Osceola (1971)

1835. The Native American chief Osceola and his tribe, the Seminoles, live peacefully in Florida by farming and hunting. They seek to coexist peacefully with their white neighbors. Some of those neighbors share the views of Moore, an opponent of slavery who owns a nearby sawmill. Moore also employs Black people, not as slaves but as wage workers. But there are also those who have long seen the Seminoles as a thorn in their side, such as Raynes, a wealthy plantation owner and slaveholder who wants to grow sugar cane on Seminole land. Some escaped slaves live among the Seminoles, which he regards as the theft of “private property.” When his daughter Gladis tells him that Osceola frightened her horse (in reality, he helped her stop the horse after it bolted), and another slave manages to escape to the Indians, Raynes decides to act. He hires some thugs and the slave overseer Hammer to lure the Indians into a trap and bring back the escaped slaves. Major Thompson bribes the Seminole chief Emathla with a large sum of money, asking only that the Seminoles relocate to an “extremely fertile land” in Arkansas in return. Osceola witnesses the bribe and advises his people not to follow Emathla, suspecting that it is a trap. Acting in self-defense, he shoots Emathla. Only a handful of Indians believe the false promises; despite the warning, they move on and are gunned down in cold blood a short time later by Hammer and his men. Hammer then abducts Osceola’s wife, Che-Cho-Ter, on Raynes’s orders. Osceola rescues his wife from Raynes, during which Hammer is killed and the mansion is set on fire. When a gunboat opens fire on a large number of escaped slaves, Osceola realizes he can no longer prevent war and single-handedly blows up the gunboat. In the end, the escaped slaves flee by boat together with the Indians. Moore, whose sawmill was destroyed by the gunboat, flees north because he can no longer make a living in Florida. For the Seminoles, this marks the beginning of a seven-year war that will claim many more lives on both sides.