Blessed with an intellect of no ordinary mould, he reflected deeply upon his condition, and determined upon his course. Hostilities had not yet commenced, and he was in the daily habit of conversing with Indians, and often with Exiles. He was well acquainted with the character of each, and knew the men to whom he could communicate important information with safety. To a few of the Exiles, men of integrity and boldness, he imparted the facts that Dade, with his troops, would leave Fort Brooke about the twenty-fifth of December, for Fort King, and that he, Louis, was to act as their guide; that he would conduct them by the trail leading near the Great Wahoo Swamp, and pointed out the proper place for an attack.[81]
This information was soon made known to the leading and active Exiles, and to a few of the Seminole chiefs and warriors. The Exiles, conscious that the war was to be waged on their account, were anxious to give their friends some suitable manifestation of their prowess. They desired as many of the Exiles capable of bearing arms as could assemble at a certain point in the Great Wahoo Swamp, to meet them there as early as the twenty-seventh of December, armed, and prepared to commence the war by a proper demonstration of their gallantry.
Information was sent to Osceola and his followers, inviting them to be present. They were lying secreted near Fort King, too intent upon the death of Thompson to turn their eyes for a moment from their victim. However, many other chiefs and warriors assembled at the time and place designated, in order to witness what they supposed would be the first scene in the great drama about to be acted. Their spies detached for that purpose, arrived at their rendezvous almost hourly, bringing information of the commencement of Dade's march, the number of men forming his battalion, and their places of encampment each night.
In the evening of the twenty-seventh, their patrols brought word that Dade and his men had arrived within three miles of the point at which they intended to attack them. Of course every preparation was now made for placing themselves in ambush at an early hour, along the trail in which it was expected the troops would pass. The scouts reported that precisely one hundred and ten men constituted the force which they expected to encounter, and the official report fully confirms the accuracy of their intelligence. The Exiles looked to the coming day with great intensity of feeling. More than two hundred years since, their ancestors had been piratically seized in their own country, and forcibly torn from their friends--from the land of their nativity. For a time they submitted to degrading bondage; but more than a century had elapsed since they fled from South Carolina, and found an asylum under Spanish law in the wilds of Florida. There their fathers and mothers had been buried. They had often visited their graves, and mourned over the sad fate to which their race appeared to be doomed. For fifty years they had been subjected to almost constant persecution at the hands of our Government. The blood of their fathers, brothers and friends, massacred at "Blount's Fort," was yet unavenged. They had seen individuals from among them piratically seized and enslaved. Their friends, residing with E-con-chattimico and with Walker, had been openly and flagrantly kidnapped, and sold into interminable servitude, where they were then sighing and moaning in degrading bondage. In looking forward, they read their intended doom, clearly written in the slave codes of Florida and the adjoining States, which could only be avoided by their most determined resistance. If they behaved worthy of men in their condition, their influence with their savage allies would be confirmed, and they would be able to control their action on subsequent occasions. Every consideration, therefore, tended to nerve them to the work of death which lay before them.