History of Miami
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not practice any form of agriculture. They buried the small bones of the deceased, but put the larger bones in a box for the village people to see. The Tequesta are credited with making the Miami Circle. In 1513, Juan Ponce de León was the first European man to see the Miami area by sailing into Biscayne Bay. He wrote in his journal that he reached Chequescha, which was Miami's first recorded name. It is unknown whether or not he came ashore and made contact with the natives. Pedro Menéndez de Avilés and his men made the first recorded landing when they visited the Tequesta settlement in 1566 while looking for Avilés' missing son, who was shipwrecked a year earlier. Spanish soldiers led by Father Francisco Villareal built a Jesuit mission at the mouth of the Miami River a year later but it was short-lived. By 1570, the Jesuits decided to look for more willing subjects outside of Florida. After the Spaniards left, the Tequesta Indians were left to fend themselves from European-introduced diseases like smallpox. Wars with other tribes greatly weakened their population, and they were easily defeated by the Creek Indians in battles. By 1711, the Tequesta sent a couple of local chiefs to Havana, Cuba to ask if they could migrate there. The Cubans sent two ships to help them, but Spanish illnesses struck and most of the Indians died. The Spaniards sent another mission to Biscayne Bay in 1743, where they built a fort and church. The missionary priests proposed a permanent
1500s to 1700s: Early Spanish settlement
settlement, where the Spanish settlers would raise food for the soldiers and American Indians. However, the proposal was rejected as impractical and the mission was withdrawn before the end of the year. Samuel Touchett received a land grant from the British government of 20,000 acres (81 km) in the Miami area in 1766. The grant was surveyed by Bernard Romans in 1772. A condition for making the grant permanent was that at least one white settler had to live on the grant for every 100 acres (0.4 km) of land. While Touchett wanted to place a plantation on the grant, he was having financial problems and never was able to develop it. The first permanent white settlers in the Miami area arrived in the early 1800s. Pedro Fornells, a Minorcan survivor of the New Smyrna colony, moved to Key Biscayne to meet the terms of his Royal Grant for the island. Although he returned with his family to St. Augustine after six months, he left a caretaker behind on the island. On a trip to the island in 1803, Fornells had noted the presence of squatters on the mainland across Biscayne Bay from the island. In 1825 U.S. Marshal Waters Smith visited the Cape Florida Settlement (which was on the mainland) and conferred with squatters who wanted to obtain title to the land they were occupying. People came from the Bahamas and the Keys to South Florida to hunt for treasure from the ships that ran aground on
1700s to 1800s: Early non-Spanish settlement