intermediary for the officers and the Indian leaders. Asked to help persuade the remaining Indian fighters in Florida to surrender and relocate to Indian Territory as he and others had done, he returned to Florida in 1839 to act as go-between with one of the last Seminole war chiefs, Coacoochee (Wild Cat), eventually convincing his old friend to accept the inevitable and come in, too. John Horse was sent back to Indian Territory in 1842, as part of a group of about 120 other exiles, once the army felt he had done what they needed. In Indian Territory again, the exiled Seminole leadership finally voted freedom for John Horse, too, around the year 1843 in light of his services to the Seminole during their lengthy war. At the time the main chief, Micanopy (Mico Nuppa), had nominal ownership over him. It was Micanopy, in concert with his council, who finally granted the black warrior his freedom from any claims of enslavement against him which the tribe still had. Thus John Horse had been freed three times: by Jesup's original declaration, by General Worth who was Jesup's last successor (for services rendered), and by the Seminole leadership. Only the first of these actions applied to John Horse's second wife, Susan (daughter of the black leader July) and their children, however, and that action would soon come into serious question. Conflict arose in the Territory because the transplanted Seminole had been placed on land allocated to the Creek Indians since the U.S. government had failed to recognize the tribal distinctions between the two peoples (the Seminole were a loose amalgam of Creek bands which had detached themselves from the Creek Indian federation a century earlier and relocated to then Spanish Florida, although they had continued to maintain ethnic and some kinship ties with their northern Creek brethren in Georgia, Alabama and part of the Carolinas). Because the Creek had adopted the American institution of chattel slavery while the Seminole had not done the same (they lived in very different ways), the presence of free blacks among the Seminole on Creek land and under the nominal sovereignty of the Creek tribal council, caused friction between the two groups. The free blacks threatened the Creek slave-holding status quo, because their very existence tempted the Creeks' own slaves to challenge their status, and provided a tempting target for Creek and affiliated groups seeking to acquire