Ahaya

Ahaya (c. 1710 – 1783) was the first recorded chief of the Alachua band of the Seminole tribe. European-Americans called him Cowkeeper, as he held a very large herd of cattle. Ahaya was the chief of a town of Oconee people near the Chattahoochee River. Around 1750 he led his people into Florida where they settled around Payne's Prairie, part of what the Spanish called tierras de la chua, "Alachua Country" in English. The Spanish called Ahaya's people cimarones, which eventually became "Seminoles" in English. Ahaya fought the Spanish, and sought friendship with the British, allying with them after Spain ceded Florida to Great Britain in 1763, and staying loyal to them through the American Revolutionary War. He died shortly after Britain returned Florida to Spain in 1783.

The chief of the Alachua band of Seminoles was usually called "Cowkeeper" by the British while they ruled East Florida. William Bartram, who visited the Alachua Seminoles and has provided much of what we know about the man, refers to him only as "the Cowkeeper". John Richard Alden, in his 1944 book John Stuart and the southern frontier, gives Cowkeeper's Oconee name as "Ahaya". ("Ahaya" is a rare Seminole name.) Boyd and Harris also state that the leader of the Alachua Seminoles was known to the English as "Ahaya" or "Cowkeeper".

Some sources state that the Oconees moved to Florida under a chief named "Secoffee", and that it was Secoffee who was called "Cowkeeper". Kenneth Porter argues that Cowkeeper and Secoffee were different people, and finds "nothing to support the claim [that Cowkeeper was Secoffee] and much to disprove it".

The name "Alachua" derives from la Chua, the name of the largest ranch in 17th century Spanish Florida. The center of the hacienda de la Chua was located on a bluff overlooking a sinkhole, now called the "Alachua Sink", that drains Paynes Prairie. There is evidence that the Timucua word for "sinkhole" was chua, meaning that the ranch was named after the sinkhole. The Spanish called a large area in the interior of Florida west of the St. Johns River, tierras de la Chua. English-speakers who ventured into interior Florida called the area "the Alachua Country".

The name "Seminole" likely is derived from the Spanish cimarones, meaning "wild or untamed", as opposed to the Christianized natives who had previously lived in the mission villages of Spanish Florida. Some of the Hitchiti- or Mikasukee-speakers who had settled in Florida identified themselves to the British as "cimallon" (Muskogean languages have no "r" sound, replacing it with "l"). The British wrote the name as "Semallone", later "Seminole". The use of "cimallon" by bands in Florida to describe themselves may have been intended to distinguish themselves from the primarily Muskogee-speakers of the Upper Towns of the Muscogee Confederacy (called the "Creek Confederacy" by the British). The term "Seminole" was first applied to Ahaya's band in Alachua. After 1763, when they took over Florida from the Spanish, the British called all natives living in Florida "Seminoles", "Creeks", or "Seminole-Creeks".

While the name "Seminole" was commonly applied by whites to all Native Americans in Florida, even as late as 1842, at the end of the Second Seminole War, US Army officers referred to various bands in Florida as Seminoles, Mikasukis, Tallahassees, Creeks, and Uchees, with "Seminoles" or "Alachua Seminoles" often referring only to the people who had lived around the Alachua Prairie prior to 1813, and owed allegiance to Ahaya and his successors, King Payne, Bolek (Bowlegs) and Micanopy.

Ahaya was born to the Hitchiti-speaking Oconee, who lived in a town at a site now called "Oconee Old Town", on the Oconee River, in what is now central Georgia. In the late 1720s the Oconee people moved to the Chattahoochee River, among the Hitchiti- and Mikasuki-speaking Lower Towns of the Muscogee Confederacy. The Oconee move has been attributed to a desire by the Oconees to distance themselves from whites encroaching on their town and hunting grounds.

After the decimation of the Apalachee and Timucua people and the collapse of the Spanish mission network in Florida at the beginning of the 18th century, many peoples of what is now the state of Georgia, including the Oconees, used Florida as a vast hunting ground. Ahaya may have become familiar with the lands surrounding the Alachua Savanna (now known as Paynes Prairie) on hunting trips into Florida. In 1740, James Oglethorpe, the governor of the Province of Georgia, mounted an invasion into Spanish Florida, laying siege to its capitol, St. Augustine. Ahaya, who had become chief of his town, led 45 men to join the siege.