1836 Seat of War Map
#8 location of Dade battle on the Withlacoochee River while on the way to Fort King #5
(click for full map)

Tensions continued to escalate when on morning of December 28, 1835 two U.S. Army companies numbering about a 100 men under the command of Major Francis L. Dade left Fort Brooke on Tampa Bay to reinforce Fort King in Alachua. On they way they were ambushed by approximately 180 Seminole and Black Seminole warriors led by the chiefs Micanopy, Jumper and Alligator.

   At a narrow passage where the road was bordered by palmettos, the Indians sprang their trap. Half of Dade’s men – more than fifty – fell at the first volley. The concealed Indians were firing at a distance of thirty or forty yards, and they were in a position to take deliberate aim. It is said that Micanopy leveled his gun at Major Dade, who was riding in the advance guard, Jumper took aim at Captain U. S. Frazer, and both officers fell dead at the first Seminole volley. In the words of Georg A. MaCall, who accompanied Genera Gaines on a inspection of the battlefield two months later, Major Dade was “shot probably though the heart, as I should judge by the bullet-hole in his side.”[1]

Only three U.S. soldiers survived the attack., two which  died within a few days and the third died from his wounds five years later.  The army guide Luis Pacheco was taken prisoner by the Seminoles but his life spared because he was a Negro. Pacheco was later removed west with other Seminoles but returned to the site of the massacre fifty years later when he told his story to Mrs. John Claude Engle, the daughter of the his original owner when he was a slave.

The battle, later was called the Dade Battle or Dade Massacre, is considered the beginning of the Second Seminole War. 

[1] The Seminoles, Edwin C. McReynolds (1957), University of Oklahoma Press, p 154

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