Spring Warrior The Discovery by Bill Grant

Set in the rolling sand hills and vast, mysteriously daunting swamps of northern Florida’s Big
Bend region, this begins a multi-generational series of stories set in a region about which so little
is known that even today parts of it are often referred to as “The Forgotten Coast” or “The Other
Florida.” They are told so that we do not forget the people who dared face its dangers, trying to
make it home. Unique to this one region, still these are stories of how all homelands are built,
erected on the foundations of real lives lived, of blood and bone, of hopes and dreams, deaths,
honor and treachery, achievements and failures, all an indelible brand on that to come.

The settling of America, and of Florida, was predicated on the taking of that which seemed
secure to those who had thought of it as their own. These chronicles begin, then, with stories of
cultural upheaval and bitter disagreements. They begin with the story of Biroyobo, the Yustaga
warrior who fought valiantly against brutal Spanish conquistadors, only to have his tribe killed
off by their violence and diseases. It is eerily similar to the story of Talmuches Hadjo, the
conflicted Muscogee Creek leader whose people were swept into a terrible war over the
challenges to their culture brought on by the permanence of White settlers and of his fights with
Andrew Jackson, the Whites’ glory-seeking general who here meets the boy Billy Powell, who
would become the legendary Native leader Asiyahola. Also opens here the story of the
Thomson’s, the much-maligned Scots Irish family who had not thought to forcibly take the land
of others but, having come to it during a time of heartbreaking loss, chose to not leave.

These are stories of proud people, all struggling to reconcile their past with the turbulent
demands of the present, seeking resolution to dare an uncertain future.