The Seminoles For thousands of years before the Europeans arrived in Southeastern North America, about 400,000 of the ancestors of the Seminoles built towns and villages across the area. After 1510, when Spaniards began to explore and settle in their territory, disease killed many of the Seminoles, separated many of the towns, and caused many tribes to break up. Over the past centuries, they faced enormous pressures to change to give up their own view of the world and the systems they had developed to substitute systems of belief and actions that, did not always work for them as well. In order to understand the true importance