Scouts

Both the army and the maroons understood the arrangement in Texas as temporary. A large portion of the Black Seminoles had expressed a desire to emigrate back to the Oklahoma Indian Territory. The end of American slavery had made the territory less foreboding. Maroons who once sought freedom in Mexico now wanted to reunite with kinsmen and former Seminole Indian allies, who likewise sought reunion.

Until a reunion could take place, however, the maroons agreed to serve the U.S. In exchange they received money, rations, stock, agricultural equipment and, problematically, promises of land or the use of it. The precise terms of the agreement between Captain Perry and John Kibbetts have never been located. From the 1870s on, generations of Black Seminoles understood “the treaty,” as they called it, as an exchange of military services for a promise of land either in Texas or the Indian Territory. Officers of the period corroborated that such a promise existed, but documentation did not survive, and the issue remained a sore point for the next century. It remains so to this day.*