Many residents of Palm Beach County are unaware that Jupiter, Florida was the site of three distinct wars. Native Americans occupied this territory and are honored to this day.  Many names of our towns are named in honor of the indigenous people who once lived here.  Names such as Tequesta and Miami are names of Native American tribes that once lived here. The Loxahatchee River was not originally named "Loxahatchee".  It is an Anglicized version of the river's earliest Seminole name, "Locha-hatchee" meaning turtle river.  The Seminoles occupied much of Florida.  After the American Revolution, Spain regained control of Florida from Britain. The Seminoles set up farms and acquired land grants from the Spanish.

The Seminole Wars, also known as the Florida Wars, were a series of three battles between the Seminole Indians and the U.S. military from 1816-1858. They were the longest, most expensive Indian wars in U.S. history both monetarily and lives lost. The U.S. began the First Seminole War (1817–1818) on the Florida-Georgia line, which pushed the Seminoles further south. 

In 1830 the Indian Removal Act sparked the second war as it required all natives to move to "Indian Territory"- the eastern side of the state of Oklahoma. Hundreds of soldiers were sent to the east coast of Florida with orders to capture and remove tribes from the state. The soldiers discovered a route inside of the Jupiter Inlet that led him to a Seminole camp near the Loxahatchee River. When the military invaded, but they were outnumbered, and a long battle ensued. The soldiers retreated from the “Battle of the Jupiter Inlet” and set up Fort Jupiter.  Over the following four years, the military captured and transported 600 Seminoles to Oklahoma.

In 1832, the Treaty of Payne's Landing required the indigenous inhabitants to forfeit their land and move west within a three-year window. In 1835, the U.S. Army returned to Florida to enforce the treaty and found them prepared to protect their land. The government began building forts and trading posts in native territories enforcing the movement of the Indians by treaty and forcing the Seminoles and other tribes to move to one large reservation in the center of the state. The government began building forts and trading posts in native territories enforcing the movement of the Seminoles by treaty.

At the end of the third war in 1858, American forces destroyed the remaining Native Americans' food supply, forcing them to agree to be dispatched to Oklahoma in exchange for safe passage. It is estimated 200 remaining Florida Seminoles still refused to move to Indian Country and retreated to hide deep in the Everglades.