From a quiet perch atop an Indian mound, it's easy to imagine the lives of the Tocobaga Indians who lived there centuries ago.
By JEFF KLINKENBERG
Published January 19, 2004
[Times photo: Jamie Francis]
A feather dangles from a tree at the centuries-old Tocobaga Indian mound near Park Street in St. Petersburg. The mound and others stand as a testament to the thousands of Tocobagas who once thrived in the area.
When I want to be alone, I go to an Indian mound in St. Petersburg near Boca Ciega Bay. It's quiet up there, except for the rustle of the breeze in the treetops, a good place to think. In the winter, especially a cold and dry one, I need not worry about mosquitoes, though sometimes I crave solitude so much I endure even bug bites in the heart of summer.
Hidden among the oaks, my mound is a few hundred feet from a popular restaurant on Park Street. Sometimes as I hunker on the mound I can smell the restaurant's celebrated jerked chicken on the wind. Of course, the people who built the mound knew nothing about jerked chicken. Their menu was heavy on clams, oysters and mullets.
They were known as the Tocobaga. Over centuries, they built giant mounds out of discarded shells throughout west-central Florida. Some mounds were simple dumps for garbage. Others were places to bury their dead or to worship. I like to think that some folks sat on the mounds to think or for the view or for the joy of it.
When I visit the mound, I also try to imagine what it must have been like on that spring day in 1528 when a Spanish ship showed up in Boca Ciega Bay. Was somebody at that moment shucking oysters on the top of the mound or biting mullet flesh off a smoking backbone? Perhaps somebody wading in the marl, collecting blue crabs in a pine needle basket, yelled an alert.
Until that moment, the Tocobaga were masters of their world. But Panfilo de Narvaez, the notoriously cruel conquistador, was on the way.
Uncovering history
I like the bacon, lettuce and tomato sandwiches from Williams Sub Shop five minutes away over on Tyrone Boulevard. The BLTs aren't on the menu, but they will make one for you if you ask nice. I like the way the Williams women who run the restaurant cut the tomatoes into small cubes and are generous with the bacon. I am pretty sure I could be a vegetarian if it weren't for those BLTs.
On a winter day, the Indian mound is a good place for a picnic. There are no tables, but if you don't mind sitting on the grass, or leaning against an oak limb, you can be comfortable. Sometimes I read a book with my lunch, maybe poetry by Peter Meinke or Mary Oliver, or read some Florida history. Recently I was up there with Raymond Arsenault's St. Petersburg and the Florida Dream. His book includes what happened to the poor Tocobaga.
We actually know quite a bit about them. Narvaez brought a secretary, Cabeza de Vaca, who wrote everything down. The Tocobaga were healthy and strong. About 20,000 of them lived in a series of villages and towns that stretched from Tampa Bay to the north side of Charlotte Harbor. They slept in palm-thatched huts, built temples dozens of feet high and crafted elaborate jewelry.
Their "religion sought to explain and enhance a recurrent pattern of birth, life, death and renewal," writes Arsenault. "The Tocobaga . . . lived in a world of cyclical equilibrium and subtle adaptation, a world where there was little need for a linear sense of time or development."
What exactly does that mean? It means they paid attention to the seasons. In the winter, mullets were fat with roe and schooled by the millions. They must have been easy pickings for a good man with a spear. In the spring, scallops hid in the turtle grass. In the summer, blue crabs scurried through the shallows. In the late fall, some pretty plump oysters and clams must have been gathered in the clear water near today's Bay Pines VA Medical Center. The mosquitoes in the mangroves, the little biting flies that emerge from the sand at dusk, would drive most of us mad. Not the thick-skinned Tocobagas. They learned to endure. The Tocobaga disdained clothing, for the most part, instead covering their bodies with elaborate tattoos - probably stuff that would impress the kids who roam Tyrone Square Mall only five minutes away in 2004.
How many oyster shells did it take to build mounds 100 feet long and 20 feet high? Mounds that have survived going on five centuries? I guess somebody good at math could figure it out, but I am going to guess countless generations of Tocobaga had to eat millions of oysters to produce those mounds.
In west-central Florida, their history is under our feet, at Safety Harbor, at Pinellas Point, at Terra Ceia, at Tierra Verde, on the eastern shores of Tampa Bay - their history is under our parking lots and under our buildings.
I live within walking distance of Bayfront Medical Center. Night and day I hear the wail of ambulance sirens and the roar of emergency helicopters landing and taking off. On the quieter south side of the complex is the remainder of what must have been a mighty Tocobaga mound. Many old-time St. Petersburg residents remember when Bayfront was called Mound Park Hospital.
The stars keep shining
My favorite Tocobaga mounds are scattered along Park Street between Tyrone and Central Avenue. Once the site of a huge village, the area is now a wealthy neighborhood where landscapers huff and puff while pushing mowers up modest hills that once were Tocobaga mounds. At nearby Abercrombie Park, you can leave your car and stroll to the bay across a former Tocobaga terrace that is now a place where residents walk their dogs.
Near Saffron's, the Caribbean restaurant on Park Street, I take possession of my mound. Oaks and cabbage palms and black earth hide the oyster shells, but there's no mistaking that you are at the top of the mound. I hear a motorcycle in the distance, followed by the cry of an osprey. I try to answer the osprey but break into a wracking cough. My weak lungs, damaged long ago by an immune disorder, remind me once again of mortality.
Narvaez once was described by the historian Samuel Eliot Morison as "both cruel and stupid." He was "the most incompetent of all who sailed for Spain in this era."
No matter. The Crown valued ruthlessness. Ruthless, Narvaez wanted gold.
The conquistadors marched east across Pinellas to what we now call Safety Harbor, where Narvaez met the Tocobaga chief, Hirrihigua. A fight broke out, and a soldier wounded Hirrihigua. When his mother intervened, she was hacked to death. Narvaez fed pieces of her body to his pet greyhounds.
It was the beginning of the end. Within a century, all the Tocobaga were gone, vanished from the face of the earth, victims of war and diseases for which they had no immunities.
Of course, the stars kept on shining and the mullets kept on leaping. And here we are now.
So I finish my lunch and put the leftovers into a paper sack as the cardinals twitter and the blue jays scold. I stop for a moment to admire a collection of laughing gull feathers a previous visitor hung from the branches, perhaps to honor the memory of a lost tribe.
Not everybody visits the Tocobaga mounds for spiritual sustenance, however. Dangling from another branch like a big lavender flower is a more earthly souvenir of contemporary society, a pair of women's very skimpy underpants. Hope she didn't catch cold.
