Mayaimi

The Mayaimi lived around the great lake later called Okeechobee in southern Florida. Their communities built earthworks and used canals for travel by dugout canoe. Fish and game supplied food, and roots of the coontie plant were prepared as flour. In the sixteenth century Hernando de Escalante Fontaneda described many small settlements around the lake. Early eighteenth-century raids devastated communities in southern Florida and carried captives into slavery. Refugees, including a chief of Maimi, reached Cuba in 1710; missionaries recorded Mayaimi people among a mixed group farther south in 1743.