| |
Five million years ago, Southwest Florida was a shallow tropical sea teeming with life.
During the Ice Ages, the sea level around Florida rose and fell as the ice sheets thawed,
reformed and melted again. Each time the water receded, a new layer of sand and shell
was deposited, gradually building up the limestone and sandy sediment that lie beneath
much of Collier County today.
The first humans reached Southwest Florida at least 10,000 years ago, when the climate
was colder and drier. The earliest archaeological evidence of man in Collier County was
discovered in 1880 at the Bay West Site, northeast of Naples, and dates back to about
6,500 B.C.
Centuries before Columbus landed in the New World, Florida's lower Gulf coast was
controlled by the Calusa Indians. A complex and powerful people, the Calusa built huge
mounds of shell and earth for their religious temples and public buildings. Highly skilled
Calusa artisans also created elaborate masks and wood carvings for religious and ceremonial
purposes, such as those discovered by Frank Hamilton Cushing on Marco Island in 1895.
Throughout the 1700s, small bands of Creek Indians from Georgia and Alabama joined
with escaped black slaves and other displaced Indians to forge a new identity in Florida
known as the Seminole.
From 1835 to 1842 vastly outnumbered Seminole war parties fought the U.S. Army to a
stalemate in the longest, bloodiest and most expensive Indian war in U.S. history. A chain
of forts along the fringes of Collier County were reactivated when a third and final fight with
the Seminole broke out in 1855. The few surviving Seminole found refuge deep in the
Everglades and Big Cypress Swamp where they developed a culture uniquely suited to the
climate and terrain of south Florida.
|
