Osceola

Osceola would become the most famous Seminole chief of the war, yet by birthright he was neither a Seminole nor a chief. Born around 1804 in Alabama, he was the son of an Englishman named William Powell who married among the Upper Creeks. Osceola emigrated to Florida as a boy and as a result lacked any hereditary claim to Seminole leadership. Moreover, he was an ethnic polyglot, the product of a culture where Creeks, English, Scotch-Irish, and blacks mixed and intermarried. In the words of one of his most dependable modern biographers, "Osceola was all of these."