Apalachee massacre

Battle of Ayubale
Part of Queen Anne's War
Detail from a 1733 map showing the Apalachee Province (roughly the eastern end of what is now called the Florida Panhandle). Ayubale is marked "Ayavalla"; the locations of many mission villages are of uncertain accuracy.
Date 25–26 January 1704 Location Ayubale, Apalachee Province, Spanish Florida (near present-day Tallahassee, Florida, U.S.) Result English-Creek victory
Belligerents
Spain Apalachee	England Province of Carolina Creek
Commanders and leaders
Father Angel de Miranda (killed or captured) Juan Ruíz de Mexía (POW)	James Moore
Strength
30 Spanish cavalry 400 Apalachee warriors	50 English traders 1,000 Creek warriors
Casualties and losses
14 Spanish casualties[1] 200 warriors killed or captured[2] many civilians killed or taken prisoner	18 English casualties 15 Creek casualties[1]
This battle was the major event of the campaigns by Moore and the Creek Indians against Spanish Florida.

The Apalachee massacre was a series of raids by English colonists from the Province of Carolina and their Indian allies against a largely peaceful population of Apalachee Indians in northern Spanish Florida that took place in 1704, during Queen Anne's War. Against limited Spanish and Indian resistance, a network of missions was destroyed; most of the population either was killed or captured, fled to larger Spanish and French outposts, or voluntarily joined the English.

The only major event of former Carolina Governor James Moore's expedition was the Battle of Ayubale, which marked the only large-scale resistance to the English raids. Significant numbers of the Apalachee, unhappy with the conditions they lived in under the Spanish, simply abandoned their towns and joined Moore's expedition. They were resettled near the Savannah and Ocmulgee Rivers, where conditions were only slightly better.

Moore's raiding expedition was preceded and followed by other raiding activity that was principally conducted by English-allied Creeks. The cumulative effect of these raids, conducted between 1702 and 1709, was to depopulate Spanish Florida beyond the immediate confines of Saint Augustine and Pensacola.