Fort Country: The War That Made Florida
Why is every other street in Florida named after a people the United States tried to erase? And what is that giant lit-up guitar on the horizon?
I moved to downtown Miami five years ago after a long stretch elsewhere in the country. The place names got to me first: Fort Lauderdale, Fort Myers, Fort Pierce, Fort Meade, Osceola County, Dade County. Each one is named after a military post or an officer or a chief from a war almost nobody talks about anymore. Then one night I saw the guitar. A 450-foot hotel shaped like a Gibson Les Paul, glowing over the Everglades, owned by the people the U.S. Army spent forty years trying to remove.
The people who won the Seminole Wars named their cities after the forts they built. The people who survived those wars own Hard Rock.
Fort Country traces the 200-year legal chain that runs from Johnson v. M'Intosh in 1823 through the 1981 Butterworth bingo ruling, the Indian Gaming Regulatory Act, the 2007 Seminole acquisition of Hard Rock International, the 2021 Florida sports betting compact, and the 2025 Metropolitan Park casino license in Queens. It is a story about how a doctrine designed to diminish Indigenous sovereignty was gradually appropriated and inverted by the people it was designed to diminish.
The seven chapters:
The Overstory. The toponymic infrastructure of conquest and what the Armed Occupation Act of 1842 did to every chain of title in Florida.
Two Wars. The Second Seminole War as two overlapping conflicts: the Indian war most histories describe, and the slave revolt running underneath it. Abraham, John Caesar, the Black Seminoles, and the fort at Prospect Bluff.
The Head. Osceola's capture under a flag of truce, the portraits painted in his cell, the post surgeon who removed his head after death, and the medical museums it passed through.
140 Canoes. Commander John T. McLaughlin's Mosquito Fleet: the riverine force the U.S. Navy invented from scratch in the Everglades in 1839, then forgot so completely that both sides of the Civil War had to reinvent river warfare a generation later.
Wild Cat and John Horse. The Seminole and Black Seminole leaders who escaped removal to Mexico, founding communities in Nacimiento and Brackettville that still exist, and a creole that persists on Red Bays in the Bahamas.
Whookipee. The Hollywood Reservation bingo hall, James Billie, the Hard Rock acquisition, the Guitar Hotel, and the legal cascade that turned a $900,000 bingo operation into one of the most powerful gaming licenses in North America.
Who Speaks. The split between the Seminole Tribe of Florida, the Seminole Nation of Oklahoma, the Miccosukee Tribe, and the Independent Traditionalists; Abiaka's bones in the Big Cypress; and why authority over the word "Seminole" is still a live legal dispute.
Running through all seven chapters is a parallel story about institutional memory: how legal knowledge compounds across generations and how military knowledge evaporates. The legal legacy of the Seminole Wars built modern Florida. The military legacy was forgotten before the Civil War even started.
A note on how this book was made. This is a short, AI-assisted book. A few days of identifying credible sources, a few hundred dollars in AI costs, and a lot of editorial back-and-forth until it said what I wanted it to say. It is not a tribal history, not a definitive military history, and not a legal textbook. It is one curious reader's attempt to connect a question about street names to a building shaped like a guitar, and everything in between.
If the table of contents and the sample read well, we will probably get along. If not, that is what the sample is for.
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