The history of the City of Kissimmee is inextricably linked to its location within the Kissimmee Chain of Lakes system. Scientists estimate that 125,000 years ago the St Johns River began its flow north to the Atlantic; at about the same time 40 miles west, the Kissimmee River began to flow south 80 miles to Lake Okeechobee.
The land in between the two rivers was low, flat marshland and home to a number of Native American communities. Early tribes used the name “Ays” for the Kissimmee River. Though there is debate about the origin of the name “Kissimmee”, historians reference a Spanish map that indicated that the name was “Cacema”. Much of the native population was wiped out by these first Spanish explorations to Florida and until the late to mid 1800s very few people lived far from Florida’s coasts. Central and southern Florida was primarily wilderness, which sheltered runaway African slaves and a few pockets of Creek tribes. The Creeks and the Africans intermingled and became a single people known today as the Seminoles. Many places in Osceola County—especially Lake Tohopekaliga, which means “fort site” in Creek language— were important to the Seminoles and acted as places of refuge during the three Seminole Wars in the first half of the 19th century. By the late 1850s a few dozen cattle families from nearby states had moved to the Kissimmee River Valley. The “line of settlement” was advanced by these families who needed the open land to graze their cattle, but few went south of Lake Tohopekaliga—with the exception of the settlements of Tampa Bay, the rest of south Florida was the last frontier in the United States east of the Mississippi. Osceola County was primary cattle country, and even played a role in the Civil War as the source of the Confederacy’s “Cow Cavalry”.