Numerous banners have flown over Florida since European pilgrims initially arrived here in the mid-sixteenth century. Among these have been the banners of five countries: Spain, France, Great Britain, the United States, and the Confederate States of America. The first people to enter the Florida peninsula around 12,000 years ago were not explorers, adventurers, or settlers, but nomads following the big game animals upon which their survival depended on. Sea level was lower and rainfall less plentiful than today.

As a result of the fierce and determined hostility that the Apalachee manifested toward the first Spanish intrusions into their territory in the second quarter of the 16th century, Spain made no additional attempts to contact them until early in the next century. The present arrangement of Florida’s state flag was proclaimed in 1900. In that year, Florida voters affirmed an 1899 joint resolution of the state lawmaking body to incorporate red bars, as a St. Andrew’s cross, to the flag.

After the Civil War, Florida was the first Southern state to adopt a flag of its own. On August 6, 1868, the state seal was designated to appear in the centre of a white flag; the design showed an American Indian woman on a promontory extending into water where a steamboat was sailing. A band with the state name and the motto “In God we trust” completed the design. Between 1868 and 1900, Florida’s state pennant involved a white field with the state seal in within. In the midst of the late 1890s, Governor Francis P. Fleming suggested that a red cross is incorporated, so that the flag did not appear, all in all, to be a white standard of truce or surrender when hanging still on a flagpole.

In the changing of the Constitution in 1968, the measurements were dropped and got to be statutory language. The banner is depicted in these words: “The seal of the state, of diameter one-half the hoist, in the center of a white ground. Red bars in width one-fifth the hoist extending from each corner toward the center to the outer rim of the seal.” The Seminoles of Florida call themselves the “Unconquered People,” descendants of just 300 Indians who managed to elude capture by the U.S. army in the 19th century. Today, more than 2,000 live on six reservations in the state – located in Hollywood, Big Cypress, Brighton, Immokalee, Ft. Pierce, and Tampa.

Today the cross on the Florida state pennant gets from the Confederate Battle Flag. The State Seal on the flag components a Native American Seminole woman diffusing blooms, a steamboat, a cabbage palmetto tree and an impressive sun.