generally lived in their own communities. In exchange for paying an annual tribute of livestock, crops, hunting, and war party obligations, Black prisoners or fugitives found sanctuary among the Seminole. Seminoles, in turn, acquired an important strategic ally in a sparsely-populated region. They elected their own leaders, and could amass wealth in cattle and crops. Most importantly, they bore arms for self-defense. Florida real estate records show that the Seminole and Black Seminole people owned large quantities of Florida land. In some cases, a portion of that Florida land is still owned by the Seminole and black Seminole descendants in Florida. In the 19th century, the Black Seminoles were called "Seminole Negroes" by their white American enemies and Estelusti ("black People"), by their Native American allies. Under the comparatively free conditions, the Black Seminoles flourished. US Army Lieutenant George McCall recorded his impressions of a Black Seminole community in 1826: We found these negroes in possession of large fields of the finest land, producing large crops of corn, beans, melons, pumpkins, and other esculent vegetables.... I saw, while riding along the borders of the ponds, fine rice growing; and in the village large corn-cribs were filled, while the houses were larger and more comfortable than those of the Native Americans themselves. Historians estimate that during the 1820s, 800 blacks were living with the Seminoles. The Black Seminole settlements were highly militarized, unlike the communities of most of the slaves in the Deep South. The military nature of the African and Seminole relationship led General Edmund Pendleton Gaines, who visited several flourishing black Seminole settlements in the 1800s, to describe the African Americans as "vassals and allies" of the Seminole. The traditional relationship between Seminole Blacks and natives changed in the course of the Second Seminole War when the old tribal system broke down and the Seminole resolved themselves into loose war bands living off the land with no distinction between tribal members and Black fugitives. That changed again in the new territory when the Seminole were obliged to settle on fixed lots of land and take up settled agriculture. Conflict arose in the territory because the transplanted Seminole had been placed on land allocated to the Creek, who had a practice of chattel slavery. There was increasing pressure from both Creek and pro-Creek Seminole for the adoption of the Creek model of slavery for the Black Seminoles. Creek slavers and