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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