Apalachee

The Apalachee were a Muskogean-speaking people of the Florida Panhandle, settled between the Aucilla and Ochlockonee rivers around Apalachee Bay. Their Fort Walton culture, heir to Mississippian mound-building, was organized into chiefdoms with temple mounds; the capital of Anhaica lay near Tallahassee.

Hernando de Soto wintered at Anhaica in 1539 and 1540 against stubborn resistance; Apalachee arrows were said to pierce double mail. From about 1600 Franciscan missions converted many Apalachee, and San Luis de Talimali became western capital of Spanish Florida in 1656. A revolt in 1647 was followed by forced labour and growing slave raids out of Carolina.

In 1704 James Moore and about a thousand Creek allies destroyed the missions in the Apalachee massacre, carrying off or enslaving over two thousand people, and the province was abandoned. Survivors scattered to Carolina, Pensacola and Mobile, and the Apalachee language died out by the end of the eighteenth century.