Archaeological evidence indicates that the first natives in the Broward County area arrived approximately 4,000 years ago. At the time of initial European exploration, the area was occupied by the Tequesta tribe of Native Americans. Contact by Spanish explorers beginning in the 16th century proved disastrous for native tribes, including the Tequesta, as the Europeans unwittingly brought with them diseases to which the native populations possessed no resistance, such as smallpox. For the Tequesta, disease, coupled with continuing conflict with their Calusa neighbors, contributed greatly to their decline over the next two centuries. By 1763, there were only a few Tequesta left in Florida, and most of them were evacuated to Cuba when the Spanish ceded Florida to the British in 1763, under the terms of the Treaty of Paris (1763), which ended the Seven Years' War. Bernard Romans reported sighting many abandoned Tequesta villages when he visited the area in the 1770s. Subsequently, Florida returned to Spanish control under the terms of the Treaty of Paris in 1783, which ended the American Revolutionary War.
In the early 18th century, Creek Indians had moved down from Alabama and joined the Oconee, themselves recent immigrants from Georgia; together, they formed the core of the Seminole tribe. Settlements by the English, and later Americans, gradually pushed the Seminoles southward. In 1788, roughly the same time that the Seminoles began to arrive in what was eventually to become Broward County, two families arrived and set up homes along the New River—the Lewis family and the Robbins family, who had arrived in Florida from the Bahamas.
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