Capron, Louis Bishop, 1891-1971.

Author.

Born in New York, attended Yale University. Moved to Florida during the 1940s and befriended the Seminole Indians. Student of Indian life and culture and author of fiction and nonfiction works about the Seminole Indians of Florida. Capron's nonfiction was published by the Smithsonian and the National Geographic Society.

Louis Bishop Capron was born in Albany, New York in 1891. Capron spent his childhood in Oneonta, where his exposure to local Indian history fostered an interest in folklore and ethnography. He attended Yale University to study chemistry, but received informal anthropological training by sitting in on graduate courses and participating in the Yale-Andover Archeological Survey of the Connecticut River Valley.

Capron moved to Florida in 1925 and worked at the Palm Beach Mercantile Company until 1952. He developed friendships with the Tommie family of the Seminole tribe after meeting them in 1926 during hurricane relief work. This encounter initiated a life-long relationship with the Seminoles that would inform both his work as an author and lay scholar.

Capron's young adult adventure fiction and nonfiction works both detailed the social life and customs of the Florida Seminole Indians. The novels he is best known for include White Moccasins, Golden Arrowhead, and The Red War Pole . He is also noted for his ethnographic work on the significance of medicine bundles and the Green Corn Dances. In 1953 his article on the subject was published by the Smithsonian's Bureau of American Ethnography. Capron's nonfiction works on the Seminoles were also published by National Geographic . Capron died on December 16, 1971.

Sources: Interview by Samuel Proctor, August 31, 1971, SEM 30, Samuel Proctor Oral History Program, University of Florida, Gainesville, Fla.; "Louis Capron's First Published Book Is, of Course, On Indians," Palm Beach Post-Times, Sunday, Sept. 12, 1948, in the Capron Papers, Box 1, Biographic Material folder; Henry Marks, Who Was Who in Florida (Huntsville, Ala.: Strode Publishers, 1973); "Obituary, Louis Bishop Capron," The Florida Historical Quarterly 50(1) (July 1971): 461.