Elijah Daniels was a Black Creek who brought his band of Black Creeks out of Oklahoma shortly after the Seminole Negroes and joined up with them for the next twenty years as military colonists in Mexico. Daniels and his band returned to the United States soon after the Civil War, before the Seminole Negroes did. They settled in Uvalde County and eventually they made up the majority of the second group of Seminole Negro Indian Scouts enlisted at Fort Duncan. In August of 1872, most of the Daniels band moved to Fort Clark to become Scouts there.

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When the rest of the Seminole Negro Scouts moved to Fort Clark, Daniels and his people camped separately from them and seem to have held onto their Creek identity, except for when it was useful to be a “Seminole Negro” in the eyes of the Army. In this 1873 letter they were still considering themselves a separate people and requesting to move to Fort Sill. Eventually those distinctions faded somewhat, and the families in the Daniels band no longer distinguished themselves from the Seminole Negroes.

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Daniels was the only Seminole Negro Indian Scout leader who was said to have been able to read and write. He may have written his own letters, very remarkable in the 1870s when most people were illiterate and letters were written by clerks. That would account for the unusual spelling and handwriting of the original.

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An interesting aspect of this letter is the window it offers on what the Seminole Negroes called themselves. Daniels states that his people are members of the “Semanoles Negro Indians” even though all his actions show that they considered themselves to be a separate tribe of Black Creeks. This is probably because in the eyes of the military his band was considered Seminole Negro so that they could enlist as Seminole Negro Indian Scouts.

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However, his use of the title Seminole Negro for his people indicates that it is probably how the Seminole Negroes referred to themselves as well. Daniels also names himself Chief of the Seminole Negro Indian Scouts, which is a military designation, not a tribe. He clearly considered himself the Chief of his band, and was the leader of the group of Seminole Negro Indian Scouts at Fort Clark from 1872 to 1876 until the rest of the Scouts transferred from Fort Duncan to Fort Clark.