West Point Command Historian Sherman L. Fleek critiqued weaknesses in early training at the US Military Academy in remarks at Saturday's Seminole War memorial ceremonies at the St. Augustine National Cemetery.

"During the first fifteen years after its founding in 1802," said Fleek, "a young man could attend courses for six months or two years and graduate once he passed his examinations and was commissioned into the Regular Army. In the detachment commanded by Major Francis Dade we find West Point's first official commandant of cadets, Captain George Gardiner. He was appointed to the academy from New York in 1812 and graduated two years later in 1814."

During what Fleek called "this Hundred Years War against native peoples, roughly from 1790 after the new nation was formed until the last gasps of dying breathe in 1890 at Wounded Knee in South Dakota, the stark reality was that marching, parading and drilling on the Plain above the scenic Hudson River did not prepare a young lieutenant for the reality of combat on the Great Plains, in the canyonlands of Montana and Wyoming, and certainly not the swamps and grasslands of central Florida."

Putting into perspective 40 years of on and off conflict between the Seminoles and young American army (1818-1858), Fleek recalled, "I asked my father one day which tribe was the most fierce and successful warriors. I expected him to say the Apaches, or the Comanches, or perhaps the Sioux and Cheyenne. He did not. He said, 'The only tribe the US Army did not conquer or defeat was the Seminoles of Florida.'"