During the early sixteenth century, South Florida’s populations were positioned between the tragedy Bartolomé de Las Casas called “la destrucción de los Indios” and the Mississippian shatter zone. The Calusas’ unmatched control over goods, bodies, and knowledge in South Florida gave them advantages over the Spanish and Tocobaga of Tampa Bay, for whom records are sparse. After a failed mission attempt in the 1560s, the Spanish largely abandoned the region, and its peoples appear only sporadically in subsequent records. One hundred years later, pockets of Tocobaga diaspora appeared north across Apalachee, deploying information networks to leverage kinship, knowledge, and economic value for safety. This paper shows that the Tocobaga caciques led their communities to settle along the Wacissa River, making decisions in the context of a world suffused with knowledge, and seeking to protect smaller, clan affiliated family groupings by leveraging old kinship ties across Indigenous Florida.