This is the history of a remarkable nation, the only Indian tribe that has never officially made peace with the United States. General Thomas Sidney Jesup admired the Seminoles as adversaries: "We have, at no former period in our history, had to contend with so formidable an enemy. No Seminole proves false to his country, nor has a single instance occured of a first rate warrior having surrendered." Jesup made those comments in 1837, and they proved true throughout the Seminole-white confrontations of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.