Native Legend or Modern Nonsense?

 Native Legend or Modern Nonsense?

A few months back I was going  through some sighting reports of the Skunkape from the early 1970s. As usual, the person who claims to have seen the creature claimed it was the beast of Native Legend. In the news article from the “Sun Sentinel”  local men claim to have seen a Skunkape. During the journalist’s investigation the reporter interviews Betty Mae Jumper, the first female leader of the Seminole tribe, who says “I’ve never heard of anything like it in any of our legend”.  She continued “I have lived out there along time and I never heard of any Indian talking about any Apemen” (Sun Sentinel,Aug 1971)  the subject of the article, H.C. Osbon, claimed he would prove the Seminole wrong and come back with proof. Predictably, he never returned with his proof. 

The question remains about how we should proceed with these sorts of investigations. Even now, cryptozoologists regularly reference Seminole or Miccosukee legends about the skunkape or ape men or something or other. I have scoured what I have available to me and I find very few references to Seminole legends, or any other tribe from the southeast, that mention these sorts of wild men  and the things I do find are riddled with basic factual errors,and perhaps most importantly, come from non native sources who claim to have gotten the story from natives. Second, the Seminole and other tribes are not necessarily the ancestral inhabitants of Florida. 

In 1971 in this incident between Mr. Osbon and Betty Mae Jumper we have white men claiming to have seen “beast of native legend” and when questioned, the literal leader of the Native people in the area essentially said “I have no idea what they are talking about!” The white men respond with “well, we will prove them wrong!” There seems to be some level of cognitive dissonance going on. Who is the authority on native legend? Some white men, or the leader of the Seminole Tribe at the time? For my money what we have going on is an instance where these men are looking at native legends from other parts of the country. In other areas there are native legends about wild men and things that can maybe be interpreted that way if you squint and look at it sideways, and H.C. Osbon and friends just assumed the same was true about the Seminole Tribe of Florida.  There are some obvious implications when we have white men assuming that all Native Americans are the same and have the same legends and ideas, but I wont really go into that now. As of this writing, March 21, 2022, I have not been able to find any reference to native legend from the Seminole (or any other Florida tribe that preceded them) that talked about a wild man, apeman, skunkape or anything else. At least not a reference that wasn’t given by non natives, I have not been able to find any un solicited native reference to anything like that. And even if there was, it is important to remember, that the Seminole are not the original inhabitants of Florida, they have some ancestry to those original tribes sure, but the influx of natives from other parts of the country in the 1700s means that any myths/legends and stories the tribe tells today is not necessarily indicative of stories told in Florida for thousands of years, they may have been carried from Alabama or Georgia or somewhere else. 

I WANT the Skunkape to be real, it would be really incredible, and would be an amazing discovery, not to mention it may discourage some of this insane amount of develoment we have going on in Florida (Sorry! No more subdivisions, thats uhhhhhh, Skunkape habitat!). But the fact remains, if there was a liklihood that this animal was real, somebody before the 1940s-1970s would have seen something. Early French and Spanish explorers as far back as 1513 would have recorded seeing something, or at least hearing about it from native Americans. For all their problems the Spanish kept alot of records about their activities during their exploits, I am pretty confident that if there was a skunkape we would have heard about it from the survivors of the Herndo de Soto expedition as they blasted their way through Florida. What about Alvar Nunez Cabeza De Vaca and the other survivors of the Navaerez expedition? surely in their wanderings of Florida and the rest of the Southeast to Southwest they would have seen something? Or the hundrends of Spanish troops and priests and cattle ranchers who settled in Florida from 1565 on? So far I have not found anything, as much as I would love too. 

So, is the Florida Skunkape native legend? Maybe, but so far im gonna say no. Is it a real animal? Also, probably not. Is it a really fun un official state mascot? YUP!