The United States acquired the territory that became downtown Chicago from Wyandots, Delawares, Shawnees, and others in the same 1795 treaty that gave the U.S. most of Ohio. At the time, the Illinois part of the cession was limited to six square miles at the mouth of the Chicago River, but it did not bode well that the treaty granted U.S. citizens free passage through Sauk lands to the Mississippi River. Within a decade, a small group of Sauks would cede their remaining territory in Illinois.
The Florida State University Seminoles have earned the official endorsement of the Seminole Tribe of Florida. The team’s mascot, Osceola, thrusts a flaming spear into the ground at every home game.
Two centuries ago, after Andrew Jackson launched the first Seminole War in 1817-1818, the Seminole people were fighting for their lives. The U.S. military campaign was the first in a decades-long conflict, waged in part on behalf of Southern planters who wished to eliminate the threat that Seminoles posed to the slave economy. Fought in malarial swamps and deeply unpopular in the Northeast, the quagmire became America’s first Vietnam. In 1823, the Seminoles ceded the land that Florida State’s Doak Campbell Stadium sits on and retreated down the Florida peninsula, where the fighting continued until 1858.