14 it since I knew--they taught white American people democracy! They didn't have any chiefs. They said to Osceola, "You lead us. You fight better." There was delegated authority. K: Tell me the funny story about Osceola. R: Well, Buffalo Tiger told me once...and all these Indians know the old stories from their side. Illiterate people are very articulate and well-spoken people, but they don't read, and they know it from their side of the fence. And Buffalo said, "Well, the story we know goes that Coacoochee and Osceola were captured under that flag of truce when they went in. And they all went in and were taken to that place at St. Augustine, and they were in that fort. They sang a song and they made a magic, and they got the dogs quiet, and they got the white soldiers asleep, and all the Indians--Coacoochee and all but Osceola--got out through those narrow little slits." Buffalo had been up there. He says, "You know how narrow they are." I said, "Yeah!" He said, "Osceola was too fat to get out." So I told that to Howard Osceola. It's a certain touching tragedy that fatness does run in the Osceola family today. They're diabetics. They can't drink anymore! And Howard said, "That sounds like Buffalo! That wasn't true at all! Osceola and Coacoochee, who was Wildcat, made a deal that Wildcat would get out and Osceola would stay there and try to reason with the white people. It is well known he died, and Coacoochee escaped. The Loxahatchee River, which runs into the Ocean at Jupiter, Florida, is a touching place. There is a place near it called Hungry Land Slough. And why I know it's touch- ing is I was talking to Betty Mae Jumper when we were doing the newspaper, and we were doing place names, and I said, "What does the Loxahatchee River mean?" And she said, "My grandmother," (that was her Indian grand- mother) "said that's the Lie River." I said, "What do you mean, the Lie River?" She said, "It's another place that white men lied to Indians." And by our own history, white people's history that is so true, the Indians came in there and.... It was before the Civil War, and the white general in charge sent word to Secretary of War Poinsett [Joel R. Poinsett]: "The Indians said, 'We would like to surrender, but we don't want to go to' (this was right at the tail end of the Seminole War) 'but we don't want to go to Oklahoma'."