They were heroes.
A Franciscan friar, one of those who labored so long in the poor but promising land of La Florida.
The missions
Most of the Spanish settlers in La Florida (which originally extended north as far as modern day Virginia) lived in or around the old city of St. Augustine. The Native people of Florida continued to live in their traditional regions. Missionary priests went to many native towns and, with the consent and invitation of many chiefs (caciques or holatas) helped to establish churches there. The Apalachee town of Talimali, for instance, became the Mission San Luis de Talimai. From the 1590s onward in La Florida, many of Florida’s indigenous people made their homes in such missions. At these mission towns, people grew corn, made tools, raised livestock, and did all the ordinary things a town has to do. The ultimate purpose of every mission, however, was prayer and growth in virtue.
Antonio Cuipa, inija of an Apalachee mission. Native, educated, and talented, Antonio brought life to his community. He is pictured here offering to strangers one of the many flutes he made and played.
Don Patricio de Hinachuba, an Apalachee cacique who wrote to the King of Spain seeking justice for his people.
A new look at the missions
The missions were not always easy places to live. Sometimes, terrible epidemics filled communities with death and fear. Sometimes, Spanish soldiers treated their Apalachee and Timucua neighbors badly and failed to see them as human beings. Often, though, the missions became places where Spanish and Native people alike grew in selflessness and practiced their shared religion in peace. Many of the missions of northern Florida were destroyed between 1702 and 1704 in a series of devastating attacks by British colonists to the north and their native allies. These attacks were motivated in part by a British desire for Southern expansion and partly by a hatred of Spanish Catholicism. Many people who lived at the missions died in those attacks – but they died for what they believed to be true. These people died as heroes.