"A Perfect Paradise for Indians, Alligators, Serpents, Frogs": Reptiles and Florida in the Era of the Seminole Wars

Abstract

This article explores the cultural and environmental significance of reptiles – in particular, crocodilians and snakes – within U.S. accounts of Florida during the first half of the nineteenth century, with a specific case study of the Second Seminole War of the 1830s and 1840s. Interpreting Florida as a human-reptile contact zone has value both for our understanding of the territory’s U.S. borderland history and for the field of animal history, in which reptiles have remained often at the fringes. I argue that herpetofauna (reptiles and amphibians) shaped in myriad ways the experiences and imaginations of white soldiers and travelers in “frontier” Florida. Race and species at times blurred in fearful Euro-American conceptions of Florida as an inhospitable, water-logged territory – understood as in (disputed) possession of Native Americans, but also the alligators and snakes that seemed to “abound” in its rivers, woods, and everglades, and thus became actors in this historical “more-than-human” frontier.