Seminole History in Tampa: Fort Brooke, the Seminole Wars and the Tribe Today

Fort Brooke was set up on the Hillsborough River at Tampa Bay in 1824 on orders from Secretary of War Calhoun, and the Seminole side of the story begins with the Treaty of Moultrie Creek, which moved Seminoles to a reservation south of Ocala.

The City of Tampa Clerk's archive timeline records that Col. George Mercer Brooke received orders in November 1823 to set up a military post on Tampa Bay, and that he, James Gadsden and four companies of infantry arrived on January 18, 1824 (City of Tampa Clerk). The city's own history page says those four companies set up Fort Brooke to protect the harbor at Tampa Bay (City of Tampa).

The Seminole side of the story starts with the Treaty of Moultrie Creek. The Seminole Tribe of Florida says the treaty told Seminoles to give up their farms and ranches in the north and move to a reservation south of Ocala, land they knew to be far less desirable (Seminole Tribe of Florida). Meanwhile Fort Brooke at Tampa Bay grew quickly: by 1829 it had a guardhouse, barracks, storehouses, a blockhouse, a powder magazine, stables and a wharf (Florida Department of State).

Some older Tampa histories, including an earlier version of this page, give January 10, 1824 as the founding date. The City Clerk's archive timeline, the official record checked for this revision, gives January 18, 1824 as the day Brooke's party arrived; it does not use January 10.

Major Francis Dade's column left Fort Brooke in Tampa for Fort King in December 1835 and was attacked by about 180 Seminole warriors near present day Bushnell, an attack that opened the Second Seminole War.

Under the Treaty of Payne's Landing of May 1832, which only a few Seminoles signed, they were to leave Florida for the West within three years. The Army came to enforce it in 1835, and on the road from Fort Brooke to Fort King, Dade's command was attacked by 180 warriors under Micanopy, Alligator and Jumper (Florida Department of State).

Florida State Parks dates the attack to December 28, 1835, and puts it in a pine forest about 50 miles short of Fort King, in present day Bushnell; it says 107 officers and men set out from Fort Brooke on Tampa Bay, that all but three were killed, and that six warriors fell (Florida State Parks). The Department of State page says only one man of the detachment survived. The two state agencies disagree on the survivor count, and both are stated here.

The battlefield lies near Bushnell, not in Tampa, but the column was a Fort Brooke command. After Dade's defeat, Seminoles and their allies who had escaped slavery laid siege to Fort Brooke for almost a month in 1836 (Florida Department of State).

Fort Brooke was a major military post of the 1835 to 1842 war: more than 40,000 soldiers passed through the Tampa post, in a war the state calls the fiercest the U.S. government waged against American Indians.

The troop figure comes from the Florida Maritime Heritage Trail, which also says the fort's grounds reached 16 square miles at their largest before the federal government cut them back several times (Florida Department of State). On July 25, 1848, the day Tampa was legally created, President Polk signed an act granting Hillsborough County 160 acres of the fort's land.

The war's scale was lopsided. The Department of State says Micanopy, Alligator, Jumper and Osceola led fewer than 3,000 warriors against four U.S. generals and more than 30,000 troops, that the United States spent more than $20 million, that more than 1,500 soldiers died, and that a nominal end came in 1842 without any peace treaty (Florida Department of State). By then most Seminoles had been moved from Florida to Indian Territory, present day Oklahoma, far from Fort Brooke and Tampa Bay.

After 1842 a smaller Seminole population stayed in Florida, fought the Third Seminole War from 1855 to 1858, and saw captives held on Egmont Key at the mouth of Tampa Bay before removal west.

The Department of State says the Third Seminole War broke out in 1855 over land, and that patrols and rewards for capture had cut the Seminole population in Florida to about 200 when it ended in 1858 (Florida Department of State). The department's Seminole History page gives a different figure, roughly 200 to 300 left in Florida when the United States declared the conflicts over on May 8, 1858 (Florida Department of State). Florida State Parks says Egmont Key, at the mouth of Tampa Bay, served as a camp for captured Seminoles at the end of the Third Seminole War (Florida State Parks). Fort Brooke played only minor roles in that war and in the Civil War and was abandoned afterward (Maritime Heritage Trail).

The Seminole Tribe of Florida tells this period in stronger terms. It says the Army shifted to targeting home camps and capturing mostly women, children and elders, that places like Egmont Key became concentration camps for those taken, and that Billy Bowlegs, Holatta Micco, and many of his followers then agreed to removal to Oklahoma (Seminole Tribe of Florida). The Tribe adds that American histories count three Seminole Wars, while for the Seminole people there was one war, from 1812 to 1858.

Those who stayed are the ancestors of the Tribe that now holds land in Tampa. In the state's telling, Florida's Seminoles descend from only 300 people the U.S. Army never captured in the 19th century, and they call themselves the Unconquered People (Florida Department of State).

The Seminole story in Tampa runs from the November 1823 order to build Fort Brooke to the 1858 end of the Third Seminole War, and resumes with the Tribe's Tampa Reservation and its March 2004 Hard Rock opening.

The Tampa dates in the table are the U.S. government's war dates. The Seminole Tribe frames the same years as a single conflict that began in 1812 and ended in 1858 (Seminole Tribe of Florida).

The Seminole Tribe of Florida holds a Tampa Reservation off Interstate 4 at North Orient Road, home since March 2004 to the Seminole Hard Rock Hotel and Casino Tampa at 5223 Orient Rd.

The Tribe lists the Tampa Reservation among its reservations and gives the hotel's March 2004 opening and its location just off I-4 at North Orient Road on the Seminole Indian Reservation in Tampa (Seminole Tribe of Florida). Its Seminoles Today history says the addition of the Tampa and Immokalee reservations brought the Tribe's federal trust holdings in Florida to more than 90,000 acres, and it lists the Sheraton Tampa East among the enterprises of that period (Seminole Tribe of Florida).

Tampa is one of six Seminole reservations in Florida, with Hollywood, Big Cypress, Brighton, Immokalee and Fort Pierce, and the state puts the number living on them at more than 2,000 (Florida Department of State). The downtown fort itself is gone: Ybor City businesses, other parts of Tampa and part of the interstate sit on former Fort Brooke ground, and bronze plaques mark where parts of the post stood (Maritime Heritage Trail).

The Tribe that holds the Tampa Reservation organized itself on July 21, 1957, when members voted for a constitution establishing the federally recognized Seminole Tribe of Florida (Florida Department of State). In 1970 the Indian Claims Commission awarded the Seminoles of Oklahoma and Florida, together, $12,347,500 for the land the U.S. military had taken from them.

The burials later found on old Fort Brooke ground in downtown Tampa, and their reburial, have their own Fort Brooke Cemetery guide in this Tampa history section and are not repeated here. Last verified: October 18, 2026, against the Department of State Seminole history pages, the Seminole Tribe of Florida site and the City of Tampa Clerk's archive.