chronological margin. Jacksonville would seem to be beneath such bother
as competitor.
Jacksonville does notlookold, whereas St. Augustine has a few surviv-
ing, restored buildings dating to the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries
and some evocative Spanish- and British-style houses and public build-
ings put up during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Many of these
are situated along quaintly narrow streets and alleys, the very same once
trod and remarked upon by William Bartram, William Cullen Bryant, and
other notable visitors from times past. Most important, however, St. Augus-
tine boasts a magnificent Spanish stone fort, Castillo de San Marcos, con-
structed of locally quarried coquina toward the end of the seventeenth cen-
tury. Now a federally operated national monument, San Marcos stands on
the same low promontory facing Matanzas Bay and the ocean on which pre-
vious, wooden castillos had bristled since the s. Not far away, facing the
town square and old covered market, is the stately Cathedral-Basilica of St.
Augustine. It is a little more than a century old but, like the Castillo, stands
on the burned ruins of a predecessor. Nearby are three large, bizarre ‘‘Moor-
ish’’ style buildings, all originally hotels (one still is) constructed of poured
concrete late in the nineteenth century by Yankee magnate-developers. St.
Augustine is blessed with (for a place in Florida) relatively few other tour-
istic attractions, but these include a so-called geological exhibit just north
of downtown reputed to be the very Fountain of Youth Ponce de Leon sup-
posedly discovered during his brief incursion into La Florida. Nearby
is the Ripley’s Believe It or Not museum. The Alligator Farm—the same
from which came Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings’s Christmas gift of a huge bag,
ca. —thrives, still, to the east on Anastasia Island. From downtown one
gets to the farm via the Bridge of Lions, a splendid (albeit crumbling) relic
of the s, guarded at its western end by a large pair of stone lions, its
span decorated with towers and flagpoles.^4
Today and ever in the past, remnants of the once mighty Pamunkey
people might drive down to West Point from their reservation to see what
Euro- and Afro-southerners have made of their ancient capital. Not so the
aboriginals of northeastern Florida and St. Augustine. These were the Seloy
Indians, a substantial group belonging to the Timucua language group,
who numbered, by best estimate, perhaps , souls ca. . The Se-
loys, one of at least thirty-five Timucuan chiefdoms, lived in St. Augus-
tine and its hinterland. Other chiefdoms extended over most of peninsular
Florida above present-day Orlando and northward to St. Simons Island and
the Altamaha River in Georgia, and westward past present-day Live Oak,