Sail of Tears

Some folks find themselves lost at sea, forever in search of dry land, never at a loss for water and storm. Same goes for entire families. Here's a story about both.

Following are are some materials from the Native American part of my ancestral line. They come from stories passed down by my maternal grandmother, my mother's genealogical research, old family photographs and documents, and my own life experiences. Hopefully this will add a little to the rediscovery of our heritage. I may add more materials or commentary at a later date.

John Bemo, the noted Seminole educator and my great-great-great-grandfather, was born in Florida in 1825 and given the Seminole name Talamasmico. His family may have been from the vicinity of St. Marks, although a great deal of India wandering and migration occurred in those times.

At the age of around nine or ten, while he and his father visited St. Augustine on a trading expedition, his father got into a drunken street brawl with another Seminole, both of them encouraged to fight by a mob of white men. According to at least one account, the other Seminole's name was King Philip.

The father died of his wounds the next day, leaving the young Talamasmico to wander the city lost, alone and hungry. Shortly he met a group of white sailors from a French merchant ship. He was surprised that these white men acted friendly towards him, having no similar experience except from the "round hats", or William Penn's men. They fed him and offered to take him home, so he boarded ship and went to sleep. When he awoke, he was in open sea, shanghaied.

Settling into his new life as a cabin boy, he traveling the world, learned ship's carpentry and converted to Christianity. He also befriended a sailor named Jean Bemeau and adopted the man's name for his own, anglicized to John Bemo. He apparently didn't abandon his Seminole name entirely, though, for "Tal·a·mas·mico" is printed in large type on the reverse of a portrait photograph. Meanwhile, the Second Seminole War erupted in Florida, which would prove disasterous to his tribe and pivotal to the young sailor's future.

Eventually he left the sea behind him in Philadelphia, where he remained for a year. He joined the Mariner's Church, where the Rev. Orson Douglas took an interest in him and arranged for his education. At around the same time, as the highly unpopular war ended with no clear victory on either side, the U.S Army rounded up as many Seminoles as they could and force-marched them to Oklahoma on a "Trail of Tears". This is why the Seminoles have two distinct tribal organizations, one in Oklahoma and another in Florida.

He decided to return to his tribe, and in 1843 was sent to Indian Territory (later part of Oklahoma) as a teacher and missionary at a salary of $300 per year, possibly under the sponsorship of the federal government. There he discovered that his entire family had died in either the war or on the Trail of Tears, and that the Seminoles in that region were destitute to the point of near-extinction. In 1844 he began teaching at Prospect Hill, in the nearby Creek Nation.

After a time he left school and pulpit in order to raise funds for his tribe's survival. He traveled to various cities, giving one-man shows to packed houses and receiving as much as $1,000 per night. There he would dress in traditional Seminole garb and lecture on his tribal heritage and the injustices suffered upon his people. He also claimed to be a nephew of the late, renowned war chief Oceola, although many Seminoles at that time made similar claims.

He married Harriet Lewis, a Creek who also lived in Indian Territory and who is described has having similar interests to his. The government had removed most of her tribe to Indian Territory a few years before the Seminoles' arrival, so it's likely that at the least they shared a common sense of loss. Following a matrilineal tradition common to both tribes, my family's tribal affiliation is Muscogee Creek.

They owned a prosperous farm with an excellent orchard, northwest of Muscogee in the vicinity of Fern Mountain. Instead of selling their harvest, they gave it to the needy. John died in 1890, a respected member of his community. I don't know when Harriet died. The original farm is still owned by the Bemo family.