They Still Don't Talk to the Others

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April 25, 1836

In a letter to a superior on April 25, 1836 William Whitehead recounted the harbor attack that leveled the house of the Customs Collector Henry B. Crews. Another Whitehead letter a month later said that the bodies of Crews and a boat-hand had been found and that the Indians that Crews had employed at the Useppa fishery had killed them. The same year Crews was killed, a year after the manager of the fisheries José Caldez boarded his schooner the "Joseffa" for Cuba for the last time, the fishing company he operated, symbolically passed on to him by the Calusas, would be overgrown and other fishing communities nearby would be burned by American soldiers fearing those communities were sympathetic with the Indians. Not long after, Crews' replacement would report "no living person in Charlotte Harbor."


 

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