SIMON & SCHUSTER

Rockefeller Center

1230 Avenue of the Americas

New York, NY 10020

Copyright © 2006 by Michael Grunwald All rights reserved,

including the right of reproduction

in whole or in part in any form.

SIMON & SCHUSTER and colophon are registered

trademarks of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

Designed by Ellen Sasahara

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Grunwald, Michael.

The swamp / Michael Grunwald.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references.

1. Everglades (Fla.)—History. 2. Everglades (Fla.)—

Environmental conditions. 3. Environmental protection—

Florida—Everglades—History. 4. Drainage—Florida—

Everglades—History. I. Title.

F317.E9G78 2005

975.9’39—de22 2005056329

ISBN-13: 978-1-4165-3727-4

ISBN-10: 1-4165-3727-9

Visit us on the World Wide Web:

http://www.SimonSays.com

For Mom and Dad

with love

Contents

Introduction “A Treasure for Our Country”

Part One The Natural Everglades

1 Grassy Water

2 The Intruders

3 Quagmire

4 A New Vision

5 Drainage Gets Railroaded

Part Two Draining the Everglades

6 The Reclamation of a Kingly Domain

7 The Father of South Florida

8 Protect the Birds

9 “Water Will Run Downhill!”

10 Land by the Gallon

11 Nature’s Revenge

12 “Everglades Permanence Now Assured”

13 Taming the Everglades

Part Three Restoring the Everglades

14 Making Peace with Nature

15 Repairing the Everglades

16 Something in the Water

17 Something for Everyone

18 Endgame

Epilogue The Future of the Everglades

Notes

Acknowledgments

Index

And God said unto them: Be fruitful, and multiply, and

replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion

over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air,

and over every living thing that moveth upon the

earth.

—Genesis 1:28

Nature is overrated.

But we’ll miss it when it’s gone!

—Florida golfers, in the 2002 film Sunshine State

Introduction

“A Treasure for Our Country”

ON DECEMBER 11, 2000, the Supreme Court heard oral

arguments in George W. Bush, et al. v. Albert Gore Jr., et al.,

the partisan battle royale that would end the stalemate over

the Florida recount and send one of the litigants to the

White House. The deadlocked election had exposed a

divided nation, and pundits were describing Governor

Bush’s “Red America” and Vice President Gore’s “Blue

America” as if they were separate countries at war. After

five weeks of ferocious wrangling over “pregnant chads”

and “hanging chads,” hard-liners in both camps were

warning of an illegitimate presidency, a constitutional crisis,

a bloodless coup.

Inside the Court’s marble-and-mahogany chambers,

Senator Robert Smith of New Hampshire watched the legal

jousting with genuine awe. Smith was one of the hardest of

Red America’s hardliners, a passionate antiabortion,

antigay, antitax Republican, and he believed he was

watching a struggle for the soul of his country. Smith was

also a former small-town civics teacher, less jaded than

most of his colleagues in Congress, and Bush v. Gore was a

civics lesson for the ages, a courtroom drama that would

decide the leader of the free world. “It doesn’t get any

bigger than this,” he thought.

But less than an hour into the proceedings, Smith

suddenly walked out on history, squeezing his six-foot-five,

280-pound frame past his perplexed seatmates. “Excuse

me,” he whispered. “Excuse me.” A bear of a man with

fleshy jowls, a bulbous nose, and a sloppy comb-over, Smith

could feel the stares as he lumbered down the center aisle,

then jostled through the hushed standing-room crowd to the

exit. “Excuse me. Excuse me.”

Smith’s abrupt departure looked like one of his

unorthodox protests, like the time he brandished a plastic

fetus on the Senate floor, or the time he announced he was

resigning from the Republican Party because it was cutting

too many big-government deals with the Democrats. Smith

was an unabashed ideologue, rated the most conservative

and the most frugal senator by various right-wing interest

groups. He had voted against food stamps and Head Start,

clamored for President Bill Clinton’s impeachment, and even

mounted his own quixotic campaign for president on a

traditional-values platform.

But this was no protest. Smith was rushing to the White

House, to celebrate a big-government deal with the

Democrats.

At the height of the partisan war over the Florida

recount, President Clinton was signing a bipartisan bill to

revive the Florida Everglades, a $7.8 billion rescue mission

for sixty-nine endangered species and twenty national parks

and refuges. It was the largest environmental restoration

project in the history of the planet, and Smith had pushed it

through Congress with classic liberal rhetoric, dismissing its

price tag as “just a can of Coke per citizen per day,”

beseeching his colleagues to “save this treasure as our

legacy to our children and grandchildren.” So after his dash

from the Court, he headed straight to the Cabinet Room,

where he exchanged congratulations with some of the

Democratic Party’s top environmentalists, like Interior

Secretary Bruce Babbitt, the former head of the League of

Conservation Voters, and White House aide George

Frampton, the former head of the Wilderness Society. And

Smith was not even the most surprising guest in the West

Wing that day.

That was Florida’s Republican governor, another key

supporter of the Everglades plan, a former Miami developer

named Jeb Bush. As the world waited to hear whether his

brother would win his state and succeed their father’s

successor in the White House, Jeb was already there, staring

out at the Rose Garden with the air of a quarterback who

had stumbled into the opposing locker room near the end of

the Super Bowl. “The last time I was here, your father was

president!” one lobbyist told him. Jeb tried to smile, but it

came out more like a grimace. One Clinton appointee began

babbling about the Cuban Missile Crisis—possibly the last

time that room had felt that tense. Jeb even said hi to a

Miami congresswoman who had publicly accused him of

suppressing black votes. “This,” thought Jeb’s top

environmental aide, “is as surreal as politics can get.”

Unless, that is…but no, Vice President Gore, a key

architect of the Everglades plan, stayed home to listen to

the Supreme Court audiotape. “I was really proud of what

we accomplished in the Everglades,” Gore later recalled.

“But I was in a pretty pitched battle that day.”

At 1:12 P.M., an ebullient President Clinton invited

everyone into the Oval Office, the room that George W. Bush

liked to say needed a good scrubbing. If the president was

upset about Gore’s plight, or Jeb’s presence, or the legacy of

impeachment, or his imminent move to the New York

suburbs, the legendary compartmentalizer hid it well. “This

is a great day!” he said. “We should all be very proud.” He

used eighteen ceremonial pens to sign the bill, graciously

handing the first souvenir to Jeb. Senator Smith quipped

that it was lucky Clinton’s name wasn’t Cornelius

Snicklefritzer, or else the ceremony might never end. The

president threw his head back and laughed. “Wow,” thought

his chief of staff, John Podesta, “this is like a Fellini movie.”

If Florida’s political swamp was tearing Americans apart,

Florida’s actual swamp had a knack for bringing people

together. The same Congress that had been torn in half by

Clinton’s impeachment had overwhelmingly approved his

plan for the Everglades, after lobbyists for the sugar

industry and the Audubon Society walked the corridors of

Capitol Hill arm-in-arm. The same Florida legislature that

was in turmoil over Bush v. Gore had approved Everglades

restoration without a single dissenting vote.

At a press conference after the ceremony, Jeb

sidestepped the inevitable Bush v. Gore questions to

highlight this unity: “In a time when people are focused on

politics, and there’s a little acrimony—I don’t know if y’all

have noticed—this is a good example of how, in spite of all

that, bipartisanship is still alive.” Reporters shouted follow-

ups about the Court, but the governor cut them off with a

smile. “No, no, no, no, you’re going the wrong way on that

one. We’re here to talk about something that’s going to be

long-lasting, way past counting votes. This is the restoration

of a treasure for our country.”

The Test

TODAY, EVERYONE AGREES that the Everglades is a national

treasure. It’s a World Heritage Site, an International

Biosphere Reserve, the most famous wetland on earth. It’s a

cultural icon, featured in Carl Hiaasen novels, Spiderman

comics, country songs, and the opening credits of CSI:

Miami, as well as the popular postcards of its shovel-faced

alligators and spindly-legged wading birds. It’s the

ecological equivalent of motherhood and apple pie; when an

aide on NBC’s The West Wing was asked the most popular

thing the president could do for the environment, he

immediately replied: “Save the Everglades.”

But there was once just as broad a national consensus

that the Everglades was a worthless morass, an enemy of

civilization, an obstacle to progress. The first government

report on the Everglades deemed it “suitable only for the

haunt of noxious vermin, or the resort of pestilential

reptiles.” Its explorers almost uniformly described it as a

muddy, mushy, inhospitable expanse of razor-edged

sawgrass in shallow water—too wet to farm, too dry to sail,

too unpredictable to settle. Americans believed it was their

destiny to drain this “God-forsaken” swamp, to “reclaim” it

from mosquitoes and rattlesnakes, to “improve” it into a

subtropical paradise of bountiful crops and booming

communities. Wetlands were considered wastelands, and

“draining the swamp” was a metaphor for solving festering

problems.

The heart of the Everglades was technically a marsh, not

a swamp, because its primary vegetation was grassy, not

woody; the first journalist to slog through the Everglades

called it a “vast and useless marsh.” But it was usually

described as a dismal, impenetrable swamp, and even

conservationists dreamed of draining it; converting wet land

into productive land was considered the essence of

conservation. Hadn’t God specifically instructed man to

subdue the earth, and take dominion over all the living

creatures that moveth upon it? Wasn’t America destined to

overpower its wilderness?

This is the story of the Everglades, from useless bog to

national treasure, from its creation to its destruction to its

potential resurrection. It is the story of a remarkable swath

of real estate and the remarkable people it has attracted,

from the aboriginals who created the continent’s first

permanent settlement in the Everglades, to the U.S. soldiers

who fought a futile war of ethnic cleansing in the

Everglades, to the dreamers and schemers who have tried

to settle, drain, tame, develop, sell, preserve, and restore

the Everglades. It’s a story about the pursuit of paradise and

the ideal of progress, which once inspired the degradation of

nature, and now inspires its restoration. It’s a story about

hubris and unintended consequences, about the mistakes

man has made in his relationship with nature and his

unprecedented efforts to fix them.

THE STORY BEGINS with the natural Everglades ecosystem,

which covered most of south Florida, from present-day

Orlando all the way down to the Florida Keys. For most of its

history, it was virtually uninhabited. As late as 1897, four

years after the historian Frederick Jackson Turner declared

the western frontier closed, an explorer marveled that the

Everglades was still “as much unknown to the white man as

the heart of Africa.”

But once white men got to know it, they began to

transform it. A Gilded Age industrialist named Hamilton

Disston was the first visionary to try to drain the swamp. A

brilliant oilman-turned-developer named Henry Flagler

considered his own assault on the Everglades while he was

laying the foundation for modern south Florida. And an

energetic Progressive Era governor named Napoleon

Bonaparte Broward vowed to create an Empire of the

Everglades with more canals, declaring war on south

Florida’s water.

The Everglades turned out to be a resilient enemy,

resisting man’s drainage schemes for decades, taking

revenge in the form of brutal droughts and catastrophic

floods, converting Florida swampland into an enduring real

estate punchline. In 1928, a hurricane blasted Lake

Okeechobee through its flimsy muck dike and drowned

2,500 people in the Everglades, a ghastly fore-shadowing of

Hurricane Katrina’s assault on New Orleans. Mother Nature

did not take kindly to man’s attempts to subjugate her.

But the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, the ground troops

in America’s war against nature, finally conquered the

Everglades with one of the most elaborate water-control

projects in history, setting the stage for south Florida’s

spectacular postwar development. Suburbs such as Weston,

Wellington, Plantation, Pembroke Pines, Miami Lakes, and

Miami Springs all sprouted in drained Everglades wetlands.

So did Miami International Airport, Sawgrass Mills Mall,

Florida International University, Burger King corporate

headquarters, and a vast agricultural empire that produces

one out of every five teaspoons of American sugar. Disney

World was built near the headwaters of the Everglades. And

some people began to wonder whether the creation of a

man-made paradise across Florida’s southern thumb was

worth the destruction of a natural one.

So the story of the Everglades is also the story of the

transformation of south Florida, from a virtually uninhabited

wasteland to a densely populated Fantasyland with 7 million

residents, 40 million annual tourists, and the world’s largest

concentration of golf courses. “There has never been a more

grossly exaggerated region, a more grossly misrepresented

region, or one concerning which less has been known than

this mighty empire of South Florida,” the Palm Beach Post

said in 1924. That’s still about right.

AMERICA’S WAR ON NATURE has left a tattered battlefield in

south Florida. Half the Everglades is gone. The other half is

an ecological mess. Wading birds no longer darken the skies

above it. Algal blooms are exploding in its lakes and

estuaries, massacring its dolphins, oysters, and manatees.

And it is now clear that the degradation extends beyond

noxious vermin and pestilential reptiles, affecting the people

of south Florida as well. The aquifers that store their

drinking water are under siege. Their paradise has been

sullied by sprawl, and by overcrowded schools, hospitals,

and highways. Most of them are at risk from the next killer

hurricane—and the one after that. It is now almost

universally agreed that south Florida’s growth is no longer

sustainable.

The Everglades restoration plan that President Clinton

signed with Governor Bush at his side is supposed to restore

some semblance of the original ecosystem, and guide south

Florida toward sustainability. And the Army Corps of

Engineers, after decades of helping to destroy the

Everglades, will lead the effort to undo some of the damage.

“The Everglades is a test,” one environmentalist has

written. “If we pass, we may get to keep the planet.”

On that December day at the millennium’s end,

Republicans and Democrats described Everglades

restoration as the dawn of a new era in conservation—not

only for south Florida, but for mankind. Instead of taming

rivers, irrigating deserts, and draining swamps, man would

restore ravaged ecosystems. Instead of fighting over scarce

fresh water—the oil of the twenty-first century—Floridians

would demonstrate how to share. The Everglades, Jeb Bush

said, would be “a model for the world,” proof that man and

nature could live in harmony. America’s politicians would

finally pass the Everglades test.

It was a noble sentiment. But man had been flunking that

test for a long time.

Part 1

The Natural Everglades

One

Grassy Water

There are no other Everglades in the world.

—South Florida author Marjory Stoneman

Douglas

“The Place Looked Wild And Lonely”

THE NATURAL EVERGLADES was not quite land and not

quite water, but a soggy confusion of the two.

It was a vast sheet of shallow water spread across a

seemingly infinite prairie of serrated sawgrass, a liquid

expanse of muted greens and browns extending to the

horizon. It had the panoramic sweep of a desert, except

flooded, or a tundra, except melted, or a wheat field, except

wild. It was studded with green teardrop-shaped islands of

tangled trees and scraggly shrubs, and specked with white

spider lilies and violet-blue pickerelweeds. But mostly it

looked like the world’s largest and grassiest puddle, or the

flattest and wettest meadow, or the widest and slowest-

moving stream. It had the squish and the scruff of an

untended yard after a downpour, except that this yard was

larger than Connecticut. It wasn’t obviously beautiful, but it

was obviously unique. “No country that I have ever heard of

bears any resemblance to it,” wrote one of the U.S. soldiers

who hunted Seminole Indians in the Everglades in the

nineteenth century. “It seems like a vast sea, filled with

grass and green trees.”

The Everglades seeped all the way down Florida’s

southern thumb, from the giant wellspring of Lake

Okeechobee in the center of the peninsula to the ragged

mangrove fringes of Florida Bay and the Gulf of Mexico, a

sodden savanna more than 100 miles long and as much as

60 miles wide—just grass and water, water and grass,

except for the tree islands and wildflowers that dotted the

grass, and the lily pads and algal mats that floated on the

water. The Seminoles called it Pa-Hay-Okee, or Grassy

Water. The American soldiers who trudged through it during

the Seminole Wars described it as a grassy lake, a grassy

sea, an ocean of grass. The bard of the Everglades, Marjory

Stoneman Douglas, later dubbed it the River of Grass.

Sawgrass is actually a sedge, not a grass, but the nickname

stuck.

The Everglades was relentlessly, remarkably, almost

perfectly flat—no majestic canyons, rugged cliffs, or rolling

hills, no glaciers, geysers, or craters. Even Everglades

National Park’s first superintendent admitted that its

landscape lacked a certain flair, calling it “a study in

halftones, not bright, broad strokes of a full brush,”

summarizing its attractions as “lonely distances, intricate

and monotonous waterways, birds, sky and water.” The

Everglades was also an incomparably tough slog. It lacked

shade and shelter, high ground and dry ground. Breathing

its heavy air felt like sucking on cotton. Wading through its

hip-deep muck felt like marching in quicksand. Penetrating

its dense thickets of sharp-toothed sawgrass felt like bathing

in broken glass. And there was something downright spooky

about the place, with its bellowing alligators, grunting

pigfrogs, and screeching owls—and especially its eerie

silences.

“The place looked wild and lonely,” one hunter wrote

after an 1885 expedition through the Everglades. “About

three o’clock it seemed to get on Henry’s nerves, and we

saw that he was crying, he would not tell us why, he was

just plain scared.”

The Everglades also teemed with rats, roaches, snakes,

scorpions, spiders, worms, deerflies, sand flies, and

unfathomably thick clouds of bloodthirsty mosquitoes that

flew up nostrils and down throats and into ears. The pioneer

Miami naturalist Charles Torrey Simpson loved the

Everglades like a son, but he readily acknowledged that “the

wilds of Lower Florida can furnish as much laceration and as

many annoyances to the square inch as any place I have

ever seen.”

“My advice is to urge every discontented man to take a

trip through the Everglades,” another explorer wrote. “If it

doesn’t kill him, it will certainly cure him.”

BUT THE EVERGLADES was more than a river of grass, and it

contained more than swarming bugs, slithering reptiles, and

lacerating annoyances.

The river of grass was only the most distinctive link of an

interconnected ecosystem that once blanketed almost all of

south Florida, from its headwaters atop the Kissimmee

Chain of Lakes near modern-day Orlando down to the coral

reefs off the Keys, an area twice the size of New Jersey. The

ecosystem was a watery labyrinth of lakes and lagoons,

creeks and ponds, pine flatwoods and hardwood hammocks.

It encompassed Biscayne Bay and Florida Bay, the St. Lucie

and Miami Rivers. And in addition to its extensive

marshlands, it included genuine swamps, most notably the

Big Cypress Swamp, a Delaware-sized mosaic of pinelands,

prairies, and black-water bogs just west of the sawgrass

Everglades.

Sawgrass could be as uninviting to wildlife as it was to

people, but the diverse habitats of the broader Everglades

ecosystem—also known as the Kissimmee-Okeechobee-

Everglades or south Florida ecosystem—supported an

astonishing variety of life, from black bears to barracudas,

turkey vultures to vase sponges, zebra butterflies to fuzzy-

wuzzy air plants that looked like hairy psychedelic squid.

The Everglades had prehistoric-looking wood storks that

snapped their beaks shut in three milliseconds, sausage-

shaped manatees that devoured 100 pounds of plants a

day, mullet that ran in schools three miles long, and four-

foot-tall dwarf cypress trees that looked like skeletal bonsai.

The Everglades was the only place on earth where alligators

(broad snout, fresh water, darker skin) and crocodiles

(pointy snout, salt water, toothy grin) lived side by side. It

was the only home of the Everglades mink, Okeechobee

gourd, and Big Cypress fox squirrel. It had carnivorous

plants, amphibious birds, oysters that grew on trees, cacti

that grew in water, lizards that changed colors, and fish that

changed genders. It had 1,100 species of trees and plants,

350 birds, and 52 varieties of porcelain-smooth, candy-

striped tree snails. It had bottlenose dolphins, marsh

rabbits, ghost orchids, moray eels, bald eagles, and

countless other species that didn’t seem to belong on the

same continent, much less in the same ecosystem.

“It is a region so different that it hardly seems to belong

to the United States,” said the forester Gifford Pinchot, a

founding father of American conservationism. “It is full of

the most vivid and most interesting life on land, in the air,

and in the water. It is a land of strangeness, separate and

apart from the common things we all know so well.”

For all its mystery and monotony, the Everglades

ecosystem did have a few awesome attractions. Charles

Torrey Simpson was enthralled by its 100-foot-tall royal

palms with trunks like cement pillars, standing guard over

its golden ocean of sedge and stream: “It is a picture of

unsurpassed beauty set in a wonderful frame…. The whole

effect is glorious beyond the power of description.” Another

visitor adored its profusion of wild orchids, “specimens

colorless and full of color, scentless and filled with odor that

made the surrounding air heavy with their fragrance: some

garbed somberly as a Quakeress, others costumed to rival

the Queen of Sheba.” Early explorers were mesmerized by

the millions of ibis, egrets, herons, storks, and other wading

birds that seemed to darken the skies; the legendary artist

and naturalist John J. Audubon nearly swooned after

watching a flock of hot-pink flamingos soar over the

Everglades. “Ah! Reader, could you but know the emotion

that then agitated my breast. I thought I had now reached

the height of my experience.” The celebrated zoologist

Louis Agassiz was just as fascinated by the luminous coral

reefs at the ecosystem’s edge, the only living reefs in North

America: “Even a brief description of the immense number

of shells, worms, crabs, lobsters, shrimps, crawfishes and

fishes seen everywhere upon the reef, would be out of place

here. In variety, in brilliancy of color, in elegance of

movement, the fishes may well compare with the most

beautiful assemblage of birds.”

For the most part, though, the Everglades was less about

beauty than subtlety and originality. It was less ooh or aah

than hmm. It was a dainty purple gallinute tiptoeing across

a lily pad in a predawn mist, or a vast swath of sawgrass

arching in the breeze like a congregation at prayer. It was

the vines of a strangler fig slowly choking the life out of a

cabbage palm, or a split-tailed, red-eyed hawk called the

Everglade snail kite scanning a marsh for the apple snails

that made up its entire diet. Everglades vistas seemed to

shift like a kaleidoscope with subtle changes in the light or

the weather. Guidebooks still warn tourists that the

Everglades “takes some getting used to,” that it “reveals its

secrets slowly,” that its appeal “may escape many visitors

at first glance.”

There was always more to the Everglades than met the

eye. Take the golden-brown Everglades goop known as

periphyton. It was easy to overlook, clumped around aquatic

plants like slimy oatmeal sweaters, floating in sloughs like

discolored papier-mâché, crumbling into a snowy powder

during droughts. But it was the dominant life-form in much

of the Everglades, measured by biomass. It was also the

base of the Everglades food chain, providing grazing

pastures for small fish, prawns, insects, and snails, which

became prey for larger fish and birds. Today, microscopes

reveal periphyton mats as action-packed worlds unto

themselves, teeming with bacteria, diatoms, and single-cell

organisms shaped like candles, spaghetti, bricks, nets,

tissues, and tunnels—swimming, splitting, and swallowing

one another whole.

If the Grand Canyon was a breathtaking painting, the

Everglades was a complex drama, and everything in it had a

role. The American alligator, the original Everglades

engineer, dug muck out of shallow depressions in the marsh

during droughts, creating oases for fish and wildlife like the

watering holes of the African bush. The red mangrove, the

original Everglades developer, trapped sediments in its

spidery prop roots until they formed new spits of

swampland, while providing shelter for all kinds of estuarine

species. Cauliflower clouds, the mountains of the

Everglades, printed their reflections on glittering sloughs as

they drifted over the marsh, then funneled and blackened

into thunderheads that unleashed spectacular torrents of

rain. And that clean, fresh, shallow water was the lifeblood

of the Everglades, fueling its flora and fauna, recharging its

underground aquifers, keeping its wetlands wet. “A certain

kind of lure began to dawn on me,” wrote Zane Grey, the

best-selling western adventure novelist who was also a

record-breaking south Florida snook fisherman. “This is a

country that must be understood.”

The First 300 Million Years (Abridged)

THE EVERGLADES IS OFTEN described as an “ancient

wilderness,” a “timeless relic,” a “primordial” or “primeval”

force of nature that flourished for eons before it was ruined

by man. But in geologic time, the Everglades is a newborn.

If the history of the earth is condensed to a week, algae

started growing Monday, fish started swimming Saturday

morning, and birds flew in early Saturday afternoon. The

Everglades showed up a half second before midnight,

around the time the Egyptians started building pyramids.

From the earth’s perspective, the story of the Everglades is

a rounding error, a momentary blip.

The story of how the Everglades formed stretches back a

bit further. It began with a bang about 300 million years

ago, after the fish but before the birds, with the cataclysmic

shifts of tectonic plates that crunched the planet’s major

landforms into a single supercontinent called Pangaea.

About 100 million years later, plates shifted again, Pangaea

split up again and North America dragged away a finger-

shaped chunk of northwest Africa. That hijacked appendage

became the foundation of the Florida peninsula, the Florida

Platform, dangling into the waters of the subtropics like a

big toe dipped into a warm bath, dividing the Atlantic Ocean

from the Gulf of Mexico.

Then things calmed down. And they stayed calm.

Florida has been geologically stable ever since it was

kidnapped from Africa, with none of the seismic upheavals

that carved out mountains and canyons elsewhere. South

Florida has been especially quiet: It was inundated in the

Jurassic Period and spent most of the next 150 million years

as a sea floor. Dinosaurs reigned and vanished, and

mammals inherited the earth, but south Florida remained

underwater, slowly building its limestone backbone from the

shells and skeletons of dead marine species, and from

microscopic pearls of calcium dissolved in the sea itself. The

main result of all those dull millennia of stability was that

the region ended up extraordinarily flat. Today, a sign in

Everglades National Park announces the towering peak of

“Rock Reef Pass: Elevation 3 Feet.” One Everglades scientist

used to tell the apocryphal story of the cowboy who saw the

Grand Canyon and shouted: “Something sure did happen

here!” His point was that it wasn’t clear from the

topography of the Everglades that anything had ever

happened there.

South Florida finally emerged from the ocean during the

ice ages, when the polar glaciers expanded and retreated,

exposing and reflooding the peninsula while man was

evolving from Homo erectus to Homo sapiens. It was only

during the last interglacial melt, about 100,000 years ago,

that high seas deposited the Biscayne Aquifer, the porous

layer of honeycombed limestone that underlies much of the

Everglades, and stores much of south Florida’s drinking

water in its subterranean notches and channels. The same

high seas left behind the Atlantic Coastal Ridge, the five-

mile-wide ribbon of limestone that became the eastern rim

of the Everglades, rising as high as twenty feet above sea

level, a virtual Kilimanjaro by south Florida standards. It now

supports downtown Miami, Fort Lauderdale, and West Palm

Beach.

In the last ice age, low seas exposed the entire Florida

Platform, as well as the land bridge across the Bering Strait

that Paleoindians crossed to North America 12,000 years

ago. Those hunter-gatherers journeyed down and across the

continent to discover a supersized Florida, twice as wide as

it appears today. It was cooler and drier, with fewer lakes

and rivers. But its windswept prairies and oak savannas

would have made the modern Serengeti look like a petting

zoo, with fourteen-foot-tall mammoths, fiveton mastodons,

sloths the size of elephants, jaguars, wild dogs, and saber-

toothed smilodons with nine-inch blades for canines. Most of

the world’s large mammals died out after the ice ages—

many scientists suspect their extinctions were related to a

certain two-legged predator—but Paleoindians still hunted

south Florida’s panthers, deer, and ducks, while trolling its

waters for oysters, scallops, and fish.

It was only about 5,000 years ago—after prehistoric man

was already writing, making pottery, smelting copper, and

brewing beer—that seas approached current levels and

modern climate conditions prevailed. Sawgrass began to

sprout, and dead sawgrass began to decompose into soot-

black Everglades muck soils. Geologically, not much had

ever happened there, but the ingredients for the Everglades

were in place.

THE MOST IMPORTANT ingredient was rain.

South Florida ended up in the Desert Belt, at the latitude

of the Sahara and the Arabian. But it is surrounded by cloud-

generating water bodies on three sides, with Lake

Okeechobee occupying much of the fourth. So instead of a

year-round desert climate, south Florida developed a two-

tone subtropical climate, a pleasant November-to-May dry

season with some of the continent’s warmest winters

followed by a muggy June-to-October rainy season with the

continent’s wettest summers. On average, south Florida

receives about fifty-five annual inches of rain, significantly

more than Seattle, although “average” is a misleading

concept when there are such dramatic fluctuations between

wet and dry seasons and years. Rain falls in bunches below

Lake O, most of it in summer afternoon thunderstorms that

can feel like an ocean falling from the sky, dumping a foot in

a day. South Florida is also the continent’s leading target for

tropical hurricanes.

This combination of abundant sunlight and abundant rain

was the ultimate recipe for abundant life. Rainy seasons

created biological explosions, and the winter dry-downs that

followed were just as important, concentrating fish into

shallow pools that attracted birds for feeding frenzies.

Everglades flora and fauna all adapted to these seesaws

between flood and drought; for example, the gambusia’s

upturned mouth and the gar’s oxygen-breathing lung helped

both fish survive in low water, which helped the mosquitoes

that ate gambusia larvae (also known as mosquito fish) and

the alligators that fed on gar (also known as alligator gar)

survive extended dry spells as well.

Since south Florida was the subtropical extremity of a

temperate landmass, its mix of flora and fauna was eclectic

as well as abundant. Temperate species from the north,

including hawks, raccoons, oaks, bobcats, and white-tailed

deer, joined tropical species from the south, including

roseate spoonbills that flew in, loggerhead turtles that swam

in, tree snails that floated in on branches, mahoganies

whose seeds blew in during storms, and cocoplums whose

seeds were dropped in by birds. Gators came down from the

north; crocs came up from the south. They all came

together in the Everglades—and nowhere else.

THE OTHER CRUCIAL INGREDIENT was limestone. The rock

beneath the Everglades was exceedingly level, declining as

little as two inches per mile, so all that water flowed down

the peninsula exceedingly slowly. But the Everglades was

not quite as flat as a floor or a cracker or a desk, as it is

often described, so its water did flow. It trickled ever so

sluggishly down the interior of the peninsula, inexorably

carving its tree islands into teardrops that pointed the same

direction as its almost imperceptible current. It gathered

into sloughs and streams that sometimes vanished in the

sawgrass, and sometimes found their way to the sea.

South Florida’s limestone was also exceedingly porous,

so the surface water that accumulated during wet times

percolated and recharged the aquifers within the rock,

maintaining an unusually high water table. If south Florida’s

geography made sure it got wet, its geology made sure it

stayed wet; in its natural state, 70 percent of the region

flooded every year, and 95 percent flooded at least

periodically. A man of ordinary height (and extraordinary

grit) could have walked the entire length of the Everglades

without getting his hair wet, but his ankles might have been

underwater the whole time.

In such a level landscape, even a few inches of elevation

could transform the scenery. Water-lily sloughs that stayed

wet all year long were just slightly lower than sawgrass

marshes with ten-month hydroperiods, which were just

slightly lower than Muhly-grass marshes with four-month

hydroperiods. The slightly higher uplands of the coastal

ridge rarely flooded at all, so they supported skinny slash

pines with fire-resistant bark. And the different plant

assemblies all decomposed into different soils, which

corresponded almost precisely with the different rock

formations beneath them.

Geology and hydrology were not quite destiny in the

Everglades, but they were close.

THE EVERGLADES WAS ALSO MOLDED by an ingredient it

lacked: phosphorus. It is a common nutrient in nature,

critical to plant development. But the Everglades was

phosphorus-starved, so its most successful species adapted

to a low-nutrient environment. For example, sawgrass is a

brutally efficient scavenger of phosphorus, so it

outcompeted other marsh plants in the Everglades.

Similarly, the microorganisms in periphyton mats were

bound together by an intense affinity for phosphorus.

Nature is often called “fragile,” which is usually wrong;

nature is the essence of resilience. But the Everglades was

about as fragile as nature gets, in the sense that even minor

changes—in chemistry as well as topography or hydrology—

made major differences. Tiny additions of phosphorus could

transform the marsh, just like tiny bumps in land elevation

or tiny dips in water levels. The Everglades was sensitive

that way.

But 5,000 years ago, nothing had been added to the

Everglades. Its waters were still pristine, and still flowed

south without interruption.

The Lay of the Land

THE NATURAL EVERGLADES ECOSYSTEM, in sum, was an

extremely flat drainage basin with extremely poor drainage,

an unusually wet watershed that was unusually inefficient at

shedding its water. A raindrop that fell in its headwaters in

central Florida could have taken an entire year to dribble

down to its estuaries at the tip of the peninsula. “The water

is pure and limpid, and almost imperceptibly moves, not in

partial currents, but, as it seems, in a mass, silently and

slowly to the southward,” an explorer wrote in 1848. The

story of the Everglades, in sum, is the story of that water’s

journey, and man’s efforts to reroute it.

The original journey began with the Kissimmee Chain of

Lakes, a sparkling string of shallow potholes down the spine

of the peninsula, brimming with bass and bluegill that

spawned in the bulrush along their edges. The lakes fed the

serpentine Kissimmee River, a kind of riparian Lombard

Street, zigzagging like a drunken unicyclist down its narrow

floodplain, frequently mutinying its banks to nourish its

marshes. The Kissimmee basin attracted hordes of

migratory waterfowl each winter, and supported a year-

round menagerie of wading birds so abundant that one early

visitor mistook the beating of their wings against the water

for the churning of an approaching steamboat: “They do not

attempt to fly until our boats are among them, and then it

seems as if pandemonium has broken loose!”

The Kissimmee emptied into the immense saucer of Lake

Okeechobee, Seminole for Big Water. Lake O was only

twenty feet deep, but it was the largest lake in the South

and one of the largest in America, vanishing in the distance

with the curvature of the earth. The lake was crammed with

bass, catfish, and trout that literally jumped into the canoes

of a U.S. naval force that patrolled the lake in 1842; its

shores teemed with deer, turtles, and especially birds.

“Feasted sumptuously on wild turkey, broiled and fried

curlew, plover and teal, stewed crane, [anhingas] and fried

fish, our spoils of the day,” the expedition’s leader rejoiced.

“The Astor House could not have supplied such a dinner.”

Lake Okeechobee did not have a traditional outlet. The

Caloosahatchee River began three miles west of it and

drained west to the Gulf; the St. Lucie River began twenty

miles east of it and drained east to the Atlantic; neither river

carried water out of Lake O. Instead, during summer storms,

the lake swelled until it spilled over its lower lip in a

tremendous sheet. That was where the river of grass began,

sloshing down the spoon-shaped depression between the

Atlantic Coastal Ridge and the Big Cypress Swamp.

There was a washboard pattern to the Everglades, with

dense sawgrass ridges alternating with open-water sloughs

that carried its waters to sea. The widest strip of water

draining the marsh, Shark Slough, curved southwest toward

the tidal lagoons of the Ten Thousand Islands, a bewildering

green archipelago of mangrove keys at the edge of the Gulf.

The second largest Everglades outlet, Taylor Slough, headed

due south through the sawgrass before melting into the

brackish waters of Florida Bay, a triangular wading pool

even larger and shallower than Lake Okeechobee, bracketed

by the wide arc of the Keys. There were many smaller

outlets as well, including Turner, Harney, and Lostman’s

Rivers flowing southwest to the Gulf, and “transverse

glades” like the Miami, New, and Hillsboro Rivers spilling

over or slicing through the coastal ridge on their way

southeast to Biscayne Bay.

The Ten Thousand Islands, Florida Bay, Biscayne Bay, and

the other coastal estuaries where fresh water from the

Everglades mingled with salt water from the sea were the

most productive niches of the ecosystem. They sheltered

dolphins, manatees, pink shrimp, spiny lobsters, stone

crabs, and an almost inconceivable array of fish. “Their

number and variety are simply marvelous,” another explorer

wrote after visiting Florida Bay. “You can at one glance,

through this crystal water, see over fifty varieties. The

colors would put to blush the palette of an impressionist.”

In fact, the Everglades estuaries that ringed south Florida

were so full of life that they changed the course of human

history.

Native Species

YES, MAN WAS NATIVE to the Everglades, too. In fact, the

southwest edge of the Everglades may have been man’s

first permanent home in North America.

Until 1989, archaeologists believed that all Archaic

peoples on the continent were nomadic, that year-round

settlements only appeared after the introduction of

agriculture. Then a graduate student named Michael Russo

excavated Horr’s Island, a squiggle-shaped clump of

mangrove keys at the head of the Ten Thousand Islands.

Russo found evidence of centuries of permanent occupation

by a complex society, including traces of wooden posts used

in dwellings and huge shell mounds used for rituals and

burials. Russo then carbon-dated the site to the late Archaic

period—right when the Everglades and its estuaries were

taking form.

Russo’s findings were archaelogical heresy. It seemed

inconceivable that primitive hunter-gatherers with the run of

the continent would have settled down on a swampy

outpost off the tip of Florida, separated from the mainland

by ten miles of tangled mangroves and tidal flats, in a

humid archipelago where a twentieth-century entomologist

would catch a record-breaking 365,696 mosquitoes in one

trap in one night. But that’s what happened. Russo revealed

why when he dug up the island’s food remains, which

included seventy-four varieties of fish and shellfish: Horr’s

Island was an all-you-can-eat seafood buffet. The fishing at

the edge of the Everglades was so good that its residents

did not need to leave in the off-season to find more food, so

good that it forced the archaeology establishment to revise

its assumptions about Archaic man.

The people of Horr’s Island sometimes ventured offshore

to harpoon whales, sharks, marlins, and manatees, paddling

canoes they fashioned from hollowed-out cypress logs, but

they found most of their food in south Florida’s sheltered

near-shore estuaries. They hauled in tiny pinfish, catfish,

and herring with nets woven from palm fibers, and gathered

mollusks that provided raw material for their shell mounds

as well as protein for their diets. They harvested different

species in different seasons, like reliable underwater row

crops: oysters in winter, scallops in summer, fish all year

long. Most of the world’s ancient societies had agricultural

origins, but the bountiful fringes of the Everglades, where

mangrove roots and seagrass meadows provided shelter

and nutrition for hundreds of estuarine species, proved that

cultivation was not a prerequisite for civilization.

BY THE TIME EUROPEANS arrived in the sixteenth century,

the people of Horr’s Island were gone. The Calusa Indians

controlled southwest Florida, and exacted tribute from

weaker tribes scattered around the peninsula.

None of these native people were farmers, either. Most

were coastal fishermen. Many also maintained hunting

camps in Big Cypress uplands or Everglades tree islands,

and some may have even lived year-round in drier pockets

of the interior—eating more turtles, mammals, and

freshwater fish, but thriving just the same. The Europeans

marveled at the imposing height, powerful physiques, and

rich diets of the Calusa, the ultimate tribute to the bounty of

the Everglades. Hernando d’Escalante Fontaneda, a Spanish

shipwreck survivor who spent seventeen years as a Calusa

prisoner, called his captors “men of strength” in his

memoirs. “The people are great anglers, and at no time lack

fresh fish,” he wrote.

Fontaneda catalogued the marine cuisine of the Glades

Indians, including lobsters, oysters, manatees, “enormous

trout, nearly the size of men,” and eels as thick as thighs.

He also noted that the Tequesta Indians, who occupied the

high ground of the Atlantic ridge, collected nuts and fruits

and made bread out of “coontie,” a starchy root abundant in

the pinelands. They hunted deer, birds, snakes, alligators,

“a certain animal that looks like a fox, yet is not,”

presumably raccoons, “an animal like a rat,” probably

opossum, “and many more wild animals, which, if we were

to continue enumerating, we should never be through.”

The Indians of the Everglades had enough food that they

didn’t need to spend every waking moment hunting and

gathering; they had plenty of time for construction, religion,

and art. The Calusa built enormous mounds from their

discarded clam, conch, and oyster shells, including the 150-

acre island of Chokoloskee, and topped them with palmetto-

thatched homes. They crafted hammers, bowls, toys, and

pendants out of wood, shell, and bone. They attended

rituals in elaborate costumes, and sculpted ceremonial

masks and statuettes depicting turtles, pelicans, panthers,

and gators. One archaeologist was amazed by the “startling

fidelity” of the inner ears, hair tufts, and other details he

found on a Calusa deer carving: “The muzzle, nostrils and

especially the exquisitely modeled and painted lower jaw

were so delicately idealized that it was evident the primitive

artist who fashioned this masterpiece loved, with both ardor

and reverence, the animal he was portraying.”

The Glades Indians have often been romanticized as wild

savages with hip-length hair and skimpy clothes,

worshipping natural creatures and living in harmony with

the land. The Calusa certainly were fierce warriors

—“Calusa” meant “fierce”—and it is true that they did not

overdress in the heat. “The men onely use deere skins,

wherewith some onely cover their privy members,” gasped

a British observer named John Sparke. But the Glades

Indians were sophisticated people, and they did not follow

the Leave No Trace ethic of the outdoors. They built

impressive engineering projects that molded nature to their

needs—not just the shell mounds that still dot the Gulf

coast, but seawalls, jetties, weirs, fish traps, and reservoirs.

They dug canals to create canoe routes to their hunting

grounds, including a three-mile cut from the Caloosahatchee

River to Lake Okeechobee that would be reopened centuries

later for one of the first Everglades drainage ditches. The

Calusa burned prairies to attract deer, chopped down

cypress trees for their canoes, butchered the animals they

idealized in their art, and preyed on baby fish that would be

untouchable under modern catch-and-release rules. Native

people had an impact on the Everglades environment, just

as gators did when they dug their holes, or birds did when

they ate seeds in the tropics and deposited them in south

Florida.

But the natives had an extremely modest impact. For one

thing, there weren’t many of them—perhaps 20,000 in south

Florida at the time of European contact. They did not

slaughter for sport, and their way of life was sustainable

without the hunting limits, pollution controls, water

restrictions, and wetlands protections associated with

modern eco-sensitivity. It wasn’t necessarily an admirable

lifestyle—Calusa chiefs performed human sacrifices, married

their sisters, kidnapped additional wives from conquered

villages, and murdered subjects who tried to snoop around

their secret meetings with gods—but there is no evidence

that it significantly depleted the region’s natural resources.

“In view of the fact that they lived there for about 2,000

years, the Calusa left surprisingly little impress upon the

development of the area,” one historian wrote.

The Everglades was still the Everglades before white men

arrived.

Two

The Intruders

We appeal to the Great Father, who has so often

promised us protection and friendship, to shield us

from the wrongs his white children seem

determined to inflict upon us.

—Seminole Indian chief John Hicks

A Hostile Territory

JOHN SPARKE, the British observer who described the near-

nudity of Florida’s Indians, was right about their deerskins

and privy members. But the most illuminating parts of

Sparke’s account of his 1565 voyage to Florida were the

parts he got wrong. He thought Florida was an island, “very

scant of fresh water.” He reported rumors of “a serpent with

three heads and foure feet, of the bignesse of a great

spaniel.”

“It is thought that there are lions and tygres as well as

unicornes, lions especially, if it be true that is sayd, of the

enmity between them and the unicornes,” Sparke wrote. He

revealed the source of this ignorance in a later passage on

Florida’s birds: “Concerning them on the land I am not able

to name them, because my abode there was so short.”

This is a common thread in early European accounts of

south Florida: They offered dead-on depictions of the coast,

and wild speculation about the interior. One Spaniard

perfectly described the “islands surrounded by

swamplands” at the edge of the Gulf, then lapsed into

fantasies of kangaroos, emerald deposits, and mountain

ranges further inland, “the emeralds being common near

the mountains.” That’s because he never made it past the

Calusa, or the coast.

A MIDDLE-AGED SPANISH CONQUISTADOR named Juan

Ponce de León was the first white intruder in Florida, and he

learned the hard way that it was hostile territory.

Ponce had accompanied Christopher Columbus to the

New World, where he had brutally suppressed revolts by

Indian slaves and greedily exploited Indian mineworkers. He

had become governor of Puerto Rico, then wrangled a

charter to colonize Bimini, a Caribbean island rumored to

contain fabulous wealth, as well as a magical river that

restored youth. Ponce certainly hoped to find the wealth; his

charter specified “gold and other metals and profitable

things.” He may have sought the Fountain of Youth as well;

historians tend to scoff at this notion, but at a time when

adventurers believed in three-headed serpents and

unicorns, it’s certainly possible. In any case, Ponce didn’t

find Bimini. In 1513, in the Easter season—Pascua Florida—

he found what he thought was another balmy Caribbean

island, and named it Florida. Ponce didn’t find fabulous

wealth or eternal youth, either. He found trouble.

After landing near Cape Canaveral on the Atlantic coast,

Ponce sailed around the peninsula to Charlotte Harbor on

the Gulf coast, where a Calusa messenger promised him

gold for trade—moments before twenty canoes full of war-

whooping Indians swooped in to attack his caravels. The

Spaniards fought them off with artillery, and Ponce sent two

Indian prisoners to the chief with a message of peace. They

returned with another promise of trade—and then another

ambush, this time with eighty canoes. “The natives of the

land [were] a very austere and very savage and belligerous

and fierce and untamed people and not accustomed to a

peaceful existence nor to lay down their liberty so easily,”

one Spaniard wrote. This was not the bucolic island of

submissive natives that Ponce had envisioned, and he left in

frustration.

Ponce returned eight years later with 200 men to try to

settle the area, but the Calusa welcomed him with another

ambush at Charlotte Harbor. This time, they shot him in the

thigh with an arrow dipped in the poisonous sap of the

Everglades manchineel tree. Ponce had to retreat to

Havana, where he died of his wounds. The Calusa remained

untamed, and so did the Everglades.

A Doomed Marriage

THE NEXT CONQUISTADOR who tried to colonize south

Florida was Pedro Menéndez de Avilés, who is best known—

but still not very well known—for founding America’s oldest

settlement at St. Augustine in north Florida, fifty-five years

before the better-publicized Pilgrims landed at Plymouth

Rock. Menéndez was a fearless seaman who rose from

modest origins to lead the fabled Spanish armada. He was a

muscular, strange-looking man, with oversized ears, an

undersized mouth, and a long, crooked nose; in a Titian

portrait, his dark eyes give a hint of his fanatic intensity and

his considerable self-regard.

In 1564, a group of French Lutherans set up camp in

north Florida, threatening Spanish hegemony over the

territory and its trade routes. It was the Age of Exploration

as well as the height of the Inquisition, and Menéndez

persuaded King Philip II that an influx of Spanish Catholics in

Florida could serve as bulwarks against colonial rivals and

Protestant heretics in the New World. In an early example of

Florida boosterism, he also predicted the colony would

produce sugar, wheat, cattle, silk, and “endless supplies of

fruit” even more valuable than the precious metals Cortés

and Pizarro had plundered from Mexico and Peru. Finally,

Menéndez also hoped to find a cross-peninsula waterway

linking the Atlantic to the Gulf, a shortcut to bypass the

reefs, shoals, and pirates that had scuttled so many Spanish

ships and sailors—including his only son—in the Florida

Straits.

So Menéndez set sail for Florida with supplies that

included 3,182 hundredweight of biscuits, eight church

bells, and 1,758 cannonballs. Shortly after he dropped

anchor in St. Augustine Bay to prepare for the climactic

battle, a hurricane destroyed the French fleet on the open

seas. God was clearly on Spain’s side, and Menéndez

showed his gratitude by slaughtering the “evil and

detestable” Protestants and burning their prayerbooks. “At

them!” he shouted during one rout. “God is helping! Victory!

The French are killed!”

His captives begged for mercy, but Menéndez coldly

replied that he was waging a war of fire and blood. He

spared only twelve musicians and four repentant Catholics

out of 150 prisoners, then butchered another 200

Frenchmen at an inlet the Spaniards proudly named

Matanzas, for massacre. “They came and surrendered their

arms to me, and I had their hands tied behind them, and put

them all, excepting ten, to the knife,” he told the king. His

contemporary biographer praised his mercy, since “by every

right he could have burnt them alive.”

AFTER SUBDUING THE FRENCH in north Florida, Florida’s

new adelantado turned his attention to the Calusa in south

Florida. Menéndez brought gifts to their headquarters on

Mound Key near the mouth of the Caloosahatchee: silk

breeches, a shirt, and a hat for the strapping young chief

Carlos; gowns and mirrors for his wives. Menéndez then

invited Carlos to board his galleon for a feast of fish,

oysters, and wine. Resplendent in war paint, egret plumes,

and a golden forehead ornament, Carlos presented

Menéndez with a large bar of silver recovered from a

Spanish shipwreck, and grasped his hand in friendship.

But Carlos had foolishly surrendered his manpower

advantage by coming aboard with only a few guards; the

Spaniards had a strong firepower advantage. Spanish

soldiers with matchlit muskets quietly surrounded the

Indians, and Menéndez informed Carlos that they would

become great friends once he released the Spanish captives

he had seized from nearby wrecks—but that he could not

leave the ship until then. The captives, including the diarist

Hernando d’Escalante Fontaneda, were released.

Carlos wasn’t always foolish. He invited Menéndez to

celebrate their new alliance in his palm-thatched banquet

hall, in front of 1,000 braves and bare-breasted women, and

declared that he now considered the adelantado his brother.

He then offered Menéndez his homely older sister’s hand in

marriage. To be consummated immediately.

But I can only be with a Christian, Menéndez stammered.

You’re my brother, Carlos replied, so we’re all Christians

now!

It’s not so simple, Menéndez said. He began an

impromptu lecture about Christian duties, but Carlos was in

no mood for theology. We understand, he said: Your food

and music are better than ours, and we’re sure your religion

is, too. But if you don’t sleep with my sister right now,

Carlos warned, my people will be scandalized.

It was an awkward situation: Menéndez was married to a

sister of the expedition’s official historian. But according to

his understanding brother-in-law, his aides practically forced

him to commit bigamy in order to build trust, win converts,

and ensure Spanish control of south Florida: “The

Adelantado showed much [desire] to try some other

expedient, but as none could be found, it was decided that

thus it should be done.” The chief’s sister was baptized as

Antonia, and the new allies all partied together until 2 A.M.

Antonia was “very joyful” the next morning, so Menéndez

apparently did his part, too.

BUT MENÉNDEZ LEFT WITHOUT HIS NEW BRIDE, dispatching

her to Havana to receive a Christian education while he

attended to famines and mutinies elsewhere in his territory.

And the next time he visited Havana, he did not even intend

to see her. To Menéndez, the marriage was pure realpolitik,

but Antonia was heartsick. She had memorized prayers and

mastered Christian doctrine, even while her entourage was

dying of colonial diseases.

Menéndez realized that an unhappy Antonia endangered

his mission, so he finally showed up with fancy clothes and

necklaces, fibbing that he hadn’t visited earlier because

knights of his order were not allowed to sleep with their

wives for eight days after battle. Antonia was not appeased:

“She told him she wished that God might kill her, because

when they landed the Adelantado had not sent for her.”

That night, Antonia snuck into her husband’s room holding a

candle. Please, she sobbed, let me lie in a corner of your

bed. Then my brother won’t think you’re laughing at me,

and he’ll become a true friend of the Christians, or a

Christian like me. Menéndez laughed and sent her off with

more baubles. He then sailed her back to Carlos, promising

to return to build a home where they could all live together

as Christians. “She was very sorrowful because he didn’t

stay eight days and sleep with her,” the historian wrote.

Carlos was insulted, too, and Menéndez did not ease his

hostility by badgering him to cut his hair and bring his tribe

to Christ. Carlos considered Menéndez a vital ally against

the Tocobaga people in Tampa Bay as well as his internal

Calusa rivals, so he agreed. But he said he first needed nine

months to prepare his people to renounce their rituals, or

else they would revolt. Menéndez decided that Carlos could

not be trusted.

The feeling was mutual. By 1567, when Menéndez

returned to south Florida for the last time, the alliance of

expedience was as fragile as his marriage of expedience.

One missionary complained that Indians only attended his

lectures for the free food, and then had the impudence to

question his Christian logic: “When I showed them clearly

and to their face the falsity and deception of their idols, they

threw up to me our adoration of the cross.” He said Carlos

remained “very much involved in his idolatries and strongly

attached to his witchcrafts and superstitions,” as well as his

multiple wives.

Carlos did agree to accompany Menéndez on a peace

mission to Tampa Bay, but they had a rather significant

difference of opinion about the purpose of the voyage: As

they approached the tribe’s village by moonlight, Carlos

proposed that they burn it down and kill all the inhabitants.

Menéndez refused. Then let me do it myself, Carlos pleaded.

The adelantado would not budge. Carlos wept with rage,

and if Menéndez thought his scorned wife would appreciate

his peacekeeping, he was deeply mistaken.

You have two hearts, Antonia cried. One for the

Tocobaga, and one for yourself, but none for me or my

brother. The marriage was over.

The father of Florida returned to Spain, where he died

still clinging to his dreams of colonial grandeur. “After the

salvation of my soul, there is nothing I desire more than to

be in Florida,” Menéndez wrote in his final letter. St.

Augustine continued to flourish, but his southwest Florida

colony collapsed after he left. Carlos repeatedly attacked

the Spaniards, until they killed him and installed a rival on

the throne. They soon murdered the rival as well, so the

Calusa torched their own village and fled to the sodden

interior.

By 1570, the Spaniards in south Florida were

missionaries without a mission. They conceded failure and

returned to north Florida. Menéndez’s nephew reported to

the king that south Florida was “liable to be overflowed, and

of no use.” The cross-Florida waterway had turned out to be

as fanciful as the Fountain of Youth. And the Calusa had “a

blood lust for killing Christians, for they lose no opportunity

they see.”

His advice: Stay away from south Florida.

FOR THE NEXT THREE CENTURIES, most white men did.

Florida became a pawn on the global chessboard, a

blood-soaked outpost in wars of European conquest. But the

fighting was all in north Florida. Spanish settlers fought off

the British in the War of the Spanish Succession, the French

in the War of the Quadruple Alliance, and the British again in

the War of Jenkins’ Ear. Nothing changed. Spain did

surrender Florida to the British after the French and Indian

War, but regained it after the American Revolution. It didn’t

matter. The Spaniards weren’t doing much with it.

Florida was still an expendable backwater, still almost

entirely in its natural state. A British visitor noted that

Florida’s inhabitants, “soldiers and savages excepted, would

make but a thin congregation in a small parish-church.” And

south Florida was its most isolated outpost, the backwater

of the backwater. It was obvious that the region was

useless, and the Europeans were not inclined to try to make

it useful. Once again, the Calusa had south Florida to

themselves.

But not for long. The Calusa lacked immunity to measles,

smallpox, and other Old World diseases, so their occasional

exposure to Spanish fishermen and traders produced

virulent epidemics. Raids by British-backed Indian rivals

further decimated their numbers. When Spain ceded Florida

to the British in 1763, Florida’s last eighty Calusa families

fled to Havana. The native people of the Glades were gone.

The Wild Ones

IN MODERN SOUTH FLORIDA, where just about everyone

comes from somewhere else, it turns out that even the

Native Americans are out-of-state transplants. Today, the

Seminole Indians and their Miccosukee relatives are known

as the people of the Everglades. But they didn’t start out

anywhere near there. They were driven there.

Seminoles began streaming into north Florida from

Georgia and Alabama during the eighteenth century, just as

the Calusa were dying out. They had little in common with

the Calusa. They were known as cimarrones—“breakaways,”

or “wild ones”—because most of them split off from the

Creek Confederation, and they retained their Creek

traditions, worshipping the Breathmaker at annual Green

Corn harvest ceremonies. They were farmers and traders as

well as hunters and fishermen; they were also some of

America’s first cowboys. They visited the Everglades to

hunt, but by 1800, their permanent villages only stretched

as far south as Tampa Bay. When a Seminole chief issued his

famous vow to remain in Florida—“Here our navel strings

were first cut, and the blood from them sunk into the earth,

and made the country dear to us”—he meant north Florida.

North Florida was an ideal setting for the Seminoles, a

fertile extension of the Deep South. In 1791, the botanist

William Bartram described a prosperous Seminole

community near Gainesville in his Travels, the classic

Romantic narrative that introduced Florida to the world and

inspired Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan.” Travels is mostly

remembered for its breathless descriptions of flora and

fauna, but Bartram was also enchanted by the Seminoles, a

people “as blithe and free as the birds of the air.” He

attributed their rosy outlook to the “superabundance of the

necessaries and conveniences of life” in Florida: “They seem

to be free from want or desires. No cruel enemy to dread,

nothing to give them disquietude, but the gradual

encroachments of the white people.”

Bartram significantly underestimated the disquietude

those encroachments would cause. The Seminoles clashed

constantly with whites along the Georgia and Alabama

borders, sometimes over cattle, usually over runaway slaves

who sought refuge with the tribe. Seminoles kept black

slaves, but treated them more like sharecroppers; they

raised their own crops, inter-married, and often became full-

fledged tribesmen. For white settlers who already coveted

Indian land, the threat of a savage tribe becoming a magnet

for escaped slaves was an excellent excuse for an invasion.

In 1811, Georgia militiamen in the so-called “Patriot Army”

began crossing the border to attack the Indians in Spanish

Florida, who responded with scalping raids into U.S. territory.

Reports of their “uncommon cruelty and barbarism” soon

made their way to General Andrew Jackson, America’s

boldest Indian fighter.

TO OLD HICKORY—or Sharp Knife, as he was known to many

Indians after his exploits in the Creek War—the insolence of

the Seminoles was unacceptable, and their residence in

Spanish territory was irrelevant. In modern terms, Jackson

believed Spain was harboring terrorists; he told Secretary of

War John Calhoun that as long as Indians were using Florida

as a sanctuary to kill American frontiersmen, the U.S. Army

had a duty to “follow the marauders and punish them in

their retreat.” In 1818, Jackson led a scorched-earth march

through north Florida designed to “chastise a savage foe,

combined with a lawless band of negro brigands.” He seized

their herds and razed their farms, then commandeered two

Spanish forts for good measure. Jackson claimed the right of

national self-defense to justify his invasion, but he also

described Florida as a natural extension of America, like a

paw to a panther. “I view the Possession of the Floridas

essential to the peace & security of the frontier, and the

future welfare of our country,” Jackson wrote to President

James Monroe.

Jackson’s intrusions sparked international and

congressional furors, with critics attacking Jackson as a

budding Napoleon, and dismissing Florida as a worthless

prize. One congressman argued that Florida was not

essential to security, welfare, or anything else: “It is a land

of swamps, of quagmires, of frogs and alligators and

mosquitoes! A man, sir, would not immigrate into Florida…

no, not from hell itself!”

But most Americans shared Jackson’s disdain for

diplomatic niceties, and his faith that Florida was destined

to join the U.S. juggernaut. The push to annex Florida was

an early flowering of the doctrine that it was America’s

“manifest destiny to overspread the continent,” famously

articulated twenty-five years later to push the annexations

of Texas, Oregon, and California. One senator called the

Florida appendage “a natural and necessary part of our

empire…joined to us by the hand of the Almighty.” A

Kentucky journal declared that Florida “as naturally

belong[s] to us as the county of Cornwall does to England.”

America’s right to expand was like the right of a tree to the

air above it, or the right of a stream to its channel—a

natural right, granted by God, as inevitable as the sunrise.

At first, the Monroe administration tried to distance itself

from Jackson’s foreign adventure, but Secretary of State

John Quincy Adams soon negotiated a treaty with Spain that

ratified the facts on the ground, transferring Florida to the

United States for $5 million. “This rendered it still more

unavoidable that the remainder of the continent shall

ultimately be ours,” Adams wrote.

In 1821, Monroe appointed Jackson to be Florida’s first

American governor. Sharp Knife’s victory seemed complete.

The First Seminole War had extended the frontier to the

south, and inaugurated the expansionism that would

become standard American policy, outlasting the

presidencies of Monroe, Adams, and Jackson himself.

The only hitch was that the Seminoles remained in

Florida.

The Drive to the South

EARLY AMERICANS WERE as certain as Menéndez that God

was on their side, and against native heathens. The New

England colonist John Winthrop saw an Indian smallpox

epidemic as proof of heavenly intervention: “God hath

consumed the natives with a miraculous plagey.” Ben

Franklin viewed Indian alcoholism as similar evidence of

“the design of Providence to extirpate these savages.” In

the nineteenth century, these twin beliefs in white

supremacy and Manifest Destiny inspired the ethnic

cleansing—and often the genocide—of native tribes. For

white Americans who believed that they were a chosen

people and America their promised land, any fraudulent

treaty or land grab could be justified by their moral

obligation to overwhelm the red-skinned barbarians who

stood in the path of Christian civilization. And if their lofty

ambitions happened to coincide with their land hunger and

greed, well, what better validation of God’s plan?

In Florida, once Americans ousted the Spaniards, it never

occurred to them to let the Seminoles keep their land. “To

have acquired a territory of such extent, to be left in

possession of these Indians, was too absurd to merit one

moment’s consideration,” one officer explained. Whites

wanted to cultivate north Florida, so the Seminoles would

have to move to the unknown, unwanted south. Letting

them remain would have implied that Indians had rights,

that America had limits, that primitive hunter-gatherers

could take precedence over civilized farmers. The next thing

you know, one politician warned, “the progress of mankind

is arrested, and you condemn one of the most beautiful and

fertile tracts of the earth to perpetual sterility as the hunting

ground of a few savages.” Actually, the Seminoles were not

primitive hunter-gatherers at all; they were successful

farmers, which was why their decidedly unsterile land had

attracted such ravenous attention in the first place. But

Americans weren’t about to let such inconvenient facts get

in the way of God’s design for man’s progress. Even the

Cherokees, with their literate, agrarian society and their

democratic constitution, were forced west on the Trail of

Tears.

The task of forcing the Seminoles toward the Everglades

was assigned to James Gadsden, a tough-minded Jackson

protégé who would later negotiate the Gadsden Purchase in

the Southwest as a diplomat. In Florida, though, his job was

dictation, not diplomacy. He informed the Indians that if

they did not move south, Sharp Knife would crush them

again. “The hatchet is buried; the muskets, the white men’s

arms, are stacked in peace,” he warned. “Do you wish them

to remain so?” The chief Neamathla begged Gadsden not to

force the Seminoles into the Everglades, where the soil was

flooded and trees were scarce: “We rely on your justice and

humanity. We hope you will not send us south to a country

where neither the hickory nut, the acorn, nor the persimmon

grows.”

The Treaty of Moultrie Creek did not force the Seminoles

all the way to the sawgrass Everglades, but it did confine

them to four million marshy acres in central Florida, at the

fringes of the Everglades ecosystem. Only Neamathla and

his subchiefs received tracts in north Florida, thinly

disguised bribes to sign the treaty. For surrendering their

claim to the rest of Florida, the Seminoles were promised

less than a penny per acre. Gadsden candidly described the

deal in a letter to Secretary Calhoun: “It is not necessary to

disguise the fact to you, that the treaty effected was in a

degree a treaty of imposition. The Indians would never have

voluntarily assented to the terms had they not believed that

we had both the power and disposition to compel

obedience.”

The Seminoles were now dependent on the Americans,

who were stingy with rations, and on the new reservation,

an agricultural wasteland. “The best of the Indian lands is

worth but little,” a Florida official admitted. “Nineteen-

twentieths of their whole country within the present

boundary is by far the poorest and most miserable region I

ever beheld.” The chief John Hicks warned a surveyor in the

area that his mules might make a tasty meal for hungry

braves, since twenty-three Seminoles had already starved to

death. “I was in several of their houses & saw nothing

except two or three pounds of venison & briar root soup &

bread,” the surveyor reported. “I am confident of Hicks’

statement being true with respect to their starving

situation.”

Calhoun had predicted that the treaty would pacify

Florida for years. But the ink had barely dried before white

frontiersmen began seizing slaves from Seminoles, and

famished Seminoles began plundering cattle from whites.

The settlers began clamoring for the return of all blacks

living with the Indians, even though the tribe had purchased

many of them legally from the settlers. Florida’s legislative

council also passed An Act to Prevent the Indians from

Roaming at Large, sentencing any Seminole caught off the

reservation to thirty-nine lashes. “We were promised justice,

and we want to see it!” protested a tribal spokesman named

Jumper. “We have submitted to one demand after another,

in the hope that they would cease, but it seems that there

will be no end to them, as long as we have anything left that

the white people may want!”

He was right. There were only 4,000 Seminoles in Florida,

but that was 4,000 too many for Florida’s settlers. And the

new president, one Andrew Jackson, intended to remove

them.

Sharp Knife and the Bad Bird

JACKSON HAD COMPLEX ATTITUDES toward Indians. He had

raised a Creek orphan as a son, and expressed genuine

concern for the red man’s survival. But he also saw Indians

as inferior beings, and his concern for American security

always outweighed his concern for their welfare. He

honestly believed that eastern tribes would be overwhelmed

by land-hungry frontiersmen unless they moved west of the

Mississippi River, but it was no coincidence that the

frontiersmen favored his solution as well. His administration

would ultimately acquire about 100 million acres of Indian

land, driving about 100,000 Indians west—some with high-

minded words on parchment, some with guns and bayonets.

In Florida, Jackson’s push for Indian removal inspired the

same legislative council that had tormented the Seminoles

to petition Congress to ease their suffering—by expelling

them from the state. The council’s pitch brimmed with

crocodile-tears compassion for the Indians: “The Treaty of

1823 deprived them of their cultivated fields and of a region

of country fruitful of game, and has placed them in a

wilderness where the earth yields no corn, and where even

the precarious advantages of the chase are in a great

measure denied them.” The council neglected to mention

who had deprived them of those cultivated fields, and who

now occupied that fruitful country. Still, Jackson agreed to

send Gadsden back to Florida, this time to force the

Seminoles to move west instead of south, and to rejoin their

enemies in the Creek Nation—once again, for their own

good.

Gadsden persuaded several chiefs to sign treaties

agreeing to leave Florida, but they were obtained by

bribery, intimidation, and fraud, and the tribe renounced

them. “My people cannot say they will go,” Jumper told the

tribe’s government agent, Wiley Thompson. “If their tongues

say yes, their hearts cry no, and call them liars.”

JUMPER WAS ONE of the Seminoles whose tongues had said

yes, before a charismatic young brave named Osceola

swayed the tribe against emigration with taunts, threats,

and patriotic appeals.

Osceola, a mixed-blood Alabama Creek who was driven

south by Jackson’s army as a child, was not an actual chief.

But he had a chief’s aura, with a wiry, athletic build, regal

cheekbones, feminine lips, and fiery eyes. One U.S. officer,

swept up in the Romanticism of the day, marveled at the

“indomitable firmness” of Osceola’s body, describing his

“beautiful development of muscle and power” as

“something of the Apollo and Hercules blended.” He was a

brilliant ballplayer, a superior wrestler, a natural leader. He

could be charming in white society, and refused to target

women or children in battle, but his resentments burned

deep. “I will make the white man red with blood, then

blacken him in the sun and rain, where the wolf shall smell

his bones, and the buzzard live on his flesh!” he once

shouted in council. The legend that Osceola furiously

stabbed a treaty of removal may not be true—although

there is a slash mark on the document—but he undoubtedly

radicalized his fellow warriors and stiffened the spines of his

elders.

Thompson, a former general in the Georgia militia,

warned Osceola and his fellow Seminoles that their

intransigence would not stand. He called them fools, old

women, and deluded children, and told them their only

choice was whether they wanted to go west over land or

water. In March 1835, he read them a typically

condescending message from President Jackson, their

“Great White Father” in Washington:

My children: I have never deceived, nor will I ever deceive,

any of the red people. I tell you that you must go, and that

you will go. Even if you had a right to stay, how could you

live where you now are? You have sold all your country. You

have not a piece as large as a blanket to sit down upon.

What is to support yourselves, your women and your

children?…Should you listen to the bad birds that are always

flying about you, and refuse to remove, I have directed the

commanding officer to remove you by force.

When many Seminoles still refused to leave, Thompson

theatrically crossed their names off his list of chiefs,

withheld their traditional gifts, and barred them from buying

rifles or powder. He later clapped Osceola in irons, the

ultimate humiliation for an Indian.

At first, Osceola tore his hair, refused to eat, and

screamed like a caged beast. But then he calmed down,

apologized, and signed a pledge to move west. Thompson

set him free after six days, and he seemed like a new man,

bantering with U.S. soldiers, even bringing in his followers to

register for emigration. Thompson was so grateful that he

gave Osceola a silver-plated rifle. The wildest savage had

been tamed, and peaceful removal seemed imminent. “The

Seminole of the present day is a different being from the

warlike son of the forest when the tribe was numerous and

powerful, and no trouble in the removal of the remnant of

the tribe is anticipated,” said the St. Augustine Herald.

General Alexander Macomb, the commander of the U.S.

Army, bragged that he had trounced tribes far more

imposing than the Seminoles: “I cannot see that any danger

can be apprehended from the miserable Indians who inhabit

the peninsula of Florida.”

The Passions of a People

OSCEOLA HAD NOT BEEN TAMED. He had only played the

penitent to get out of jail.

In November 1835, Osceola and his followers surrounded

a Seminole chief named Charley Emathla, who had sold his

cattle to move west. When Emathla refused to renounce

emigration, Osceola killed him, flinging his cattle money on

top of his corpse. The Seminoles fled into the wilderness,

and the frontier erupted in panic. “I have no doubt that the

object of the whole body of the disaffected is to retire to the

wild region of the peninsula of Florida, in the neighborhood

of what is called the Everglades,” Agent Thompson warned.

He was right, if a bit premature.

A month later, while Thompson was smoking a cigar on

an after-dinner stroll, Osceola sprang out of hiding and shot

him fourteen times with his new silver-plated rifle. The same

day, Major Francis Dade was leading a march in central

Florida when a band of war-whooping Seminoles leapt out of

the tall grass and piney woods, slaughtering Dade and all

but three of his 108 men. “The passions of a people, which

had been smothered for fifteen years, descending from sire

to son, were let loose, and the savage massacres which had

appalled the stoutest heart gave undisputed evidence of the

character of the contest,” an American officer wrote. The

Second Seminole War, also known as the Florida War—

America’s longest, bloodiest, and costliest Indian conflict—

was under way.

Osceola brought Thompson’s dripping scalp to a drunken

victory celebration, and the Seminoles took turns mocking

his patronizing speeches. It no longer mattered that their

region was poor and miserable, that it lacked hickory nuts

and persimmons. They were tired of being pushed around,

and determined to fight for their adopted homeland. In

Seminole cosmology, west was the direction of death, the

path of the setting sun, and Osceola was not going to let his

people go voluntarily. He sent a message to General Duncan

Clinch, the U.S. commander in Florida: “You have guns, and

so have we. You have powder and lead, and so have we.

Your men will fight, and so will ours, until the last drop of

Seminole blood has moistened the dust of his hunting

ground.”

THIS TIME, WHITES HAD superior manpower as well as

firepower; 40,000 federal regulars and state militiamen

would cycle through Florida, while the Seminoles had no

way of reinforcing their original 1,000 warriors. But those

“miserable Indians” knew their way around the boggy

peninsula, especially their Everglades hunting grounds.

For the Americans, by contrast, the Florida peninsula was

still terra incognita, known mostly as a protrusion into

shipping lanes. In 1835, the United States was a fast-

growing nation of more than 15 million people, but fewer

than 50,000 of them lived in Florida, and almost all of those

pioneers lived in north Florida or the island of Key West.

South Florida was still such a mystery that the military

distributed maps of the state with the bottom halves blank,

“so officers may make additions thereto as they may by

their knowledge of the country.” One army engineer scoffed

at the notion of Lake Okeechobee, insisting that “there is,

however, no such Lake in existence, and its position on the

maps has been owing to the misapprehension of the

Spanish and English geographers.” A newspaper described

the St. Lucie River, more than 100 miles north of modern-

day Miami, as “beyond the ultimate limits of population on

the Atlantic border.”

The Everglades was still little more than an ugly rumor. In

1823, a British engineer named Charles Vignoles first

identified an “extensive inundated Region covered with Pine

and Hummock Islands of all sizes and generally called THE

EVERGLADES.” But Vignoles was frustrated in his own

efforts to penetrate that inundated region, admitting that

“the dissatisfied traveler has been sent back unable to

complete the object of his mission, and confused in his

effort to tread the mazes of this labyrinth of morasses.” At

the outset of the Florida War, U.S. naval forces faced similar

confusion. Lieutenant Levi Powell led one foray into the

Everglades, but his keelboats got stuck in the sawgrass. “I

found it impracticable to navigate the glades,” he reported.

“We reluctantly commenced our return to camp.”

For the Seminoles, that labyrinth of morasses was camp,

an inaccessible refuge from their persecutors. General

Zachary Taylor admitted that “the everglades may be

impenetrable to the white man, while they can be

penetrated by the hostiles.” Taylor’s exploits in Florida

earned him the nickname “Old Rough and Ready,” and

helped launch his path to the presidency, but he spoke for

many military men when he mused that if the Seminoles

wanted the Everglades, they should be allowed to keep it. “I

would not trade one foot of Michigan or Ohio for a square

mile of Florida swamp,” he wrote.

But Taylor’s bosses believed America had a duty to drive

the Seminoles out of Florida. They vowed to fight for every

square inch of the swamp.

Three

Quagmire

Florida is certainly the poorest country that ever

two people quarreled for.

—U.S. Army surgeon Jacob Motte

Catching Water in a Net

GENERAL WINFIELD SCOTT, the big, blustery, impeccably

tailored commander who replaced General Clinch a few

months after the Dade massacre, figured it would take no

more than a few weeks to force the Seminoles to surrender.

“Old Fuss and Feathers” had studied infantry tactics in

France, and he knew exactly how to fight gentlemanly

armies who presented themselves for battle before opening

fire. Scott arrived at the front with a large library, fine wines,

and a military band that played at his meals, advertising his

position to the Indians. He devised an elaborate plan to

march three synchronized columns down the peninsula to

surround the Seminoles in a pincer attack, tactics better

suited to a game of Stratego than the swamps of Florida.

“To surround what?” President Jackson snorted when he

heard the plan. “The Indians? No.”

Scott had been a hero in the War of 1812, and would be

again in the Mexican War. But he had no idea how to fight

an unconventional war in an unmapped territory that one

soldier described as “swampy, hammocky, low, excessively

hot, sickly and repulsive in all its features.” Scott never

imagined that his troops, horses, and wagons would get

bogged down in the muck, or that Indians on the warpath

would hit and run rather than stand and fight, scattering

into the Everglades instead of clumping together in tidy

formations.

Scott’s columns never did converge on the Seminoles.

Instead, his men spent months trudging through trackless

wetlands and woodlands in shredded boots and soaked

clothes, rarely encountering the enemy except when

stumbling into ambushes. The Seminoles, Scott complained,

were like the no-see-ums that buzzed his ears at night in

Florida. Just when he thought he had his finger on them,

they disappeared. “We are not inaptly compared to a prize-

ox, stung by hornets, unable to avoid or catch his

annoyers,” one officer wrote. “Or we are justly likened to

men harpooning minnows, and shooting sand pipers with

artillery.”

“The white man,” Osceola sneered, “wants to catch

water in a net for fish!”

The Second Seminole War was America’s first Vietnam—a

guerrilla war of attrition, fought on unfamiliar, unforgiving

terrain, against an underestimated, highly motivated enemy

who often retreated but never quit. Soldiers and generals

hated it, and public opinion soured on it, but Washington

politicians, worried that ending it would make America look

weak and create a domino effect among other tribes,

prolonged it for years before it sputtered to a stalemate. Of

the eight commanding generals who cycled through Florida,

Taylor was the only one whose reputation was enhanced,

when he declared victory after a clash near Lake

Okeechobee—a battle that achieved nothing except to

confirm the lake’s existence. Theodore Roosevelt, a

historian before he was president, neatly summed up the

conflict: “Our troops generally fought with great bravery,

but there is very little else in the struggle, either as regards

its origin or the matter in which it was carried on, to which

an American can look back with any satisfaction.”

At the start of the war, a disgruntled lieutenant named

George McCall predicted that it would drag on for seven

years and cost $50 million—10 times what the United States

paid for Florida, 100 times Jackson’s original budget for

driving all the eastern tribes west of the Mississippi. McCall

was right about the duration, and just a shade high on price.

“Millions of money has been expended to gain this most

barren, sandy, swampy and good-for-nothing peninsula,”

wrote another lieutenant, Amos Eaton. Fifteen hundred

federal regulars and hundreds of state volunteers would die

in the effort to evict or exterminate every Indian in Florida;

hundreds of Seminole men, women, and children would

perish as well. “How vastly wide has the earth of Florida

opened her grasping jaws, to swallow up human life during

this Seminole War!” Eaton lamented.

Privation and Disease

WAR IS ALWAYS HELL, but Florida seemed worse.

“Campaigning in Florida,” a twenty-six-year-old army

surgeon named Jacob Motte wrote in his journal, “was

characterized by every species of privation and disease.”

Motte had been educated at Harvard, where he had

written essays about the nature of genius; he was a pipe

smoker, a port drinker, the scion of a notable South Carolina

family descended from the French aristocracy. But now he

found himself “wading in morasses and swamps waist deep,

exposed to noxious vapours and subject to the whims of

drenching rains or the scorching sun of an almost torrid

climate.” Now his companions included snakes, leeches,

horseflies, and mosquitoes: “It was intolerable—

excruciating!”

Motte had the rare opportunity to experience the

Everglades in its natural splendor, and he despised almost

every minute. “It was certainly the most dreary and

pandemonium-like region I ever visited; nothing but barren

wastes,” Motte wrote. It teemed with leeches, lizards, and

other ugly, slimy creatures, not to mention the Indian

“savages” that whites viewed as just another threatening

species of the wild: “It is in fact a most hideous region to

live in, a perfect paradise for Indians, alligators, serpents,

frogs and every other kind of loathsome reptile.” It looked

nothing like the breathtaking natural landscapes that the

Hudson River School and the other artists of the Romantic

era were promoting as national symbols of America’s

greatness. It looked like a sloppy Kansas:

Before us and on either side of us, the scene presented to

our view was one unbroken extent of water and morass, like

that of a boundless rice-field when inundated. No

obstruction offered itself to the eye as it wandered o’er the

interminable, dreary waste of waters, except the tops of a

tall rank grass, about five feet or upwards in height, and

which harmonized well with the desolate aspect of the

surrounding region, exhibiting a picture of universal

desolation.

The troops spent so much time slogging through

wetlands in the Everglades and Big Cypress that their ankles

swelled like balloons, and gruesome inflammations covered

their legs. “The doctors at one time thought that the

amputation of both limbs would be necessary, and it was

more than two years before all the sores were healed,”

recalled a midshipman who spent two months around Lake

Okeechobee. Hundreds of officers quit, and one colonel got

so depressed he rammed his sword into his eye and through

his brain. One officer suggested that anyone forced to fight

in Florida should be promoted for his suffering, and given a

year’s leave of absence “to polish up and see the ladies.”

The Americans had to drag their canoes, rifles,

ammunition, and provisions through razor-edged sawgrass

that ripped their clothes and sliced their skin, through muck

so deep and sticky that one private dropped dead in his

tracks from exhaustion. They shredded their boots on

jagged pinnacle rocks that Motte compared to “a thick crop

of sharply pointed knives,” never knowing who or what was

behind the next tree. “Every rod of the way swarmed with

rattlesnakes, moccasins, and other deadly reptiles,” one

fighter recalled. Then there were the mosquitoes, the

“swamp angels,” the bane of every soldier’s existence.

“Their everlasting hum never ceases,” one doctor reported.

“One of the sailors swore that they had divided into two

gangs, and that one hoisted the net, whilst the other got

under and fed, and I verily do believe there were enough of

them to have done it.” General Alexander Webb’s war

diaries give a sense of the torment:

April 12: Did nothing but send off express to Fort

Deynaud at 4 A.M. and mourn my existence the

rest of the day. Mosquitos perfectly awful.

April 13: No peace from mosquitos…. Stayed up all

night…. Mosquitos awful. 1,000,000,000 of them.

April 18: Mosquitos worse than ever. They make life a

burden.

April 19: I am perfectly exhausted by the heat and

eaten up by the mosquitos…. They are perfectly

intolerable.

Motte and his fellow medical men did not realize it,

because they blamed tropical disease on “swamp miasmas”

and the summer “sickly season,” but those mosquitoes

spread malaria, dengue, and yellow fever. The U.S. troops

also suffered from dysentery, tuberculosis, and a kind of

collapse one officer described as a “general sinking of the

system a regular cave-in of the constitution.” At one point,

five battalions could not muster 100 men; after a two-month

trek through Big Cypress, 600 out of 800 troops in one unit

reported unfit for duty. Andrew Humphreys, a young

lieutenant who later became one of the most influential and

wrong-headed commanding generals in the history of the

Army Corps of Engineers, described the crisis in a letter

home: “My company now left with one sergeant and one

corporal—both sick—the other non-commd officers, 2 sergts

and 3 corpls, will be in St. Augustine sick!” Illness killed four

times as many Americans as the Seminoles killed, with

casualty lists dominated by generic diagnoses such as

“ordinary disease” or “fever.” One regiment attributed sixty-

three of its seventy deaths to “disease incident to climate

and service in Florida.”

“Oh!” Motte wailed while in the grips of a fever of his

own. “That I could only have escaped from [this] detested

soil! That I might once more live like a human being!”

The Character of the Country

IN THE FRENZY of finger-pointing that followed his

campaign, General Scott called Florida’s settlers cowards

who “could see nothing but an Indian in every bush,” a jibe

that got him hung in effigy in Tallahassee, while a rival

general accused Scott of “folly,” “evil genius,” and treason.

Another officer complained that President Jackson was

“either wholly ignorant, erroneously informed or criminally

apathetic as to the affairs of Florida,” while Jackson growled

that Floridians were such “damned cowards” that they

ought to let the Indians kill them, so that their “women

might get husbands of courage, and breed up men who

would defend the country.” Trapped in the White House,

Jackson raged over the “unfortunate mismanagement of all

the military operations in Florida,” and claimed he could

have whipped the Seminoles with a force of fifty women.

But after all the charges and countercharges, a court of

inquiry pinned the blame for Scott’s quagmire on Florida

itself, citing “the impervious swamps and hammocks that

abound in the country occupied by the enemy, affording him

cover and retreat at every step.” This was an assessment

everyone could accept. Scott complained that his men knew

Florida about as well as they knew the Labyrinth of Crete.

“The most prominent cause of failure was to be found in the

face of the country, so well adapted to the guerrilla warfare

which the Indians carry on, affording ambushes and

fastnesses to them, and retardation to us,” another officer

wrote. This retardation continued after Scott left Florida; his

successor, Richard Call, lost 600 horses to starvation in a

brief campaign. Call gave way to General Thomas Jesup, a

renowned logistics expert who would serve forty-two years

as the army’s quartermaster, but was stymied in Florida by

logistical snarls that left him with insufficient guns, coffee,

and canoes, and beans “utterly unfit for issue.”

To the men who fought there, Florida was the enemy, not

the prize. In a defense of soldiers stigmatized for their

service in Florida—yet another foreshadowing of Vietnam—

Motte argued that their problem was morasses, not Indians:

This is the true secret that so long retarded the victorious

termination of Indian hostilities in Florida. It was the

character of the country, not the want of valor or

persevering energy in our army—notwithstanding the

abusive comments of some civilians, who, reclining on

cushioned chairs in their comfortable and secure homes,

vomited forth reproaches, sneers and condemnation,

wantonly assailing the characters of those who, alienated

from home and kindred and all the comforts of life, were

compelled to remain in this inglorious war.

THEN AGAIN, the Seminoles managed to function in Florida’s

morasses. Outmanned and outgunned, they repeatedly

exploited their superior knowledge of the terrain, luring

Americans carefully to prepared battlegrounds with

prearranged escape routes, then cutting down a few of

them before melting back into the wilderness.

At the Battle of Okeechobee, for example, the Seminoles

waited for Taylor in a hammock protected by a half-mile-

wide sawgrass marsh, after clearing a narrow path for the

Americans. Taylor swallowed the bait, ordering a frontal

assault through the clearing into enemy fire. The Seminoles

mowed down twenty-six soldiers and wounded 112 others,

then vanished before Taylor’s troops arrived to seize the

hammock. In private letters, Old Rough and Ready sounded

quite distraught for a commander who publicly bragged that

he had “routed” the enemy: “I may be permitted to say, that

I experienced one of the most trying scenes of my life, and

he who could have looked on it with indifference, his nerves

must have been very differently organized than my own.”

Taylor, who hadn’t wanted to trade a foot of the Midwest

for a mile of Florida swamp, had traded the blood of his men

for a hammock in the middle of nowhere. He got so

frustrated that he sent an aide to Cuba to buy scent-sniffing

bloodhounds, who turned out to be equally inept at tracking

Indians in Florida’s wetlands. “Their whole object is to avoid

coming in collision with us, which the situation of the

country enables them to do,” Taylor wrote. “It is evident to

all acquainted with the country that those people can

remain with impunity in the Swamps & hammocks of the

everglades…until or after the climate draws the white man

from the country.” The Seminoles weren’t fighting a war of

extermination. All they had to do was survive.

They were good at that. They knew how to live off the

land, even without hickory or persimmon. “They had no

difficulty finding plenty of food anywhere and everywhere,”

wrote a young officer named William Tecumseh Sherman,

one of 200 future Civil War generals who saw action in

Florida. “Deer and wild turkey were abundant, and as for

fish there was no end to them.” The Indians gathered bird

eggs, turtles, and “swamp cabbage,” which trendy eateries

now call “hearts of palm.” They grew corn, squash, and

pumpkins on remote tree islands. They also discovered

natural remedies on the run; the Seminole names of

Everglades plants included “bitter medicine,” “diarrhea

medicine,” and “ringworm medicine.” “There is no country

in the world so peculiarly adapted to their wants and

habits,” one lieutenant wrote.

The Everglades was a rich source of sustenance, but the

idea that the Indians thrived while whites suffered was

another Romantic myth, fueled by stereotypical

comparisons of the Seminoles to wolves, serpents, and

other wild creatures. The U.S. fighters could import food and

supplies from outside Florida, leave their wives and children

home, retreat from the swamps in the summer, and return

home themselves after hitches as short as three months.

The Seminoles had nowhere else to go. They couldn’t herd

cattle or grow crops with any certainty on the run; they

couldn’t visit the coast to fish without risking attacks by

naval forces; they couldn’t even use their guns to hunt or

set fires to cook without exposing their location. Sherman

watched one Seminole woman remain mute after she was

riddled with buckshot; others suffocated crying babies to

avoid detection in the silence of the swamps. At parleys,

Indians hid their nakedness with tattered corn bags that U.S.

soldiers discarded, and scrounged corn kernels that U.S.

horses dropped. Still, they refused to leave Florida.

As the Seminoles fled deeper into the Everglades, it

became harder for U.S. soldiers to understand why their

government wanted them to drive the Indians out of a “God-

abandoned” hellscape where they were unlikely to get in

anyone’s way anytime soon, when their proposed

reservation in Oklahoma lay directly in the path of America’s

westward expansion. Sherman saw the peninsula as “the

Indian’s paradise, of little value to us,” and suggested that

instead of kicking the Seminoles out, America should move

the other eastern tribes in. South Florida, General Jesup

concluded, was not “worth the medicines we shall expend in

driving the Indians from it.”

The Betrayal

JESUP, THE GENERAL whose reputation suffered the most

damage in the Florida War, was also the general who best

understood its folly. He described it as “a Negro war,” not an

Indian war, fueled by selfish white Floridians who wanted to

use his troops as “negro-catchers.” Jesup became convinced

his nation was running a fool’s errand, a “reckless waste of

blood and treasure,” and he was increasingly unhappy to be

the errand boy. “The Indians are a persecuted race, and we

are engaged in an unholy cause,” he once said.

But removal was the law of the land, and few politicians

were inclined to exempt the Seminoles, who had shed

American blood and sheltered American slaves. The very

existence of the Seminoles in Florida threatened the

institution of slavery throughout the South; 800 blacks fled

plantations to join the tribe, the largest slave revolt in U.S.

history if considered en masse. Secretary of War Joel

Poinsett warned Jesup that allowing even one Indian to

remain unmolested in Florida would betray weakness and

tarnish the national honor, encouraging copycat resistance

from other tribes. Jesup thought it was ridiculous to worry

about saving face with savages, but he soldiered on.

He tried to negotiate with the Seminoles, but he soon

concluded that they could never be trusted to leave Florida

voluntarily; they were only coming to parleys for the food.

So in October 1837, after Osceola led seventy warriors to

another parley under a white flag of truce, Jesup had them

surrounded and imprisoned. Jesup was instantly pilloried in

the press for his double-dealing, while Osceola was hailed as

the patriotic leader of an oppressed people. “We disclaim all

participation in the ‘glory’ of this achievement of American

generalship,” huffed the Niles Register. “If practiced towards

a civilized foe, [it] would be characterized as a violation of

all that is noble and generous in war.” Jesup was by far the

most successful U.S. general in Florida, forcing 2,000

Indians to move west, but he would spend the rest of his

career writing long-winded justifications of his treachery.

Osceola, already weak with abscessed tonsils and

malaria, was shipped to a South Carolina prison, where the

frontier artist George Catlin painted his portrait and

promoted his legend. The thirty-three-

year-old warrior sighed to his prison doctor, Frederic

Weedon, that the Seminole birthright had been stolen by

“the strong & oppressive hand of the white people.” The

spirit was draining out of him, this time for real. In a scene

immortalized in verse by Walt Whitman, Osceola slowly

donned ostrich plumes, leggings, and a turban, as well as a

war belt, silver spurs, and red war paint. With his two wives

and two children at his side, he clutched his scalping knife in

his right hand, lay on his back, and died with a smile. “Thus

has a great savage sunk to the grave,” Weedon wrote in his

diary. Twenty-two towns, three counties, two lakes, two

mountains, a state park, a national forest, a snake, and a

turkey were later named in his honor, along with the Florida

State University mascot, the mistitled Chief Osceola, who

plants a flaming spear at midfield before Seminole home

games.

But in a final act of white betrayal, the eccentric Dr.

Weedon chopped the head off his patient’s corpse, later

hanging it above his children’s beds as a grotesque warning

for them not to misbehave. It was never recovered for a

proper burial. And for all the popular outrage over Osceola’s

martyrdom, America kept trying to wipe out his people for

four years after his death. Jesup immediately launched a

new campaign to hunt the Seminoles in the heart of south

Florida, hoping to terminate an interminable war.

IN JANUARY 1838, about 1,500 bedraggled American troops

gathered along the Loxahatchee River at the northeast edge

of the Everglades. Three hundred Seminoles awaited them

in a hammock near today’s Jupiter, this one protected by a

half-mile-wide cypress slough that would swallow their

horses to their saddle girths, much like the marsh that

confounded Taylor at Lake Okeechobee. And Jesup ordered a

frontal assault on the entrenched Indian position, just as

Taylor had done. His artillerymen lobbed shells into the

hammock, and infantrymen clawed through the slough on

foot, ducking a barrage of bullets. “The Indians yelled and

shrieked,” Jacob Motte recalled. “The rifles cracked, and

their balls whistled; the musketry rattled; the rockets

whizzed; the artillery bellowed; the shells burst, and take it

all in there was created no small racket for awhile.”

The Americans eventually reached the heavily wooded

hammock, but by then the Seminoles had retreated to the

other side of the Loxahatchee, where they had prepared a

second position by cutting notches for their rifles in cypress

trees overlooking the river. The Americans were exposed

again, and the Seminoles pumped more volleys into their

lines; one musket ball shattered Jesup’s glasses, slicing

open his cheek. Finally, the fearless Colonel William Harney

and his dragoons “plunged into the swift torrent, and

crossed in the face of a shower of balls which whistled about

them.” Motte memorably described the Seminoles’

response: “They immediately absquatulated.”

Jesup claimed victory, just as Taylor had done, bragging

that he had “met, beat and dispersed the enemy.” But

again, it was hard to see what he had won, or why

dispersing an enemy he was trying to kill or capture was a

good thing. Seven Americans were killed, and thirty-one

wounded. “There before us lay death in his most horrible

forms; bodies pierced with ghastly wounds, and locks

begrimed with gore,” Motte wrote. The Americans had taken

the field, but again it was not a field they wanted. One

Indian had been killed, but the rest had fled to fight another

day. Jesup realized that complete removal was a lost cause,

and said so in a private protest to Secretary Poinsett:

In regards to the Seminoles, we have committed the error of

attempting to remove them when their lands were not

required for agricultural purposes; when they were not in

the way of the white inhabitants; and when the greater

portion of their country was an unexplored wilderness, of

the interior of which we were as ignorant as of the interior of

China. We exhibit, in the present contest, the first instance,

perhaps, since the commencement of authentic history, of a

nation employing an army to explore a country, for we can

do little more than explore it.

The War of Exploration

IN THE SUMMER OF 1839, General Macomb cut the deal that

Jesup had advocated all along, leaving much of southwest

Florida to the Seminoles in exchange for peace. Colonel

Harney was assigned to fortify a trading post for a new

reservation on the Caloosahatchee River.

William Harney was another Jackson protégé, profane,

cocky, and tough as rock. Secretary of War Jefferson Davis

called him “physically the finest specimen of man I ever

saw,” with a muscular chest and astonishing athleticism:

“Had he lived in the time of Homer, he would have robbed

Achilles of his sobriquet of ‘swift-footed.’ ” Harney could also

be stubborn as rock; he was court-martialed twice for

insubordination—once for refusing to use a military tailor,

once for refusing to drill while recovering from gonorrhea.

And he had some anger issues. He once flogged a female

servant to death with a rawhide, and beat a dog that had

the temerity to cross his vegetable garden. When a private

complained that if he were a captain, Harney wouldn’t treat

him so harshly, Harney told him to consider himself

promoted, then thrashed him to a pulp.

But Harney saw no point in fighting the Seminoles. On a

stop for provisions at the twelve-acre island of Indian Key,

he told a local horticulturalist named Henry Perrine he would

go to the Caloosahatchee alone with his hands tied behind

his back if that would prove his good faith. “Harney, they

are treacherous rascals,” Perrine replied. “Don’t trust them

too much.” Harney should have listened. One night after he

went to sleep, 160 Indians led by the hulking warrior

Chakaika overwhelmed his contingent of thirty soldiers,

scalping many of them under their mosquito bars. Harney

escaped in his underwear, blackened his face with mud, and

raced barefoot through the woods to safety. He hobbled

back that night to find half his men dead, some with their

entrails ripped out. Nothing had ever infuriated him like the

Caloosahatchee double-cross, the duplicity of Indians who

had just assured him they were satisfied with Macomb’s

treaty. “There must be no more talking—they must be

hunted down as so many wild beasts,” he raged. “Let every

one taken be hung up in the woods to inspire terror in the

rest!”

BEFORE HARNEY COULD hunt him down, Chakaika led his

band across Florida Bay for another raid, this one on Indian

Key. Dr. Perrine was one of the first settlers killed, after

ignoring his own advice and trying to reason with the

Indians. But first he managed to hustle his wife and children

out a trapdoor in his cellar. They hid beneath a wharf for

hours while the Indians pillaged their property, carrying off

trunks, burning books, devouring fresh-baked bread and

pies. “After their repast was over they would take first one

pile of dishes and then another & throw them upon the floor

breaking them to pieces, & they would dance & whoop!”

Perrine’s daughter wrote. One brave turned their way after

hearing a splash, but saw only turtles. The Perrines were

forced to dash out of hiding after the Indians set their house

on fire, but they miraculously stumbled across a Seminole

canoe and paddled it to safety, eluding shots the Indians

fired at them across the bay.

It was a cinematic escape, but Chakaika’s braves killed

thirteen pioneers before retreating to the Everglades. It was

becoming clear that the Americans could no longer allow

the Seminoles to choose their battlegrounds. It was time to

take the fight to the Indians, to flush them out of their

hideaways. If the Seminoles can penetrate the Everglades,

Harney vowed, so could he.

In December 1840, Harney and a black guide led ninety

men in sixteen canoes to hunt Chakaika, ascending the

Miami River before crossing the Everglades from east to

west. One private noted that its “undying growth of ever-

green grass, rising about six feet above the surface of the

water, and waving in the breeze, gives it at times the

semblance of a vast green ocean.” An anonymous soldier

wrote in the St. Augustine News that the Everglades seemed

“expressly intended as a retreat for the rascally Indian.”

On their fifth day in the marsh, while lingering on a tree

island, the Americans spotted canoes in the distance. For

once they ambushed the Indians, capturing two warriors

and a woman, accidentally killing another woman with one

of the newfangled “revolvers” that the manufacturer Samuel

Colt had given Harney to test in the swamp. The next day,

the surviving widow led them to Chakaika’s island, where

they found the chief chopping wood. Chakaika howled and

tried to flee, but the Americans shot him, scalped him, and

hung his corpse from a tree. Harney’s detachment then left

the island and stumbled across Shark Slough, which they

rode to the mangroves of the southwest coast. “We have

now crossed the long fabled and unknown Everglades…. We

have accomplished what has never been done by white

man,” the anonymous soldier bragged.

Harney killed or captured only two dozen Indians, but he

showed the Seminoles that south Florida was no longer their

safe haven, that Americans were determined to penetrate

and dominate the Everglades.

THE U.S. TROOPS SPENT the rest of the war on search-and-

destroy missions in the Everglades, but they did a lot more

searching than destroying. The Everglades was still

unmapped and only sporadically navigable, and there were

only a few hundred Indians hiding in its vast expanses. “The

commands in canoes penetrated every part of the

Everglades, finding abandoned fields, villages and trails, but

not an Indian or a track was seen,” Lieutenant John

McLaughlin wrote after three weeks in the Everglades with

his 200-man Mosquito Fleet. Still, he argued, the fleet’s time

was well spent: “If our labors have not been rewarded with

the capture of any of the enemy, they have at least gained

us information of an extensive country which had never

hitherto been explored, and exhibited an imposing force in

the heart of a country hitherto deemed impenetrable.”

As Jesup had predicted, the most important thing the U.S.

military did in the Everglades was explore it, revealing a

slice of Florida that had been as mysterious as the interior

of China. Most of the explorers concluded the Everglades

should be avoided at all costs. In letters and diaries, they

denounced it as a “horridly gloomy-looking,” “bewildering,”

“Stygian,” “monstrous,” “unredeemable,” “diabolical,”

“tiresome” wasteland. “At night as we lay down the uproar

around us was fearful,” wrote an army captain named Abner

Doubleday, who was later credited (falsely) with inventing

baseball and (accurately) with firing the first Union shot in

the Civil War. “Birds of all kinds were making the night

hideous with discordant sounds.”

But on occasion, some of the men betrayed a grudging

admiration for this singular wilderness. Even Jacob Motte—

when he wasn’t venting about oppressive heat, poisonous

critters, hellacious storms, or the ungrateful politicians who

had dispatched him to the Everglades—had his moments of

Romantic reverence. He was enchanted by wild ducks that

seemed to blot out the sun, by mangroves covered by so

many egrets they looked like cotton fields, by radiant

roseate spoonbills that would “hover over our heads,

looking like the leaves of a rose that had been broken and

given to the streaming air.” There was something to be said

for the “solitary grandeur” of the Everglades, its “savage

and undisturbed communion,” its magical nuances of color

and texture and light. The Everglades was the essence of

raw nature, “sacred from the invading plough.” It was the

opposite of genteel civilization, and even a Charleston

aristocrat could appreciate that:

Nothing, however, can be imagined more lovely and

picturesque than the thousand little isolated spots,

scattered in all directions over the surface of this immense

sheet of water, which seemed like a placid inland sea

shining under a bright sun…. As we threaded this maze of

countless islets, studding the unbroken surface of water in

loneliness and silence amid the wild romance of nature—far

secluded from the haunts of civilized man and marked only

by the characteristics of wildest desolation…we felt the

most intense admiration, and gazed with a mingled emotion

of delight and awe.

THE SEMINOLES NEVER DID SURRENDER. In 1842, President

John Tyler finally agreed to let the last 300 Indians remain in

Big Cypress Swamp and the western Everglades. “The

further pursuit of these miserable beings by a large military

force seems to be as injudicious as it is unavailing,” Tyler

told Congress.

White Floridians continued to press for the removal of the

Seminoles, and Army officers continued to conduct surveys

near their lands. Hostilities flared up again in 1855, when a

surveying party at the edge of Big Cypress vandalized some

banana plants belonging to the mercurial chief Billy

Bowlegs, who retaliated with an ambush. That started the

Third Seminole War, a series of skirmishes that achieved

nothing, except for more accurate maps and descriptions of

the Everglades. The sporadic conflict ended when Bowlegs

agreed to move west with 163 supporters for $44,600 in

bribes.

But 100 or so unconquered, unbribed Seminoles

remained in the Everglades, and few of the Americans who

had chased them there had a problem with that. “This

country should be preserved for the Indians…and if the fleas

and other vermin do not destroy them they might be left to

live,” declared Alexander Webb, the general with the

mosquito-obsessed diary. “I could not wish them all in a

worse place.”

Four

A New Vision

Its being made susceptible of cultivation—and

instead of being, as now, a waste of waters, fit only

for the resort of reptiles—would be a happy epoch

for Florida.

—U.S. Army General William Harney

“The Most Desirable District in the Union”

BEFORE THE SECOND SEMINOLE WAR, when south Florida

was still just a blank spot on maps of the peninsula, one

man had a plan for the Everglades: the U.S. consul to the

Yucatán.

The consul had collected seeds of Mexico’s tropical

plants and trees, and he was sure they would flourish in

south Florida if the Everglades could be drained of its excess

water. He was an unhealthy and unlucky man—his lab

assistant accidentally poisoned him with arsenic, and a

Mexican soldier bayoneted him when he approached the

buffet without identification at an embassy banquet—but he

was a true visionary. He published a paper on the medical

benefits of an obscure bark called quinine, and helped

secure funds for a fledgling scientific institution called the

Smithsonian. He believed just as fervently in south Florida.

He knew it was considered “a sickly and sterile territory,”

but insisted it could produce the world’s most valuable

crops, “with the least possible labor, and at the least

possible price.” He foresaw a tropical paradise, supplying

fruit, vegetables, and sugar for America’s stomachs and

hemp for America’s ropes, while attracting invalid tourists

who might otherwise winter in France or Italy and pioneers

who might otherwise settle in Cuba or Texas. “How many

years have I fruitlessly labored to convince the American

people that the most slandered section of their immense

domains is the most desirable district in the union for the

physical enjoyments of the human race?” he wrote.

The consul’s labors never did bear fruit—or hemp—in

south Florida. In 1838, when the war seemed to be winding

down, Congress authorized him to select thirty-six square

miles in the Everglades for the introduction of tropical

plants. He requested a federal survey around Cape Sable at

the peninsula’s southern tip, the “sheltered seashore of an

ever-verdant prairie in a region of ever-blooming flowers in

an ever-frostless tropical Florida.” But the survey never took

place. That’s because the consul was the horticulturalist

Henry Perrine. His grandiose plans to develop the

Everglades ended with his murder at Indian Key.

But Perrine’s impact is still felt in south Florida. He

imported the region’s first mangoes and avocados. His

hemp plants, Agave sisalana Perrine, still grow wild in the

Keys. His land grant now includes the town of Perrine. And

by the war’s end, Perrine’s lonely vision of a transformed

south Florida was no longer so lonely.

THE EVERGLADES WAS STILL a distant wilderness after the

Florida war. South Florida’s white population had dwindled

to about fifty. But the region was no longer unmapped or

unexplored, and it was no longer completely undeveloped. It

had received an infusion of roads, bridges, and other

wartime infrastructure, with new military posts on the

Kissimmee River, Lake Okeechobee, and Cape Sable, as well

as the future sites of Fort Myers, Fort Lauderdale, and

Miami, which was then known as Fort Dallas. And after the

war, the Armed Occupation Act of 1842 offered 160 acres to

any homesteader willing to settle in the region for at least

five years. South Florida no longer seemed like quite so

foreign a territory.

It also seemed like an agricultural diamond in the rough.

Farming requires rainfall, sunlight, and soil, and south

Florida had all three in abundance. It was a region of year-

round sunshine and warmth, a potential winter garden that

could produce crops while the rest of America’s fields lay

fallow. It received three times as much annual rainfall as the

frigid Great Plains region that was being promoted as

America’s future breadbasket. And the deep, ink-black soils

that lay beneath much of the Everglades seemed too good

to be true. They were some of the world’s most highly

organic peats, as deep as twenty feet in some areas of the

marsh, the accumulation of 5,000 years of decaying

vegetation. An early British visitor had proclaimed them

“rich as dung.”

Some of America’s Indian-hunters had noticed them, too.

For example, a roguish soldier in Harney’s brigade named

Edward Judson—who later adopted the name Ned Buntline

and became the promoter of Buffalo Bill’s frontier show, the

father of the dime novel, and an influential nativist

demagogue—described an abandoned Indian cornfield he

found on an Everglades tree island as “the richest land I

have ever seen.” He predicted that south Florida’s organic

muck would one day produce sugar, cotton, coffee, and

hemp, as well as pineapples, guavas, oranges, and

plantains. “Florida is now, or is soon destined to be, a very

important portion of our Confederacy, both in a commercial

and a general view,” he wrote.

There was just one problem: The spongy flatlands of the

Everglades were too wet to support crops. South Florida’s

excess water would have to be removed.

The Spaniards had abandoned southern Florida after

deeming it “liable to be overflowed, and of no use.” But

retreat was not the American way, not of a time when

talking about limits on American prosperity and expansion,

in the words of the future president James Buchanan, “was

like talking of limiting the stars in their courses, or bridling

the foaming torrent of the Niagara.” The end of the Florida

War coincided with the height of Manifest Destiny, and a

new age of internal improvements. “America is a land of

wonders, in which everything is in constant motion and

every change seems an improvement,” Alexis de Tocqueville

observed. It was a time for spread-eagle visions of an

empire of progress, for white frontiersmen to extend

civilization into barren wildernesses, converting prairies,

forests, and swamps into money. Inventions like the steel

plow and mechanical reaper were making farms more

productive, while new roads, canals, and railroads were

linking farms to distant markets.

Meanwhile, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers—which had

started as a tiny engineering regiment in George

Washington’s revolutionary army, building fortifications at

Bunker Hill—was evolving into an all-purpose public works

brigade for the federal government. The Corps ran the

academy at West Point, so it was America’s only formally

trained engineering organization; its motto was “essayons,”

French for “let us try.” Congress was happy to oblige,

dispatching Corps engineers to survey the West, build

lighthouses, custom houses, and the first national road, and

“improve” rivers and harbors for navigation; in Louisiana,

for example, a snagboat invented by a Corps captain named

Henry Shreve cleared a longstanding logjam on the Red

River, allowing steamboat traffic to reach a new inland port

called Shreveport. The Corps was the bureaucratic

embodiment of the nation’s land ethic, refusing to accept

natural conditions as inevitable, determined to conquer the

wilderness to serve people. Many members of Congress

believed that man’s control of nature was God’s work on

earth, justifying American expansion across the continent.

During the debate over U.S. annexation of Oregon, John

Quincy Adams asked the House clerk to read aloud God’s

command to mankind: “Be fruitful and multiply, and

replenish the earth, and subdue it; and have dominion over

the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over

every living thing that moveth upon the earth.”

“That,” Adams said, “is the foundation not only of our

title to the territory of Oregon, but the foundation of all

human title to all human possessions.”

SO IF FLORIDA was of no use, Americans would make it

useful.

As soon as Americans began to see the Everglades, they

began to fantasize about getting rid of its surplus water.

“Could it be drained by deepening the natural outlets?” one

explorer wondered. “Would it not open to cultivation

immense tracts of rich vegetable soil?” In 1845, after Florida

became the twenty-seventh state, one of its legislature’s

first acts was to urge Congress to “survey the Everglades,

with a view to their reclamation.” The resolution

acknowledged that the Everglades had always been

considered “wholly valueless,” because draining it had

always been considered impractical. But attitudes had

changed:

Recent information derived from the most respectable

sources has induced the belief, which is daily strengthening,

that these opinions are without foundation, and, on the

contrary, that at a comparatively small expense the

aforesaid region can be entirely reclaimed, thus opening to

the habitation of man an immense and hitherto unexplored

domain perhaps not surpassed in fertility and every natural

advantage by any other on the globe.

Most of those “respectable sources” were Seminole War

officers. During their grueling treks through the Everglades,

they had been struck by the swamp’s potential for drainage

and improvement.

“I entertain no doubt of the practicability of the

measure,” General Thomas Jesup wrote in a hastily

scribbled letter to Florida senator James Westcott.

“The results of such a work as this are beyond mere

speculation,” Lieutenant Levi Powell wrote in his own

missive.

“I do not know of a project that I regard as more

calculated to benefit the country than this,” General William

Harney agreed.

Draining the Tub

JAMES K. POLK dedicated his presidency to the ideals of

Manifest Destiny, adding a million square miles to the Union

in his term. By the time Florida requested a survey of the

Everglades, the Polk administration was already fighting a

war over Texas, plotting the annexation of California, and

negotiating the partition of Oregon. Florida was already part

of America, and the Everglades was so wet that it could not

even be surveyed; one man who had tried had concluded

that his effort “might as well have been expended in

surveying the moon.” So reclaiming south Florida’s swamp

was not a high administration priority.

Still, Senator Westcott pestered Polk’s aides to study

Everglades drainage, suggesting that three million acres

could be reclaimed for just $250,000. Draining the

Everglades, he argued, would unlock America’s most

productive land for rice, sugar, and tropical fruits, and

attract an army of pioneers to a dangerously

underpopulated region at the edge of the nation’s defenses.

Wasn’t Manifest Destiny supposed to extend American

civilization from sea to shining sea? The administration

eventually relented, appointing a Harvard-educated lawyer

named Buckingham Smith to investigate the Everglades.

The rumpled, scholarly Smith was not an obvious choice

to explore the River of Grass. He was not an engineer,

surveyor, or scientist; he was a lawyer, politician, citrus

grower, and historian, an accomplished but eccentric

aristocrat, a slaveowner who set up a foundation to benefit

St. Augustine’s blacks after his death. He had served as the

speaker of Florida’s territorial legislature, and as an

American diplomat in Mexico and Spain, but he is best

remembered as the fastidious antiquarian who practically

discovered Florida’s early history, unearthing and

translating twenty-five volumes’ worth of documents in

Madrid’s archives, including Fontaneda’s memoirs.

Smith had never seen the Everglades before his five-

week examination of the swamp, but he described its subtle

charms with a lyricism rarely found in Treasury Department

documents:

Imagine a vast lake of fresh water, extending in every

direction, from shore to shore, beyond the reach of human

vision; ordinarily unruffled by a ripple on its surface,

studded with thousands of islands of various sizes, from

one-fourth of an acre to hundreds of acres in area, and

generally covered with dense thickets of shrubbery and

vines…. Lilies and other aquatic flowers of every variety and

hue are seen on every side, in pleasant contrast to the

sawgrass; and, as you draw near an island, the beauty of

the scene is increased by the rich foliage and blooming

flowers of the wild myrtle and the honeysuckle…. The

profound and wild solitude of the place, the solemn silence

that pervades it…add to awakened and excited curiosity

feelings bordering on awe.

But Smith had no interest in preserving this awe-inspiring

wild landscape. To the contrary, he wanted it destroyed as

soon as possible: “The first and most abiding impression is

the utter worthlessness to civilized man, in its present

condition, of the entire region.” Smith’s goal, America’s

goal, was to get rid of all that unruffled water, to convert a

wasteland “as useless as the deserts of Africa” into

something useful for mankind, to expand American

settlement to the edge of the continent. “The statesman

whose exertions shall cause the millions of acres they

contain, now worse than worthless, to teem with the

products of agricultural industry…will merit a high place in

public favor, not only with his own generation, but with

posterity,” Smith wrote.

SMITH MADE A METICULOUS CASE for draining the swamp,

backed up by the Seminole War officers, and a meticulous

case for how to go about it. His report provided much of the

intellectual framework for south Florida’s next century. And

as hydrological treatises go, its key points were simple.

The first point seems blindingly obvious today, but in

1848 it seemed as radical as the revolutionary movements

that were sweeping across Europe. The elevation of the

Everglades, Smith declared, was higher than the elevation

of the Gulf or the Atlantic. That meant the Everglades could

be drained, because water flows downhill. Smith did not

know the precise elevation of the Everglades, but he was

sure it was at least a few feet higher than sea level. The

Miami River, which spilled over the Atlantic ridge in rapids

so strong that canoes had to be portaged upstream, was the

most striking evidence. The other transverse glades also

seemed to drop into Biscayne Bay. “The elevation of the

Ever Glades…proved the capability of their being drained,”

wrote James Gadsden, who had visited the area after the

negotiations at Moultrie Creek. “And the number of small

rivers and creeks, which at seasons relieved the overflowing

of the interior basin of Florida, showed that by deepening

these natural outlets…the whole country, at times

submerged, might be reclaimed and brought into profitable

cultivation.”

This was the second point, which literally flowed from the

first: The way to start draining the Everglades was to draw

more water down its natural outlets—by deepening them,

widening them, and extending them further into the marsh.

Just bust open a few more gaps in the already porous

Atlantic ridge, so that the transverse glades could flow

unimpeded out to the coast, and the Everglades would drain

like an unplugged tub. Powell suggested that God had

created the transverse Glades for the express purpose of

showing man how to drain the swamp. “A bountiful

Providence has already pointed out the way, and has

partially accomplished it,” he wrote. “The surplus waters of

the great lake have, at several points, worn down the

narrow rocky girdle and opened a deep and ample channel

beyond it to the sea. We have only to follow up the work,

and break down the barrier to the proper level at these

natural outlets, to empty out the basin.”

But even if all the plugs were pounded out of the ridge,

Smith doubted the little transverse glades could whisk

enough water out of the Everglades to drain the entire

swamp, even if they were all widened and deepened. The

basin was too big, and there was too much water spilling

into it from Lake Okeechobee and the sky. Smith believed

the key to drainage would be lowering the lake, to prevent it

from overflowing into the Everglades in the first place. He

proposed one canal east from the lake to the St. Lucie River,

and a shorter canal west from the lake to the

Caloosahatchee River, following the path of a Calusa canoe

path. (Smith wrongly attributed the silted-in ditch to the

Spanish, calling it “too considerable to have been

undertaken by the Indians of Florida.”) His correspondents

proposed additional outlet canals from the lake southeast to

the Miami River, and southwest to Shark Slough. “That such

work would reclaim millions of acres of highly valuable

lands, now utterly valueless because incapable of use, I

have no doubt,” Harney wrote.

The final point of Smith’s report was that draining the

Everglades would achieve spectacular benefits for minimal

costs. Smith estimated a maximum price of $300,000, but

to be safe, he said $500,000 would “beyond question,

defray all outlay necessary for the successful

accomplishment of the work.” It was impossible to say

exactly how much swampland would be sucked dry, but

Smith expected to reduce water levels in Lake Okeechobee

and the Everglades by five feet, reclaiming one million acres

south of the lake and hundreds of thousands more in the

Kissimmee River floodplain. Harney was even more

optimistic, and was so entranced by the commercial

prospects of the Everglades that he began planning his own

tropical fruit and sugar plantation in Cape Sable, following

Henry Perrine’s example. He was sure that such fertile lands

in such a desirable climate would be “the best sugar land in

the south,” while Jesup predicted sugar plantations “as

valuable as any in the world.” A drained south Florida could

produce just about anything capable of growing anywhere,

while offering the only hope of reducing America’s

dependence on the West Indies for high-priced lemons,

limes, and pineapples. “That the results must be of

inestimable value to the whole confederacy will be so

clearly manifest as to render comment wholly superfluous,”

Smith proclaimed.

The potential bonanza extended beyond agriculture. The

canals tapping the lake to the east and west could double as

a cross-peninsula shipping lane, achieving the Menéndez

dream of a Gulf–Atlantic connection for the steamboat era,

providing the long-awaited alternative to the treacherous

Florida Straits. A habitable south Florida could also develop

a fishing industry, a maritime industry, and a timber

industry; Smith thought it would become a hub for “the

making of salt by solar evaporation.” All these opportunities

would attract settlers, bolstering the security of America’s

most exposed region, ratcheting up the pressure on

Seminole holdouts to join their exiled tribesmen out west.

“In less than five years that region will, I have no doubt,

have a population of a hundred thousand souls, and more,”

Harney predicted.

Smith suggested that post-drainage south Florida’s white

population would reach 250,000, a five million percent

increase, and that it would split off from north Florida to

form a new slave state within a decade. “To be identified,

even in a secondary position, with the commencement of an

undertaking that must be so eminently beneficial to my

country is a privilege of no mean consideration,” Smith

wrote.

SMITH DID INCLUDE ONE VOICE of caution in his otherwise

exuberant report. Stephen Mallory, a customs official who

later became a U.S. senator and the Confederate navy

secretary, knew the Everglades like his backyard in Key

West. “I have ate of its fish, drank of its waters, smelt of its

snakes and alligators and waded through its mud up to my

middle for weeks,” he wrote. Mallory was the would-be

Everglades surveyor who had scoffed that he might as well

have surveyed the moon, and he had prescient doubts

about Everglades reclamation as well: “My own impression

is that large tracts of the Glades are fully as low as the

adjoining sea, and can never be drained; that some lands

around the margins may be reclaimed by drainage or by

diking, but that it will be found wholly out of the question to

drain all the Ever Glades.”

But while Mallory clearly was not as enthusiastic a

drainage booster as Smith or his military correspondents, he

was not as pessimistic as some historians suggest. He

agreed that fruit would grow well in Everglades hammocks,

and that small farms would thrive at the swamp’s edges.

Around New River, he had seen settlers growing coconuts,

lemons, limes, and coontie, while supplementing their diets

with abundant fish and game. “The most indolent man I

ever knew prospered there,” he recounted.

That was the original Perrine dream for South Florida:

vast production and vast profits “with the least possible

labor.” In the heady days of Manifest Destiny, it did not take

a prophet to see that this Panglossian vision was certain to

become reality, and that it was God’s vision, too. The

Everglades had the best of all possible soils in the best of all

possible climates. It had no value whatsoever in its current

form—only 400 of the eight million acres below Lake

Okeechobee had been sold—but the road to reclamation

was clear. I entertain no doubt…beyond mere speculation….

A bountiful Providence has already pointed the way…. I am

also convinced…beyond question…so clearly manifest as to

render comment wholly superfluous.

The drainage of the Everglades, like the annexation of

Texas or the subjugation of the Indians, seemed as

inevitable as the torrent of the Niagara. Give America five

years and half a million dollars, and a soldier’s hell would

surely become a pioneer’s paradise. Just get rid of the

water, and money and people would pour into the blank

spot on the map. The bugs, the snakes, the “solemn

silence”—surely it would all be gone soon.

Five

Drainage Gets Railroaded

Draining of the Everglades is a subject of too great

magnitude to be idly dismissed or permanently

abandoned.

—South Florida pioneer John Darling

Yulee’s Road

AMERICA WAS A NATION on the move, extending its

frontier, taming its wilderness. But in the words of its own

governor, “the progress of Florida, if it deserves that name,

has no parallel within the limits of the Union in feebleness

and insignificance.” Nowhere was that truer than south

Florida, where the undrained Everglades seemed to mock

the advance of civilization.

The Buckingham Smith report of 1848 was the first ray of

hope for the backwater’s backwater, a plea for progress by

the U.S. government. Senator Westcott distributed 5,000

copies, and drafted legislation to give Florida eight million

acres of the Everglades for reclamation. His bill imposed

strict conditions to make sure the land grant was

“exclusively and sacredly” devoted to drainage, to prevent

state officials from using it as a “corruption fund.” But

Westcott’s bill was unexpectedly scuttled on the Senate

floor—not by senators from other states who thought it too

generous, but by his fellow Florida Democrat, David Levy

Yulee, who thought it too stingy. Yulee argued that Florida

was entitled to all its wetlands, not just the Everglades, and

said the conditions tying the state’s hands “would make the

grant utterly valueless.” The rift in the Florida delegation

spelled doom for the bill.

A powder keg of a man with bushy eyebrows, a broad

forehead, and dark hair that curled around his ears, Yulee

did not believe that Florida should be forced to promote the

drainage of the Everglades. His belief had nothing to do with

environmental concerns. He thought his state should focus

instead on promoting railroads—especially his own railroad.

IF THERE WAS EVER a typical path to power in America,

Yulee’s wasn’t it. His ancestors were driven out of Spain

during the Jewish expulsion in the fifteenth century. His

grandfather was grand vizier to the emperor of Morocco

before being burned alive during a palace revolt. His father,

Moses Levy, rebuilt his fortune in the lumber industry in the

West Indies, where the future senator was born David Levy

on the island of St. Thomas in 1810.

Moses later bought 60,000 acres in north Florida, where

he created a utopian colony called New Pilgrimage for

persecuted Jews. He became increasingly ascetic in his

faith, retreating into the Talmud, dabbling in abolitionism,

eventually cutting off his teenage son’s allowance and

tuition in order to avoid showing favoritism over other

children of God. David had to drop out of boarding school,

and became increasingly estranged from his father. He

moved to St. Augustine, making his own way as a self-

educated lawyer, defending the rights of the southern slave-

holders his father hated, attacking the capitalist class his

father represented. When he was only thirty-two, he was

named Florida’s territorial delegate to Congress, where he

skillfully debated more experienced legislators who

criticized the Florida War, especially those who dared to

express sympathy for blacks and Seminoles. “So far from

the practice of cruelty and oppression towards the Florida

Indians,” he thundered, “the great fault has been a too

great and almost criminal kindness, moderation and

forbearance!”

Levy saved his highest dudgeon for Florida’s moneyed

elites, declaring himself “unchangeably” opposed “from the

very innermost depths of my soul” to “the spirit of

monopoly” and “the supremacy of the money power”:

A swarm of mercenary and greedy speculators have settled

themselves upon our infant country, and by a system of

corruption and deception have selfishly sought to wield the

industry and resources of the whole community to their own

peculiar profit…. Now and forever, we must decide whether

we will basely yield our limbs to the chains that have been

forged for us, and be content to bear with the insolence, the

arrogance, the frauds and oppressions of CORPORATE

PRIVILEGE.

Levy was the father of Florida statehood, persuading

skeptics at home that statehood would help the territory

develop without having to rely on money-grubbing

corporatists. At the time, the state’s only railroad was a

rickety twenty-mile link between Tallahassee and St. Marks

that used mules as locomotives, but Congress was awarding

all new states 500,000 acres to jump-start their internal

improvements. Levy argued that Florida could use those

lands to finance a line from the Atlantic to the Gulf, then use

the profits to pay the entire cost of state government. In an

era when a railroad lawyer named Abraham Lincoln was

pushing for 2.6 million acres in grants for the Illinois Central,

Levy insisted that Florida’s railroad must be state-owned, to

keep it free of the “impositions and exactions which a

private chartered monopoly would impose.” Levy’s case for

railroad socialism eventually carried Florida into the Union.

The day statehood was approved in 1845, St. Augustine’s

nine-pound cannon fired for David Levy, “Florida’s favorite

son.” He soon became the first Jewish member of the U.S.

Senate.

BUT LEVY DID NOT keep his faith. He changed his name to

Yulee, married a politician’s daughter, and became a devout

Christian. His politics also changed once he tasted power.

Senator Yulee still believed a cross-Florida railroad could

provide a quicker shortcut than a cross-Florida canal, and

help “spread a belt of civilization across the continent

through Mexico, and girdle her with American & civilized

influence.” But instead of a state-owned railroad, he now

envisioned a Yulee-owned railroad. He chartered the Florida

Railroad, and used his public office to seek federal land

grants, surveys, contracts, and rights-of-way for his line.

Yulee instructed one Army engineer to write a report

concluding that a cross-peninsula railroad would be superior

to a cross-peninsula canal, a report “which will be very

useful to our company to establish in the public mind from a

disinterested official source.” A year later, that disinterested

official source became the chief engineer of the Florida

Railroad.

But Yulee still thought of his railroad as a gift to

Floridians. In a letter to his wife, he made his profiteering

sound like sacrifice: “You suffer the penalty of having a

husband involved in an undertaking too heavy for one

person, which yet, now entered upon, must be borne

through.” He told his six-year-old son he was fulfilling his

duty to serve his fellow men, “so they can visit each other

easier and get more good from what they labor to make

from the earth.”

Yulee also saw it as his duty to block Westcott’s bill, with

its land grant limited to the Everglades, and its conditions

requiring the grant to be used to drain the Everglades.

Instead, Yulee helped push the Swamp and Overflowed

Lands Act, which transferred all federal lands deemed “wet

and unfit for cultivation” to the states—still supposedly for

the purpose of reclamation, but with fewer strings attached.

The swamplands act eventually granted more than 20

million acres of wetlands—about 60 percent of Florida’s

landmass—to the state to dispose of much as it pleased.

The Everglades was just part of the bounty.

NOW THAT IT OWNED much of its land, Florida began giving

itself away.

In 1855, the Florida legislature passed a law approving

lavish land grants to stimulate railroad construction,

creating an Internal Improvement Fund that would give

railroads 3,840 acres of swampland and state-backed bonds

of up to $10,000 for every mile of track they laid. The law, a

later investigation found, was “the product of the brain of

Hon. David Yulee.”

The internal improvement law wasn’t exclusively about

railroads. One clause did authorize the fund’s board of

trustees—the governor and four other elected officials—to

promote the drainage of the swamp and overflowed lands.

But the trustees consistently ignored proposals to dredge

rivers, dig canals, and drain swamps. More than a year after

the law was enacted, when the trustees were asked how

they intended to handle reclamation projects, they admitted

they had “not sufficiently considered the subject to form any

definite ideas.” Their mandate was to create railroads,

which would open the interior and attract settlers, who

would buy land and replenish the fund, which could perhaps

be used to finance drainage ditches someday in the future.

If the state had to give away swampland to attract railroads

now, it seemed a small price to pay for growth and

development. “The rapid enhancement of the general

wealth and population certain to follow their construction

would be ample recompense for the surrender of the whole

fund,” Yulee said. He had a pretty good idea whose wealth

would be most rapidly enhanced.

AT FIRST, THE INTERNAL IMPROVEMENT FUND worked as

planned. Railroads built tracks. The fund gave the railroads

massive land grants. The railroads issued bonds backed by

the fund, which they sold to build more tracks. And Florida

finally enjoyed a mild railroad boom.

The centerpiece was “Yulee’s Road,” stretching from the

Gulf port of Cedar Key to the Atlantic port of Fernandina,

which Yulee envisioned as the new hub of the South. (The

senator and his partners had secretly bought the prime real

estate in both towns, at times using his slaves as collateral.)

The American Railroad Journal predicted that the Florida

Railroad’s economic impact on the South would rival the

Erie Canal’s up north, and might have said so even if Yulee

hadn’t recruited its editor as an investor.

Yulee used his chairmanship of the Naval Affairs

Committee to score dredging funds for Fernandina’s port,

and his chairmanship of the Post Office Committee to secure

lucrative mail contracts for his railroad. But the line still

foundered in the financial panic of 1857. And Governor

Madison Perry refused to approve its bonds, accusing the

railroad of suckering the state into risky guarantees by

hiding its debts and exaggerating its capital. “Railroads are

useful, but State credit is a pearl above all price,” he

warned.

The Florida Railroad was not finished until March 1861,

an inauspicious time to launch a new freight line in the

South. The Union was disintegrating, and Yulee and Florida

had backed secession. “I remember him in the House,

standing there and begging us—yes!—begging us to let

Florida in as a State!” one senator fumed. “Well! We let her

in, and took care of her, and fought her Indians, and now

that despicable little beggar stands up in the Senate and

talks about HER rights!” Yulee caught the last train out of

Fernandina as federal troops occupied the town; the

passenger in the seat next to him was killed by Union

gunfire as the train crossed the bridge to the mainland.

For all his public rhetoric about southern prerogatives,

Yulee’s main concern during the Civil War was his railroad.

He pleaded with the Confederate commander, Robert E.

Lee, for troops to protect his line, and filed lawsuits to

prevent Lee’s army from confiscating his iron and

locomotives. In a letter to Florida governor John Milton—who

had proclaimed death preferable to defeat, and would later

keep his word by shooting himself—Yulee argued that the

war was not the kind of emergency to justify suspending his

property rights: “I humbly trust I may not be wanting at any

time in necessary & dutiful sacrifice & contribution to the

great cause in which all citizens are engaged. But I have not

the right to make myself free with the property of others,

nor to seek merit for a generous patriotism at another’s

cost.” Yulee even sought an injunction to stop the

Confederacy from seizing sugar from his plantation.

Yulee’s effort to save his railroad was another lost cause.

The Civil War left all of Florida’s railroads battered and

bankrupt. The Internal Improvement Fund, which had

guaranteed their bonds, limped out of the war on the brink

of ruin. And in the chaotic Reconstruction era, the fund’s

trustees drove it over the brink, fueling a land-grabbing

frenzy that investigators described as “a wild run for all that

was in sight.” Florida nearly gave itself away completely

before the wild run skidded to a halt.

The Great Giveaway

RECONSTRUCTION WAS SUPPOSED to revive the South and

uplift blacks. Instead, northern carpetbaggers and southern

opportunists joined forces to line their pockets and preserve

white supremacy. Florida’s antebellum Democratic power

brokers—led by Yulee, who reestablished himself as a

kingmaker after a brief stint in federal prison for treason—

engineered the elections of “moderate” Republicans who

agreed to defend the old order’s financial interests and

block radical Reconstruction in exchange for the keys to the

treasury. In an era of scandal—the Tweed Ring in New York,

the Crédit Mobilier on the transcontinental railroad,

carpetbaggers and scalawags around the South—the

Internal Improvement Fund became the “corruption fund”

that Senator Westcott had feared. Businessmen eager for

contracts descended on Tallahassee with suitcases full of

cash, just as they were doing in President Ulysses S. Grant’s

Washington. If the Wright brothers had come along earlier,

one official later said, the Internal Improvement board

probably would have given away the air above Florida.

After the war, the fund’s trustees decided to seize the

state’s bankrupt railroads, then sell them to raise cash to

pay their bondholders. But in a classic insider deal, Yulee

and his partners repurchased the Florida Railroad for a song,

foisting its debts on the state while looting its landholdings,

raking in windfall profits while the state was begging their

bondholders to accept 20 cents on the dollar. “The

manipulations have, in all cases, proved successful, and

while no honest man can or will approve their course,

creditors have nevertheless to do the best they can,” one

land agent wrote. The board sold Florida’s other major

railroad to a pair of crooks who made Yulee look like Honest

Abe; they had just swindled North Carolina out of millions of

dollars in railroad bonds, and now swindled Florida out of

millions more, after plying politicians with whiskey and

bribes. The two men simply pocketed the cash raised by

their bonds, leaving the fund with heaps of new railroad

debt and no new railroads. Florida’s only remaining asset

was its swamp and overflowed land.

Desperate for cash, the trustees put that land up for

grabs, and no longer just for railroad schemes. They now

entertained all kinds of improvement schemes, including

reclamation projects. One young midwesterner, a bushy-

bearded pioneer named William Henry Gleason, offered to

drain the entire Everglades with canals in exchange for the

right to buy up to six million acres for less than 7 cents per

acre. The trustees eagerly accepted.

GLEASON WAS NOT THE ONLY wheeler-dealer who sought

his fortune from the fund after the war. Others offered to

drain the Caloosahatchee River and Kissimmee River

floodplains, develop a colony of Alsatians, and start a coffee

plantation in the Keys. But Gleason was Florida’s archetypal

carpetbagger, the cunning antihero of the Reconstruction

era.

He got his start on the Wisconsin frontier, where he

worked as an engineer and a lawyer, founded the lumber

town of Eau Claire, opened a bank, became a Democratic

Party functionary, and pestered the legislature for internal

improvements. But he was caught using reserves from his

bank to speculate in real estate, and accused of writing bad

checks to cover his losses. So he fled to Pennsylvania,

where he was again attacked for “irregular practices,” and

then to Virginia, where he profiteered during the war by

selling provisions in the South.

After the war, Gleason received a federal appointment to

study whether Florida should be converted into a colony for

black freedmen. He soon concluded that its sun-kissed lands

were far too valuable to turn over to blacks, particularly

when they could be turned over to, say, William Henry

Gleason. He moved his family to the future site of downtown

Miami on Biscayne Bay, an uninhabited area he found “so

beautiful and healthful that it must one day become the

resort of the invalid, the tourist and the lover of adventure,”

and began plotting his takeover of south Florida.

Gleason became the Internal Improvement Fund’s most

aggressive suitor, proposing a multitude of reclamation and

navigation projects in exchange for the right to buy

swampland on the cheap. The trustees were not supposed

to sell land for less than $1.25 an acre, but politics trumped

law in Reconstruction Florida, and the former Democrat had

the good sense to pursue a new career in Republican

politics. In 1868, he was elected lieutenant governor on a

ticket with Harrison Reed, another Wisconsin carpetbagger.

And when Reed exhibited a few unscripted flashes of

conscience—foiling a scam Gleason had concocted to buy

bonds with worthless scrip, then vetoing a bill to boost

politician salaries—Gleason led a movement to impeach

him, declared himself governor, and set up a rival

governor’s office in the hotel across the street. It was a

chaotic time in Florida politics. When Gleason stopped by

Reed’s office to retrieve his papers, a Reed loyalist shoved a

revolver in his face. “Gleason wore a fine beaver hat, which

went one way while he went the other, retreating in quick

time to the seat of his hotel government,” according to one

contemporary account. After several weeks of this anarchy,

a state court voided Reed’s impeachment and ruled Gleason

ineligible for high office on a technicality. But a defiant

Gleason continued to preside over the Senate, and

participated in three more efforts to impeach Reed. Gleason

also seized control of Dade County’s new government, and

stole an election for the state assembly from a hog farmer

named Pig Brown.

Meanwhile, the fund continued its fire sale, and Gleason

—now calling himself Governor Gleason—continued to float

new proposals: navigation canals across the peninsula and

down the east coast, a rice plantation in the Everglades, a

timber deal in the Panhandle. He signed up a senator, a

congressman, and several trustees of the fund as business

partners, and secured one pledge of 1.36 million acres from

the fund in exchange for nothing in particular. One angry

legislator compared Gleason to robber barons like Cornelius

Vanderbilt and “political tricksters” like Boss Tweed. A

newspaper mocked him in verse:

Far better for Gleason if he had remained

In Wisconsin, where he so much glory attained.

For his talents, peculiar, are out of their sphere.

There are no “wild cat” banks for his management here.

If Gleason had followed up his brassy proposals and

political shenanigans with actual drainage work, he might

have locked up millions of acres of land and reshaped the

face of Florida. But he achieved almost nothing except a

modest dredging job that created Lake Worth Inlet. And

before he could cash in, the great giveaway was shut down

—not by an outraged public or an honest politician, but by a

rival capitalist who wanted his share of the loot.

HIS NAME WAS FRANCIS VOSE, and he ended up with a lien

on half of Florida. Before the war, Vose’s New York factory

had supplied iron to the Florida Railroad in exchange for

state-backed bonds. After the war, Vose rejected the board’s

offer of 20 cents on the dollar, and secured an injunction

barring the board from disposing of the fund’s land for

anything less than the official price—and for anything other

than cash—until he received full payment plus interest. Vose

was recalled as “a little grasping fellow, with a heart no

bigger than a mosquito’s gizzard,” but his greed helped stop

the fund’s trustees from squandering Florida’s only

remaining asset. When they tried to defy the injunction by

awarding more land to Gleason and other insiders, a federal

judge forced the fund into receivership.

David Yulee then persuaded Governor Reed to stop

fighting the lawsuit—not because he felt guilty about stiffing

his creditors, but because he figured the receiver would shut

down the Internal Improvement Fund, protecting his railroad

from new competition. He was right. Gleason lost his

dubious claim to 1.36 million acres, and was even denied

3,840 acres he had actually earned—3,840 acres that would

become the heart of Palm Beach. There would be no more

giveaways of pristine wetlands—and no more improvements

—until the lawsuit was settled. Soon the fund was so broke

that its trustees had to borrow $150 to pay a lawyer.

America was building more railroads than the rest of the

world combined, but Florida was once again stuck in limbo.

“Our development from internal improvements was

stagnant, idle and motionless, and no gleam of light seemed

to penetrate the gloom,” Governor William Bloxham later

recalled. Until it could find a white knight to pay off its

debts, Florida’s wetlands would remain wet—and its growth

would remain stunted.

“How Far, Far Out of the World It Seems!”

BY 1880, FLORIDA RANKED thirty-fourth of the thirty-eight

states in population. It had less than one-fifth of Iowa’s

population and less than half of West Virginia’s. It was forty-

five times larger than Rhode Island but had fewer people. At

a time when New York City had 1.2 million residents, Florida

did not have a city with 10,000. Its 530 miles of railroads

ranked thirty-sixth in the nation, and its $20 million worth of

farmland ranked thirty-seventh. In a bustling industrial era

of immigration, urbanization, and innovation, Florida still

had 7.6 million acres of unsurveyed land; no other eastern

state had any. Americans were conquering time and

distance with the telegraph and telephone, the

transcontinental railroad and transatlantic cable, the steam

engine and suspension bridge. But Florida was still

America’s hinterland, supplying one-sixth of one percent of

its tax revenue.

While Florida was the South’s emptiest and poorest state,

north Florida at least showed signs of life. Harriet Beecher

Stowe, the author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, moved to Mandarin

on the St. Johns River, and her boosterism helped attract

thousands of visitors and settlers. Early Yankee snowbirds

began flocking to Jacksonville, to escape frigid northern

weather and foul urban air. Henry Flagler, John Rockefeller’s

right-hand man at Standard Oil, visited with his ailing wife in

1878, never imagining that he would become the father of

modern Florida. A young riverboat captain named Napoleon

Bonaparte Broward began shepherding tourists from

Jacksonville to resort towns like Enterprise, Palatka, and

Green Cove Springs, “The Saratoga of the St. Johns,” never

dreaming that he would become the father of Everglades

drainage. Yulee built a luxury hotel in Fernandina, which

began calling itself “The Newport of the South.” Even Stowe

began to resent the stampede of “idle loungers” from the

North, especially the ones who snuck into her orange

groves, hoping for a glimpse of an abolitionist heroine.

But south Florida was still a watery wilderness. In 1848,

General Harney had predicted 100,000 new arrivals in five

years; thirty-two years later, the census reported just 257

white residents in southeast Florida. Henry Sanford,

Lincoln’s ambassador to Belgium, promoted an eponymous

town near the center of the peninsula as “The Gate City of

South Florida,” but Sanford was still a gate to nowhere.

South Florida in 1880 was as empty as it had been when

Jacob Motte’s unit was chasing Seminoles, and emptier than

it had been when the people of Horr’s Island were gathering

oysters. “How still it is here!” Iza Hardy exclaimed in

Oranges and Alligators: Sketches of South Florida Life. “How

far, far out of the world it seems!” And Hardy never even

made it to the real south Florida. She described Orlando,

north of the peninsula’s geographical midpoint and 250

miles north of its tip, as the “extreme south.”

It was an understandable mistake. Back then, hardly any

whites ventured into south Florida. A few enterprising

cattlemen—led by Francis Hendry, the father of Hendry

County, and Jacob Summerlin, the “King of the Crackers”—

grazed wild herds of wiry “scrubs” in the Kissimmee and

Caloosahatchee basins, running them to Fort Myers and

Punta Rassa with buckskin whips that cracked like rifle

shots. Hendry founded LaBelle and helped develop Fort

Myers, while Summerlin founded Bartow and helped develop

Orlando. A few pioneers ventured further south, starting

villages like Coconut Grove on the high ground of the

Atlantic ridge, or homesteading in remote outposts like

Chokoloskee on the Gulf coast. But very few. “We call this

God’s country, because He could not give it to anybody,” a

Chokoloskee pioneer wrote. The pioneers subsisted by

fishing, hunting, making charcoal, salvaging shipwrecks, and

growing fruits, vegetables, sugarcane, and coontie. But they

had few local customers, and no way to ship their products

to outside markets. When Fort Lauderdale’s lighthouse

keeper had to list the men within three miles of his station,

he wrote: “None.” In 1879, a visitor named James Henshall

counted only twenty-five residences on Biscayne Bay. Even

the area’s most exuberant booster, William Gleason, moved

north to the Indian River town of Eau Gallie, defeated by

“mosquitoes and sand flies, recurring hurricanes and a

depressing sense of isolation.”

Life on the Everglades frontier was not for wimps.

Cottonmouths were as common as doctors were scarce.

Pioneers shared their shacks with two-inch roaches,

horseflies whose bites felt like stab wounds, and “swamp

angels” so thick they put out fires. “They are unbearable by

anyone not endowed with rhinoceros hide,” one settler

wrote. “The incriminating mosquito, the nimble and

microscopic sand fly, the familiar flea, the industrious

warlike ant, with many others, each have their day—and it is

frequently a long one!”

The lonesome wilderness tended to attract outcasts and

outlaws, self-reliant folks who didn’t care for human society.

The first act of the first minister to visit Everglades City was

to bury a fellow passenger who had been beaten to death

on their voyage from Fort Myers. Boss Tweed passed

through the Everglades on the lam, and the notorious Edgar

“Bloody” Watson—a fugitive suspected of murdering several

westerners, including the legendary outlaw Belle Starr—

resurfaced as a sugar grower in the Ten Thousand Islands.

Watson’s farmhands tended to vanish around payday, and

he may have killed a few fellow homesteaders as well,

before he was gunned down by an impromptu firing squad

of his neighbors.

THE SURVIVING SEMINOLES remained scattered around

south Florida’s interior. In 1880, a minister named Clay

MacCauley found thirty-seven Indian families living in five

camps around Lake Okeechobee, Big Cypress, and the

Everglades. They were doing much better, now that they

could hunt, fish, grow crops, raise livestock, and otherwise

exploit their environment without fear of attack. “The

Seminole, living in a perennial summer, is never at a loss

when he seeks something, and something good, to eat,”

MacCauley observed. They cultivated 100 acres of corn,

beans, and melons, raised hogs, chickens, and cattle, and

shot deer, birds, and even manatees with their Kentucky

rifles. They built a rudimentary mill to turn sugarcane into

juice, although they only made enough to serve themselves.

“They are the producers of perhaps the finest sugar cane

grown in America; but they are not wise enough to make it a

source of profit,” MacCauley sniffed.

The Seminoles did not share the white man’s obsession

with profit. They kept their distance from whites, except to

swap pelts and plumes for pots, beads, cloth, and

ammunition. They taught their children to turn their backs

on whites; women were not even allowed to look at whites.

Seminoles could be severely punished for learning to read or

write, or discussing tribal matters with outsiders. The tribe

remained so isolated from white society that long after the

Civil War, a chief named Tiger Tail brought a black slave to

Fort Myers for sale. As one paper recounted: “When

informed that the negroes were free he ejaculated: ‘White

man’s nigger mebbe free, but Indian’s nigger, no.’

Whereupon Tiger Tail grasped the darkey by the nape of the

neck, pushed him into the canoe and paddled back to the

Everglades.” As late as the 1920s, a group of Seminoles

visiting Madison Square Garden were still so suspicious of

whites that they nearly rioted after a speaker joked about

shipping them to Oklahoma.

It is easy to understand the mistrust, considering the

past betrayals and enduring racism. Most white accounts

portrayed the Seminoles as dignified and industrious—

except when their “wild natures” were “heated up by the

crazing liquor”—but hostility often lurked beneath the

surface. “If the native Floridian does not extend his

encroachments further the Seminole will continue to live in

peace and harmony with mankind, asking nothing, needing

nothing,” one author wrote. A nice sentiment, except that it

suggested Indians were not part of “mankind,” and that it

was up to the natives to avoid “encroachments” on white

intruders.

“Nature Reigns Here Undisturbed”

FOR THE TIME BEING, though, most whites stayed away

from south Florida.

For example, Lake Okeechobee was still so inaccessible

that writers spun yarns of a 170-foot-deep lake surrounded

by 150-foot-tall cliffs, overrun by monkeys and gigantic

spiders. “It has slept,” one writer said, “in a sort of poetical

fog of mystery.” Only the most dedicated nature lovers tried

to pierce that fog.

Kirk Munroe—a noted nature writer and the founder of

the American Canoe Association—did try to explore Lake

Okeechobee after he moved to Coconut Grove but nearly

starved to death after getting lost in “horrible” cypress

swamps and “terrible” sawgrass marshes. “Am in despair,”

he scribbled on his fourth day in the wilderness.

“Mosquitoes and lizards abound in numbers I have never

seen equaled,” he wrote on day six. “God help me!” he

wrote on day seven. Monroe finally abandoned his canoe

and thrashed through the sawgrass, passing out just as he

reached the mainland.

Angelo Heilprin, a Hungarian geologist, had a more

pleasant experience around Lake Okeechobee. There were

no 150-foot cliffs, no spiders the size of his head—just

nature and solitude. Never before had he “so keenly

appreciated the insignificance of my own humble being in

the sea of life by which I was surrounded.” Rushes and reeds

bearded the lake’s boggy perimeter, along with cypress

stands dripping with Spanish moss and a pond apple jungle

overgrown with flowering vines. “It would be vain to attempt

to depict by word the solemn grandeur of these untrodden

wilds, the dark recesses, almost untouched by the light of

day, that peer forbiddingly into a wealth of boundless green

—or to convey to the mind a true conception of the

exuberance of vegetable life that is here presented,”

Heilprin wrote.

The Everglades also remained a mystery to most

Americans, inevitably compared to unexplored lands such as

Tibet, Timbuktu, Quintana Roo, and Antarctica. James

Henshall tried to dispel some of its myths after a rare visit:

The singular and wonderful region known as the Everglades

is not, as is popularly supposed, an impenetrable swamp,

exhaling an atmosphere of poisonous gases and deadly

miasma, but a charming, shallow lake of great extent, with

pure and limpid waters from a few inches to several feet in

depth, in which grow curious water-grasses and beautiful

aquatic plants; while thousands of small islands, from a few

rods to a hundred acres in extent, rise from the clear waters,

clothed with never-ending verdure and flowers.

In these days before drainage, Everglades fauna was still

as abundant as flora. Charles Torrey Simpson, the pioneer

naturalist who noted the unmatched lacerations of the

Everglades, was nevertheless overwhelmed by the

explosion of life he encountered on his first visit:

Bear, deer, otter, mink, raccoons, various wildcats and the

opossum were abundant, while every swamp and stream

was full of alligators. Vast numbers of roseate spoonbills,

snowy herons, American egrets and the great white heron…

winged their way over the pineland as they visited the

swamps for food. And food was everywhere abundant, for

the waters were swarming with small fish and the lowlands

contained unnumbered millions of pond snails.

The Everglades, in other words, was still the Everglades.

In the late nineteenth century, with the Industrial Revolution

in full swing, America was rapidly annihilating its natural

landscapes—chopping down forests, wiping out buffalo,

replacing wild lands with farms and cities that spewed

fertilizers and sewage into rivers and streams. But a

Harper’s writer who visited south Florida observed that

“nature reigns here undisturbed.” He watched a loggerhead

turtle lay eggs in the moonlight, a laughing gull steal a fish

in midair from a pelican, a panther leap over a shrub. He

saw starfish, sawfish, bald eagles, “gorgonias brilliant with

iridescence,” and eleven species of herons.

The Everglades ecosystem was no longer purely

“natural.” Its wild boars descended from hogs imported by

Spanish explorers; its hemp descended from Dr. Perrine’s

seedlings; Gleason’s ditches had transformed Lake Worth

into a salt water lagoon. Seminoles set fires to attract deer,

while white pioneers dug wells, cut timber, and burned

buttonwoods for charcoal.

But south Florida was more natural than just about

anywhere else in America. With the Vose lawsuit freezing

the Internal Improvement Fund, plans to drain the

Everglades had been shelved. The Everglades was still the

haunt of vermin and reptiles, and it looked like it would stay

that way. “The Everglades will always retain its present state

of wildness, and thus furnish a safe retreat for game

animals, where they will multiply and increase in spite of the

advance of civilization,” Henshall wrote.

Respectable Americans considered this a deplorable

state of affairs, a disturbing glitch in the march of progress.

The New Orleans Times-Democrat, a booster publication

dedicated to the development of the South, sponsored an

expedition to the Everglades, hoping to promote its

commercial potential. But by the time its correspondents

escaped this “desolate sawgrass desert,” they had reached

the same depressing conclusion about the Everglades:

“They are nothing more than a vast and useless marsh, and

such they will remain for all time to come.”

Part 2

Draining the Everglades

Six

The Reclamation

of a Kingly Domain

A radical and recent change has taken place in that

section of Florida.

—Florida State engineer H. S. Duval

ALMOST EVERYONE AGREED that the Everglades was a

vast and useless marsh. But not everyone agreed that it

would remain that way for all time. Governor William

Bloxham, for one, believed that the right capitalist could

drain it, transform it, and launch a new age of growth and

development for Florida. The backwater era had dragged on

long enough.

In 1881, Bloxham found his man in Hamilton Disston, a

thirty-six-year-old Philadelphia saw manufacturer who had

just inherited his factory and his fortune. Bloxham was a

southern planter, a former Confederate captain, a

Democratic politician, a lifelong Floridian; Disston was a

Yankee industrialist, a former Union volunteer, a Republican

operative, a tourist who had fished a bit in Florida. But

Bloxham decided to place his state’s future in Disston’s

hands. “We want immigration and capital, come from

whatever source it may,” the governor explained.

Today, Disston is often recalled as a feckless failure who

shot himself in his tub after squandering his fortune on an

outlandish drainage scheme. But the myth of Hamilton

Disston bears little resemblance to reality.

Out of His Father’s Shadow

HAMILTON DISSTON’S ANCESTORS were French noblemen of

the D’Isney clan, but his father was a self-made millionaire.

Henry Disston was fourteen when he moved from

England to America with his own father, who dropped dead

just three days after they arrived in Philadelphia. Orphaned

and alone in a strange country, Henry apprenticed himself

to a sawmaker, and eventually built his own sawmaking

empire. He endured countless setbacks and losses on his

road to riches—evictions, fires, the death of his first wife in

childbirth—but he never lost faith in himself or his products.

He’d walk into a hardware store, ask to see a competitor’s

saw, then break it over the counter: “My name is Henry

Disston, and here is a saw that I defy you or any other man

to break with similar treatment.” He opened his own steel

mill at a time when American steel was considered so

inferior he had to conceal its use in his saws, but soon his

saws became so synonymous with quality that he had to

warn customers to look out for counterfeit Disstons. And

Henry created more than a business; he created a

community. He built a paternalistic company town called

Tacony on the outskirts of the city, providing schools,

libraries, and churches for his workers, helping them buy

coal and medicine, even organizing their baseball team.

Born in Philadelphia in 1844, Hamilton shared his father’s

restless spirit and confidence, but he could never replicate

his father’s up-by-his-bootstraps journey. By the time

Hamilton quit school to start an apprenticeship at the saw

works, Henry was already running a $500,000-a-year

operation, with customers as far away as Australia. So

Hamilton tried to escape his father’s shadow in other ways.

He joined a volunteer fire department and bolted from work

to fight so many infernos that Henry threatened to sack him.

He twice ran off to enlist in the Union army, and after Henry

twice paid bounties to get him discharged, he organized a

company of his fellow employees during the Gettysburg

emergency. Henry finally let him serve, and even bankrolled

the “Disston Volunteers.”

But when the war was over, Hamilton returned to work as

an executive in his father’s factory, and immersed himself in

his father’s Republican Party, serving as a ward leader in

Philadelphia and running Tacony politics behind the scenes.

He hobnobbed with the protectionist congressman William

“Pig Iron” Kelley and the future president Benjamin Harrison,

and lent his yacht to Senator Matthew “Boss” Quay. The

New York Times described Disston as a wealthy young

dilettante who “amuses himself with politics,” but his

political interests were no lark; they invariably promoted his

business interests. He founded the Protective Tariff Club to

push for duties on foreign steel, and later lobbied his friends

in Congress to protect his Florida sugar interests.

Disston was a fun-loving socialite with a yacht named

Mischief, but he was also a married father of three, a

Presbyterian, a Mason, a shrewd executive who knew how to

separate work from play. “He can drink plenty of champagne

between 11 o’clock and midnight, and be at the saw works

at 7 o’clock with cool and capacious brain,” one reporter

noted. Disston was easy to underestimate. He looked more

like a psychiatrist than an industrialist, with a bushy

mustache and a gentle smile. The only hint of his inner drive

was his narrow, unflinching eyes, which the reporter

described as “like that of the great eagle in the cage at the

Tampa Bay Hotel, that can look straight at the sun without a

tear, or even a blink.”

HAMILTON TOOK OVER the saw works after Henry’s death in

1878 and steadily expanded production, churning out 1.4

million hacksaws and three million files a year. The firm’s

2,000 workers still called him Ham, even though he now

walked the factory floor in striped trousers and a morning

coat, with a silk hat cocked at a rakish angle. He added

political and public relations flair to a staid operation, giving

President Rutherford B. Hayes a tour of the plant just a

month after Henry’s death. At the start, he showed Hayes a

hunk of steel; forty-two minutes later, the hunk was a

twenty-six-inch handsaw etched with the president’s name.

The exhibition had the desired effect on the press, which

saluted “the extensive and world-renowned Keystone Saw

and Tool Works, which has scarcely a rival in the Old World

or New World.”

But Ham yearned to be more than a caretaker and

promoter of his father’s company. He invested in a chemical

firm, a Chinese railroad syndicate, Atlantic City real estate,

and Wild West mines. He finally found his calling after

Ambassador Sanford, another wealthy Republican, invited

him to Florida to fish black bass. In the peninsula’s fens and

bogs, Disston saw what Buckingham Smith and his Seminole

War correspondents had seen decades earlier: countless

acres of fertile soil rendered worthless by water. He was

sure he could remove that water, and create millions of

acres of sugar fields.

For Disston, remodeling this forbidding wilderness was

more than a business venture. It was a chance to create

something new, and succeed on his own merits. It was also

“a vast amount of fun,” a diversion from the drudgery of

furnace malfunctions and annealing costs. But it was a

business venture, too. When Disston isn’t mischaracterized

as a sucker or a crook, he is often mischaracterized as a

head-in-

the-clouds romantic. In fact, he was a visionary capitalist.

He saw the Everglades as more than an opportunity for self-

actualization; he saw it as an underpriced commodity, just

waiting for someone to exploit its potential.

Stupendous Schemes

IN JANUARY 1881, DISSTON cut his first deal with Governor

Bloxham and the Internal Improvement Fund, agreeing to

drain up to 12 million acres of the Everglades ecosystem in

exchange for half the swamp and overflowed land his

dredges successfully reclaimed. He planned to improve one-

third of Florida’s landmass, an area larger than New Jersey,

Connecticut, Delaware, and Rhode Island combined. One

engineering magazine declared his a challenge more

daunting than any drainage project in modern Holland or

ancient Rome: “If this remarkable enterprise is…carried to a

successful conclusion, it will prove to be by far the greatest

work of its kind.” Pig Iron Kelley hailed Disston’s “Napoleonic

instinct and foresight,” predicting that all Americans would

benefit from his “reclamation of a more than kingly

domain.”

William Gleason and other Floridians with more moxie

than money had cut similar deals that never amounted to

much, but Disston demonstrated his seriousness by posting

a bond, hiring the region’s top engineers, and pledging to

start dredging within six months. The New York Times

decreed that his “stupendous scheme” had “every prospect

of success,” and the Weekly Floridian agreed: “All know the

value of the lands if reclaimed and the immense benefit that

would accrue to the State. Now men of capital and energy

have taken hold of the matter with an earnestness that

convinces us they mean to carry out the great work.”

The only problem was the Vose lawsuit, which still cast a

shadow over Florida, paralyzing its Internal Improvement

Fund. Vose had died, but his heirs and other creditors were

threatening to foreclose on their lien and seize the fund’s

swampland. Then Disston would have no incentive to drain

the Everglades, railroads would have no incentive to build

tracks, and settlers would have no incentive to come to

Florida. The Everglades would remain a vast and useless

marsh, probably for all time to come. But Bloxham believed

that if the fund could be restored to solvency, Florida’s pent-

up development potential would explode, and pioneers

would flock south. “This growing cancer, in the shape of a

rapidly accumulating debt, had to be arrested,” he said.

“However painful the remedy, the operation had to be

performed, or the disease would soon have been fatal to the

entire body.”

So the governor quietly visited Philadelphia, and soon

announced an even bigger deal with his new Republican

friend: In addition to his drainage efforts, Disston would pay

the fund $1 million to buy four million acres of swampland

outright, erasing its debt and freeing up the rest of its land

to promote new improvements. The Times called the

transaction “the largest purchase of land ever made by a

single person in the world,” and the Floridian exulted that it

would “give to the State the most vigorous push forward on

the road of progress that it has yet received.” A Fort Myers

telegraph operator nearly fainted after the news came over

his wire. “One million dollars in good cold cash!” he gasped.

“Imagine that!” His excitement was widely shared in Florida.

“Both Democrats and Republicans are in ecstasies over the

sale,” one paper reported.

Not everyone was ecstatic. As Disston selected his land—

most of it in the center and southwest of the peninsula,

including most of the Kissimmee and Caloosahatchee basins

—some of Governor Bloxham’s enemies attacked the 25-

cents-per-acre sale as a giveaway. But this was a rather

flimsy complaint, considering how many acres the cash-poor

fund was literally giving away; it awarded one man 98,000

acres just for surveying Disston’s lands. It was true that

other potential buyers were sniffing around the fund, but

none of them had put up “good cold cash” before Disston

came along. With Florida falling further behind its neighbors

every day, and Disston offering to retire the fund’s crippling

debt, it’s easy to see why the governor refused to waste

time trolling for a slightly better deal. There was more

griping six months later when Disston flipped two million

acres to a British shipbuilder for a $100,000 profit, but that

profit only reflected the surge in property values he had

created by freeing the fund from federal custody. As

Bloxham boasted, “when this great incubus of incumbrance

was lifted, Florida rose up and at once bounded forward

more rapidly than any other State in the Union.”

That was no exaggeration. The Disston sale sparked

Florida’s first land boom, bursting the dam of debt that had

held back immigration and capital. In the four years

following the sale, Florida added 800 miles of railroad

tracks; in the previous two decades, it had built fewer than

200 miles. Florida’s taxable property doubled in value

during Bloxham’s term, and land sales to settlers increased

sixfold. An estimated 150,000 tourists visited the state in

the winter of 1884, prompting one newspaper to complain

that New York’s businessmen had all fled to Florida. “Would

that Florida had a thousand Disstons interested in her

future!” the Floridian gushed.

The Border of Southern Civilization

ONE OF THOSE NEW YORK BUSINESSMEN, the Standard Oil

tycoon Henry Flagler, developed a particularly keen interest

in Florida’s future after honeymooning in St. Augustine with

his second wife. Flagler saw that with first-rate resorts and

railroads, America’s oldest city could become a real Newport

of the South, a winter playground for the Gilded Age leisure

class. So he started building luxury hotels, including the

540-room Ponce de Leon Hotel, a Spanish-style castle that

was the world’s largest concrete structure. Flagler also

consolidated and upgraded the area’s antiquated railroads

into a single east coast line, then extended it south to

Daytona Beach. “The scheme has outgrown my original

ideas,” he admitted to a friend. And while Flagler was

remodeling the Atlantic coast, a Connecticut entrepreneur

named Henry Plant was building resorts and railroads on the

Gulf coast, including the grand Tampa Bay Hotel with the

eagle in the lobby.

Most of the development unleashed by the Disston sale

was in north Florida, but Disston personally lured some

settlers further south. He imported 250 New Yorkers to

Orlando’s Lake Conway, selling them small farms for $5 an

acre. (With a dash of his father’s Tacony paternalism, he

only sold to families with enough cash reserves to tide them

over in case of hard times, and provided experts to educate

them about pioneer challenges.) He later founded the

coastal resorts of Tarpon Springs and Disston City, which is

now Gulfport, and sold the land that became Sarasota and

Naples. He also helped a Russian immigrant named Peter

Demens extend his Orange Belt Railroad to the Gulf, to a

tiny village that Demens named after his hometown of St.

Petersburg.

Meanwhile, Disston’s drainage operations began to

attract pioneers to the edges of the Everglades. The cow

town of Fort Myers, the base for his dredging work on the

Caloosahatchee, tripled in population almost overnight.

Thomas Edison bought a winter home there, prophesizing

that “there is only one Fort Myers, and one day 90 million

people are going to find it out.” The Times-Democrat

correspondents who stopped in before their Everglades

expedition mournfully predicted that this “little Eden in the

wilderness” would soon be overrun by hordes of sun-starved

northerners:

We will always think of this little town as we first knew it,

and although it may be best for its commercial interest that

money and men should crowd to the wall and rob it of its

present village simplicity, purity and sweetness; yet it

seems to us like trampling to earth the roses which bloom

before each door and putting an ax in the beautiful palm

and stately coconut trees which grow and thrive on every

side.

Disston also transformed a tiny trading post on Lake

Tohopekaliga into his corporate headquarters of Kissimmee.

Within two years, “The Tropical City” had 700 residents,

several hotels, a shipyard, two sawmills churning out lumber

for the construction boom, a station on Henry Plant’s new

South Florida Railroad, and a mayor named Rufus Rose, a

steamboat captain who was now Disston’s drainage

superintendent. In 1883, Disston arranged a visit to

Kissimmee by President Chester A. Arthur, a Republican,

who spent two days fishing with Captain Rose, landing a

ten-pound bass on his first cast. Kissimmee enjoyed a blast

of national publicity as “the border of Southern civilization,”

and Disston began selling downtown lots for $100 an acre.

Disston later helped launch the nearby towns of

Southport, Runnymede, Narcoossee, and St. Cloud, where

he developed an 1,800-acre sugar plantation, and the

fifteen-mile Sugar Belt Railroad. He also sold 7,000 acres in

the vicinity for a short-lived Shaker retreat called Olive

Branch. One devout Shaker, Andrew Barrett, complained

that even the trembling celibates of his ascetic community

were succumbing to the lure of Florida real estate. “When I

see the greed of money step in and engross our whole

attention, I begin to think we have forgotten the primary

object of our exit into Florida,” Brother Barrett wrote. “To

me, this was not intended as merely a speculative

scheme…. If God is in it, I don’t believe He wants any such

business.”

PERHAPS NOT, but Disston did. He was the first developer to

market Florida swampland on a global scale, opening real

estate offices in England, Scotland, Sweden, Denmark,

Germany, Italy, and throughout America, distributing maps

of the peninsula dominated by lands his company owned (in

red) or intended to drain (in green), peddling sun-bathed

“lands of inexhaustible fertility without fertilizing,” where

“heavy downpours are exceptional events” and the

summers were cooler than Cincinnati’s or Bismarck’s. “The

immigrant from Europe, or settler from other states, can find

no more favorable location, and the capitalist no better

investment,” his brochures trumpeted.

Disston promoted his domain as America’s new winter

playground and breadbasket, a frost-free, illness-free, bug-

free paradise where 20 acres were worth 100 up north: “You

secure a home in a garden spot of the country, in an

equable and lovely climate, where merely to live is a

pleasure, a luxury heretofore accessible only to

millionaires.” He depicted a cornucopia of “inexhaustibly

rich lands” producing the world’s finest fruits, vegetables,

rice, timber, and tobacco, as well as sugarcane that would

regenerate without replanting:

ATTENTION!!

FARMERS!!

Why stand you idle Six Months in the year, eating up in

winter all you make in summer, and saving nothing for old

age, or your children?

STOP! CONSIDER!

Have you heard of DISSTON’S purchase of 4,000,000 acres

of upland in

FLORIDA

The country where you can raise crops ALL THE YEAR!

“Upland” was as audacious a stretcher as Disston’s claim

that Florida’s downpours were exceptional events, since

every one of those four million acres had been deeded to

the state as low-lying wetlands, “swamp and overflowed.”

But Disston was determined that they would not remain

overflowed for long. He had pledged to reclaim central and

south Florida from its underwater limbo, and he intended to

keep his pledge.

Delivering Florida from Evil

FOR CENTURIES, SOUTHERN FLORIDA had been dismissed

as “liable to overflow, and of no use.” But Disston and his

engineers intended to end its overflows for good—by

preventing the unruly Kissimmee River from overflowing its

banks and soaking its floodplain, while preventing Lake

Okeechobee from overflowing its southern rim and flooding

the Everglades. In just a few years, they bragged, the

Everglades would be “as dry as a bone.” Disston’s corporate

prospectus described the operation as “not only a sure and

safe investment, but offering probabilities of greater returns

in the future than any enterprise that has been brought

before the public in years.”

Disston’s drainage strategy was straightforward: Move

the excess water in the Kissimmee valley down to Lake

Okeechobee, then move the excess water in Lake

Okeechobee out to sea. In the upper basin, his engineers

proposed to link the Chain of Lakes with a series of canals

and straighten the serpentine Kissimmee River. In the lower

basin, they adopted Buckingham Smith’s plan to lower Lake

Okeechobee: one canal east to the St. Lucie River and out to

the Atlantic, one canal west to the Caloosahatchee River

and out to the Gulf, and at least one canal south through

the Everglades. “Okeechobee is the point to attack,” one

Disston associate explained. The key to the plan was to

make the outflow from the lake through the Caloosahatchee

and St. Lucie Canals “equal to or greater than the inflow

from the Kissimmee valley, which is the source of all the

evil.”

By “evil,” of course, he meant “water.”

The theory behind the engineering was simple: South

Florida was higher than sea level, and water flows from

higher elevations to lower elevations. As long as the law of

gravity remained in effect, excess water would flow downhill

from the Kissimmee River to Lake Okeechobee, and from

Lake Okeechobee out to tide. And as long as the canal levels

remained lower than the surrounding water table—which in

south Florida was always near or above the surface—they

would simultaneously suck water out of the surrounding

marshes. This was basic hydraulics: Water would seek its

own level.

Disston’s chief engineer, James Kreamer, proposed to

launch the attack on the lake by shunting its water east

through a massive canal to the St. Lucie River, the steepest

and most direct route to sea; he warned that starting with a

short canal west to the lazy and level Caloosahatchee would

“undoubtedly inundate” Fort Myers and its surrounding

lowlands. So Kreamer designed a 21-mile-long, 220-foot-

wide eastern canal with an estimated cost of about

$450,000, and recommended “the immediate adoption of

measures for an energetic prosecution of the work.” He

calculated that its current would be strong enough to scour

out its own bottom, and move pebbles as large as eggs.

But Disston was too low on cash to follow Kreamer’s

advice. He decided to begin his attack with shorter,

shallower, narrower, and cheaper canals in the Kissimmee

and Caloosahatchee basins—where they could start draining

millions of acres of wetlands he had purchased in those

basins, and could create a steamboat channel from

Kissimmee to the lake and out to the Gulf, instantly

connecting his company town to the world. Disston wanted

to recoup his investment as soon as possible, and he

believed that less ambitious canals would provide faster

results that would help him claim more land. He figured that

if the drainage wasn’t perfect at first, he could always dig

more canals later with the proceeds from his land grants.

So Disston sent one dredge south along the chain of

lakes to Lake Okeechobee, slicing off a few of the Kissimmee

River’s hairpin turns. A second dredge headed east along

the Caloosahatchee to its headwaters, then slashed through

three miles of sawgrass to connect the river to Lake O. The

planned canals east to the St. Lucie and south through the

Everglades were put on hold. “The groundwork is laid for a

reclamation of land that will astonish the country by its

fertility,” the company boasted.

“THE ARRIVAL OF THE DREDGE,” one journalist has written,

“was probably the single most important thing that ever

happened to South Florida.” Dredges would reshape the

entire landscape. Dredges would make it possible to grow

crops and build houses in wetlands, and most of south

Florida was wetlands.

The dredge itself was a lumbering hunk of Industrial Age

machinery, and the engineers, boilermen, and firemen who

operated them were a rough and resilient bunch, often

spending months in the marshes without seeing dry land or

other human beings. Dredging technology had come a long

way in the half century since men with oxen had dug the

Erie Canal, but cutting trenches through the wilderness was

still a dirty, labor-intensive job. The steam-powered, smoke-

belching dredges were rickety floating factories that looked

like giant Erector sets, supporting rotating chains of buckets

that scooped up muck and squirted it to the side. They were

so unwieldy they could only be towed on windless nights,

and Disston’s men often had to build jetties and dams to

keep them afloat. Harper’s described one dredge at work in

the Kissimmee valley: “The huge crane swings; the timbers

groan; steel and iron rattle and clang; the cough of the

engine is broken by shouts of the men up to their waists in

water; the anvil clinks; the sharp word of command cracks

like a cow-whip; the constant stream of black ooze pours

over the sluices; and as the huge iron and steel

megatherium toils deep in the marsh, behind it is the clean-

cut edge and levees of the new canal.”

The dredgemen had to endure the same south Florida

badlands that had tortured soldiers during the Seminole

Wars—the same mosquitoes, cottonmouths, thunderstorms,

and heat—at a time when department stores, streetcars,

and electric fans were making civilization increasingly

comfortable. The dredges cut less than the length of a

football field a day, and the men often had to trek for miles

through the marsh to run surveys or find timber they could

use as fuel. A Disston engineer named Conrad Menge had to

abandon his dredge for a harrowing seventeen-day canoe

trip into the Everglades to take soundings for the planned

canal south from Lake Okeechobee. “We had to drag our

boats practically all the way,” he wrote. “Our food supply

gave out completely two days and a night before we

reached the dredge, and I ate sawgrass buds to stave off

hunger.”

Ever the stoic, Menge added: “They tasted pretty good.”

Menge’s near-death experience did not achieve much.

His crew dredged thirteen miles south from the lake through

the River of Grass, but had to abandon the work after

running into an underground rock ledge. So Disston would

have no outlet south of the lake through the Everglades, just

as he had no outlet east of the lake to the St. Lucie.

STILL, MUCK WAS flying north and west of the lake. In June

1883, less than two years after Disston started carving up

the peninsula, an engineer named James Dancy reported on

his progress to the fund’s trustees. Despite soggy weather,

Dancy marveled, the Kissimmee valley’s wetlands were

drying out: “To the astonishment of all, though it had

rained…for 24 days in succession, all travelers said the

streams were lower than they had ever been. Large tracts

within the drainage district heretofore considered

undesirable are today improved and susceptible of

cultivation.” Dancy reported that Lake Tohopekaliga was

four and a half feet lower than ever, and that nearby cattle

were grazing in desiccated marshes that once held two feet

of water. It was as if the laws of nature no longer applied: “I

noticed that small lakes and water ponds, though it rained

on me every day but one, heavily, did not rise as they

usually do during the rainy season.”

A year later, state engineer H. S. Duval filed an even

rosier report, declaring a “radical” transformation of the

entire region. In the Kissimmee basin, he observed, lakes

without canals rose four feet during a month of nonstop

rain, while lakes with canals rose less than one foot. The

littoral marshes around Lake Toho were replaced by a sandy

beach, while the wetlands around the Kissimmee River and

Lake Okeechobee were now “a vast pasturage of dry land.”

In the Caloosahatchee basin west of the lake, settlers were

so confident in the drainage company’s work that they no

longer propped up new homes on stilts: “They look to the

curling clouds of the smoking dredge wafted on high as a

bow of promise, pledged to exempt them in future from

floods.”

Dancy and Duval both passed along effusive letters from

a Caloosahatchee cattleman named Mr. Frazier, who

seemed to materialize whenever the company needed a

salt-of-the-earth settler to vouch for its work. “During an

experience of 12 years in this vicinity, I have not witnessed

a heavier rainy season,” Frazier wrote. “Although this is the

case…the entire country is actually reclaimed—the cypress

ponds are dry—and the beds of all the streams…are dry or

nearly so.” After touring the region with Disston’s engineers,

Duval and Dancy certified that the company had reclaimed

nearly three million acres of swamp and overflowed land.

The sawgrass Everglades below Lake Okeechobee was

not yet reclaimed, but it seemed only a matter of time.

Disston had spent a mere $250,000 on drainage, less than 7

percent the cost of the new Brooklyn Bridge, and the state

had already credited him with draining three Rhode Islands

worth of wetlands. Disston’s other Florida ventures showed

great promise as well. The maiden Fort Myers–to–Kissimmee

voyage took seven weeks, but soon Disston’s steamers

were completing the trip in thirty-six hours. His sugar

plantation produced U.S.-record yields, and he expanded it

to exploit a 2-cents-a-pound federal tariff; it turned out that

sugar really did regenerate in south Florida without

replanting, a process called “ratooning.” After visiting

Disston’s farm at St. Cloud, the sugar king of Hawaii

declared its muck soil “as rich as any that I have ever seen.”

The federal government’s chief chemist agreed they were

“superior to any other soil.”

Disston was also raking in cash by selling those

mucklands. The boosters from the Times-Democrat could

not decide whether to cheer or cry after seeing Lake Toho’s

islands, previously worthless because of flooding,

commanding exorbitant prices: “There is not one of our little

party that does not envy the possessors of the beautiful

islands. We are aware that there is not a pocketbook in the

crowd that does not contain cash enough to have paid the

original purchase price of that, which if we owned now,

would be a competence for the remainder of our days, the

magical work of turning cents into dollars having been but

the labor of months.”

This was the original Everglades vision, the Henry Perrine

dream of maximum money for minimal work. Disston was

making it a reality—not just for himself, but for anyone with

the gumption to move his family or his money to Florida.

Bloxham’s gamble had paid off, and the Floridian crowed

that the skeptics had been proven wrong:

None but those who are fault-finders through lack of

information, mental perversion or deliberate malice now

deny that the Disston sale was an act of the wisest

statesmanship. It is useless to ask the latter class of persons

to acknowledge its wisdom, and that it opened the doors of

Florida to the march of progress which is now making her

great among the States. They have said white is black, and

they will stick to it with childish pertinacity. They will

continue their bald assertions and puerile arguments in the

face of splendid facts that almost everyone acknowledges.

Death of a Dream

THEN THE CALOOSAHATCHEE BASIN started to flood again,

and those facts no longer seemed so splendid. The area’s

settlers angrily blamed Disston, and began clamoring for

him to dam his new channel to the Caloosahatchee. In 1887,

after a review of Disston’s drainage work, a state

commission suddenly declared most of it a flop. White was

now officially black. The state of Florida had joined the

skeptics.

The commission did acknowledge that Disston had

reclaimed some of the upper Kissimmee valley, where he

had dug his widest and deepest canals, and where the

steeper slope of the landscape gave those canals their

greatest velocity. It also conceded that in the lower

Kissimmee valley and the marshes above Lake Okeechobee,

“nearly the whole of the vast prairie, extending as far as the

eye could reach…was dry and apparently fit for cultivation.”

But the commission credited Mother Nature, not Disston. It

claimed that Dancy and Duval had mistaken a temporary

drought for permanent drainage, persuading the fund to

award Disston nearly 1.2 million acres he hadn’t earned.

The commission said that, in reality, Disston had only

reclaimed about 80,000 acres.

This revisionism has shaped Disston’s image as a shady

operator. But the commission—appointed amid a flurry of

Disston-bashing—did not even hear the company’s side of

the story. “That style of tribunal, where the injured is

allowed no representative, brought on the Revolutionary

War,” Duval complained. Dancy and Duval did rely too

heavily on Disston’s version of events, but they were well

aware of Florida’s wet and dry cycles, and their rain-soaked

reports certainly did not sound like they were written during

droughts. It’s clear from the dueling reports and other

accounts that while Dancy and Duval were too kind, the

commission was too harsh.

Disston’s problem wasn’t shadiness; he simply failed to

execute his original plan. He successfully drained the upper

Kissimmee valley, conveying even more water into Lake

Okeechobee at an even faster rate. But he barely even tried

to convey water out of Lake Okeechobee, which was

supposed to be his key point of attack. Big canals were

expensive, so Disston focused on local drainage in the upper

basin, quickly reclaiming land he could sell at a profit. He

put off his plan for a more ambitious assault on the lake and

the Everglades.

Disston had intended to lower the lake with canals to the

east, west, and south, but he only finished the three-mile

ditch to the west—the one Chief Engineer Kreamer had

warned would “undoubtedly inundate” the Caloosahatchee

valley if it were dredged first. That’s exactly what happened.

With much less capacity and much less slope than the

Kissimmee valley canals, the Caloosahatchee canal quickly

filled up with silt and sand, sometimes even flowing

backward into the lake. The lake, like a trillion-gallon tub

with a tiny clogged drain, continued to rise and overflow

into the Everglades in summer storms. And lake water that

did squeeze west through the twenty-five-foot-wide canal

overwhelmed the Caloosahatchee River and sloshed into its

floodplain, just as Kreamer had predicted. It was as if the

huge tub was being emptied through a leaky straw.

Disston had a lot of work to do if he wanted the lake’s

outflow to exceed its inflow and stop its overflows. He

needed to increase the capacity of his existing canals—by

widening them, deepening them, and removing the silt

accumulating in them—and dig the other canals in his

original plan of attack. But even the hostile commission

believed the plan was a good one: “While the company has

not progressed as rapidly as may have been desired and

expected, the progress made has been sufficient to

establish beyond any reasonable doubt the practicability of

the drainage scheme.” Disston and the fund’s trustees

eventually reached an amicable compromise, which let him

keep the land he had already received, and seek more once

he spent an additional $200,000 on drainage.

Disston ultimately dug more than eighty miles of canals,

and received 1.6 million acres from the fund. The trustees

credited him with “the reclamation of vast areas of rich land

and the general improvement of the drainage of the entire

country,” which does not sound like failure at all. But his

investments were buffeted by the nationwide financial panic

of 1893, the cancellation of the sugar tariff in 1894, and a

pair of freezes that devastated the peninsula’s groves and

farms in 1895. He mortgaged his Florida holdings for $2

million, but he never did dig canals south and east of the

lake, so he never did drain the Everglades.

THE STORY USUALLY ENDS like this: Ruined by the panic and

his futile Florida adventures, as creditors prepared to

foreclose on his mortgage, Disston blew his brains out in his

bathtub in 1896. It’s a dramatic story, but there’s little

evidence to support it.

The panic did force Disston to cut wages at the saw

works, but he later rescinded the cuts, announcing that

business was recovering beautifully. He did have some

setbacks in Florida, but his partners shared in his financial

reverses, and their creditors did not foreclose on his

mortgage until four years after his death. Disston’s estate

was valued at $100,000, the equivalent of more than $2

million today, and he carried more than $1 million in life

insurance, the nation’s second-richest policy. All but one of

Disston’s obituaries reported that he died of heart disease in

bed. So did the coroner’s report, and there is no reason to

doubt it. Disston exhibited no signs of depression the night

he died, attending the theater with his wife, dining with the

mayor of Philadelphia. He did complain of fatigue, which had

never been a problem in the past.

Buckingham Smith had predicted that the first man to

reclaim the Everglades would “be a hero to posterity.” It

never happened for Disston. The Everglades was still as wet

as a waterfall when he died at fifty-one. His family had no

interest in pursuing his drainage dream, so it died with him,

and his Florida empire crumbled. Some of his land was sold

at auction for a pittance. Some eventually ended up in the

hands of his distant relatives in the D’Isney family—or, as

they were known in America, the Disneys.

But Disston was not a hapless loser chasing a hopeless

fantasy. He saved Florida from financial limbo, launching the

development of the state. And he began the transformation

of the Everglades ecosystem, reclaiming the upper

Kissimmee valley. By the time of Disston’s death, the area’s

sawgrass was overrun with prairie grass, its desiccated

sloughs were littered with the decayed roots of dead aquatic

plants, and its once submerged wetlands were invaded by

dry-land red bugs. “These are nature’s silent witnesses of a

change that has been wrought in the status of the country,

showing a new order of things unknown in ages past,” wrote

state engineer Duval.

This new order was Disston’s greatest success. And his

failures only reinforced the lesson of the Seminole Wars: The

Everglades was a formidable enemy.

Seven

The Father of South Florida

Think of pouring all that money out on a whim! But

then Henry was always bold.

—Standard Oil president John D. Rockefeller Sr.

“OH, LORD! OH, GOD!” South Florida Railroad president

James Ingraham wanted to sleep, but he couldn’t stop

moaning in agony. His feet were blistered raw. His legs were

jelly. And it was only the third night of his trek across the

Everglades. He still had three weeks to go.

It was the spring of 1892, and the owner of Ingraham’s

railroad, Henry Plant, had asked him to survey a line from

Fort Myers on the Gulf coast to the fledgling community of

Miami on the Atlantic coast. The twenty-one men on his

team were probably the first whites to cross the Everglades

from west to east since the Seminole Wars, and they were

learning all too well why even grizzled pioneers had avoided

its thigh-deep muck and head-high sawgrass. “Locomotion

is extremely difficult and slow,” the expedition’s log noted.

“The bog is fearful and it sometimes seems as though it

would be easier to stay in it than to go on.”

The surveyors expected to travel five miles a day, but

they averaged less than three, and frequently got lost in

twisted streams and morasses. They ate through all their

food except hominy, which had to be rationed by the

spoonful. Two men got so exhausted they had to be carried

in their canoe, and Ingraham canceled the survey to focus

on reaching Miami without any loss of life. “I was so tired I

had lost interest in everything,” the expedition’s compass

man recalled. “I thought that we were great idiots to come

into such a place when we had no wings with which to fly

out.”

Ingraham decided his sore feet were telling him

something: The Everglades was no place to run a railroad.

The idea seemed even sillier once the men arrived in Miami,

which consisted of two properties on the Miami River: the

widow Julia Tuttle’s on the north bank and the storekeeper

William Brickell’s on the south. Ingraham admired Miami’s

setting on the coastal ridge, overlooking the turquoise

waters of Biscayne Bay, and he believed its Everglades

backcountry could be drained and reclaimed into “a great

tract of land of almost unprecedented fertility.” But who

would extend a railroad to a settlement without settlers?

And who would settle in a settlement without railroads?

This was the catch-22 that had kept south Florida so

empty for so long. But it was about to be solved by Plant’s

rival, Henry Flagler, the Standard Oil baron who had

launched a new career as a resort and railroad builder along

Florida’s east coast. Flagler believed that if he laid tracks

and built settlements, people would come. And he was

wealthy enough to lay tracks and build settlements

wherever he wanted.

Soon Ingraham would be working for Flagler instead.

The Making of a Mogul

HENRY MORRISON FLAGLER was born poor in 1830, the son

of an itinerant minister in upstate New York. Henry had to

take summer jobs as a farmhand and a stable boy, and

while he embraced his father’s Presbyterianism, he hated

his father’s poverty. So he dropped out of school at fourteen

and set out for Republic, Ohio, paying his passage on an

Erie Canal steamer by working as a deckhand. He had only

six coins in his pocket when he arrived, and kept one of

them all his life as a memento of his humble origins. It made

sense that his childhood talisman was money; six decades

later, as one of the richest men on earth, Flagler would still

struggle to remove an unused stamp from an envelope. “If I

can get this stamp the rest of the way off, we shall save two

cents,” he told a secretary.

In Ohio, Henry began working as a store clerk for $5 a

month, sleeping in an unheated room in the back of the

shop, using wrapping paper as a blanket on frigid nights. He

routinely declined invitations from friends so that he could

work overtime, and he fastidiously put away a few cents

from every paycheck. He eventually became a partner in his

boss’s grain business, and married his boss’s daughter,

Mary Harkness. And even though Flagler was a strict

teetotaler who taught Sunday school and abhorred the use

of liquor, he took an interest in Mary’s family’s whiskey

distillery as well. “I had scruples about the business and

gave it up,” he recalled, “but not before I made $50,000.”

He was a man of strict compulsions, insisting on punctuality

at meals, keeping a meticulous diary of his expenditures,

signing his love letters “H. M. Flagler.” He looked like a bit of

a dandy—tall and slender, with a high forehead, a luxuriant

mustache, and a taste for top hats—but he worked like a

man obsessed.

Flagler got his start as an entrepreneur during the Civil

War, investing in a salt-making venture in Saginaw,

Michigan. It flourished during the wartime salt boom, but

the industry was soon glutted by competition. Flagler went

broke, and had to borrow from Mary’s family to pay his

workers. A failure at thirty-five, he returned to Ohio in

shame. As his frustrations mounted—he invented a

horseshoe, but couldn’t find a manufacturer—he told a

friend that if he could ever pay his debts and get $10,000

ahead, he would retire from business forever. He went back

to buying and selling grain, skipping lunch to save money,

dreaming of the day he could again afford a comfortable

overcoat. “I trained myself in the school of self-control and

self-denial,” he later recalled.

Flagler soon worked off his debts and relocated to

Cleveland, where he rented office space from a business

acquaintance, a former grain broker named John Rockefeller.

Flagler then persuaded Mary’s cousin to invest in

Rockefeller’s new oil firm, and Rockefeller agreed to make

Flagler a partner as part of the deal. Flagler never had to

worry about overcoats again.

FLAGLER AND ROCKEFELLER became almost inseparable,

walking to work together every morning, then home for

lunch, back to work, and home again at night, constantly

discussing their moneymaking plans. In the office, they

passed letters back and forth until they agreed on every

word. Flagler liked to say that a friendship founded on

business was better than a business founded on friendship,

and theirs was one of the most successful in capitalist

history. Rockefeller once remarked that in thirty-five years

working together, they never exchanged an unkind word.

They were not so kind to their competitors. Flagler kept a

quotation on his desk that summarized the Standard Oil

philosophy: “Do unto others as they would do unto you—and

do it first.” They began with a single refinery; a decade

later, they controlled the U.S. oil industry. The Standard

“octopus” became the ultimate symbol of corporate

monopoly in the Gilded Age, extending its tentacles across

the country.

Rockefeller was the top man, but Flagler was his

indispensable right hand, creative about the big picture and

obsessive about details. Despite his limited schooling,

Flagler ran numbers better than most accountants, and

knew contract law better than most contract lawyers. It was

Flagler—who had learned the risks of unbridled competition

in salt—who recognized that cooperation would be the key

to oil, and he masterminded the notorious railroad rebates

that helped Standard crush its competition by shipping large

volumes on the cheap. Flagler also oversaw the company’s

brutal negotiations with refiners, threatening them with ruin

if they refused to merge into the Standard fold. “If you think

the perspiration don’t roll off freely enough, pile the

blankets on him,” he once instructed an underling. And

while Rockefeller became the symbol of Standard’s might,

incorporating the business was his partner’s idea. “No, sir, I

wish I’d had the brains to think of it,” Rockefeller told an

interviewer. “It was Henry M. Flagler.”

If Flagler had a weakness, Rockefeller remarked

privately, it was that he could be too aggressive: “He was a

man of great force and determination, though perhaps he

needed a restraining influence at times when his

enthusiasm was roused.”

“Now I Am Pleasing Myself”

IN THE 1880s, FLAGLER LOST his enthusiasm for the oil

business, and scaled back his role with Standard. He did not

share Rockefeller’s goal of becoming the richest man on

earth. And he had no patience for the muckraking

journalists who made Standard a national pariah, or the

politicians who hauled its executives before investigative

committees. During one hearing, a Senate lawyer advised

Flagler to stop evading questions. “It suits me to go

elsewhere for advice, particularly as I am not paying you for

it,” Flagler shot back. The lawyer got the last word: “I am

not paying you to rob the community. I am trying to expose

your robbery!” Flagler grew weary of such abuse.

His private life also entered a new phase. Mary was an

invalid, and Flagler spent all but two nights of their marriage

by her side. But she died in 1881, and Flagler soon married

her young nurse, Ida Alice Shourds, a former actress with

flaming red hair and a temper to match. She started

dragging Flagler to high-society parties and spending so

much of his money on lowcut dresses and garish jewelry

that he had to liquidate some of his Standard Oil stock. She

wasn’t educated, cultured, or mentally stable, but Flagler

was smitten.

After their honeymoon in St. Augustine, Flagler became

equally smitten with Florida, and began pouring his money

and energy into his vision of its future. He discovered that

building fancy hotels and creating new communities was a

lot more fun than browbeating oil refiners, and he began to

shelve some of the Presbyterian thrift that had guided his

work for Rockefeller. He once compared himself to the

apocryphal drunken church elder who declared that he had

previously given all his days to the Lord, and was now taking

one for himself.

Flagler considered his Florida projects part hobby, part

philanthropy. Like Disston, he loved the idea of making an

indelible mark on a virgin wilderness, and transforming a

worthless wasteland into a vibrant civilization. He wanted to

step out of Rockefeller’s shadow, and develop a wild

territory that Spaniards, Frenchmen, and Englishmen had

been unable to tame. “I can make more money [in New

York] in a month than I can in St. Augustine in a lifetime,” he

wrote. “The improvement of the place has been, and will be,

to me a source of great gratification.” He gave the city a

hospital, a jail, a school for blacks, a city hall, and a grand

Presbyterian church. Flagler also built Methodist, Catholic,

and Baptist churches, although not quite so grand. His

friends called his Florida investments The Hole, but he

hadn’t entirely forgotten the value of a dollar. “I see that

you are wheeling the muck into the church lot,” he

chastised a contractor working on the Methodist church.

“Country sand is good enough for them.”

Flagler’s work in Florida was part business, too, and

Flagler was still a hands-on, hard-nosed businessman. If he

was going to build hotels, he was going to micromanage the

details down to the height of the floor joists, the shape of

the fire escapes, and the designer of the stained-glass

windows. (He chose a then-obscure artist named Louis

Tiffany.) If he was going to run a railroad, he was going to

centralize authority until he owned 9,996 of its 10,000

shares of stock. Flagler was still the kind of boss who

noticed the costly blend of cement his contractors were

using at the Ponce de Leon.

But the bottom line was no longer his main

consideration, and he approved the cement: “I comfort

myself with the reflection that 100 years hence it will be all

the same to me, and the building better because of my

extravagance.” When an economy-minded hotel manager

suggested that Flagler should fire an overpaid French chef

and a top-flight orchestra, Flagler wired back: “Hire another

cook and two more of the best orchestras.” In Florida,

Flagler wanted to create, not just accumulate. “Permanence

appeals to him more strongly than to any other man I ever

met,” one of his engineers observed. His enthusiasm was

roused, and he no longer had Rockefeller to restrain him. In

fact, Rockefeller was so appalled by Flagler’s gauche new

wife and his ritzy new lifestyle that he never visited his old

friend in Florida, even though he built a mansion near

Flagler’s railroad in Ormond Beach.

AS HE BEGAN to transform the Sunshine State, Flagler’s

personal life fell apart. One of his daughters had died as a

toddler; now his other daughter died at thirty-three. He

became estranged from his only son, a Princeton dropout

who resented Flagler’s efforts to spark his interest in

business. Meanwhile, Ida Alice descended into madness,

communing with ghosts through her Ouija board, bragging

about her imaginary romance with the czar of Russia,

threatening to kill Flagler over his extramarital affairs. And

while Ida Alice was delusional, she was right about her

husband’s cheating. Flagler gave one mistress $400,000

and a Manhattan town house. He then took up with socialite

Mary Lily Kenan, thirty-seven years his junior. He also

became depressed, which only disgusted him. “Not a day

passes but that I call myself to account for what I fear my

friends may think is unmanly weakness,” Flagler wrote to a

friend. “I realize that mine is no exceptional case, but it is no

use…. This is something immeasurably harder to bear than

death.”

Flagler tried to push aside his pain by focusing on Florida,

gradually expanding his financial and emotional investment

in the state. At first, he had limited his interests to St.

Augustine and Jacksonville. Then he had intended to stop at

Daytona Beach. He had already spent ten times more than

he had planned, and south Florida was still a blank space on

the map. Flagler figured he would concentrate on north

Florida. But after several chilly winters, Flagler realized that

north Florida’s supposedly frost-free climate was not much

warmer than the rest of the temperate South. When he took

a trip to the real subtropics 200 miles south of Daytona, he

became enthralled by a white-sand barrier island called

Palm Beach: “I have found a veritable Paradise!” Flagler also

noticed a tangle of scrublands on the mainland, directly

across Lake Worth from his new enchanted isle, and West

Palm Beach began taking shape in his mind’s eye: “In a few

years, there will be a town over there as big as

Jacksonville.”

He could see it already. Palm Beach would be his new

American Riviera. West Palm would be a bustling

commercial hub. Americans would come to the area to play,

and move to the area to stay.

“The Wizardry of the Dollar”

FLAGLER WAS NOW a silver-haired man in his sixties, more

dignified than dashing, more driven than ever. He snapped

up huge tracts of land on both sides of Lake Worth. He also

secured a charter from the legislature promising 8,000 acres

for every mile of track he laid south of Daytona, more than

twice the amount specified by the internal improvement law.

His steel ribbon soon unspooled down the Atlantic coast, to

New Smyrna, then Eau Gallie, then Fort Pierce in January

1894. At the height of the nationwide financial panic, Flagler

had 1,500 men working on the line.

That February, another 1,000 laborers completed

Flagler’s most extravagant resort yet, the colonial-style

Royal Poinciana on Palm Beach, with twice as many rooms

as the Ponce de Leon. It was not only the world’s largest

hotel but the world’s largest wooden structure, requiring

2,400 gallons of paint, most of it in a lemony color known as

Flagler Yellow. Flagler’s men filled in wetlands along the

coast, and landscaped the resort with Australian pines, fast-

growing shade trees that controlled the native scrub by

blocking its sunlight. In April, the railroad reached West Palm

Beach, and land values in the area skyrocketed. “Yesterday

a swamp was here,” one visitor marveled. “Today you see

the wizardry of the dollar.”

The Royal Poinciana soon became the Gay Nineties

winter hub for the Social Register’s exclusive “Four

Hundred,” attracting Vanderbilts, Carnegies, Morgans,

Astors, Fricks, and the rest of America’s industrial royalty.

The guests enjoyed golf, fishing, yachting, and sunbathing—

Flagler employed beach censors to make sure women

covered their legs—along with haute cuisine, orchestras,

and vaudeville. The guests were served by 1,400 staffers so

attentive the resort was known as the Royal Pounce-on-

them. Black employees whisked them around in bicycle-

powered carriages known as Afromobiles, and entertained

them with “cakewalks,” minstrel-style dance competitions

whose winners got to “take the cake.” Suites cost $100 a

night, about three months’ wages for a typical laborer.

Flagler soon added the Breakers, another swank resort

that still operates on the ocean side of Palm Beach. And he

commissioned the architects who designed the New York

Public Library to build him a $2.5 million Beaux Arts

mansion called Whitehall, a fifty-five-room white marble

palace stuffed with Spanish tapestries, Renaissance art, the

largest pipe organ ever installed in a private home, and

period furniture from sixteen epochs in history. The New

York Herald described Whitehall (which now houses the

Flagler Museum) as North America’s Taj Mahal, “more

wonderful than any palace in Europe, grander and more

magnificent than any other private dwelling in the world.”

West Palm Beach flourished, too, attracting 1,000

residents in its first year, most of them Flagler employees.

Flagler again built the city’s churches and civic buildings,

paved its streets, and donated land for its cemetery. His

aide James Ingraham laid out the town site, and set up a

volunteer fire department called the Flagler Alerts. “I feel

that these people are wards of mine and have a special

claim upon me,” Flagler wrote.

FLAGLER THOUGHT HE HAD REACHED the end of his line.

But Mother Nature changed his mind that winter, after

Florida endured two of its worst freezes in a century, the

double whammy that helped doom Hamilton Disston’s

ventures. In late December, temperatures dipped to

fourteen degrees in Jacksonville and thirty as far south as

West Palm; in February, snow fell in Fort Myers. Florida’s

yearly citrus production dropped from more than 5.5 million

boxes to 150,000. Flagler dispatched Ingraham to assess

the damage, and to hand out seeds and cash to growers

willing to give Florida another chance.

Ingraham made his most interesting damage assessment

in Miami, sixty-five miles south of West Palm Beach: no

damage. Even before the cold snaps, the widow Julia Tuttle

had been pestering Flagler to extend his railroad to Miami.

“It is the dream of my life,” she once wrote, “to see this

wilderness turned into a prosperous country.” Flagler had

demurred, seeing no need for another railroad to nowhere.

But now Ingraham returned from a meeting with the ever-

persistent Tuttle with unscathed orange blossoms, proof that

Miami was below the frost line. Flagler sat silently for a

minute, then asked: “How soon can you arrange for me to

go to Miami?” Tuttle, her neighbor William Brickell, and local

real estate speculators offered Flagler tens of thousands of

acres of additional land to bring his iron horse south, and

the railway soon chugged down to Fort Lauderdale on the

New River, then on to Miami.

Once again, its arrival sparked a mini-boom. Five

hundred voters incorporated Miami in 1896; they wanted to

call it Flagler, but he declined the honor. The city was still

Flagler-dominated; he provided the electric plant, the water

works, and the sewage system, as well as churches and

public buildings. He built the Royal Palm Hotel with south

Florida’s first golf course on an old Indian mound along the

Miami River. He set up a steamboat terminal with service to

Cuba and the Bahamas and began dredging Biscayne Bay

for a deep-water port; he had one of his Standard Oil

lobbyists secure $300,000 in federal aid. Flagler even

donated land for a U.S. Weather Bureau station, hoping to

advertise Miami’s climate to the nation.

Thousands of soldiers billeted in Miami during the

Spanish-American War, and many of their reactions were

reminiscent of Seminole War diarists. “If I owned both Miami

and Hell, I’d rent out Miami and live in Hell,” one

complained. But others decided to stay after the war, and

the city’s population increased tenfold in five years. Miami

became the Dade County seat, and Flagler offered his rival

Henry Plant teasing instructions on how to get there: Go to

Jacksonville and follow the crowd.

FLAGLER PUT INGRAHAM in charge of his real estate

operations, ordering him to focus on maximum growth and

immigration instead of maximum profit. Flagler was losing

several hundred thousands of dollars a year in Florida, but

he took the long view. He calculated that every permanent

resident would be worth $300 to his railroad alone, ensuring

a steady cash flow after the winter tourists went home:

“What we want for some little time to come is more settlers,

more cultivation and more freights.”

Ingraham sent land agents around the world to promote

America’s winter breadbasket, and sponsored a “Florida on

Wheels” railroad car to remind shivering midwesterners

what they were missing. He also published the Florida East

Coast Homeseeker, trumpeting the potential of south Florida

agriculture. “Most Productive Soil in Existence,” read one

typical ad. “Cool Summers, Mild Winters, Pure Water,

Perfectly Healthy, No Swamps, Few Insects.”

Soon, settlers were launching farming communities all

the way down the Atlantic ridge, the so-called “Gold Coast.”

Below West Palm Beach, Michigan transplants founded

Boynton Beach and Delray Beach. A Flagler engineer laid

out Boca Raton; southern farmers founded Deerfield Beach

and Pompano Beach. The Miami Metropolis was impressed

by the Japanese immigrants who started a now-defunct farm

colony called Yamato, praising “these interesting little

people” as industrious tomato and pineapple growers.

Danes started Dania, and Ingraham’s brother-in-law, Luther

Halland, led a group of Swedes to Hallandale. Just north of

Miami, Ojus was named for the Seminole word for “plenty,”

and Flagler helped Henry Perrine’s heirs to develop the town

of Perrine. He eventually extended his line all the way down

to the last dry land at the edge of the Keys, which became

Homestead. Dade County’s property value increased

eightfold in the 1890s, and south Florida was just getting

started.

Years later, a reporter for Everybody’s Magazine asked

Flagler if he had really known that settlers would follow his

iron into the subtropics. “Did you close your eyes and see

the men in the field working?” the reporter asked. “Did you

really vision the thing as clearly as that?”

In a matter-of-fact tone, Flagler replied: “Yes.”

The interviewer wanted to make sure he wasn’t planting

ideas in an old man’s head. “Please understand me,” he

said. “Don’t let me suggest it to you. Did you actually vision

to yourself the whole thing? Did you really close your eyes

and see the tracks? And the trains running? And hear the

whistles blowing? Did you go as far as that?”

“Yes.”

“How clearly?”

“Very clearly.”

FLAGLER TREATED the Gold Coast’s new residents with an

unfailing sense of noblesse oblige, spending millions of

dollars to promote their welfare. But there was never any

doubt who was the noble and who were the serfs. When

Flagler invited President William McKinley to Florida in 1898,

he sounded like a medieval baron inviting the king to tour

his fiefdom. “My domain begins in Jacksonville,” Flagler

wrote. Even “if the East Coast of Florida belonged to anyone

else,” he told the president, “I should venture to say that it

possesses very great attractions.”

The east coast of Florida really was Flagler’s domain. He

controlled its transportation and most of its land; he also

controlled a host of its newspapers, from Jacksonville’s

Florida Times-Union to the Miami Metropolis. Behind the

scenes, he also controlled its politics. In West Palm, for

example, Flagler personally blocked proposals for a road, a

wharf, and a fish house along Lake Worth, and demanded

that the local council shut down a brothel.

Flagler’s power throughout the state was most

notoriously on display after Ida Alice was banished to a

sanatorium. Flagler threw his money and influence around

Tallahassee to ram House Bill 135 through the state

legislature, making “incurable insanity” a legal grounds for

divorce. He remarried a few days after the bill passed, and

gave Whitehall to Mary Lily as a wedding gift. The so-called

Flagler divorce law was one of the most reviled legislative

acts in Florida history, widely denounced as a sellout to the

state’s richest resident. But Flagler felt entitled to a bit of

consideration. He had visualized an American Eden, and he

had carved it out of the wilderness with his own money. He

thought it only fair that he should be able to choose his own

wife in his own domain.

“It Would Be a Glorious Undertaking”

FLAGLER’S DOMAIN TRANSFORMED the eastern rim of the

Everglades, as railroad men and settlers began cutting and

burning the pine forests and hardwood hammocks that grew

along the coastal ridge. The fire-resistant pinelands—ideal

habitat for red-cockaded woodpeckers and five-lined skinks

with electric-blue tails—were converted into turpentine and

termiteresistant homes. The hardwood hammocks—shelters

for swallowtail butterflies and multicolored tree snails—were

“being rapidly destroyed and will soon be a thing of the

past,” wrote the pioneer naturalist Charles Torrey Simpson.

“The charred ruin glares in the sun as a silent and pathetic

protest against useless waste and folly.”

But while Flagler’s domain stretched 350 miles down the

peninsula, it was only a couple of miles wide in south

Florida. It was devouring the pines, palms, gumbo-limbos,

ironwoods, poisonwoods, and mahoganies that had

flourished in the higher and drier coastal ridge, but it had

yet to penetrate the low-lying wetlands of the Everglades.

“There was a most magnificent and gorgeously appointed

hotel right in the midst of a perfect paradise of tropical trees

and bushes,” one soldier recalled after his stay in Miami.

“But one had to walk scarce a quarter of a mile until one

came to such a waste wilderness as can be conceived of

only in rare nightmares.”

This “waste wilderness” was still so obscure that in 1897,

Flagler’s friend Hugh Willoughby, a former naval officer,

embarked on a Lewis-and-Clark-style journey of discovery

across the Everglades in a dugout canoe. “It may seem

strange, in our days of Arctic and African exploration, for the

general public to learn that in our very midst, as it were, in

one of our Atlantic coast states, we have a tract of land 130

miles long and 70 miles wide that is as much unknown to

the white man as the heart of Africa,” he wrote. After

Disston’s troubles, many Floridians doubted the swamp

nightmare would ever end.

“Some men believe the Everglades should be drained,”

one paper scoffed, “while others urge the annexation of the

moon.”

JAMES INGRAHAM WAS ONE of the believers. He had seen

and felt the Everglades with his own eyes and feet, and he

remained convinced its waters could be removed by

opening vents through its limestone rim, and that its

mucklands could become farms of “almost unprecedented

fertility.” He also thought it made perfect sense for his boss

to take on the job. Draining the Everglades could draw new

settlers to Flagler’s domain, to ship crops on Flagler’s trains.

Drainage could also expand the domain from a thin strip

along the coast to a huge swath of the peninsula. The

drainage booster William Bloxham was back in the

governor’s office, and was again offering Everglades lands

as a reward for Everglades reclamation. Flagler had the cash

to succeed where Disston had failed.

Ingraham also suspected that Flagler would embrace the

challenge of draining the Everglades, the opportunity to

achieve something important that others considered

impossible. Ingraham still recalled the stirring words of a

companion on his own slog through the swamp, an engineer

named John Newman:

With the money spent on hotels in St. Augustine to gratify

the luxurious tastes of our millionaires, I believe this land

could be drained, and the promoter of such a scheme would

have the right to be considered the greatest philanthropist

of his age. It would be a glorious undertaking, for charity

could ask no nobler enterprise, ambition no higher glory and

capital no greater increase than would result from the

redemption of this land.

Except for the swipe about St. Augustine hotels, that was

just the kind of outsized pitch that appealed to Flagler. Sure

enough, the New York Times soon reported that as his

railroad was snaking down the coast, Flagler was

investigating a “land development scheme of monumental

proportion” in the interior. The Times noted that “very few

people believe that the Everglades will ever be other than

the rich game land and unhealthy swamps that they now

combine to make.” But Flagler reportedly believed those

swamps could be “transformed into a Garden of Eden,” and

a sugar bowl for the nation.

In 1898, Ingraham and Rufus Rose, Disston’s former

drainage superintendent, launched the Florida East Coast

Drainage and Sugar Company. Flagler’s name did not

appear in its corporate papers, but its drainage plan was

clearly tailored to his interests.

DISSTON HAD DRAINED the upper Kissimmee basin with

local canals, but his grand plan to cut off the Everglades at

its source by eliminating overflows from Lake Okeechobee

had fizzled. For Flagler, Captain Rose designed a purely local

plan that ignored Lake Okeechobee. Instead, he proposed to

drain the easternmost Everglades wetlands near Flagler’s

developments by digging a dozen short canals through the

coastal ridge. As Buckingham Smith’s report had said,

Providence had already begun the job; Rose simply

proposed to expand natural Everglades outlets to the

Atlantic, “transverse glades” like the Miami, New, and

Hillsboro Rivers and Snake, Cypress, and Snapper Creeks.

He then planned to wall off the drained tracts from the rest

of the Everglades with dikes. About 800,000 acres of

seasonally flooded wetlands at the edges of the Everglades

would be sucked dry and added to Flagler’s domain as sugar

plantations, but the permanently flooded sloughs and

marshes in the heart of the Everglades would remain as wet

as ever.

The company signed a lucrative contract with the

Internal Improvement board, and proclaimed that drainage

would be “a simple process” in its prospectus: “Where

drained by natural means and where reclaimed by artificial

means, these soils have produced phenomenally heavy

crops.” Governor Bloxham proclaimed that the deal would

produce hefty profits for investors, rapid growth for south

Florida, and “incalculable benefits” to the state, while

freeing the nation from its dependence on foreign sugar.

The engineering seemed easy, and money clearly wouldn’t

be a problem. “It may be taken as assured fact that this

section of the Everglades will be drained,” one paper said.

By expanding the transverse glades and helping them flow

out to sea, the company would simply accelerate nature’s

work: “As the bottom of this basin is above tide water,

drainage is rendered a certain and simple process.”

The politics of drainage, however, was increasingly

uncertain and complex.

“I Haven’t the Money or the Inclination”

IN THE LATE NINETEENTH and early twentieth centuries, the

progressive movement emerged to try to rein in corporate

America. The United States was now the richest country on

earth, producing half the world’s oil and one-third of its iron

and steel. Its citizens were consuming Campbell soup,

Borden cheese, Post Grape-Nuts, and Hershey chocolate,

while enjoying lightbulbs, telephones, automobiles, and

airplanes. It was the dawn of the American century, a time

of puffed-up national pride and confidence. But there was a

growing feeling that average Americans were not sharing in

the progress, that business interests controlled the

government, and that the balance of power ought to be

reversed.

Progressivism was a gospel of science and reason;

progressives believed the same pragmatic thinking that was

solving great technological and engineering problems could

be applied to social problems. Muckraking journalists and

social reformers exposed the abuses of obscenely wealthy

robber barons and their anticompetitive trusts, as well as

the victimization of ordinary Americans who lived in slums,

labored in sweatshops, and ate rotten meat. The public

began to clamor for action to rein in the abuses—railroad

regulations, meat inspections, worker protections, and

prosecutions of monopolies like Standard Oil. The “Great

Commoner,” the Democratic presidential candidate William

Jennings Bryan, captivated audiences with his attacks on

corporate greed. But President Theodore Roosevelt, who

disdained left-wing agitators as much as “malefactors of

great wealth,” came to embody the spirit of the Progressive

Era—not just his trust-busting, but his insistence on

energetic government action in general, his rejection of the

Republican dogma that elites should be left alone to

manage the economy and the country. “I have no command

of the English language that enables me to express my

feelings regarding Mr. Roosevelt,” the usually even-keeled

Flagler seethed to a friend. “He is shit.”

The progressive spirit spread slowly in Florida, but it did

spread, and the Standard Oil magnate turned railroad

kingpin inevitably became its prime target. Reformers such

as Napoleon Bonaparte Broward—the riverboat captain who

was now sheriff in the Jacksonville area—accused Flagler

and his ilk of gouging farmers and consumers by

manipulating freight rates. The legislature approved a

railroad commission by such an overwhelming margin that

even the corporate-friendly Governor Bloxham had to

approve it, and the commission promptly lowered shipping

rates on cabbages and oranges.

In 1900, Bloxham was replaced by an antirailroad,

anticorporation progressive named William Sherman

Jennings, an Illinois native who happened to be the Great

Commoner’s cousin. Governor Jennings pushed for an array

of progressive reforms, including a pure food and drug law,

free textbooks, and a ban on cruelty to children. He also

decided to stop Florida’s lavish land giveaways to railroads

and other corporations.

BY THE TURN OF THE CENTURY, the Internal Improvement

Fund that Disston had bailed out in 1881 was in shambles

again, its records so chaotic that Jennings had to launch an

investigation to figure out whether it owned any land. He

found that Florida had given away about 17 million of the 20

million acres of swamp and overflowed lands it had received

from the federal government. That left about three million

acres of the Everglades in state possession. But the fund

had already pledged an additional six million acres to

corporations, so it was oversubscribed by about three

million. And the Everglades was still drenched.

Jennings decided to shut down the candy store. He

declared that state lands belonged to the people, not to

railroads that rarely bothered to improve them. He refused

to grant a single acre to any corporation during his term,

contending that the giveaways violated the spirit of the

federal Swamplands Act of 1850, which was specifically

intended to promote reclamation. When Flagler’s railroad

tried to claim 156,000 acres near Cape Sable—a tract it had

been promised by the Bloxham administration—Jennings

declared that the promise was not worth the paper it was

written on. His message to corporations was simple: If you

want state lands, buy them. They responded by filing

lawsuits seeking the grants the state had promised.

Flagler’s railroad claimed more than two million acres.

In this climate, there was not much incentive for Flagler

to try to drain the Everglades, not when he wouldn’t even

get to keep the land he drained. He also worried that an

influx of reclaimed lands could glut south Florida’s real

estate market, reducing the price of his own lands. He did

spend more than $100,000 on private drainage canals that

reclaimed several thousand acres at the edge of the

Everglades, but he never gave Ingraham and Rose the

funding they needed to execute their comprehensive plan.

Soon Jennings and his fellow trustees canceled their

dredging contract for nonperformance. The governor had

just traveled to California, and had seen how massive

irrigation projects were reclaiming the deserts of the West.

“Never before had I appreciated the full value of water,” he

recalled. “As the train went on, mile after mile, day after day

through waterless plains, my eyes were opened to the

possibilities of the Everglades.” Jennings figured it would be

much easier to move water off wetlands than it was to move

water onto drylands, and he was tired of waiting for the

private sector to take up the challenge.

If any businessman could have finished what Disston

started, it was Flagler. He would eventually spend $50

million in Florida, and it would barely dent his bottom line.

But he clearly developed a bad feeling about the

Everglades. At one point, he suggested to Ingraham that a

wise investor wouldn’t touch the swamp with a ten-foot

pole.

“So far as I am personally concerned,” Flagler wrote, “I

haven’t the money or the inclination to take up as big a

matter as the drainage of the Everglades.”

THAT WAS AN INTERESTING WAY to put it, because there

were few Americans with more money or more inclination

for big matters than Henry Flagler. In fact, as he entered his

eighth decade, Flagler was about to take up his biggest

matter: extending his railroad all the way from Homestead

to Key West. Flagler believed that America’s coral-rock

Gibraltar could become a megaport, the nation’s access

point for a newly liberated Cuba and the soon-to-be-built

Panama Canal. Unfortunately, it was isolated from Flagler’s

new Florida civilization by more than 150 miles of swamp

and ocean. Building a railroad there wouldn’t be quite as

difficult as the annexation of the moon, but it would cost

Flagler at least $27 million—the equivalent of more than

half a billion dollars in 2005—and would force him to borrow

money for the first time since his salt-making fiasco. It

would also be hailed as the engineering achievement of his

era.

At the time, though, it was ridiculed as Flagler’s Folly.

One of Flagler’s closest friends gasped: “You need a

guardian!” There were only two conceivable ways to lay

track to Key West: by slashing through the muck of the

Everglades to Cape Sable and then across the muddy

shallows of Florida Bay, or by island-hopping through the

ocean along the arc of the Keys. The railroad’s brochures

gave a sense of the challenge: “The financiers considered

the project and said: Unthinkable. The railway managers

studied it and said: Impracticable. The engineers pondered

the problems it presented and from all came the one

verdict: Impossible.” But once the vision popped into

Flagler’s head, he could not let it go.

Flagler’s railroad was already hemorrhaging cash, and his

hotels were barely breaking even. But for a man who

couldn’t bring himself to throw away a 2-cent stamp, this

mission had little to do with money. “It was very strange, at

first, for me to work for Mr. Flagler,” one of his engineers

told Everybody’s Magazine. “With him it is never a case of

How much will it cost? nor of Will it pay?” Flagler just

wanted to make sure his Eighth Wonder of the World was

completed before he died.

THE ONLY QUESTION was whether Flagler’s railroad would

go through the ocean or the Everglades. Flagler’s Model

Land Company already had holdings in Cape Sable, and

laying iron there seemed marginally less insane than cutting

across the sea. The residents of the frontier outpost of

Flamingo began to fantasize about their tiny fishing village

becoming the next Chicago, or at least the next West Palm

Beach.

In 1902, a decade after Ingraham’s trek, Flagler

dispatched an engineer named William Krome to lead a new

railroad survey of the Everglades. Krome and his crew spent

six months in the marsh, lugging forty-pound packs,

wrapping themselves in cheesecloth to ward off clouds of

mosquitoes as thick as pudding. “I found a most God-

forsaken region,” Krome reported. “Of keys, bays, rivers and

lagoons there is no end, and it is going to take us much

longer to get a survey than I had expected.”

After his half year of hell, Krome concluded that

Ingraham had been right the first time: The Everglades was

no place for a railroad. Flagler would have to connect the

dots of the Keys, building concrete bridges as long as seven

miles across the open sea—unthinkable, impractical,

impossible, but easier than slashing through the Everglades.

Krome also agreed with Ingraham that the Everglades

could be redeemed. “The muck with proper drainage will

eventually become fine farming land, and the mosquitoes

will disappear to a great extent as the country opens up,”

he wrote. But Flagler had no interest in opening it up

himself. He had created a civilization at the edge of the

Everglades, but it would be up to his progressive enemies to

extend it into the Everglades.

Eight

Protect the Birds

Florida has been considered in all respects

as a prey and a spoil to all comers.

—Florida transplant Harriet Beecher Stowe

DISSTON’S DITCHES TRANSFORMED the headwaters of the

Everglades in the upper Kissimmee basin. Flagler’s railroad

transformed the eastern rim of the Everglades along the

Atlantic Coastal Ridge. But at the turn of the century, the

Everglades itself was still essentially the Everglades. Disston

and Flagler had begun to attract people to south Florida, but

the region was still emptier than it had been during the days

of the Calusa.

The Calusa, however, never had rifles. South Florida’s

newcomers shot deer, bear, gators, turkeys, bobcats—and

especially skinny-legged Everglades wading birds. They shot

wading birds until there were hardly any left to shoot, and

an Everglades without wading birds would not have been an

Everglades at all.

In the Progressive Era, bird massacres in the Everglades

became a national scandal, inspiring one of America’s first

conservation crusades, illustrating the potential power of

environmental advocacy. Conservation became a national

priority. But “conservation” did not always mean then what

it means now.

“We Could Scarcely Believe Our Eyes”

WADING BIRDS ARE extraordinarily demanding creatures. A

pair of seven-pound wood storks, for example, needs to

catch about 440 pounds worth of minnow-sized fish every

breeding season. And wood storks are grope-feeders, blindly

probing for their prey by swishing their long, slightly hooked

bills around in the water. So even though their bills

automatically snap shut faster than any other reflex in the

animal world when they bump into a fish, they can only

forage in shallow water where fish are highly concentrated.

The black-and-white storks, which look a bit like

pterodactyls, will fly more than forty miles to find a fishing

hole, gorge themselves, then fly home and regurgitate some

of the food for their chicks. But they will rarely fish in water

more than two feet deep, because they end up expending

more energy swishing than they gain from eating.

The natural Everglades offered a kind of Restaurant Row

for wood storks and other wading birds, a shallow-water

ecosystem with an extended dry season that could satisfy

their picky foraging demands. It was so vast—and

encompassed wetlands with such a wide variety of water

levels—that they could find drying-but-not-yet-dry marshes

throughout their breeding and nesting seasons, starting with

the shallowest wetlands at the edges of the marsh in

December and progressing inland to the deepest sloughs by

March. These shrinking pools supported as many as 600 fish

per square meter, attracting spectacular feeding frenzies.

Green herons and snowy egrets trolled the edges of the

pools; great blue herons and great egrets with longer legs

sought slightly deeper water. Each bird had its own foraging

strategy, and beaks that had evolved for their favorite

foods. Great blues stood still for hours to stab sunfish and

gar with their stiletto-shaped beaks, while white ibis

grubbed in the mud for crawfish and insect larvae with their

downward-curving beaks. Green herons dropped fish food in

the water as bait, while reddish egrets spread their wings

over the water to cast shadows over their prey.

The Everglades also offered ideal bedrooms and

nurseries where wading birds could build nests—usually in

cypress clumps or mangrove trees, near alligators that could

chase away raccoons and other predators. The density and

intensity of these rookeries was astounding, tens and even

hundreds of thousands of birds in a bunch. “Here I felt I had

reached the high-water mark of spectacular sights in the

bird-world,” wrote Reverend Herbert Job, a Unitarian

minister who was one of the first photographers in the

Everglades. “Wherever I may penetrate in future

wanderings, I never hope to see anything to surpass, or

perhaps to equal, that upon which I then gazed.”

As many as 2.5 million wading birds patrolled the

Everglades before the late nineteenth century. They reeked

of fishy guano, and sounded like a chorus of foghorns,

whistles, and screeching babies, but they were amazing to

behold. “It was truly a wonderful sight, and I have never

seen so many thousands of birds together at any single

point,” wrote an ornithologist named William Scott. Silvery-

black anhingas with S-shaped necks darted underwater to

spear fish, then stretched their wings to warm up like avian

Karate Kids. Snowy egrets with bright yellow feet seemed to

float through the sky, “with the sunlight on their white

wings, shining like snow, and then melting from sight like a

dream.” Brown-and-

white limpkins probed the shallows for snails and crayfish by

day, then shattered the night with ghastly cries of kree-ow,

kree-ow. “When do they sleep?” the explorer Hugh

Willoughby asked. “Or do they ever sleep?”

John James Audubon, the renowned painter and author,

was the first naturalist to fall in love with south Florida’s

birds. During an 1832 visit, he wrote rapturously of roseate

spoonbills that “stalked gracefully beneath the mangroves,”

great white herons “thrusting their javelin bills into the body

of some unfortunate fish,” and pelicans sunning themselves

on the mud flats: “Should one chance to gape, all, as if by

sympathy, in succession open their long and broad

mandibles, yawning lazily and ludicrously.” In Cape Sable,

Audubon rhapsodized about gluttonous ibis, timorous

gallinules, and herons crying wie-wie-wie: “The flocks of

birds that covered the shelly beaches, and those hovering

over head, so astonished us that we could for a while

scarcely believe our eyes.”

Audubon was so astonished that he almost forgot to

shoot those flocks out of the sky. “The first volley procured a

supply of food sufficient for two days consumption,” he

recounted. “Our first fire among a crowd of the Great

Godwits laid prostrate sixty-five of these birds.” Audubon

preferred to paint freshly killed specimens, but he didn’t

need sixty-five fresh godwits for his art. He just liked

shooting birds.

So did the winter pleasure-seekers who descended on

Florida later in the century. They picked off birds from the

decks of steamboats, much like the western travelers who

blew away buffalo from the windows of trains. These

“sportsmen” reignited the outrage of the abolitionist

crusader Harriet Beecher Stowe, who published Florida’s

first environmental broadside in 1877, “Protect the Birds.”

She accused Florida’s winter visitors of waging a “war of

extermination” against its feathered natives, a war she

considered as evil as the slave trade: “The decks of boats

are crowded with men, whose only feeling amid our

magnificent forests, seems to be a wild desire to shoot

something and who fire at every living thing on shore.”

But these trigger-happy intruders barely dented

populations of wading birds and other wildlife, because they

rarely strayed from the rivers. Tourists didn’t venture into

the fastnesses of the Everglades, where most of the bird

rookeries were hidden. In the nineteenth century, people

still avoided the Everglades unless they had an extremely

good reason to be there. The love of hunting was not usually

a compelling enough reason.

The love of money was a different story.

The Killing Fields

IN FEBRUARY 1886, a birdwatcher named Frank Chapman

conducted an experiment in Manhattan, identifying 160 bird

species on two strolls through the Ladies’ Mile shopping

district. This was no winter ornithological miracle. The birds

were all dead, and perched atop the heads of stylish ladies.

Of the 700 women’s hats spotted by Chapman, 542 were

festooned with feathers, the most elegant with “aigrettes,”

the dainty nuptial plumes of courting wading birds. A few of

the most expensive hats served as pedestals for entire

birds.

At the height of the fad, an ounce of feathers cost more

than an ounce of gold, which provided an excellent

incentive to brave the Everglades. Plume hunters sold

spoonbill skins for $5, great white herons for $10, flamingos

for up to $25. At a time when average per capita income

was less than a dollar a day, plumers gladly supplied

cheaper birds as well, selling tricolor and great blue herons,

reddish and snowy egrets, pelicans and owls for a dime to a

half-dollar per skin.

“What do you hunt?” the ornithologist William Scott

asked one Florida plumer.

“Almost anything that wears feathers,” the man replied.

In 1886, the American Ornithological Union estimated the

annual nationwide carnage at five million birds. One Florida

agent shipped 130,000 plumes in a year. A plumer named

George Cuthbert slaughtered $1,800 worth of herons,

egrets, and spoonbills on a single trip to a rookery he found

in a mangrove jungle near Cape Sable. Birds were big

business, and competition was fierce. Cuthbert used the

proceeds of his hunt to buy half of Marco Island, which

became some of America’s priciest real estate. Cuthbert’s

crewman was murdered by a rival plumer for refusing to

divulge the rookery’s location.

Florida’s most notorious plumer, Jean Chevelier—a

curmudgeonly Frenchman who shot out the St. Petersburg

area’s rookeries, then relocated to the Ten Thousand Islands

—gathered 11,000 skins in a single season. “There were

plume and song birds of every description that the Creator

had placed here to beautify and adorn Man’s Paradise, but

the lawless marauders just about destroyed everything that

came in reach of their powder and lead,” one critic

complained. The logkeeper for one Chevelier expedition into

the Everglades catalogued the destruction of 1,397 birds of

thirty-six species, recording the daily slaughter with matter-

of-fact entries like: “Louie killed eleven birds, Guy killed

eight, and I killed nineteen.” Over one rookery, the flocks

were so thick that Chevelier became disoriented and laid

down his rifle. “Mine God, ’tis too much bird in this country, I

cannot shoot,” he gasped. The logkeeper had no such

problems: “I killed two night herons, two [tricolor] herons,

and sixteen reddish egrets.”

If Stowe was repelled by tourists taking potshots from

steamboats, it’s good she never witnessed the systematic

slaughter of a plume hunt. It was more like a harvest than a

hunt. At the height of nesting season, plumers patiently shot

out rookeries one bird at a time, leaving rotting carcasses

and helpless chicks to be devoured by raccoons, crows, and

buzzards. They used quiet weapons like Winchesters or the

Flobert—a rifle favored by French aristocrats for after-dinner

target shooting inside their chateaux—so their shots

sounded like snapping twigs. The birds rarely noticed them,

and when they did, the adults rarely left their nests for fear

of abandoning their young. The ornithologist Scott described

the remains of another rookery in Charlotte Harbor:

Hundreds of broken eggs strewed the ground everywhere.

Fish crows and both kinds of buzzards were present in great

numbers and were rapidly destroying the remaining eggs. I

found a huge pile of dead, half-decayed birds lying on the

ground which had apparently been killed for a day or two.

All of them had the plumes taken off with a patch of skin

from the back, and some had the wings off. I counted over

200 birds treated this way…. I do not know of a more

horrible and brutal exhibition of wanton destruction than

that which I witnessed here.

The feather trade also provided income for Seminoles,

but they practiced an early kind of sustainable exploitation,

refusing to wipe out entire rookeries. “The Indian leaves

enough of the old birds to feed the young of the rookery,”

one writer observed. “The white man kills the last plume

bird he can find, leaving the young ones to die in their

nests, then returns a few days later lest he might have

overlooked a few birds.”

This kill-them-all strategy took its toll. Roseate spoonbills,

snowy egrets, great white herons, and short-tailed hawks

nearly vanished from Florida. The wild flamingos that so

enchanted Audubon—and inspired the name of the village

at the tip of Cape Sable—did vanish from Florida. The lime-

green-

and-carmine Carolina parakeet was hunted to extinction.

There was only one pair of reddish egrets left on the

peninsula, and only one rookery for brown pelicans, a clump

of mangroves off Vero Beach called Pelican Island. “I don’t

think in my reincarnation, if there is such a thing, that I want

to come back to Florida,” sighed the author and

outdoorsman Kirk Munroe. “They are killing off all the plume

birds. I remember when the spoonbills on the beach in front

of my house made such a racket it was almost unpleasant.

Now they are all gone.”

The Roots of Conservation

THIS WAS A REVOLUTIONARY CONCEPT for Florida, the

notion that a human victory over nature might not represent

progress, the idea that spoonbills might have value

regardless of their usefulness to human beings.

The early descriptions of the peninsula were relentlessly

utilitarian: Cypress stands were evaluated for timber quality,

marshes for agricultural potential, rivers for navigability.

Wildlife was described as “game.” In 1837, for example, the

author of The Territory of Florida noted that alligators made

“excellent leather,” panthers were “particularly destructive

to calves,” and flamingos were “excellent food.” These were

natural resources in the literal sense, valuable only insofar

as they could be exploited by human beings. Occasionally, a

writer like Buckingham Smith lapsed into lyricism,

confessing that “the effect of such visit to the Pa-Hay-Okee

upon a person of romantic imagination, and who indulges

his fancies on such subjects, it may be presumed, would be

somewhat poetic.” But Smith hastened to make it clear that

he was by no means that kind of person; from a practical

standpoint, the Everglades was worthless, and ought to be

reclaimed.

The industrialization and deforestation of the latter half

of the nineteenth century prompted a few Americans to

think about nature in new ways, laying the groundwork for

the environmentalism of the twentieth century. Henry David

Thoreau, the bard of Walden Pond, worshipped at the altar

of nature, and raged against its exploitation by man. “We

need the tonic of wildness,” he wrote. “We can never have

enough of nature.” Nature was his God, his nurse, his balm,

and he denounced the destruction of trees and animals the

way others denounced the murder of people. What is a

country, he asked, without rabbits and partridges? He

rejected his era’s anthropocentric worldview: “I love Nature

partly because she is not a man, but a retreat from him.” He

loved all of Nature—even the most dismal swamps: “I enter

a swamp as a sacred place, a sanctum sanctorum.”

Thoreau inspired devout preservationists like John Muir,

who founded the Sierra Club in 1892. Muir fought like an

avenging angel to protect the wilderness—not for the sake

of man, but for the wilderness itself. He wanted to preserve

the nastiest rattlesnakes and ugliest alligators as well as

rabbits and partridges, and he argued that man was

conceited to fancy himself more precious than other beasts.

“They…are all part of God’s family, unfallen, undepraved,

and cared for with the same species of tenderness and love

as is bestowed on angels in heaven or saints on earth,” he

wrote.

While Thoreau was meditating at Walden, George Perkins

Marsh was developing a less radical but no less alarmist

philosophy of conservation, more sympathetic to the use of

natural resources but not to their abuse. Marsh—who

dabbled in manufacturing, farming, lumber, real estate

speculation, and politics as well as writing—was a dedicated

capitalist who believed in man’s dominion over nature and

the pursuit of progress. But he also believed in moderation.

He warned that Americans were knocking nature out of

balance, risking dire consequences to themselves and their

descendants by obliterating forests and extirpating entire

species: “All nature is linked together by invisible bonds, and

every organic creature, however low, however feeble,

however dependent, is necessary to the well-being of some

other.” While Thoreau raged that civilization was destroying

nature, Marsh fretted that the wanton destruction of nature

would end up destroying civilization, and the human race.

“The earth,” he warned, “is fast becoming an unfit home for

its noblest inhabitant.”

Marsh inspired utilitarian conservationists like the first

director of the Forest Service, Gifford Pinchot, a European-

trained forester who shared his belief that environmental

degradation had led to the collapse of ancient Rome and

Greece, and championed the “wise use” of America’s

natural resources: “The conservation of natural resources is

the basis, and the only permanent basis, of national

success.” Pinchot, a child of the New York City elite,

compared a nation’s resources to a family trust fund, and

while he supported spending the interest, he was appalled

by timber syndicates that exhausted the principal, clear-

cutting forests into desolate moonscapes. He did not want

to ban logging, grazing, or mining, but he wanted to

manage them rationally and sustainably—to conserve

enough trees, grasses, and ores for future generations to

use for logging, grazing, and mining. It was government’s

duty to ensure that natural resources were exploited

efficiently, so they would produce the most good for the

most people over time.

CONSERVATION WAS A CORNERSTONE of the progressive

movement, as vital to the spirit of the age as child labor

restrictions or railroad commissions. The progressive

Governor Jennings, William Jennings Bryan’s cousin, signed

Florida’s first forest protection law; his wife, May Mann

Jennings, became one of Florida’s leading conservationists.

And it was no coincidence that the central figure of

America’s conservation movement was the central figure of

America’s progressive movement: President Theodore

Roosevelt, a passionate outdoorsman who shared

Audubon’s fascination with living beings, as well as his

inclination to shoot them.

T. R. began his career as a naturalist at age seven,

composing meticulous zoological treatises about the bugs,

reptiles, rodents, and other specimens in the “Roosevelt

Museum of Natural History” that he curated in his bedroom.

“All the insects that I write about in this book inhabbit North

America,” he wrote in his Natural History of Insects. “Now

and then a friend has told me something about them but

mostly I have gained their habits through ofserv-a-tion.” As

a teenager, Teddy became obsessed with birds,

documenting every cheech-ir’r’r and fl’p-fl’p-trkeee in his

diary, publishing an ornithological guide to the Adirondacks

when he was eighteen. Roosevelt’s enthusiasm for nature

went well beyond “ofserv-a-tion”; he also became an ardent

big-game hunter. But as the great herds of the West

dwindled, he began to denounce the “swinish game-

butchers” who wiped them out indiscriminately. In 1888, he

helped found the Boone & Crockett Club, one of America’s

first conservation groups to fight for their protection.

After entering politics, Roosevelt maintained sympathy

for both strains of conservationism—Thoreau’s aesthetic

and spiritual revulsion to all attacks on nature, as well as

Marsh’s more practical and ecological opposition to

needless and overzealous attacks. He was still a devoted

nature-lover who exploded with enthusiasm while camping

with John Muir under the sequoias of Yosemite. “This is

bully!” he yelled. “I never felt better in my life!” But he was

also an economic expansionist who put his friend Gifford

Pinchot in charge of his conservation agenda. As president,

Roosevelt protected 230 million acres of public land—

including the Grand Canyon, Mount Olympus, and Alaska’s

Tongass and Chugash forests—but his proudest conservation

achievement was the Reclamation Act, which promoted

ecologically destructive dams and irrigation schemes

throughout the arid West. Roosevelt loved the outdoors and

its creatures, but he believed that mankind had not only a

right but a duty to exploit nature: “Conservation means

development as much as it does protection.”

The preservationist and utilitarian strains of American

conservationism found common ground in the defense of

Florida’s birds. It was hard for anyone to defend the

systematic extermination of such lovely creatures, just so

upscale matrons could wear feathers in their caps. “This is

the last pitiful remnant of hosts of innocent exquisite

creatures slaughtered for a brutal, senseless, yes, criminal

millinery folly,” Reverend Job wrote after photographing a

shot-out rookery. This became a mainstream view,

supported by almost everyone except hatmakers and

hunters. By 1900, “Audubon societies” devoted to bird

protection laws were forming nationwide, despite the

trigger-happy proclivities of their namesake; the Florida

Audubon Society’s honorary officers included Flagler as well

as his political nemeses, Jennings and Roosevelt. The

society helped Governor Jennings and a state senator

named W. Hunt Harris to usher a plume-hunting ban through

Florida’s legislature—not known as a hotbed of

environmentalism—authorizing jail sentences of ten days

and fines of $5 per bird.

In 1903, Frank Chapman, the shopping-district feather-

counter who had become the curator of New York’s Museum

of Natural History, visited Roosevelt to request additional

protection for Pelican Island. The president turned to his

aides and asked if any law prevented him from declaring the

five-acre mangrove key a federal bird sanctuary. They didn’t

think so. “Very well then,” Roosevelt said, “I so declare it!”

Pelican Island became the first of America’s 535 national

wildlife refuges. “Birds should be saved for utilitarian

reasons—and moreover, they should be saved for reasons

unconnected with dollars and cents,” he said later. “To lose

the chance to see…pelicans winging their way homeward

across the crimson afterglow of the sunset…is like the loss

of a gallery of the masterpieces of the artists of old time.”

The butchery of wading birds just didn’t feel right. Even a

hardened Everglades pioneer named Charles McKinney, who

routinely celebrated victories over nature in newspaper

columns under the byline “Progress,” was overcome by guilt

after his one plume hunt. He could not bear to watch the

group of crows gnawing on some orphaned egret chicks

whose mothers he had just killed. Somehow, that didn’t feel

like Progress at all. “It looked too hard for me,” McKinney

wrote. “I decided that I did not think it was doing God’s

service, and I never went on that kind of hunt anymore.”

A Martyr to the Cause

THE STATE HAD NO SHERIFFS canoeing the Everglades beat,

so the National Audubon Society hired its own bird warden

to enforce the pluming ban, a thirty-two-year-old ship

captain from Flamingo named Guy Bradley, a reformed

plumer who knew every nook of south Florida’s rookeries.

Kirk Munroe, who recruited him for the job, described him as

“a sturdy, fearless fellow, filled with a righteous indignation

against the wretches who…are using every effort to kill off

the few remaining birds of that section.”

Bradley had tagged along on his first plume hunt at age

seven. As a teenager, he had been one of the shooters on

Jean Chevelier’s expedition in the Everglades, the “Guy” in

entries like “Guy killed eight.” And as a young man working

as a surveyor for Flagler’s railroad, he had done some

plume hunting on the side. But he later renounced bird

slaughter, and eagerly accepted the $35-a-month Audubon

job. A short but rugged man with thinning hair and a bushy

mustache, Bradley wasted no time making his presence felt

in the Everglades, patrolling nesting sites, issuing citations,

even searching the boats of gator hunters to make sure they

were only hunting gators. He also gave tours to visiting

ornithologists, who praised his conscientiousness but

worried about his safety. Bradley was thrusting himself

between armed men and their livelihood in the middle of

nowhere, bringing the law to a wild frontier that hadn’t

exactly been clamoring for it.

The most overt threat was sixty-year-old Walter Smith, an

ornery Confederate sharpshooter who had been blinded in

his left eye at the Battle of the Wilderness. He had once

been on good terms with Bradley, but the relationship had

soured over local politics. Then, in the winter of 1905,

Bradley ensured Smith’s lasting hatred by arresting him for

plume hunting, and arresting his teenage son, Tom, twice.

“You ever arrest one of my boys again, I’ll kill you,” Smith

warned.

On the morning of July 8, Bradley was home in Flamingo

with his wife and two boys when he heard gunfire across

Florida Bay. He peered across the glassy water and saw

Smith’s blue schooner anchored at Oyster Keys, two small

mangrove islands where Bradley had once done some

poaching with Smith’s sons. He could see that the Smiths

were again terrorizing the local cormorants, so he rowed his

dinghy across the bay and announced that he was arresting

Tom again. Smith demanded to see a warrant. “I don’t need

one,” Bradley replied, according to Smith’s account. “I saw

them shoot into the rookery and I see the dead birds. Put

down your gun, Smith.” Smith claimed that Bradley cursed

at him and wildly fired his nickel-plated pistol, burying a

bullet in the schooner’s mast. Smith then shot Bradley to

death with his .38-caliber rifle.

Smith was arraigned in Key West by the local prosecutor,

W. Hunt Harris, the senator responsible for Florida’s bird

protection law. But Smith knew how justice worked on the

frontier, and a week later, Harris showed up to court as

Smith’s attorney. A lawyer hired by Audubon to monitor the

trial noted that Smith’s self-defense claim was outlandish;

for starters, Bradley’s pistol still had all six bullets in its

chamber. But the stand-in prosecutor never challenged

Smith’s testimony, and never checked his mast for the

purported bullet from the unfired gun. Smith was soon a

free man, and the carnage resumed in the Everglades.

“There is no community sufficiently law-abiding to leave a

bank vault unmolested if it were left unprotected,” Frank

Chapman sighed. “We have given up. We can’t protect it,

and the rookery will have to go.”

But Chapman spoke too soon. Bradley’s martyrdom was

chronicled in the press in New York, the center of the fashion

industry, and pressure began building for a state ban on

feather imports. Milliners claimed it would eliminate 20,000

jobs, but the New York legislature eventually passed the bill

with only three dissenting votes. The feather craze faded,

except among prostitutes, which only hastened its

abandonment by everyone else.

As the demand for plumes relaxed, at least 250,000

wading birds came back to the Everglades. It was still an

ideal habitat, with abundant food and seasonal dry-downs; it

was still the Everglades. The adventure writer Zane Grey,

the president of a south Florida fishing club, described a

creek near Cape Sable after the return of the white ibis,

known as curlew:

Though we saw birds everywhere, in the air and on the

foliage, we were not in the least prepared for what a bend in

the stream disclosed. Banks of foliage as white with curlew

as if with heavy snow! With tremendous flapping of wings

that merged into a roar, thousands of curlew took wing, out

over the water…. It was a most wonderful experience.

TURN-OF-THE-CENTURY conservationists stopped the

annihilation of the birds of the Everglades. But they had no

problem whatsoever with the drainage of the Everglades.

In fact, Florida’s conservationists led the fight to drain

the swamp. They saw reclamation as the essence of

conservation, an eminently wise use of natural resources.

South Florida’s leading conservationist, John Gifford of

Coconut Grove—the first American to earn a doctorate in

forestry, and the cofounder of a national magazine called

Conservation—declared that the reclamation of the

Everglades would be “the greatest conservation project in

the United States.”

A pedantic Cornell-educated professor with a booming

voice and a withering disdain for those who questioned his

theories or interrupted his monologues, Gifford was a bank

president, a land speculator, and a home builder, as well as

an academic, and, like President Roosevelt, he scoffed at

the idea that conservation should be synonymous with

preservation: “Do not think that conservation is merely

saving and hoarding things. Conservation means sane use.

Conservation fights for those things which will benefit the

greatest number of the present and coming generations.”

Conservation meant the opposite of waste, and the

Everglades—even if it provided a home to pretty birds—was

clearly a wasteland.

Gifford threw down the gauntlet to his fellow Floridians,

challenging them to convert the useless swamp into a

productive civilization:

In southern California, the hand of man has produced a

highly developed and attractive region with no resources

except vim and climate. In southern Florida, we have the

resources, but the vim has been lacking. We have been

reposing since the Seminole War…. but it is this grappling

with nature which develops the latent forces within the man.

The coming age is to be an age of conquest, the conquest of

nature, the reclamation of swamplands and the irrigation of

deserts.

Gifford backed up his words with deeds, importing a

thirsty Australian tree called melaleuca to help drain the

swamp. He planted a teaspoonful of melaleuca seeds near

Biscayne Bay and Davie, and the fast-growing tree with

absorbent roots and white papery bark began spreading

through the Everglades, sucking the wet out of wetlands. “It

is a natural swamp tree,” Gifford exulted. “It has few, if any,

equals in the plant world.”

Not even Gifford could match the vim of Conservation’s

energetic editor, Thomas Will, a self-made man who had

worked for Gifford Pinchot at the Forest Service, and would

earn a reputation as the John the Baptist of the Everglades.

Born in a log cabin on his father’s Illinois farm, Will attended

country schools for just a few months every winter; with

relentless determination, he worked his way through

Harvard, and eventually became the president of Kansas

State Agricultural College. “He was capable of extreme

exertion, both physical and mental, and apparently never

tired,” his son later recalled. Will was also a born reformer,

invariably championing “the underdog against vested

interests,” losing his job at Kansas State for advocating

populist causes. So he moved to Washington to join

Pinchot’s push for forestry reform, then took over

Conservation after his appointment expired. In his late

forties, he happened to edit one of Gifford’s articles on the

potential of the Everglades, and decided to visit to see what

all the fuss was about.

Will was so inspired that he quit the magazine, and

devoted the rest of his life to Everglades drainage and

development—first as the region’s leading promoter in

Washington, then as the founder of a pioneer settlement

called Okeelanta. Will started the Florida Everglades

Homebuilders Association, the Everglades Farming

Association, and the South Florida Development League; he

literally mounted soapboxes to preach the virtues of the

swamp on the streets of Fort Lauderdale. “Remember, I’m

on the job all the time, seeking our Glades’ salvation,” he

wrote to a friend. Will was convinced that the Everglades

would be the ultimate conservation challenge of the

twentieth century, and it would consume him for twenty-

seven years.

But it would take more than Gifford’s trees and Will’s

passion to reclaim the Everglades. It would take drainage

canals and political leadership. The man who led Florida into

its age of conquest was Napoleon Bonaparte Broward,

another crusader for progress and conservation, a politician

as colorful and forceful as his name suggested. No one

would ever accuse Broward of lacking vim.

Nine

“Water Will Run Downhill!”

Yes, the Everglades is a swamp; so was Chicago 60

years ago.

—Florida governor Napoleon Bonaparte Broward

NAPOLEON BROWARD declared war on the swamp during

his 1904 campaign for governor, unfurling giant

multicolored maps of the Everglades at campaign rallies,

promising to bust a few holes in the coastal ridge and create

an instant Empire of the Everglades. “It would indeed be a

sad commentary on the intelligence and energy of the

people of Florida to confess that so simple an engineering

feat as the drainage of a body 21 feet above the level of the

sea was beyond their power,” he taunted his audiences.

Here was a challenge that Henry Flagler had rejected as too

big and expensive, but to Broward, it was simple and

necessary. If the turbulent floods of the Nile and the

Mississippi could be controlled by man, he demanded, then

why not the comparatively gentle overflows of the

Everglades? His mantra was: Water Will Run Downhill!

Broward was a force of nature, a rugged man of action

who looked and behaved like a rustic Teddy Roosevelt.

Awestruck journalists gushed about this “man among men”

with “a jaw like that of the intense fighter who does not

know the meaning of defeat,” possessing “the faith that

moves mountains, the determination that brooks no

resistance and the energy that knows no weariness,” not to

mention “the driving force of a dynamo and the unswerving

steadiness of a trip-hammer.” He seethed with contempt for

nitpickers “who quibble now, and stand on the bank and

shiver and shake, instead of plunging in and doing

something.” He bristled that if the critics had their way, the

Everglades would be a wilderness dominated by Indians

until the next millennium: “It might be said of me, and

perhaps of every other man who has a desire to accomplish

something for the good of mankind, that he belongs to that

class ‘who rush in where angels fear to tread.’ ” He served

only four years in statewide office, and dredged just a few

miles of canals, but it is no coincidence that Florida’s

drainage era is still known as the Broward Era. “Had it not

been for Broward,” said one contemporary, “the talk of

draining the Everglades might have run on for several more

generations without the reclamation of a single acre.”

Broward has been vilified by modern environmentalists

for his intense assault on the Everglades, but he was

considered a staunch conservationist in his day. He

supported strict laws to protect fish, game, birds, and

oysters, and his top priority was the reclamation of a swamp

for agriculture and development. Broward never stopped to

think what draining the Everglades might do to the fish,

game, birds, and oysters that lived there, but hardly anyone

did. The conservationist John Gifford dedicated his book of

Everglades essays to Broward, explaining that “the man

who makes two blades of grass grow where only one grew

before is the proverbial public benefactor, but the man who

inaugurates a movement to render 3,000,000 acres of

waste land highly productive deserves endless

commendation.”

Broward was also a progressive—an antirailroad,

anticorporation, anti-Flagler populist. His crusade for

Everglades drainage was not just a fight for man against

nature; it was a fight for ordinary Floridians against “the

seductive and enslaving power of corporate interests” who

monopolized state lands without improving them. Flagler

and other railroad barons, he complained, were “draining

the people instead of the swamps.” At a time when the

richest one percent of Americans owned half the nation’s

wealth, when forty-two corporate trusts controlled at least

70 percent of their industries, Broward wanted to turn the

Everglades into a place where ordinary people could

improve their lot in life through hard work. That’s what he

had done.

“We Were Not Discouraged.”

NAPOLEON BONAPARTE BROWARD was born on a plantation

near Jacksonville in 1857, a child of Florida’s antebellum

elite; his grandfather had served on the state legislative

committee that first proposed draining of the Everglades.

But when Napoleon was five, the Browards fled during the

same Union advance that killed the train passenger sitting

next to David Yulee. When they returned home after the

war, they had almost nothing left. Their slaves had been

freed, their plantation looted and burned. They had no

home, no mules, no fences; they had to sell most of their

land to pay taxes. The Browards could not afford to send

Napoleon to school, so he stayed home and cleared

overgrown fields by hand. For his first crop, he planted four

sacks of potatoes, which yielded only one sack at harvest

time. He also planted peas that died, and sugarcane that

was trampled by a neighbor’s cattle. “We were not

discouraged, but immediately went to work,” he later

recalled.

It was a hardscrabble childhood, and it only got harder:

Napoleon was orphaned shortly after he became a

teenager; one of Broward’s letters suggests that his mother,

a longtime invalid, committed suicide after his father

became an alcoholic. His father, a Confederate captain who

was never the same after the war, caught pneumonia and

died after spending a rainy night by her grave. For a while,

Napoleon and his brother tended the farm themselves, two

miles from their nearest neighbor, sleeping with their rifles

by their beds, their knives within reach, their quilts pulled

over their heads to drown out the screech owls. He later

took jobs rafting logs, splitting rails, and tending an orange

grove. Napoleon finally found his calling as a deckhand on a

St. Johns River steamboat. Nature, he liked to say, was a

better teacher than school—and a lot more fun. After a stint

as a crewman on a schooner off Newfoundland, he returned

to the St. Johns as a captain during the tourism rush of the

1880s and married his business partner’s daughter. But his

wife died in childbirth, and his baby died six weeks later.

Tragedy seemed to be stalking him.

Broward again buried his sorrow in work, taking over the

fastest steamer on the St. Johns, learning every bend of the

river, thriving financially as it became a vibrant liquid

highway. By the time he was thirty, according to his

biographer, Samuel Proctor, he was “every inch the

prosperous riverboat captain”—six-foot-two and over 200

pounds, with a neatly trimmed walrus mustache and a

sunburn. Broward was well liked for his country bluster and

bonhomie, well respected as an upright businessman who

refused to allow liquor on his steamer. He was clearly an up-

and-comer, expanding his riverboat service into a sizable

salvaging, shipbuilding, and dredging business. He bought a

lumberyard and a grist mill, and invested in phosphate

mines. When he remarried, a local paper called him “one of

Jacksonville’s strong and manly young men [whose] high

character, joined to force and energy, have already given

him influence and friends.”

IN 1888, Broward’s influence and friends got him appointed

sheriff for the Jacksonville area. He made an immediate

splash by leading raids on illegal casinos, and exposing

efforts by gamblers to bribe him. He cemented his

reputation for integrity by crusading to keep a particularly

scurrilous form of entertainment out of Jacksonville: a

boxing match for the heavyweight championship of the

world. A judge let the fight proceed, but after Gentleman Jim

Corbett defended his title with a third-round knockout of

Charles Mitchell, Sheriff Broward charged both fighters with

assault. Broward soon emerged as a charismatic leader of

Jacksonville’s “straightouts,” a wool-hat reform faction of

the Democratic Party, accusing the silk-hat ruling faction of

handing over the state to corporations. He had learned in

the phosphate business how railroads puffed freight costs,

and he attacked them with folksy rhetoric on the stump. “He

is not one of the high-falutin spread-eagle kind of orators,

but he is an entertaining talker,” a reporter observed. In

1894, when Florida’s corporation-friendly governor ousted

Broward for trying to crack down on election fraud, that only

burnished his reputation as a reformer.

After rising to prominence as a high-minded guardian of

the law, Broward rose to legend as an adventure-minded

outlaw. When Spain declared martial law in Cuba, President

Grover Cleveland warned Americans not to take sides in the

conflict, and the Spaniards offered a $25,000 bounty for any

“filibuster” who assisted the island’s rebels. But Broward led

a series of expeditions to Cuba on his tug The Three Friends,

smuggling guns, explosives, and guerrillas to the junta led

by poet and revolutionary José Martí. At a time when the

publishers William Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer were

competing to manufacture a war with yellow journalism, the

ex-sheriff’s filibustering made great copy, as he eluded

Spanish gunboats and U.S. revenue cutters in high-speed

chases in the dead of night, then jovially denied his

involvement in the light of day. Filibustering was lucrative

work, but with war lust rising, Broward was hailed as a

humanitarian hero. The citizens of Jacksonville threw him a

parade, and the more Cleveland’s administration harassed

him—boarding and detaining his boat, then charging him

with violating neutrality laws—the higher his star rose. His

case eventually reached the Supreme Court, which ruled

that the government had the right to seize The Three

Friends. But by that time, Cleveland was out of office,

America was heading for war with Spain, and Broward had

regained his sheriff’s job in a landslide. The ruling was never

enforced.

TEDDY ROOSEVELT ONCE needled Broward that if it weren’t

for The Three Friends, he never would have become

governor. (Broward shot back that if it weren’t for The Three

Friends, Roosevelt never would have become president.) But

Broward’s stint as a revolutionary hero was only part of his

appeal in 1904. He was also a native Floridian, a log-cabin

pioneer, a self-made businessman, a reform sheriff, a father

of nine, and a brilliant campaigner. He knew he had little

chance in Florida’s cities, where Flagler and other railroad

men controlled the press, so he barnstormed the

backwoods, making his case to villagers who didn’t read the

papers. “I’m going to…talk to the farmers and crackers and

show them their top ends were meant to be used for

something better than hat racks,” he vowed. “I’m going to

make ’em sit up and think. They won’t mind mistakes in

grammar if they find I’m talking horse sense.”

Broward made the Everglades and the Internal

Improvement Fund the centerpiece of his campaign,

warning that his Democratic primary opponent,

Congressman Robert Davis, would overturn the Jennings

land freeze and resume the handouts to Flagler and other

railroad barons. Broward pledged not to give any

swampland to any corporation. Instead, he proposed to

reclaim the Everglades at a cost of only $1 per acre, then

sell the reclaimed farmland on behalf of taxpayers for $5 to

$20 per acre. He said the profits would pay for state

government, plus an extra $500,000 a year for public

schools.

Broward’s drainage dreams were ridiculed by the state’s

conservative papers, especially Flagler’s. They printed

rumors that Broward was Catholic, an Apache Indian, a fop

who dyed his mustache daily. They called him a rube and a

rabble-rouser. But Broward kept roaming the hinterlands

with his map of the Everglades, portraying their attacks as

proof of their corruption: “If a graveyard has been despoiled,

you know a hyena has been abroad, and if an effort to save

land for the people meets with the vituperative, slanderous

and lying opposition of certain purchasable newspapers, you

know that behind such bureaus of misinformation…will be

the land-grant corporations of the State.” He bashed Davis

as a corporate shill, a former lawyer for railroads who still

accepted free passes from railroads. “Is it for legal services,

or is it because he is a member of Congress?” Broward

demanded. “If only as a Congressman, then what

consideration does he give them as a Congressman?”

Broward also published a campaign autobiography, with

Horatio Alger headings like “Pioneer Days of My Early

Boyhood,” “Rafting Logs for a Livelihood,” and “Climbing Up

in Life.” He once spotted a man reading it on a train,

snickering about his early difficulties planting peas. “Laugh

if you like,” Broward said, “but that book is a vote-maker.”

He was right. Broward upset Davis by 714 votes in the

Democratic primary, the only election that mattered in the

South.

Broward roared into Tallahassee with a bold, progressive

agenda, calling for higher teacher pay, humane treatment of

prisoners, a crackdown on corruption, a repeal of the Flagler

Divorce Law, and state-run life insurance modeled on a

program in New Zealand. But his top priority was to extract

the potential of the Everglades for a new class of yeoman

farmers, to “tap the wealth of the fabulous muck.”

“The Everglades of Florida should be saved,” Broward

declared in his inaugural address. It was a heartfelt

sentiment, with none of the ecological concern those words

would imply today. Broward meant that the Everglades

should be saved from railroad executives, and from oblivion:

“They should be drained and made fit for cultivation.”

The Chief Engineer

BROWARD WAS A MAN on a mission, and a man in a hurry.

One of his first acts as governor was to appoint outgoing

Governor Jennings, another drainage advocate, to be

counsel to the Internal Improvement Fund. The two men

immediately left Tallahassee to inspect the Everglades with

Captain Rose, the former Disston and Flagler drainage

superintendent who was now the state chemist. Broward

soon sent the legislature a special message on drainage,

proposing to start lowering Lake Okeechobee with a canal

east to the St. Lucie, the original strategy of Disston’s chief

engineer, James Kreamer. Broward predicted that the canal

would be complete in eighteen months, basing his

calculations on Kreamer’s old reports, and on “a personal

knowledge of the character and quantity of work to be

done.”

Broward had run dredges for years, and took his own

soundings on his trip with Jennings and Rose, but citing

“personal knowledge” as the basis for the world’s largest

drainage project was essentially winging it. Broward refused

to commission feasibility studies or engineering surveys; he

said he already knew it was feasible to reclaim the

Everglades, because water ran downhill. He grumbled that

by the time the studies were done, he would be dead and

the fund would be bankrupt. He was sure the skeptics would

come around once his dredges started digging and the

waters of the Everglades started receding: “If my friends will

hold the knockers in check, we can soon make a convincing

ocular demonstration.” Broward also had a legal incentive to

make the dirt fly: The rationale for halting the land

giveaways had been that the corporations on the receiving

end were doing nothing to improve state swamplands, a

rationale that would crumble if the state did nothing as well.

“I consider the launching of a dredge absolutely essential to

the success of the litigation,” Jennings advised him.

Broward quickly convinced the legislature to create the

Everglades Drainage District, which levied a 5-cents-per-

acre property tax in most of south Florida to support the

reclamation project. He also wrote an open letter to

Floridians proclaiming the feasibility of Everglades drainage

and the fertility of Everglades soils, savaging the project’s

knockers as corporate conspirators intent on controlling

every acre of the state: “Shall the sovereign people of

Florida supinely surrender to a few land pirates and

purchased newspapers and confess that they cannot knock

a hole in a wall of coral and let a body of water obey a

natural law and seek the level of the sea? To answer yes to

such a question is to prove ourselves unworthy of freedom,

happiness or prosperity.” Broward saw Henry Flagler as the

captain of the land pirates, an “insidious enemy” who

symbolized New York corporate greed. “He desires to own all

lands that are for sale or rent, by any means,” Broward

wrote.

BROWARD ALSO DECIDED THAT the state would need dipper

dredges to drain the Everglades—as opposed to ladder,

grapple, or hydraulic dredges—so he traveled to Chicago to

buy them. Governors generally delegate purchases of heavy

machinery, but Broward had staked his reputation on this

project, and he insisted on controlling every detail—not only

the politics and promotion, but the design and construction

as well.

One day, the governor wrote to tell a contractor to

shorten the specifications for a dredge boom from seventy

to sixty-five feet; the next day, “after thinking the matter

over carefully,” he ordered it cut to sixty feet. He wrote

another letter asking why a bulkhead had been thickened by

one-sixteenth of an inch. His letters to the project’s chief

engineer, John Newman—the drainage booster who had

accompanied James Ingraham across the Everglades, and

had predicted that its redeemer would be the philanthropist

of the age—were similar marvels in micromanagement:

“The dipper should never be hauled back to the rear of the

line immediately below the center of the shaft, but should

be perpendicular to the horizon, then pulled by the

tackle….” There was no doubt who was the project’s real

chief engineer. “The governor just naturally sweats dope

about the Everglades and drainage,” one supporter gasped

after a three-hour Broward speech. “He is chock full of it and

I believe he could talk all night on the subject without ever

being at a loss for a word.”

Like Disston, Broward abandoned his initial plan to start

lowering Lake Okeechobee with a canal east to the St. Lucie.

Instead, he decided to begin with diagonal canals through

the Everglades from the New River in Fort Lauderdale—

where he enjoyed more political support, and where the

ditches could help reclaim state-owned swampland as well

as lower the lake. By the end of his first year in office, two

state dredges, the Everglades and the Okeechobee, were

under construction in Fort Lauderdale—a hamlet of fiftytwo

residents before the project came to town—and the

governor was making monthly visits to make sure they were

built right. In 1906, Broward triumphantly launched the

Everglades into the north fork of the New River. The

christening was a bit premature—the state had not even

surveyed a line through the swamp—but the governor was

determined to get the dirt moving, and start providing

convincing ocular demonstrations.

THE CANALS DID MAKE an instant impression, as tomatoes,

potatoes, and cabbage began to sprout in former

marshlands at the edge of the Everglades. The developer R.

P. Davie began promoting his land just west of Fort

Lauderdale—then called Zona, because its first settlers

came from the Panama Canal Zone, but later renamed

Davie—as “The First Improved Town in the Everglades.” The

populist rabble-rouser Thomas Watson, the editor of

Watson’s Jeffersonian Magazine, declared that Sir

Christopher Wren’s work on St. Paul’s Cathedral was trivial

compared to Broward’s work in the eastern Glades. An

engineering magazine predicted that the Everglades would

soon relieve America of its addiction to foreign sugar, and

that Florida was about to become “one of the richest and

most important states in the Union.”

“It has been said that man can never improve on nature,

but one view of this magnificent place contradicts that,”

another journalist wrote after visiting a sixty-acre

Everglades vegetable farm. “Here the hand of man has

fashioned out of a once valueless and despised tract of land

not only a thing of beauty, but one of great utility.”

Who said that man could never improve on nature?

Swampland the state had sold to settlers for 25 cents an

acre now produced harvests of $600 an acre for tomatoes,

$1,000 for lettuce, $1,500 for celery. At a time when farmers

were struggling to survive on 160-acre homesteads out

west, the farmer Walter Waldin netted $3,400 on six acres in

six months in the Everglades—after building a home and

feeding a family of five. The Everglades, he wrote, was “a

country where fortunes have been and will be made, with

probably less exertion, on a smaller body of land, under

more pleasant circumstances, and in less time than in any

known place on earth”—the original Henry Perrine dream.

Promoters began spreading word of a balmy paradise

where the muck was richer than manure, where summer

spent the winter, where prosperity beckoned to the lazy and

the poor. For a fraction of the cost of a western irrigation

scheme, a drainage project was converting the Everglades

into a new Nile Valley. “My prophecy is that this great

Everglades district will not only develop into a most

beautiful and prosperous country, but will prove itself the

Eden of America,” Waldin wrote.

THE KNOCKERS, however, kept knocking.

They attacked the drainage project as “a wildcat

scheme,” a “sinful waste of the dear people’s money,” “the

death knell of many of the industries of our State,” a plot to

enrich Broward and a cabal of land sharks. “Of all the foolish

ideas that ever entered the brain of man, the draining of the

Everglades is the most nonsensical,” one paper sneered.

The Flagler-controlled Times-Union ran cartoons of the

fund’s trustees robbing children and teachers, and

compared the governor to the czar.

Critics wondered why the governor would try to drain

such an inaccessible marsh when Florida still had so much

land available near existing roads and markets. And they

ridiculed his armchair engineering, predicting that his canals

would cause fires from overdrainage as well as floods from

underdrainage, speculating that kindergartners must have

prepared his dollar-an-acre cost estimates. One writer

compared the dredges at work in the Everglades to Mrs.

Partington, the legendary British storm victim who tried to

dry up the Atlantic Ocean with a mop. Frank Stoneman, the

editor of a newspaper that would become the Miami Herald,

was the most persistent skeptic, arguing that it might make

sense to try to reclaim small portions of the Everglades with

a gradual approach, but not to drain the entire marsh at

once without scientific or economic analysis. “What would

be thought of a railroad corporation that would start the

construction of a road without first making complete

surveys of the entire route…[or] computing costs?” he

asked.

As usual, Broward dismissed his critics as land-grabbing

corporate stooges, and newspapers that aired the criticism

as “cuttlefish literature.” He called for stricter libel laws,

sued the Times-Union for slander, and refused to sign

papers confirming Stoneman’s election to a judgeship. He

scoffed that if drained swamps really could burn, “the great

bogs of Ireland would have been ash heaps long before St.

Patrick drove out the snakes.”

Broward stepped up his attacks after the state’s land

grant corporations—which owned 95 percent of the

drainage district—persuaded a judge to grant an injunction

blocking the drainage taxes. He launched a statewide

campaign for a constitutional amendment to overturn the

injunction, accusing Flagler and other real estate moguls of

scheming to steal the Everglades. “This rich, fertile land, so

admirably situated, so rich in its soil, is your land,” Broward

told one audience. “These corporations want it, and that is

why they belittle it. They want to rock you to sleep and then

take it away from you.” He mused that if he were to change

his mind and hand the Everglades to Flagler, “the Times-

Union would come out in letters big and black and say

‘Broward is the greatest governor that Florida has ever had,’

and the little Metropolis would say, ‘me, too.’ ”

Flagler was a convenient bogeyman, but he had yet to

receive a single acre of land from the state, even though he

had built 250 miles of track to state specifications. He had

poured capital into south Florida when no one else had

dared, financing civic improvements, creating jobs, even

spending his own money on drainage projects. “Is there any

steal in this?” his aide James Ingraham asked. Florida’s

voters didn’t think so, and rejected Broward’s amendment.

Broward rammed a new drainage tax through the legislature

anyway, but the corporations refused to pay it, and the

Internal Improvement Fund began running out of cash

again. The Broward Era’s momentum was stalling.

Reclaiming the Reclamation

BY 1908, DRAINAGE WAS Broward’s claim to fame. He was

named president of the National Drainage Congress, and

President Roosevelt invited him on an inspection tour of

Mississippi River drainage projects, the trip on which they

traded quips about The Three Friends. Broward was even

bandied about as a possible running mate for William

Jennings Bryan, “because he is the man who is draining the

Everglades of Florida.”

He wasn’t draining it very quickly, though. His

administration touted the project’s “splendid” and

“marvelous” success, hailing “achievements far beyond the

most sanguine or hopeful expectation of those in charge.”

But the Everglades and Okeechobee had dug only five miles

of canals, reclaiming less than 12,000 acres. At that rate, a

critic noted, it would take a century to drain one million

acres, a mere fraction of the Everglades. Dredging costs

were much higher than Broward had anticipated, and two

new dredges, the Miami and Caloosahatchee, were taking

much longer than expected to build. Yet his plan seemed to

expand by the day. Broward now wanted at least six

dredges to dig at least twelve major canals as well as

smaller lateral canals. Basically, he planned to dig more and

more ditches to carry more and more water until the

Everglades was dry.

But all that digging required cash, and the Internal

Improvement Fund was paralyzed. It tried to sell

swampland, but buyers were scared off by the lawsuits the

corporations had filed after Governor Jennings had revoked

5.3 million acres’ worth of promised land grants; few

investors wanted to pay for land that might turn out to

belong to Henry Flagler. For all of his vituperation about

“land pirates,” Broward realized he had to settle their

lawsuits if he wanted to drain the Everglades. He eventually

resolved their claims for 13 percent of the disputed land;

Flagler settled for 260,000 acres on his claim of 2.6 million

acres. The corporations still refused to pay drainage taxes,

but now at least the state could raise money for drainage by

selling its land. And much of the Everglades still belonged to

the public.

BROWARD NEEDED A Disston–style white knight to bail out

the fund; and he found one in Richard Bolles of Colorado

Springs, a deep-pocketed developer with a silver tongue and

a gambler’s heart. Bolles looked like a diminutive Vladimir

Lenin, with arched eyebrows and a white mustache and

goatee, but his expensive suits and free-spending habits

reflected decidedly capitalist attitudes. “Money will assuage

almost every other grief,” he wrote in his diary, “and the

want of it, I really believe, is the only thing that in my case,

with my nature, gives me unbearable suffering.” He

reflected that no modest man had ever made a fortune, and

that only three traits were necessary for getting rich:

impudence, impudence, and more impudence.

Dicky Bolles had all three. The son of a New York doctor,

he skipped college to become one of the youngest men ever

to hold a seat on the New York Stock Exchange. But he

abandoned Wall Street for the Wild West during the silver

boom, making and squandering several fortunes in the

Colorado mines, spending his money on wine, women, and

polo ponies, berating himself in his diary about the fast-

paced lifestyle and weak impulse control that led him into a

costly divorce and financial ruin. “Suicide is reasonable for

such a fool,” he wrote. He urged himself to settle down and

stop “running out after amusement and excitement, women

especially.” But then he struck it rich again with Aspen’s

famous Mollie Gibson mine, which he liked to call the best

girl he ever had. Bolles craved respectability, but he

admitted to himself that he was a scoundrel at heart: “You

have acquired the habit of considering yourself a high-tone,

liberal and honest man. Yet occasionally you have been

frightened to sickness to see that you are plainly none of

these—but low in taste, mean and tricky if you think it safe.”

Bolles shifted from mining into real estate late in life,

buying gigantic tracts of arid farmland in Colorado and

Oregon on the cheap, then subdividing and selling them on

the promise of irrigation. Some of his buyers later

discovered that their parcels were rocky, mountainous,

unredeemable wastelands, “so high that a person could not

even carry a bucket of water on top of it, letting alone

irrigat[e] it.” But by that time, Bolles had cleared millions of

dollars in profits, and had decided to try to replicate his

success marketing western drylands with Everglades

wetlands. “The people of our country are land-hungry,” he

explained. And the governor of Florida was investor-hungry.

Bolles met Governor Broward and ex-Governor Jennings

at the 1908 Democratic convention in Denver; William

Jennings Bryan had decided to choose a midwestern running

mate, so Broward had plenty of time for other business. By

the convention’s end, the Florida men had brokered a deal

for Bolles to buy 108,000 acres in the Everglades from a

land grant corporation. Bolles then agreed to buy another

500,000 acres from the Internal Improvement Fund for $1

million, the same amount Disston had paid for eight times

as much land. Once again, the deal rescued the fund from a

financial crisis. But Disston had pledged to drain the

Everglades on his own. Bolles got the state to pledge to do

the job for him.

Broward and his fellow trustees promised to dredge at

least four major diagonal canals from Lake Okeechobee

through the Everglades and the coastal ridge, following the

natural outlets of the transverse glades. The canals would

empty out to sea through the Miami River in Miami, New

River in Fort Lauderdale, Hillsboro River in Boca Raton, and

Lake Worth in West Palm Beach. They would drain Lake

Okeechobee as well as the Everglades marshes, allowing

the development of millions of acres. The trustees also

agreed to expand Disston’s short canal west to the

Caloosahatchee and out to the Gulf, which would lower the

lake even faster. The long-awaited canal east to the St.

Lucie was delayed yet again, but the state finally had an

official drainage plan with a designated funding source.

Bolles declared the project was bringing “a magnificent

development to Florida.” Broward boasted that “all doubt of

its ultimate success has been removed.”

Frank Stoneman continued to sound alarms about the

“glittering promises” of Everglades drainage. He had little

interest in preserving the Everglades—his daughter, Marjory

Stoneman Douglas, would feel differently one day—but he

fretted about “a large number of dissatisfied people

charging this community with being a set of swindlers.” He

suggested that “the hysterical enthusiasts should at least

leave a few words to express their wonder, amazement,

surprise, astonishment, admiration, gratification, pleasure,

delight and thankfulness” for the first shred of evidence that

the project would work. But that evidence seemed to arrive

when the state plan was endorsed by the federal drainage

engineer investigating the Everglades—the ultimate rebuttal

to the knockers.

The Wright Track

CHARLES ELLIOTT, CHIEF of the U.S. Department of

Agriculture’s new drainage bureau, had written an

ingratiating letter to Governor Broward immediately after

the 1904 election, offering the federal government’s help in

reclaiming the Everglades. “You are directing attention to

the value of millions of acres which have from time

immemorial been regarded as irredeemable and a menace

to the healthfulness of the State,” Elliott wrote. “The

reclamation of this area is of no little importance, not only to

the State but to other sections of the country.” Broward had

welcomed the bureau’s assistance, and President

Roosevelt’s agriculture secretary, James Wilson, had assured

him that federal engineers would be glad to help study how,

not whether, the Everglades could be drained.

Broward did not really want an investigation of the

Everglades, just a rubber-stamp federal endorsement for his

drainage plans. But Elliott, who had written two textbooks

on drainage, demonstrated an inconvenient penchant for

objectivity; he believed in drainage, but he considered the

drainage of the Everglades as difficult as it was desirable.

Elliott had the gall to suggest that reclamation could cost

$50 an acre, and that Broward was “carrying this matter

forward in a very energetic and possibly arbitrary manner.”

Elliott was a fastidious, apolitical engineer, a by-the-book

bureaucrat who kept a private supply of pencils for

nonofficial use. He was no rubber stamp.

Fortunately for Broward, the lead investigator on the

Everglades study was one of Elliott’s underlings, James

Wright, a former high school math teacher with no formal

engineering training and none of Elliott’s ethical qualms.

Wright’s main talent was speech-making; the bureau often

sent him around the country to deliver lectures about the

wonders of drainage. When he did oversee surveys, he

routinely accepted gratuities from landowners and drainage

companies. He once appeared before North Carolina’s

legislature as a federal official to lobby for the sale of a lake

bed, neglecting to mention that he had lined up $45,000 in

kickbacks—twenty times his annual government salary—

that were contingent on the sale.

Wright was a smooth political operator in a world of

engineering nerds, and he was happy to do Governor

Broward’s bidding in the Everglades. Shortly after he began

working in Florida, he tipped off a Broward aide and

drainage lobbyist named J. A. Dapray that railroad men were

giving members of Congress tours of other southeastern

swamplands. “Mr. Wright is afraid that the federal drainage

force which he had hoped to have at work in Florida may be

sent to the northern Louisiana and Arkansas section, and he

himself may be ordered there in charge,” Dapray warned

Broward in a letter marked “Important and Confidential.”

“This in Mr. W’s opinion would be fraught with very serious

consequences to the drainage plans in Florida, and beside

would prevent his carrying out his ambitions to help you in

the great work of draining the Everglades.”

Dapray urged the governor to do whatever he could to

keep Wright in charge, predicting a big political payoff:

“With Mr. W. at the head, I can foresee for you a great

change in public sentiment in the sections that have

opposed your plans, and there would be a great tidal wave

of popularity that could…sweep you from the Executive

Office into the U.S. Senate.” Clearly, the rubber stamp had

arrived. “I feel sure he can be trusted as a loyal friend of

Florida drainage and yourself,” Dapray wrote.

With Broward’s help, Wright retained control of the

Florida study, and made little effort to conceal his support

for Broward’s project. He gave a booster-style speech in

Miami before his survey was even complete, announcing

that there were “no engineering difficulties to overcome in

the draining of the Everglades.” And in March 1909, Wright

released some predictably rosy excerpts of his report to

Florida officials and land developers—before his bosses in

the drainage bureau had even seen it.

The Wright report declared reclamation to be perfectly

feasible, endorsed Broward’s plans, and seconded the

governor’s $1-an-acre cost estimate. Wright predicted that

Everglades muck would produce America’s most prolific

crops without a pound of fertilizer. And he suggested that

Florida could use its canals for dry-season irrigation as well

as wet-season drainage. Everglades land companies quickly

began citing the Wright report in advertisements promoting

the Everglades as the “Tropical Paradise,” the “Land of

Destiny,” “Nature’s Gift to Florida.” They promised “the

richest land available,” thanks to a project “assured to be

thorough and complete.” They argued that since a federal

engineer “cannot afford to give out an exaggerated

statement, his valuation of the land should be accepted as

conclusive proof that the buyers of Everglades [farms] hold

the most valuable assets obtainable.” Bolles paid a Kansas

City firm $400,000 to help his Florida Fruit Lands Company

advertise the “Poor Man’s Paradise,” the “Land of

Opportunity,” the “Magnet Whose Climate and Agriculture

Will Bring the Human Flood.” His ads even quoted Secretary

Wilson warning that “doubting Thomases who were waiting

for the Everglades to develop before buying would regret it

all their lives.”

That Wilson quotation was probably phony, but the

Wright report was real, and the federal seal of approval was

like an engineering endorsement from God. Even the

skeptical Frank Stoneman had to admit that “the tentative

experiments that have been made seem to point to the

eventual success of drainage.” Magazines predicted that the

Everglades would soon supply winter vegetables to every

American east of the Rockies, that its downpours would

“disappear within a few minutes.” William Jennings Bryan

declared the project “one of the greatest enterprises on

record.”

By 1909, the state had dug only thirteen miles of canals,

less than one-sixth of Disston’s output. But John Gifford

announced that the time for debate was over: “The

drainage of the Everglades is well under way, and almost

every unprejudiced person who visits this work becomes an

enthusiastic convert. This is no idle dream or wild land

scheme, but a feasible, practical piece of good business…. It

is not a complex engineering problem; it is merely a matter

of digging, so that the water in this great Everglades basin

can flow into the sea.”

AFTER WRIGHT’S ENCOURAGING words leaked into view,

major Everglades landowners finally agreed to support the

drainage project with 5-cents-an-acre taxes. In exchange,

the state agreed to turn the project over to a private

contractor, and to hire Wright as Florida’s chief engineer at

twice his federal salary. “We do not believe a more

competent, honest, energetic and thorough man could be

found than Mr. Wright,” a legislative committee enthused.

The new contractor purchased the state’s four dredges,

added five of its own, and pledged to speed up the work to

excavate 200 miles of canals by 1913. After a cursory

review, Wright announced that Broward’s original plan

would proceed without revisions.

The Broward Era was back on track. “There is no ‘if’ nor

‘but’ nor ‘maybe,’ ” one booster publication declared. “The

reclamation of the Everglades does not depend upon the life

or the promise of any one man or any one corporation. IT IS

BASED ON THE PLEDGE OF A STATE.” The land syndicates

dispatched propagandists across the nation to promote that

pledge, promising “the greatest opportunity of the century,”

highlighting “the evident cooperation of the Government.”

The Florida Everglades Land Sales Company sponsored an

Everglades lecture series by the editor-turned-promoter

Thomas Will, published Everglades books by the

conservationist John Gifford and the farmer Walter Waldin,

and distributed Florida Everglades Review and Everglade

Magazine “to report on the progress of America’s Latest

Empire.”

“The Great West of Horace Greeley’s day no longer

exists,” read the company’s brochures. “Were Greeley alive

he would now say: Go South, Young Man, Go South!”

Even Flagler’s Florida East Coast Homeseeker, which had

attacked the drainage project for years, now printed a

special Everglades edition with a dredge on its cover,

featuring articles titled “America’s Winter Garden,” “An

Irrigation System Designed by Nature,” and “Cities in the

Everglades—Why Not?” The Homeseeker predicted that

within a decade, the population of the new Palm Beach

County would skyrocket from 5,000 to 750,000: “It is hard to

keep within the bounds of belief in foretelling the future…as

the possibilities here are greater than in any other part of

the Union. The resources are unlimited and the

opportunities unsurpassed.”

UNFORTUNATELY FOR BROWARD, the Wright report was not

done in time to sweep him into the Senate in 1908. He was

narrowly defeated by Duncan Fletcher, who had worked as a

railroad lawyer and had railroad support but managed to

portray Broward as the railroad candidate, accusing him of

settling Flagler’s land claims on Flagler’s terms. Fletcher

also distributed brochures warning that “Broward’s Drainage

Scheme Will Bankrupt the State,” lambasting the governor

for plowing ahead without planning or funding after his

constituents rejected his drainage amendment.

But that was just campaign talk. Senator Fletcher

became a loyal supporter of Broward’s drainage scheme

after the election, pulling strings to get Congress to publish

the full Wright report in 1911, a promotional masterstroke

that implied the entire federal government had endorsed

Florida’s reclamation project. “United States Official

Indorsement” trumpeted ads for the Florida Everglades

Land Company. “First time in the history of the Government

such a thing’s been done!” In a letter to the Everglades

promoter Thomas Will, who had helped persuade Senator

Fletcher to take on the issue, the company’s president

exulted: “It is a peach!”

Broward’s successor, Albert Gilchrist, a genial moderate

who had distanced himself from drainage and the

progressive movement during his campaign, also embraced

the project after touring the Everglades with Broward during

his transition. Gilchrist preached the gospel of the

Everglades with a convert’s fervor, and the pace of dredging

accelerated almost tenfold during his term. A natural

booster with a background in Florida real estate, Gilchrist

gave exuberant speeches around the country promoting the

Everglades, introducing himself as “the governor of a state

draining 7,488 square miles.”

“Opposition is rapidly disappearing,” wrote the editor of

the Miami Metropolis. “On the Glade land, with a little

intelligence and application, a man may get larger returns

on less capital than in any business that I know anywhere.”

Here was a dream world where pioneers could drop peels in

the soil and watch potatoes sprout, where “sunstrokes and

heat prostrations have never been known,” where the

drainage question, in John Gifford’s scientific opinion, was

no longer a question at all: “It is a question only in the

minds of doubting Thomases who are prejudiced, who are

ignorant or who belittle every project in which they have no

hand and out of which they can make no rake-off.”

IN FACT, drainage was still a question in the minds of some

federal engineers, as a U.S. Department of Agriculture form

letter made clear. Distributed to all prospective investors

who requested information on the Everglades, the

mimeographed circular warned that land values were “still

largely problematical.” It also cautioned that drained

mucklands could be highly flammable, and usually required

fertilizers to support crops. “Undoubtedly much time will yet

be required before any considerable areas will be habitable

and fit for cultivation,” the letter said.

In other words, the department was alerting the public

not to believe the Wright report—until the letter was

abruptly withdrawn from circulation.

“I Call It Graft”

BROWARD AND JENNINGS continued to promote the

Everglades after leaving the public sector. Both former

governors took jobs with Dicky Bolles—Jennings as a lawyer,

Broward as a celebrity spokesman. As the public face of

Everglades drainage, Broward was paid $400 a month to

provide testimonials for Florida Fruit Lands holdings. “I

believe this Company is thoroughly responsible and reliable,

and will comply with whatever representations or

propositions they may make to you,” he wrote one prospect.

Never disclosing his own connection to the company, he told

a North Carolina man that its Everglades lands were so good

—and so certain to be reclaimed within two years—that he

was buying some himself. Broward also peddled his name to

the rival Florida Everglades Land Sales Company for $1,000,

authorizing its officers to use the letter he had been sending

on behalf of Bolles with one significant change: “You may

strike out the words ‘Florida Fruit Lands Co.’ and it will imply

to the Everglade lands owned by any company.”

Broward stopped working for Bolles to run for Senate

again in 1910. But the relationship became an issue when

one of his Democratic primary opponents, a muckraking

editor named Claude L’Engle, revealed that Broward and

Jennings had received lucrative payoffs from Bolles while

they were still in office. Bolles had given both progressive

stalwarts 27,000 acres of land—a parcel approximately the

size of Boston for each. “Some call this a bonus,” L’Engle

said. “I call it graft.”

Broward claimed the tracts were “commissions” the

politicians had earned by brokering Bolles’s private 108,000-

acre land deal at the 1908 convention, and insisted the work

had nothing to do with their public duties. “I had a right to

do it,” he said. “There’s no legal or moral law against a

governor making a real estate transaction.” But real estate

brokers rarely receive 50 percent commissions. The more

plausible explanation was that Bolles bribed his new friends

to ensure favorable terms for his subsequent 500,000-acre

purchase from the fund, a transaction directly related to

their public duties. Jennings, in fact, drew up the contract for

that deal, and excused himself as the fund’s counsel so that

he could represent Bolles at the hearing where it was

approved; his temporary substitute, the state’s attorney

general, ended up on the Bolles payroll as well.

The people did not care. Despite gallstone attacks that

limited his campaign, and a new allegation of a $24,500

cash kickback from Bolles, Broward fought off L’Engle on his

left and a procorporation incumbent on his right to capture

the primary. Even if Broward had made some rake-off,

voters did not believe his passion for Everglades

reclamation was motivated by anything but a genuine

desire to develop south Florida. They knew Broward had

envisioned an American Italy rising out of the swamp, and

they had every reason to believe his impossible dream was

about to become a reality. Even L’Engle, in the same speech

that accused Broward of rank corruption, conceded that his

drainage project was a marvelous achievement, that history

would revere him long after his mistakes were forgotten,

that there were not enough bricks in Florida to build a

monument tall enough to do him justice. “If Broward had the

good fortune to be located in one of our north-central

states,” one admirer wrote, “without a question of a doubt

he would be elected president.”

BROWARD NEVER DID become president, or even senator.

He died suddenly after another gallstone attack before he

could take office. He was fifty-three. “The stunning and

hardly comprehensible announcement…fell with the same

awesome effect that the sudden death of a near relative

would bring,” reported the Metropolis.

L’Engle was right: Broward’s graft was instantly

forgotten, and he was mourned across the state as “a great

man in every sense of the word.” Even his antagonists at

the Times-Union saluted “his brain, his force, his power,”

and the Fort Lauderdale area—which had planned to call

itself Everglades County—decided on Broward County

instead. He was eulogized as a public servant of modest

means, although his widow later netted a $167,500 profit

from the land he had received from Bolles, the equivalent of

$2 million in 2005 dollars.

Governor Broward reorganized Florida’s universities,

banned child labor in its factories, expanded its roads, and

erected more state buildings than all his predecessors

combined. But his most important legacy was his

Everglades project—not only his four canals, but his no-

turning-back attitude. Most Floridians had already accepted

that the Everglades ought to be drained, but Broward made

them believe that it must be drained, and would be drained.

Florida now had a plan, with the money and the will to

execute it. A month after Broward’s death, the fund sold

50,000 acres in the Everglades for $15 an acre—sixty times

what Disston had paid three decades earlier, and seven and

a half times what Bolles had paid before Broward sent

dredges into the swamp. The deal, Governor Gilchrist said,

“placed the fund on Easy Street, with ample funds to

complete the work.” The Everglades land rush that Broward

had always envisioned could now begin.

“The Florida Everglades will be dry in two years—that is

the latest Big Fact for farmers,” Flagler’s Homeseeker

declared. “There is no longer any doubt about this

enterprise.” A Florida legislative report officially concluded

that the Everglades would soon be the garden spot of the

world, and that its farmers would never have to fear frost,

drought, or flood: “Your committee is of the opinion that the

drainage operation will ultimately be a great success, and is

one of the greatest undertakings of the age.”

MEANWHILE, FLAGLER SPENT his twilight years on his own

great undertaking, his overseas railroad to Key West. He put

a dozen dredges and as many as 4,000 men on the job, far

more than the Everglades ever had. Three hurricanes

ravaged his construction sites, killing 140 men and wiping

out huge chunks of track. The Roosevelt administration

indicted his railroad for peonage in 1907, charging that

workers were being held in the wilderness against their will.

But the charges were eventually dropped, and the old man

eventually proved his doubters wrong.

Flagler was eighty-two when he rode the first train to Key

West. He was nearly deaf and blind, but he was still

mentally keen. Long reviled as a rapacious robber baron, he

was now hailed as a conquering hero, a living embodiment

of progress. Thousands of citizens chanted for Uncle Henry;

his workers gave him a plaque; a children’s choir sang in his

honor. “I can hear the children, but I cannot see them,”

Flagler whispered, overcome with emotion. Governor

Gilchrist compared the railway to the Panama Canal, and

one reporter compared Flagler to Moses, raising his rod and

parting the sea. “Now I can die happy,” Flagler said. A year

later, he did.

Flagler was wrong about Key West. It was too small to

become a great port, and too isolated to become anything

more than a funky tourist attraction in the automotive age.

The overseas railway was a financial disaster, and in 1935,

it would be destroyed by the most powerful hurricane in U.S.

history. It was rebuilt as the Overseas Highway.

But Flagler was right about south Florida. In his mind’s

eye, he had envisioned a flood of humanity following his

tracks down the coast. The flood was on its way.

Ten

Land by the Gallon

The real estate propaganda said: “Take a tent, a bag

of beans and a hoe, clear a few rows in the

sawgrass, plant the seed, and in six weeks you will

have an income.”…That may have provided an

income for the land offices, but the settlers found

out differently.

—Everglades settler John Newhouse

The Great Utopia

THOUSANDS OF NORTHERNERS descended on Fort

Lauderdale in the spring of 1911, transforming the piney-

woods hamlet at the mouth of the former New River—now

the North New River Canal—into a swarming tent city. “The

Village of Yesterday Today a Seething Mass of Bustling

Humanity,” one headline blared. The lines stretching out of

the post office were so long that one mail-seeker thought he

had stumbled into a bank run. One land company set up a

booth for befuddled newcomers to find their friends—and

perhaps buy some real estate in the Everglades while they

waited. That, after all, was why everyone was in town.

The visitors had arrived for the Everglades land lottery, a

gimmick concocted by Dicky Bolles, who had used similar

methods to sell parched land out west. The contestants all

agreed to pay Bolles $240 over two years, in exchange for

swampland to be chosen in a random drawing—anywhere

from ten to 640 acres in the Everglades, plus a town lot

along the coast in a planned community called Progresso.

Most of the “swamp boomers” would only receive ten acres,

but the Bolles literature had assured them that was just as

good as 100 acres of farmland up north. Journalists

proclaimed that south Florida’s long-awaited explosion of

immigration and capital was on its way. “The air of

expectancy pervading this place is equal to that possessing

a kindergarten the day before Christmas,” the Metropolis

observed.

Few of the lottery players had ever laid eyes on the

Everglades, which gave the air of expectancy a bit of a

nervous edge. But ex-Governor Jennings, still on the Bolles

payroll, reminded the crowd that the state had solemnly

promised to drain the swamp, even if it had to spend every

cent in the Internal Improvement Fund. One man asked

whether the state would cut lateral farm ditches as well as

major canals, but Jennings refused to get any more specific.

“The State’s going to drain the land,” he repeated.

He didn’t say that just because of his corporate

connections, or because of his progressive politics. He said

it because he believed it. Almost everyone believed it.

EVEN SKEPTICAL JOURNALISTS BELIEVED IT.

In April 1912, a dry month in a dry year, the Internal

Improvement board sponsored a four-day media tour of the

Everglades, showing off its canals and two farms to about

two dozen newsmen. The visitors heard from all the leading

drainage advocates, including Governor Gilchrist, ex-

Governor Jennings, Captain Rose, Dicky Bolles, Thomas Will,

and James Wright, who assured them that by year’s end the

Everglades would never overflow again. The reporters

received the same hard-sell treatment that Bolles gave his

prospective buyers, including a trip up the Caloosahatchee

River on his steamboat, Queen of the Everglades, followed

by a stay at his Bolles Hotel on Lake Okeechobee’s south

shore, the first two-story building in the Everglades. A Grand

Rapids News correspondent bought 100 acres on the spot.

One might have expected the reporters to exercise

caution before concluding that drainage was a sure thing;

the “unsinkable” Titanic had sunk a week earlier, puncturing

the era’s aura of invincibility and infinite progress. But they

all left rhapsodizing about the Everglades as “the Garden of

Eden without a serpent,” “the Great Utopia,” a cornucopia

where “you simply tickle the soil and the bounteous crops

respond to feed hungry humanity.” Several reporters

seriously suggested that Everglades knockers might be

traitors. Their glowing testimonials reveal how compelling

the project seemed to unbiased eyes:

“The most superlative adjectives are required to tell the

bare truth and to give the actual facts…. It was not my

intention to write what must sound like a land agent’s

advertisement, but one cannot begin to do justice to this

embryonic paradise without seeming unduly enthusiastic

and visionary.”

—Chicago Telegram

“Seeing is believing. Hence, to see the Everglades in their

present state, with the drainage system only partially

completed, is to believe—to be certain, for that matter—that

the absolute and complete reclamation of the Everglades is

not a possibility, but an assured fact.”

—Cleveland Plain Dealer

“I had read with the proverbial grain of salt the stories that

have come north about the results that would follow the

completion of the drainage project. Now that I have seen

what has been accomplished by the engineers, I have to

admit that the truth is more wonderful than any of the

promises and predictions I had read before visiting Florida. A

new name must be found for this land, for within a few

months The Everglades will exist no more.”

—Canada Monthly

“I can think of no sufficient expressive adjectives and will

therefore say simply that ‘Them’s my sentiments.’ Since my

return north I have been preaching the gospel of the

Everglades, and I believe every other man of the party I

accompanied is today an Everglades evangelist.”

—Sioux City Tribune

Evangelist was the right word. The imminent redemption

of the swamp was hailed as a victory of faith as well as

progress, an expression of divine will. “God made the

Everglades and He made them for a good purpose,” the

Chicago Record-Herald reporter explained. “He also made

man to discover His purposes in Nature, and it is evidenced

that man is doing so in carrying out the drainage of this

great tract of land.” It was inconceivable that a benevolent

God, after ordering mankind to take dominion over the

earth, would expect wastelands to lie fallow when they

could be transformed to feed the hungry: “Now comes man,

driven by necessity to complete God’s plan…Presto! North

America’s tropical winter garden is made ready for the

sower.” Reclamation was God’s work, and as surely as water

would flow downhill, Americans would improve the

Everglades into a Promised Land.

Seeing was believing, but it wasn’t knowing. “The

absolute and complete reclamation” of this “embryonic

paradise” was about as sure a thing as the Titanic.

Water, Water Everywhere

THE INITIAL EVERGLADES BOOM was a faith-based process,

fueled by the breezy drainage assurances of land

syndicates, state officials, and the oracular James Wright.

The market concluded that the reclamation of the

Everglades was inevitable, and Bolles and his fellow swamp

barons sold 20,000 parcels in a matter of months. But as

additional months passed without the miraculous

redemption that had been so energetically promised,

settlers and speculators began to experience a crisis of

faith. One Iowa man, after inspecting the swampland he had

purchased in the Bolles lottery, uttered the memorable line

that still haunts Florida’s real estate industry: “I have bought

land by the acre, and I have bought land by the foot; but, by

God, I have never before bought land by the gallon.” As one

Illinois school-teacher discovered while wading through the

marsh in a fruitless search for her new farm, the Everglades

still “looked like a wheat field in June until you got close.

Then you would see water, water everywhere.”

The swollen canals from Lake Okeechobee to the coast

were making floods even worse, spilling excess water from

the lake into the lower Glades during storms. When a

Chicago man named R. H. Little arrived in south Florida in

1912 to check out the Everglades, he heard a local on the

platform muttering about “another trainload of land

suckers.” Little bought anyway, but soon concluded that the

local had been right. Another pioneer called the “lurid

literature” of the land syndicates “a mass of glossy

deception,” and offered his own description of the swamp:

“The mosquitoes in the Everglades are fearful, the gnats are

blinding and the morning fog looks like a sea. There are all

kinds of snakes, every kind of bug that lives, and my folks

cannot keep the worms out of their clothes and food.”

Swamp boomers joked that they would have to attach their

plows to boats, or grow fish instead of crops; one quipped

that he couldn’t visit his land because he didn’t have

webbed feet. The Everglades became so synonymous with

unfulfilled drainage promises that the unwieldy phrase “rave

on, Everglades, we’ll get you drained someday” became the

local equivalent of “yeah, right” or “when pigs fly.” One

Miami resident summed up the plight of the swamp

boomers in a letter urging the U.S. government to ban

Everglades land sales. Every day, she wrote,

some poor, deluded victim arrives here in Miami to find the

acres which he has bought, and which have been described

to him as a very gold mine for productiveness, as much as

eight feet under water, and with no present prospect of that

water disappearing. These land companies are flooding the

country, especially the Middle West, with the most fabulous

misrepresentations. We who live here know how absolutely

cruel are the sufferings of these misguided creatures. The

Everglades may be drained some day, but that day has not

arrived.

The misguided creatures began suing Bolles, who stood

to clear more than $2 million in profits from his lottery; one

newspaper decried his scheme as “one of the biggest land

swindles in history.” Federal prosecutors in Kansas City

indicted Bolles and other Florida land promoters for mail

fraud, accusing them of falsely assuring midwesterners that

drainage would be complete by 1913, and that Everglades

soils were so fertile they could be sold as fertilizer. Even the

fund’s trustees began to distance themselves from the land

rush, claiming they had “nothing whatever to do with these

companies, know nothing of their plans, methods of selling

or contracting to sell their holdings” and “cannot in any way

endorse or recommend any private enterprise.”

Still, a parade of current and former Florida officials

traveled to Missouri to testify for the defendants and defend

the honor of the Everglades. They insisted the state was still

committed to reclaiming it, and complained that the main

stumbling block was the “agitations and

misrepresentations” generated by the trials, which were

slowing down the land sales they needed to finance the

drainage work. “I read something not so long ago about

there being six feet of water on some of your streets here in

Kansas City when you had a flood,” ex-Governor Gilchrist

sniped on the stand. If public officials were still promoting

the Everglades as an imminent paradise, the promoters

asked, how could it have been a crime for them to say the

same thing? Bolles only bought his land after the state

promised to drain it, and only sold it after the Wright report

declared that the drainage plan would work. One judge

tossed out his indictment, agreeing that he had simply

relied on official drainage assurances, declaring that “the

action of Mr. Bolles throughout the entire transaction is that

of an honest man.”

The Bolles indictment was later reinstated, and several of

his fellow promoters were convicted by midwestern juries.

But most of them had only echoed the assurances of the

government. Bolles was an incorrigible wheeler-dealer, and

his initial intentions were far from pure, but he ended up

believing in the Everglades as strongly as any of the buyers

he had supposedly swindled. He died before his case could

go to trial, but to the end, he was still buying land in the

Everglades, and still predicting a spectacular boom. It

turned out that the most flagrant Everglades swindle was

the Wright report.

What Wright Got Wrong

THE U.S. HOUSE COMMITTEE on Expenditures in the

Department of Agriculture was not known as a marquee

congressional panel, but in 1912, its investigation of the

department’s role in promoting the Everglades land rush

attracted breathless newspaper coverage in forty-three

states. “If the people want to be humbugged, I am perfectly

willing to let them be humbugged,” said Congressman Frank

Clark of Florida, who requested the hearings, “but not by a

partnership between a great government and land

speculators.” The Everglades hearings produced 1,759

pages of testimony, with scandalous revelations almost

daily. It came out that Secretary Wilson had scuttled the

form letter warning about “problematic” land values under

pressure from Everglades promoters like Thomas Will and

ex-Governor Broward. Wright confessed that on at least four

occasions, he had accepted under-the-table “commissions”

from interested parties while conducting government

surveys in North Carolina, lamely explaining that he hadn’t

read the department’s ethics rules. The press also

chronicled the entertaining feud between Governor Gilchrist,

who showed up uninvited to denounce the hearings as a

conspiracy to discredit the Everglades, and Congressman

Clark, who responded that the governor was a pinhead.

But the central drama of the hearings was the story of

Wright’s wildly enthusiastic report about Everglades

drainage, and how it got foisted upon the public. The

hearings revealed that by the time Elliott got to see the

report, Wright had already circulated the giddiest excerpts

among Everglades land companies, allowing them to claim

the imprimatur of the department. “With only a cursory

examination in the field and no critical review in the office,

engineering plans for this vast reclamation work—the

largest drainage project in the world—were favorably

recommended to the public, bearing the approval of the

Department of Agriculture,” the committee noted.

That would not have been a problem if the report had

been solid. But Elliott quickly realized that it sounded more

like a real estate promotion than a technical evaluation. And

a bright young engineer in the drainage bureau, Arthur

Morgan, recognized that Wright’s problems extended far

beyond irrational exuberance; he was also “completely

incompetent as an engineer.” So Elliott rewrote the report,

softening its cheerleading tone and removing some of the

more glaring errors. But Secretary Wilson then refused to

publish the corrected version, saying he was fed up with the

Everglades. “I don’t want you to say anything more about

the Everglades to anybody—not a thing,” he told Elliott.

“The state and those people down there are engaged in a

promotion scheme, and we don’t want to have anything to

do with it.”

It was too late for that. Thanks to Wright, the department

was already on record as endorsing the Everglades drainage

project. The department’s involvement only deepened after

Thomas Will slipped a copy of Wright’s original report to

Senator Fletcher, who got it published in its entirety as a

congressional document—even though the leaders of the

drainage bureau had already rejected and rewritten it. And

when Elliott had the temerity to complain, Wright pulled

strings at the department to get the squeaky-clean Elliott

and his top lieutenant fired for trumped-up financial

irregularities. “The Everglade interest is all-powerful,” Elliott

later wrote. “I see now that a nice good report would have

been worth a lot of money to me.”

THE SIX MONTHS of hearings produced only circumstantial

evidence that Wright had been rewarded financially for his

“nice good report.” But they provided damning evidence

that the report was a mess of bad data, bad analysis, and

bad recommendations, and that reclaiming the Everglades

would be much harder than Florida’s leaders thought.

Wright’s most obvious mistake was radically

underestimating the canal capacity needed to drain the

Everglades. Wright’s proposed canals were much too

shallow, too narrow, and too few. That’s because he

designed them to remove a maximum of ten millimeters of

rain in a day—even though gauges in Fort Myers had once

recorded 297 millimeters in a day. Wright made his

calculations by assuming a constant daily rainfall, ignoring

the region’s dramatic fluctuations between flood and

drought. So he underestimated how much rain would fall

and how much would need to be removed, and

overestimated how much would evaporate. Morgan noted

that if his outlandish evaporation predictions had been

correct, Lake Okeechobee would have dried up without

human intervention.

Wright’s second error was expecting the same gravity

canals to provide irrigation as well as drainage, as if water

would flow wherever it was needed whenever it was needed

without prompting. Without powerful pumps capable of

moving water in a hurry, Morgan warned, south Florida

would remain at the mercy of the weather. If Lake

Okeechobee were kept low for drainage purposes, an

unexpected drought could parch Everglades farmland and

ignite muck fires. And if the lake were kept high for irrigation

purposes, a sudden storm could drown Everglades farmland

and create floods in the new communities downstream.

Wright also dramatically underestimated the cost of

drainage, not only by omitting pumps and lowballing the

necessary canal capacity, but by predicting ludicrously low

dredging costs that turned out to be less than one-fifth the

actual cost. Wright also ignored the high cost of maintaining

canals, a problem exacerbated by the gentle gradient of the

Everglades, which produced currents too slow for the canals

to scour themselves out, and by the explosive proliferation

of the water hyacinth, an attractive but invasive weed that

had clogged almost all the state’s waterways since a well-

intentioned gardener named Mrs. Fuller imported it to

Florida in 1884.

Morgan found other serious errors as well. Wright

assumed that five-foot-deep canals would carry five feet of

water; in fact, there was a two-foot difference between

depth of cut and depth of flow, which meant the actual

capacity of Wright’s proposed canals would be much less

than his estimated capacity. Wright also discounted the risk

of “subsidence,” the possibility that drained Everglades soils

would burn up or blow away, which would further diminish

the capacity of his canals. And while Wright did admit that

additional lateral canals and farm ditches would be needed

to drain individual properties, the state had no plans to dig

them or pay for them. How were thousands of Illinois

schoolteachers supposed to coordinate the drainage of their

ten-acre farms?

IN AUGUST, THE COMMITTEE released its report on the

Everglades fiasco, concluding that Wright’s conduct “cannot

be too severely condemned.” Elliott got his job back with a

pay increase, and Wright had to quit his state job

overseeing the drainage work. But Elliott never recovered

his health after his ordeal, and Wright made a soft landing,

getting hired by the contractor whose work he had been

overseeing.

Wright blamed his newfound notoriety on “a bitter and

acrimonious political campaign” to slander the Everglades.

“This tirade of abuse and misrepresentation has placed the

entire project and everyone connected with it in a false

light; it has created dissatisfaction among the many

purchasers of Everglades lands; it has destroyed the

confidence in the project to such an extent that the future of

the work is jeopardized,” he wrote. It never occurred to

Wright that the lost confidence of the purchasers might

have anything to do with the submerged condition of their

land. He insisted he was “more firmly convinced than ever

that the plan of reclamation adopted by the State and now

being carried out is the best and most economical one that

could have been selected.”

Not even the land syndicates believed that anymore. The

Florida Everglades Land Sales Company—which had

aggressively championed the Wright report, and had helped

get it published by the Senate—now commissioned its own

independent review by three hydraulic engineers. Their

secret assessment was even harsher than the House

committee’s, declaring that Wright’s original version was

“totally inadequate to accomplish the drainage of the

Everglades,” and that even Elliott’s revised version was “still

too optimistic.” The consultants agreed that reclamation

was feasible, but concluded that the capacity of Wright’s

proposed canals would have to be expanded at least 800 to

1,200 percent—not including the extra capacity needed to

provide separate canals for irrigation as well as drainage,

and to compensate for the expected “shrinkage” of as much

as 40 percent of the muck in the Everglades. They warned

that private landowners would still have to build additional

dikes, ditches, and pumps in order to make agriculture

profitable in the Everglades, and rejected Governor

Broward’s Jeffersonian dream of small farms as

economically unrealistic for the Everglades. Echoing Captain

Rose’s suggestions to Henry Flagler, the consultants also

recommended piece-by-piece reclamation rather than an

all-at-once approach, urging the company to wall off and

drain its own land immediately, instead of waiting for the

state to reclaim the entire swamp.

Finally, the consultants recognized that controlling Lake

Okeechobee and draining the Everglades were two separate

problems. They urged the state to rely exclusively on direct

east–west canals to the St. Lucie and Caloosahatchee to

reduce lake levels and prevent overflows to the Everglades,

so that the long diagonal canals through the marsh could be

used solely to carry away local rainfall, and would no longer

worsen floods downstream. Water does run downhill, but in

the Everglades, there wasn’t enough downhill to carry huge

volumes of water all the way from the lake to the sea.

The consultants’ report was a remarkably gloomy

document, considering that their client had been one of the

loudest voices in the Everglades choir just a few months

earlier. But the scandals had brought the land rush to a

screeching halt, and the syndicates were as unsure as

anyone about the future of their holdings. Everglade

Magazine warned that “under no circumstances should any

purchaser make any arrangements to migrate to the Glades

until we advise him that his land is ready for occupancy.”

After his run-ins with prosecutors, even Bolles revised his

brochures, blacking out suggestions that fertilizer would be

unnecessary in the Everglades. Florida swampland was now

a national punch line, lampooned in cartoons of befuddled

suckers touring their underwater farms, and helpless

widows handing their life savings to land sharks. National

magazines published tales like “The Plunderer: A Story of

the Florida Everglades,” and booster publications

complained that “in many localities in the North, the mere

mention of the term ‘Florida Everglades’ suggests a

swindle.”

As the real estate market fizzled, swamp boomers

stopped making land payments, syndicates stopped paying

drainage taxes, and the Internal Improvement Fund nearly

went broke again, dipping below $24,000 in reserves. It was

becoming clear that draining the Everglades would not be

quick, cheap, or easy after all.

Back to Broward

TO RESTORE CONFIDENCE in the Everglades, Florida needed

a credible new drainage plan. In 1913, it outsourced the job

to sixty-five-year-old Isham Randolph, one of America’s

best-respected hydraulic engineers. Randolph had served on

the Panama Canal board and had helped recommend its

design. He had also overseen the Chicago Drainage Canal, a

gargantuan project best remembered for reversing the flow

of the Chicago River.

In October, Randolph’s Everglades Engineering

Commission published an impressive-looking report, stuffed

with hundreds of pages of maps and meteorological charts.

Its strongest recommendation was a familiar one: a massive

canal to send water east from Lake Okeechobee into the St.

Lucie River and out to sea. Both Hamilton Disston’s chief

engineer and Governor Broward had initially proposed this

as a first step, to end overflows from the lake into the

Everglades, and the land company’s consultants had

recommended it as a next step, to relieve pressure on the

diagonal canals. The commission agreed that Lake

Okeechobee was the key point of attack, that controlling

lake levels was a separate problem from draining

Everglades rainfall, and that the St. Lucie Canal was the way

to solve it. “Without that canal,” Randolph wrote to ex-

Governor Jennings, “the efforts now being expended are a

sheer waste of money.” The commission noted that the St.

Lucie Canal would also fulfill the Menéndez dream of a

shipping shortcut across the peninsula, which was

reasonable, and even suggested that it could power a

hydroelectric plant, which was not.

The commission also agreed that much more canal

capacity would be needed to drain the torrential rainfall in

the Everglades. The Miami and North New River Canals were

complete; the Hillsboro and West Palm Beach Canals were

under way, along with several smaller ditches to the

Atlantic. But the Randolph commission proposed an

extensive latticework of additional canals to suck the

peninsula dry—some parallel to the main southeastern

ones, some draining southwest to the Gulf along Shark

Slough and other outlets. The commission also explicitly

warned that even these canals would not complete the job;

private landowners would have to dig and maintain ditches

on their own properties as well, or else the Everglades

would soon “revert to the swamp conditions which now

prevail.”

The Randolph commission estimated that the project

would ultimately cost $24.6 million, twelve times what the

state had spent so far. Still, its report was relatively upbeat,

describing Everglades drainage as “entirely practicable” and

the cost per acre as “very small.” It predicted that muck

soils would subside less than eight inches, which was wrong,

and it asserted that “in the Everglades violent floods are

inconceivable,” which was tragically wrong. And even

though Randolph privately harbored doubts about the

Broward Era canals, his report claimed they were “worth…

every dollar that they have cost,” and would “serve a useful

purpose in the great scheme of reclamation upon which the

State has embarked; a scheme which has only to be carried

to completion to make fertile fields of a watery waste and a

populous land where now no man dwells.”

It was a delicate moment for the project, and Randolph

didn’t want to sink it. In fact, Randolph formed an

Everglades engineering company, and became one of the

project’s leading boosters.

THE RANDOLPH COMMISSION did provide a modest reality

check for the Broward Era. But in the wake of the land scam

indictments and the Wright report, its barely measured

optimism and ambitious reclamation plan allowed the

Broward Era to continue. It gave the land syndicates enough

confidence to pay drainage taxes again, which gave the

state enough confidence to float bonds to try to finance the

project.

Bond buyers had been scared away by the Everglades

scandals, so the dredging work still lagged far behind

schedule. In 1915, impatient drainage boosters organized

the Back to Broward League, clamoring for the state to

hurry up and fulfill the late governor’s dream. In a pamphlet

with Broward’s photograph on the cover, over the caption

“Florida’s Favorite Son,” the league argued that “we are

actually losing thousands of settlers each year through the

odium attached to the Everglades operations.” One cartoon

portrayed masses of potential pioneers turning their backs

on the swamp: “They Came to Boost, but Went Away to

Knock When They Found the Glades Not Drained as

Promised.” Another depicted baby egrets asking their

mother when they would have to move out of the

Everglades. “Not during the present administration,” the

bird replied.

But the Back to Broward movement never gained much

political traction, because the establishment was already

committed to Broward’s dream. Florida officials were eager

to drain the swamp and replace its egrets with people. The

scandals bogged down their work and ended their

guarantees of overnight success, but they gradually

proceeded with their new plan, led by a new engineer who

personified Florida’s slightly chastened but generally

undaunted attitude toward drainage.

WRIGHT’S REPLACEMENT WAS a thirty-four-year-

old Tallahassee native named Fred Cotten Elliot, a trim,

clean-cut engineer with a military bearing, a Wall Street

haircut, and a formidable aura of confidence and

competence. He was the kind of bureaucrat who always

seemed indispensable, even when things went wrong on his

watch, which they often did.

Elliot finished twelfth in his class at the Virginia Military

Institute, one spot ahead of a cadet named George Marshall,

then toiled as a civil engineer in the subways of New York

City and the mines of Mexico and the American West. But he

had always dreamed of returning home to Tallahassee to

help develop Florida, and the Everglades job was a perfect

fit. He would serve fourteen governors, and would still be

working to drain the Everglades when his old VMI classmate

was launching the Marshall Plan to revive Europe after World

War II. Elliot led the first comprehensive survey of the

Everglades, designed an early version of the “swamp

buggies” that are still driven in the Everglades, and

engineered many of the canals that still crisscross the

Everglades.

Elliot was a conservationist who loved to go hunting,

fishing, and boating, but the kind of conservationist who

believed in developing natural landscapes, especially those

with the economic potential of the Everglades. Like Wright,

he was sure that the reclamation of the Everglades was not

only feasible but inevitable, and that the swamp was

destined to become as valuable as America’s richest gold

mines. “The wonderful lands which you are now rescuing

from inundation will become, when drained, a national asset

of great value, inexhaustible and perpetual,” Elliot said in a

1913 speech in West Palm Beach. “This great but as yet

undeveloped resource…will continue to develop and

advance with ever-increasing fruitfulness. The limit of its

possibilities can scarcely be measured.”

But unlike Wright, Elliot cautioned that the Everglades

would not be safe for settlement until the drainage project

was complete. The marsh might look dry in the winter dry

season, he warned, but it was foolish to expect it to stay dry

in the summer rainy season. He wished he could keep

people out of the Everglades until it was truly prepared for

cultivation, fretting that “notwithstanding the catastrophes

which are liable to occur…many settlers are swarming to

that section.

“Those who rush in, regardless of these uncertain

conditions,” Elliott said, “should bear in mind that the blame

lies with their own folly and impatience, and not with the

drainage scheme. I wish you would bear that point in mind.”

Hope City

SETTLERS WEREN’T REALLY SWARMING into the Everglades.

But they were starting to trickle.

In the second decade of the twentieth century, as

America’s population passed the 100 million mark, a few

thousand pioneers braved the Everglades frontier, founding

muck towns with sunny names like Chosen and Utopia and

Hope City. As a settler named John Newhouse wrote in a

memoir of Okeelanta, the first community in the upper

Glades, most of the newcomers expected “a life of ease,

plenty and independence” in a frost-free, flood-free

agricultural paradise. “Then the hard work and sweating

began,” Newhouse recalled. So did the frost and floods.

The editor-turned-promoter Thomas Will was the driving

force behind Okeelanta, buying the land four miles south of

Lake Okeechobee, devising the plan for a farmer’s utopia in

the middle of nowhere. His son Lawrence, later a folksy

“Cracker historian,” was one of the five original pioneers

who traveled up the North New River Canal to Okeelanta in

1913. There was nothing around the canal but seven-foot

sawgrass, and the lakeshore was “blamed near vacant of

human life,” he wrote in his Cracker History of Okeechobee.

Aside from a few catfish camps and tar paper shacks, “it

was still just as the good Lord had fashioned it.” Will cursed

the brochures—some written by his father—that had

described the Everglades as almost mosquito-free: “They

came in swarms, they zinged and bored, they even brought

droves of fireflies to light up the massacre.” His father soon

moved down from Washington, and they lived together in a

twelve-by-sixteen-foot shack, toiling in the squishy black

soil, battling “the muck and the muck itch.” Even the elder

Will, who had abandoned a comfortable life in academia,

government, and journalism to pursue his vision for the

swamp, soon realized that “farming here is not the Cock-

sure thing we may have thought.”

The pioneers who had harbored the old Everglades

dream of maximum profit for minimum work were in for a

rude awakening. They had no phones or refrigerators, and

little access to credit or labor. A trip to Fort Lauderdale for

supplies could take two days; deliveries were sporadic, and

usually came FOB—Flung Over Board. Realtors handed out

snapshots of a quaint sign one family had posted in its yard,

advertising “A Happy Home in the Everglades,” but the

Chicago transplant R. H. Little recalled the sign as a symbol

of shattered expectations. “Apparently their home was not

so happy,” he wrote in his memoir, “as they left a few

months later.”

The settlers had to brave a wilderness squirming with

snakes, gators, and lizards. One of Okeelanta’s first women

was particularly unnerved by the blue-tailed skinks that

scurried around her palmetto-thatched shack. “Jim says

don’t kill any, they are wonderful bug killers,” she wrote in

her diary. “So far they have not depleted the supply of

roaches.” Insects were the central fact of pioneer life, even

more than loneliness or shortages. “If ’n a man was to put

his mind to it, I reckon that a plumb book could be written

about the insects that used to infest these Everglades,”

Lawrence Will recalled.

There were redbugs in the custard apple woods, while hard-

shelled, thousand-legged worms covered the sawgrass

ground. We had flying ants with red hot feet which came in

swarms on windless, muggy afternoons, when you felt

plumb beat up anyway. There were yellow gnats that didn’t

bite, but filled your eyes, your nose, your ears, buzzing like

a swarm of bees, deerflies which picked out a shady place

under your hat brim or your chin, and bored in until you

swatted him; and in the spring time, horseflies, good golly,

how they could bite; and naturally, all summer long,

mosquitoes by blue millions.

The glowing descriptions of the Everglades as a miracle

garden also turned out to be a stretch. Farming the swamp

was a bitter struggle, and most early settlers in the upper

Glades were northerners with little agricultural experience;

the southerners who hunted and fished around the lake

called them Dumb City Dudes. Their mules sank into the

soft muck, and a sixteen-foot-long amphibious tractor

developed for the Everglades—known as the Juggernaut—

also turned out to be useless. In the marshes, the settlers

had to hack down the sawgrass with scythes or machetes,

then yank out the roots with hoes or potato hooks, then try

to burn it away without igniting the precious soil. In the

richer custard apple (or pond apple) belt that lined the

lake’s southern shore, they had to clear and burn an even

more forbidding jungle of gnarled trees and thorny shrubs.

It could take a farmer two months to prepare an acre of

the Everglades for planting, and preparation was no

guarantee of success. Three weeks after Newhouse arrived,

for instance, a cold snap swept through the Everglades.

Settlers tried to protect their crops by burning trash,

hanging lanterns in their fields, and covering their plants

with muck, but the frosts recurred all winter, and the

harvest was ruined. The pioneers also learned that the soot-

black organic muck that had lured them to the Everglades in

the first place was not as perfect as it looked. Beans and

tomatoes sprouted quickly, but then wilted, yellowed, and

died from a mysterious “reclaiming disease.” Marsh rabbits

devoured cabbage, blight destroyed celery, and cattle died

of malnutrition. Only potatoes flourished. In 1915, the U.S.

Department of Agriculture published a report suggesting

that most Everglades soils were ill-suited to any agriculture,

although settlers made sure to burn every available copy at

a public bonfire in Fort Lauderdale.

Many of the frontiersmen gave up and returned north.

Utopia and Hope City withered away. So did Gladesview,

Gladescrest, Fruitcrest, and Gardena. The usually upbeat

Thomas Will began to worry that any more bad publicity

about the Everglades “simply kills the whole thing—and it’s

dead enough now, Heaven knows, with a lot of the old

buyers.”

STILL, FOR PIONEERS WHO KNEW BETTER than to believe

the promises of land syndicates, and understood that

success in America’s last frontier would require hard work

and good luck, all was not lost. They learned to outfit their

mules with steel snowshoes that kept the beasts from

sinking. They discovered that the copper-based fertilizers

they had applied to their potatoes helped control reclaiming

disease. Thomas Will developed an Everglades plow, and

several manufacturers rolled out more effective Everglades

tractors with oversized wheels, rotating knives, and other

swamp accessories. And poor black laborers from the South

and the Caribbean began migrating to the Everglades to

work as field hands, allowing the white settlers to expand

their operations.

For several relatively dry years, the settlers enjoyed ideal

weather for winter vegetables, with just enough summer

rain to keep the soil moist through the growing season. Lake

Okeechobee retreated several miles, exposing its rich

bottomlands for cultivation, allowing farmers to “raise

cabbages on land which a few years ago was the home of

the turtle and the catfish.” And soaring demand for food

during World War I pumped up prices for Everglades

produce, prompting celebratory headlines in the Palm Beach

Post: “Cane, Potatoes and Corn Factors in Great Wealth of

Everglades,” “New Day Dawning in Everglades

Development,” “The Florida Everglades an Empire of Wealth

and Potency Unequaled by Any Like Area in the Country.”

The problem was getting crops from farm to market. The

first roads in the Everglades were muck piles; they were

impassable in the rainy season, and shrouded drivers in

black dust in the dry season. But soon railroads arrived to

connect the growers to civilization and consumers. James

Ingraham, whose faith in the Everglades had never dimmed,

linked Henry Flagler’s east coast line to the tiny outpost of

Tantie on Lake Okeechobee’s northeast shore, a boost for

farms as well as the local catfish, cattle, timber, and

turpentine industries. A few years later, Henry Plant’s line

pulled into Moore Haven on the lake’s southwest shore. And

prosperity followed the tracks. Within a year, Okeechobee—

the new name for Tantie—had 1,100 residents, electric

lights, and an ice plant for the catfish industry. Boosters

hyped it as the future Chicago of the South, and tried to

make it the state capital. Moore Haven became the largest

town in the Everglades, with two theaters, another ice plant,

a bank with half a million dollars in assets, and an

amazingly relentless real estate operation. “I don’t know

which was advertised more, Moore Haven or Coca Cola,”

Lawrence Will wrote.

Soon Everglades land began to sell again—not like it had

sold before the scandals, but enough to spur development.

Just before his death, Bolles laid out the town of South Bay

south of Lake Okeechobee. Moore Haven’s Marian O’Brien,

America’s first woman mayor, helped found nearby

Clewiston. William Jennings Bryan bought marshland below

the lake, as did Alton Parker, the 1904 Democratic

presidential nominee. The steel magnate Henry Phipps

bought several thousand acres east of the lake, and hired

Chicago’s city planners to design Port Mayaca. They

proposed to dig up the area’s wetlands to create artificial

lakes and inlets with names like Sapphire, Emerald, Crystal,

and Opal, then use the displaced muck to create artificial

high ground for waterfront homes and golf courses, an early

vision of the dredge-and-fill alchemy that would guide south

Florida’s future development. “I have watched the

development of the Everglades for a long time,” Phipps said.

“I have seen that once vast wilderness gradually molded

into a place of human habitation…I’d be just a trifle

ashamed of my judgment if I let an opportunity like this get

away.”

No investor was more enthusiastic about the Everglades

than William “Fingy” Conners, a foul-mouthed Buffalo

shipping tycoon who shared power over New York’s

Democratic machine with Tammany Hall. With a linebacker’s

build, a prizefighter’s nose, and a mouth “as round and

menacing as a cannon,” Conners had been renowned for his

brawling as a young longshoreman, and had built a

multimillion-dollar freight empire through similarly bare-

knuckled tactics. “There are no rules in his fighting, any

more than there used to be in his slugging days on the

Buffalo docks, unless it be the bull-rule—rush and gore and

never go back,” one reporter wrote. But for all his brutality,

Conners was a dreamer at heart; he was the inspiration for

Jiggs, the gruff but lovable Irish bricklayer-turned-millionaire

in the popular comic strip Bringing Up Father.

Conners began dreaming about the Everglades after a

trip up the West Palm Beach Canal when he was sixty years

old. He knew nothing about agriculture, but he immediately

launched the state’s largest vegetable farm near Canal Point

east of Lake Okeechobee. When that failed, he started an

even larger cattle ranch on a nearby tract he named

Connersville. When that failed, he bought another 12,000

acres of marshland. Conners explained his faith in the

swamp in a state agriculture bulletin, offering a concise

version of the Everglades creed: “Balmy sunshine,

wonderful climate…unlimited opportunities for

development, wonderful productivity…nothing like it on

earth.”

THE MOST WONDERFULLY PRODUCTIVE land in the

Everglades was in the pond apple belt, a strip of dark,

swampy, almost impenetrable jungle along the lake’s

southern rim, about fifty miles across but only two miles

wide. Before the settlers arrived, the area was dominated by

a thick forest of scraggly pond apple (or custard apple) trees

with cream-colored blossoms and yellow fruits, blanketed by

a dense mat of green moonvines that blocked out the sun.

There were also pop ash, cypress, and elders, amid lacy

ferns and gourds found nowhere else on earth. Lawrence

Will loved wandering through these moody woods, brushing

away spider-webs, “the silence broken only by a hawk’s

lonely scream.” In 1913, the noted botanist John Kunkel

Small, curator of the New York Botanical Garden, found the

area “picturesque beyond description…one of the most

beautiful spots I had seen.”

But as Will noted, the custard apples made the mistake

of growing in the most fertile soils of the Everglades,

protected from frost by the lake, “and when farmers found

this out, it was goodbye custard apples.” When Small

returned a few years later, he found that “the whole region

is a waste.” He snapped photos of a desolate landscape

littered with twisted trunks and branches; pond apple wood

was too soft to use as timber, so it was burned to expose

the spongy peat below. “The natural features of that region

are duplicated nowhere else, and unfortunately they are fast

being destroyed,” wrote Small, a Renaissance man who

identified fifty varieties of ferns in south Florida, played the

flute for the Metropolitan Opera, and counted Thomas

Edison and Henry Ford among his friends.

Small recognized that the fires were not only obliterating

the forest, but ravaging the soils underneath, accelerating

the subsidence that James Wright and Isham Randolph had

cavalierly dismissed. Fires were natural phenomena in the

Everglades, but they were normally caused by lightning

during rainstorms, and were usually limited by water tables

near or above ground level. Now they were being set by

people in dry conditions, and the combination of drought

and drainage canals was lowering water tables so drastically

that the fires were spreading underground, smoldering for

months and burning away the desiccated soils. One member

of Small’s party fell into a crater where a subterranean fire

had consumed the muck; such fires, he said, “were so

numerous that the region might well be designated ‘The

Land of A Thousand Smokes.’ ”

The naturalist Charles Torrey Simpson, who accompanied

Small on the expedition, was similarly disgusted by the

destruction of such a unique place. With a shaggy John Muir

beard and a let-it-alone John Muir worldview, the “sage of

Biscayne Bay” had protected a tropical hammock on his own

Miami property as a wilderness reserve, and he wished the

government had done the same for the pond apple swamp:

All the glamour and mystery which once surrounded the

great lake, all the wildness and loneliness…peace and

holiness are fast disappearing before the advance of the

white man’s civilization…. It should have been preserved as

a state or government reservation where its rare flora and

rich fauna, its mystery and beauty, could have been kept

forever.

Most of the pioneer towns that survived in the upper

Glades sprouted from the pond apple swamp, including

Moore Haven, Belle Glade, Chosen, and Pahokee. But even

some development-minded settlers echoed the nature-

minded scientists, lamenting the rapid destruction of a

singular wilderness. It had thrived for millennia, and they

had erased it almost overnight. “I was grieved at the loss of

much of the natural beauty of the original growth of trees

and shrubs that were here…two years ago,” R. H. Little

wrote. “I thought it a great mistake not to keep at least 100

acres of this virgin vegetation reserved by the state, so the

present and future generation should have the opportunity

of admiring the original beauty of the land and lake shore

prior to the advent of the white man.”

The pond apple swamp was gone forever, sacrificed on

the altar of progress. But south Florida’s conservationists

did manage to preserve one slice of the Everglades.

Saving Paradise

SIMPSON HAD TRAVELED throughout the tropics, from the

islands of the Caribbean to the coast of West Africa, but his

favorite place was a hammock island in the middle of the

sawgrass Everglades. “My eyes,” he once wrote, “have

never rested on any spot on earth as beautiful as Paradise

Key.”

The island felt like a lush rain forest stranded in the

marsh, packed with gumbo-limbos, mastics, and other

hardwoods, shrouded in Spanish moss and thick vines. It

had drooping clumps of shoestring ferns that clung to its

cabbage palms, and resurrection ferns that seemed to

spring to life after storms. Simpson once hauled away a

forty-pound sack of iridescent orchids; they were so

abundant that their removal felt no more destructive than

snapping a few blades of grass off a lawn. But Paradise

Key’s most memorable feature was America’s largest stand

of royal palms, presiding over the Everglades like ancient

monarchs. “Their great smooth white stems appeared

everywhere, and one could look up, up, up away into the

intensely blue sky where their glorious crowns were tossing

the sea breeze,” Simpson marveled.

Paradise Key could easily have gone the way of the pond

apple swamp. Flagler’s railroad had wiped out many of the

region’s finest hammocks, and the settlers who followed the

railroad down the coastal ridge had cleared many more.

Paradise Key also faced growing threats from developers,

especially after James Ingraham built a road from

Homestead to Flamingo right through it. And the Everglades

drainage project was carrying away much of the water that

had surrounded and protected Paradise Key, exposing its

virgin forest to wildfires for the first time in centuries.

Simpson, Small, John Gifford, and the nature writer Kirk

Munroe all wrote passionate defenses of Paradise Key, but

the conservationists who ultimately saved it were women.

Gifford’s wife, Edith, and Munroe’s wife, Mary, persuaded

the Florida Federation of Women’s Clubs to launch the first

battle for its preservation. Henry Flagler’s widow, Mary

Kenan Flagler, agreed to donate his company’s land around

Paradise Key for a state park. And the wife of ex-Governor

Jennings, the persistent May Mann Jennings, pushed the

park through the state legislature after becoming president

of the women’s federation.

Mrs. Jennings had an elegant bearing and a finishing-

school education, with training in piano, needlepoint, and

French, but she was also a politician’s daughter and a

politician’s wife who understood the levers of power. Women

did not yet enjoy the right to vote, but conservation was one

issue where they could exert influence—thanks in part to

their garden clubs, and in part to a widespread belief that

defending beauty was women’s work. In 1914, Mrs. Jennings

began to throw her weight around Tallahassee, staying as a

guest in the governor’s mansion, persuading the internal

improvement trustees to donate additional land in Paradise

Key. Her husband then drafted a bill to create Florida’s first

state park, and she mobilized her federation—including

many other wives of politicians—to lobby the legislature to

act before its two-year recess.

This was harder work. Many legislators dismissed

Paradise Key as a wasteland, and ridiculed the idea of a

park. “If the park tract is so dense and useless,” Mrs.

Jennings groused, “I do not see why the men are so anxious

to keep it if we are so anxious to have it.” Time was of the

essence—vandals were already digging up royal palms—so

she literally lobbied until she dropped, besieging legislators

with letters and visits before falling ill with exhaustion. Her

husband picked up the slack, and the bill passed a few

minutes before the session’s midnight deadline.

In November 1916, Mrs. Jennings formally dedicated the

4,000 acres of Royal Palm State Park “to the people of

Florida and their children forever.” Royal Palm saved only

one-tenth of one percent of the Everglades ecosystem, but

it would one day become the nucleus of Everglades National

Park, introducing millions of visitors to the Everglades

through Anhinga Trail, Gumbo-Limbo Trail, and the Royal

Palm Visitors Center. The new park also set a vital

precedent. Florida had given away land for decades, but this

was the first time it had done so for a purpose other than

development and exploitation.

IF NEWCOMERS WERE TRICKLING into the Everglades, they

were streaming into the Gold Coast. In the 1910s, Miami’s

population swelled nearly sixfold to about 30,000, and

southeast Florida’s population quadrupled to about 70,000.

The nation was entering a prosperous new age of leisure,

mobility, and easy credit, and middle-class “Tin Can

Tourists” began driving their Model Ts down to Florida for

vacations, attracted by new mass marketing campaigns

featuring palm trees, sun-kissed beaches, and “bathing

beauties” whose knees were scandalously uncovered.

But the early stirrings of progress were already starting

to take an ecological toll. Conservationists had succeeded in

protecting wading birds and Paradise Key, but Everglades

“swamp rats” filled their skiffs with gator hides, otter pelts,

and frog legs, and developers tore up the coastal ridge for

houses, farms, roads, and resorts. Miami had the world’s

highest per capita consumption of concrete, most of it

fashioned from limestone gouged out of the Biscayne

Aquifer. Simpson observed how massive quarries were

becoming “the dumping ground for the offal of a rapidly

growing town,” jammed with discarded trunks, stoves, tubs,

crockery, and even automobiles. He also catalogued the

new phenomenon of “roadkill,” from the smashed crabs and

grasshoppers that practically covered local highways to

sparrows, rabbits, minks, and a dozen varieties of snakes.

There were now nearly four times as many people living

in south Florida as there had been at the time of European

contact, and they made their presence felt on the land.

Work crews started building a Tampa-to-Miami highway

called the Tamiami Trail across the Everglades and Big

Cypress, an engineering marvel that would block the north-

to-south flow of shallow water down the peninsula as

abruptly as any dam. Lumbermen, oystermen, and

fishermen plundered natural resources, while settlers

poured sewage into streams and estuaries. And a dynamic

midwestern entrepreneur named Carl Fisher—the father of

the automobile headlight, the Indianapolis 500, and

America’s first transcontinental highway—began carving an

overgrown barrier island into the winter playground of Miami

Beach, hacking away its deep-rooted mangroves, and

expanding its shoreline with millions of cubic yards of white

sand dredged from the bottom of Biscayne Bay. By 1920,

“Crazy Carl” had remodeled a worthless spit of swampland

into a destination resort, but he had also ravaged a formerly

pristine habitat for crocodiles, pelicans, shrimp, crabs, and a

rainbow coalition of fish. “The jungle itself seemed to

protest in every possible way against this intrusion by man,”

Fisher’s wife recalled. “But Carl had started something, and

it was not easy for him to give it up.”

The Everglades drainage project was starting to remodel

the ecosystem as dramatically as any developer,

transforming the crystalline transverse glades into drab

canals choked with weeds and silt. For example, the Miami

River, once called “as beautiful a stream as ever flowed

through an unbroken wilderness,” was now the Miami Canal,

straightened, deepened, and polluted beyond recognition;

its picturesque rapids had been dynamited into oblivion, and

its dredge spoil dumped along its banks. Meanwhile, 34,000

acres of the Everglades had been converted into farms, and

much of the rest was parched by ditches, drought, and the

Tamiami Trail. “The drying up of the Glades, due to the

various canals, is playing havoc with the birds here,” one

surveyor wrote. “The finer ones are fast disappearing. They

lack feeding grounds.” The water table was dropping fast,

drying out springs that once bubbled to the surface on Cape

Sable and within Biscayne Bay, reducing the downward

hydraulic pressure caused by the weight of fresh water—the

“head”—that kept salt water from the region’s estuaries

from intruding into its aquifers. By 1920, Miami’s

overpumped well fields at the edge of the Everglades were

turning salty.

The declining water table was also fueling the fires that

raged in overdrained Everglades wetlands. Broward had

ridiculed the idea that a swamp could catch fire, and