Now, they're not perfect. The next page briefly mentions Calusa warriors taking captives to enslave.In the Hands of the Great Spirit: The 20,000-Year History of American Indians, Jack Page, 2003.
" . . . Ponce de Leon sailed up and down the coasts of what he thought to be an island and eventually landed in the area of today's Fort Myers, only to be driven off by hostile Calusa Indians.
"Not a great deal is known about most of the Indian peoples present on the sourthern peninsula at the time besides their names—Tocobagas, Ais, Calusas, Tekestas, for example—and that they were primarily nonagricultural chiefdoms, mostly dependent on the fruits of the sea. By the late eighteenth century, these tribes were no more, and gone with them was any knowledge of exactly what languages they spoke. We know, chiefly from archaeological studies, that the Calusas were a highly developed society with an estimated four thousand (and possibly ten thousand) people at the time of European contact. This is unusual for any society without an agricultural base, but the Calusas inhabited one of the most biologically productive places imaginable—a vast flat realm where freshwater flowed in a stately and eternal sheet across the land through through cypress groves and endless strands of saw grass, to mix with the tidal salt water from the sea, . . . "
https://books.google.com/books?id=X...driven off by hostile Calusa Indians"&f=false
All the same, these Calusas would probably make for some interesting PODs and timelines.
Last edited: