Long before the advent of the white man in America,West Indian natives made expeditions to Florida in the belief that one of its many springs held miraculous properties, and so the myth of the Fountain of Youth was current here when early European maps, drawn before Columbus sailed from Spain, located a similiar spring in the Far East.
Eternal youth was not to be found in the crystal depths of Florida's springs, but their mysterious caverns provided a source of much lore among the now-extinct Indian tribes. From them came water gods and many legends. One legend was that on moonlight nights hundreds of little people only four inches in height came and danced around the deeply submerged inflow of Wakulla springs until a huge Indian warrior in a stone canoe appeared to drive them away--an illusion perhaps created by waving water plants and the moving shadow from a projecting rock in the springs. Scores of these legends, collected in book form, give a romantic overtone to the wonders viewed by tourists through glass-bottomed boats.
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