Hidden Seminoles

A visual journey into turn-of-the-century south Florida offering insights into Seminole life and history

In April 1905, A. W. Dimock, a New York financier, and his thirty-one-year-old son Julian motored their boat across Chokoloskee Bay. They docked at George Storter's store in the small outpost of Everglade on the southwest coast of Florida.

At Storter's, the Dimocks saw several Seminole individuals who came from their homes in the interior of south Florida to shop and trade for household goods. Survivors of three wars, these proud people kept to themselves. Julian, an accomplished photographer, set up his camera and expressed an interest in learning more about their lives. Over the next five years he would amass an unprecedented photographic record of the Seminole people and their surroundings. Now archived at the American Museum of Natural History, his six thousand glass negatives, unique for the time in that they were not taken for the tourist trade, are a national treasure.

Milanich and Root relate the adventures of the Dimocks among the Seminole at a time when few outsiders ventured into the Everglades and the Big Cypress Swamp. Reproduced in rich duotones, Julian's photographs reveal fascinating aspects of Seminole life in the depths of the Florida peninsula.