Beginning a series of highlights before St. Augustine's 450th anniversary September 8.

   Before Columbus, before Balboa, before Ponce de Leon, Pizarro and Menendez there were the Indians - some 10,000-plus years before.

  St. Augustine was founded at a Timucuan Indian village in 1565. Bands of Indians both traded with and harassed early settlers in the 1600s, and joined defenders and attackers of the young settlement in the 1700s. Osceola, Florida's best known Indian leader, was imprisoned at the Castillo during the Seminole War in the early 1800s, as were western Indians in the late 1800s.

   "They seem to be a noble race," Pedro Menendez remarked in notes to his king, Philip of Spain, after his first encounter. Fishermen, hunters and farmers, he would later report. "They possess human physical characteristics, but were clothed only in loincloths of animal skins, their hair done in topknots, and their flesh covered with tattoos."

   He learned that the tattoo colors and arrangement indicated rank within the tribe.

   Early garrison officers reported these Indians were so quick that they could wait until the flash of an arquebusier's weapon, then dodge into the woods, and each could unleash four to five arrows in the time it took a Spaniard to reload. 

   Uneasy peace with Indians marked the first 300 years of St. Augustine. Survival of the garrison had to be laid in great measure to divine providence. When the English corsair Sir Francis Drake raided virtually defenseless St. Augustine in 1586, Indians living in the area snuck into the abandoned town and took anything of value they could carry. After Drake burned the town to the ground, the Indians returned with the townspeople and helped them rebuild.

   Florida's Indian population was estimated at 350,000 in 1513. Warfare, slave trading and especially European-borne disease dropped the number to almost none in the 1700s, but it swelled again in the early 1800s as northern settlers forced Indian migration to this virgin area rich in fish, game and farmland.

   These scattered bands were not, at first, united, but came to be called as a group Seminoles, or wild people, by the whites.

   Eventually joining forces to hold their homeland, the Seminoles engaged the young United States in its longest and most costly Indian war, a war to remove them to the west. That war was never won, simply declared ended by the American government.

   St. Augustine's Castillo de San Marcos, renamed Fort Marion when the U.S. took over the territory in 1821, was prison to numerous captured Indians during the Second Seminole War of 1835 to 1842. Among its prisoners was Florida's most famous Indian leader, Osceola. (In 1942 the original name, Castillo de San Marcos, was restored by an Act of Congress.)

   In the late 1800s, many leaders of the plains and western Indian tribes were moved here, away from their tribes out west - Kiowa, Comanche, Cheyenne, Arapaho and Chiracahua Apaches.

   The Indian confinement at St. Augustine and its Castillo play a major role in U.S. history, as it was here that Army Captain Richard Pratt began an Indian education program, which led to new Indian policies and the establishment of the Carlisle Indian School in Pennsylvania.