Fort Clark

The pay of the scouts was barely sufficient to feed their families, let alone the extended community whom the scouts tried to support. Elderly Black Seminoles, like John Horse’s sister Juana, were often destitute.

Throughout the period, officers at Fort Clark tried to alleviate the poverty of the maroons. They frequently petitioned the government for rations, which were dispensed erratically, usually on the initiative of local officers without government approval. With equal urgency, officers sent and endorsed a series of formal requests to relocate the maroons to the Oklahoma Indian Territory. Such a move was seen “as a last hope,” General Philip Sheridan wrote the U.S. Adjutant General in 1875, “that some action will be taken to meet the wants of a deserving people whose service has been and can still be made so valuable to the Government.”