Fakahatchee
Fakahatchee
Ansel Adams, "This is not a landscape for picnics and sightseeing, this place is for the testing of souls." Ed Watson’s place was once a thriving cane and vegetable farm of 40 acres on an old Indian shell mound. The location is reclusive and hard to find, the Seminole Indians called the place Fakahatchee, others call it Chokoloskee, whatever one called it, it was and still is a ruthless and terrible terrain. The famous photographer Ansel Adams is quoted as saying, "This is not a place for picnics and sightseeing, but a place for the testing of souls." Watson place, purchased through deception, near insanity, survival and murder, while on the run for murdering (shooting in the back) the famous western gunslinger Belle Star, it seemed that Watson had found his sanctuary far from the arm of the law. The farm, known as Chatham Bend, was operated by the notorious Watson who came to the Fakahatchee, ten-thousand-islands of the Everglades in the 1890s. Watson carried with him a troubled past, and he is believed to have murdered several people on the site and dumped their remains, feeding them to sharks and alligators and scattering them around the Everglades. Watson would work Indians, and transients to near death, while they hoped to be paid for their labor when it came time to harvest the crops. Instead all they would receive was swift death and a sheriff that would do nothing to stop this one man’s rampage on the community of people who feared him greatly. In 1910, after several bodies with weights attached to them were found in the river near the farm , men of nearby Chokoloskee Island formed a posse and gunned Watson down, then they burned down his farm. All that remains of the notorious Mr. Watson is a gravestone and the folklore. After his death, the legends around his persona grew. As Peter Matthiessen notes: The
most lurid view of Mr. Watson is the one often perpetuated by the islanders
themselves, for as Dickens remarked after his visit to this country, "These
Americans do love a scoundrel." Over long decades in lonely remote
islands, where notable citizens have been few, Mr. Watson’s venerable
contemporaries and their descendants have arrived at an "ornery"
sort of reverence for Mr. Watson, who has transcended his original role
as a notorious cold-blooded killer to become a colorful folk-hero, the
west coast counterpart of the bank robber and killer John Ashley, whose
gang terrorized eastern Florida after World War I. It
doesn't take but a few pages for a reader of "Lost Man's River''
to go sun-blind, be bled nearly to death by mosquitoes, and become lost
in a maze of sea islands and swamps as haunted by murder and unreasoning
hatreds as they are beautiful. This is a novel choking with catclaw and
liana, white limestone potholes and marl pools, poison trees called manchineel
and poison snakes called coral, rotting fish shacks, sabal and gumbo-limbo,
salt grass and thornbush and palmetto and a song, "chuck-will's widow"
coming from the "whiskery wide gape of a mothlike bird hidden in
lichens on some dead limb at the swamp edge, still and cryptic as a dead
thing decomposing.'' As a fictional character, Watson is of genuinely heroic proportions. He is a pioneer in a region profoundly hostile to human life (alligators, diamondbacks as big around as a man's arm, panthers screaming in the night, and hurricanes approaching are only the beginning); an inventive, resourceful, tireless farmer (cuttings from his abandoned plantation prove to be the source of the later success of a megacorporation, United Sugar); a dedicated and loving family man (he had three legitimate families and a couple "backdoor'' as well); and, by almost all accounts, a good friend and generous neighbor. He was also, reputedly, a cold-blooded killer of something like sixty people, ranging from the outlaw queen Belle Starr to his own hired hands. If such a resume sounds suspiciously historical, that is because Edgar Watson did once live on this earth and was a heroic, frightening, mysterious, uncompromisingly human figure around whom tall tales grew. Matthiessen makes it clear, in an author's note, how he has worked the gray area: "E. J. Watson has been reimagined from the few hard `facts' -- census and marriage records, dates on gravestones, and the like. All the rest of the popular record is a mix of rumor, gossip, tale, and legend that has evolved over eight decades into myth. The book is in no way `historical,' since almost nothing here is history. On the other hand, there is nothing that could not have happened -- nothing inconsistent, that is, with the very little that is actually on record.'' "Killing Mr. Watson'' relies almost solely on first-person narratives, long monologues rendered in the speech of the islands that relate the tall tales and firsthand observations that lead up to the killing. "Lost Man's River'' is messier in its structure, but is perhaps only the more convincing for that. Lucius Watson, E. J.'s third son (second son from the second family), is the hero here. An old man (21 when his father died, 50 years before), he has been deeply troubled all his life by his father's murder. Unable to remember his father as anything but a good man -- kind, gentle, fun, full of life -- he is therefore unable to reconcile himself to what appears to be the truth about the man's other side, a chillingly dark side from which insistently spring stories of drunkenness, racial bigotry, and sudden or stalking violence. Lucius has decided, once and for all, to hunt the sources of the legends and lies, and establish a foundation for the truth about his father's life and death. Having
spent most of his life in the solitude of emotional flight, he is at once
resolute and plagued by doubt. "All his life, Lucius's moods had
been prey to shifts of light, and now a dread and melancholy dragged at
his spirits, as heavy as the graybeard lichen which shrouded the black
corridors between the trees. In forcing his way into this road, he seemed
to push at a mighty spring, which, at the first faltering of his resolve,
would hurl him outwards.'' A
great narrative unfolds here, in the overlapping, told and retold stories,
confirming each other in one breath and contradicting in the next, as
pungent with stubborn belief as they are unreliable, a family narrative
that feels denser with American truths than any verifiable account ever
could. We, along with the speakers and listeners of the novel, want to
hear stories about great men brought low, and we need to hear those stories
in ways that let us off the hook, that make it clear that if we are not
great, we are good, or at least not bad, that our desires and secret lusts
for wealth and fame and blood of enemies are not as poisonous as those
of our hero/villains. Matthiessen has, with these ugly memories, homely
hopes, virulent capituations to cowardice, and moments of transcendent
honor, insight, and love, given us a different sort of story altogether. Mostly
fiction, but also part historical exploration, Matthiessen has created
a compelling work of oral "history". His characters tell their
own tales about the life of a South Florida outlaw, who was killed by
a group of his neighbors after a fierce hurricane in 1910. But this is
not a simple story. It has many layers of personal experience and interpretation
that leave much of the accusations in the book ambiguous. The people are
well drawn, and the commentary on history that is told in their stories
is subtle and powerful. The tale of E. J. Watson takes place in a little
known area of the country, but enough of the story is grounded in fact
that many of the places described appear in this detailed map of the Florida
Everglades. The book is followed by two others: Dead Man's River, and
Bone by Bone. On the western edge of the Everglades and deep in the heart of the 10,000 Islands, Chokoloskee Island has been called one of Florida's last frontiers. Here at Historic Smallwood Store you will learn the story of the pioneers and settlers who tamed this vast wilderness. Human habitation of Chokoloskee Island began approximately 2,000 years ago when a mound building people began altering the landscape with mounds and canals. Subsequent influxes of Native Americans expanded the mounds and fished, hunted and farmed the rich fertile soil. Moving south from conflict in North Florida and Georgia, the Seminole Indians were the last native peoples to make the Everglades their home. Old Florida White
settlement in Chokoloskee Bay began near the end of the nineteenth century.
Plume, hide, and fur hunters were the first to visit. They were quickly
followed by families who combined seasonal hunting, fishing, and farming
to make a living like their native predecessors. Settlement
brought a need for goods and mail and that need was met by the Smallwood
Store. Established in 1906, this Trading Post served a remote area, buying
hides, furs and farm produce and providing the goods required. The End of the Road At
the end of the nineteenth century the south Florida coast was still largely
wilderness, one of the last coastal regions east of the Mississippi to
be settled. Only three small communities -- Chokoloskee, Cape Sable and
Flamingo -- existed along the coast of what is now Everglades National
Park. The
town of Flamingo was established in 1893; its citizens had to choose a
name in order to obtain a post office. According to records from the National
Archives, Howell C. Low was the first postmaster. He was appointed on
December 13, 1893. Cape Sable had its own post office and Jay L. Watrons
was appointed postmaster on February 23, 1904. Chokoloskee, near present-day Everglades City, was first settled in the 1870s, although it had been the home of Calusa Indians for centuries in pre-Columbian times. It became the trade center for homesteaders scattered throughout the Ten Thousand Islands region. Charles McKinney was Chokoloskee's first postmaster; he was commissioned on June 30, 1892. George Storter was commissioned as postmaster for Everglades on July 19, 1893. The 1910 census for Everglades township, including Chokoloskee Island, listed 144 people in 29 different households. Many were farmers or farm laborers. Of those, most were probably engaged in the labor-intensive growing of sugar cane. There was also one carpenter, a mail carrier, a wash woman, a sailor, and a school teacher. Two men made their livings as merchants, Charles "Ted" Smallwood and George Storter. The largest family, their name illegible in the records, had twelve members. The Everglade and Chokoloskee community was just recovering from a hurricane in 1909 when it was devastated by another, the worst on record, the following year. Only the highest ground of the old Calusa shell mound remained above water. Low-lying farm fields were salted by flood tides and most cisterns were polluted, a major tragedy in an area where few springs or wells existed. Many inhabitants of the outlying islands were forced to abandon their homesteads. The most infamous incident of the times, the vigilante murder of a local man suspected of several murders, occurred a few days after the hurricane. A somewhat fictionalized account of the event is told in the book Killing Mister Watson by Peter Matthiesson. In the early days the only way to arrive at Flamingo or Chokoloskee was by boat. Supplies were shipped from Key West, Fort Meyers or Tampa and cane syrup, fish, and produce were traded in return. Although neither town was ever to become a metropolis, they did have commerce, with some vegetables from Chokoloskee even reaching New York City. When Royal Palm state park was created in 1916, a road was built from Florida City to Royal Palm hammock. The Ingraham Highway, as it was eventually named, was later completed to Flamingo. The name highway gave more prominence to this road than it actually deserved. Often it could only be traveled in good weather and it was always full of ruts and mud holes. Early visitors could however enjoy the scenic Everglades as they traveled this road. Prosperity of a sort reached Everglades in the 1920s when Barron Collier made it his headquarters for the building of the Tamiami Trail across south Florida. It served as the county seat of Collier County until 1960, when prosperity waned and county offices were moved to Naples. Neighboring Chokoloskee did not have a road until a causeway was built from the mainland in 1956. Flamingo,
still marking the end of the main park road, is now a park community with
a campground, ranger station, marina and lodge. Chokoloskee, surrounded
by park waters at the end of highway 29, is still home to fishermen, with
a few motels and a resort having been added for park visitors. Although
the tiny cane farms and fishing shanties are gone, both areas maintain
the tranquil beauty for which they are famous. In the 1890s Ed Watson came to the Florida wilderness known as the Ten Thousand Islands. Rumors about his violent past and ungovernable temper accompanied him and the islanders soon learned to respect and to fear him. In time he became the most successful man in the islands. The first novel in Peter Matthiessen's acclaimed Watson trilogy, this powerful book builds a portrait of its complex central character through the multiple voices of those who knew him. Through the shifting, changing narratives of people like Watson’s own daughter Carrie, a plume hunter called Bill House and the Sheriff Frank Tippins, Matthiessen drives his story relentlessly forward to a bloody and violent conclusion. Based on his researches into the real-life figure of Watson, he has produced a novel that brilliantly conveys the fetid and unforgiving landscape of the Florida swamplands and the character of a man who came to dominate them. Bone By Bone "Bone
by Bone" completes Peter Matthiessen's Everglades trilogy. In the
first novel, "Killing Mr. Watson," we meet Edgar J. Watson,
a shrewd and gentlemanly businessman whose sugar cane plantation produces
the best syrup in Florida. Watson can tolerate and produce violence of
a level even more intense than the pretty high level his Everglades neighbors
can live with. He blames his overseer when the mangled bodies of two of
his workers are discovered near his plantation, but in the end everybody
believes Watson ordered the killings, and in the year 1910 his neighbors
finally gun him down. Right off the bat something makes us stumble over the narrator's "I," since the success of the preceding books depends largely on our seeing Watson externally. But Matthiessen gradually disarms our objections. He takes us back to Edgar's childhood, showing a boy caught between his father's beatings and his mother's hysterical provocation of them. The brutality gives rise to Edgar's alter ego, Jack Watson -- the J. of Edgar J. This Jack is the side of Watson that at 13 gets the hickory stick out of his pa's hand and thrashes him to within an inch of his life. Later, Jack plays 19th century schizoid to Edgar's ambitious bourgeois. Since, as readers of the previous books, we know the story, the novel sometimes seems to be trudging through old business, and when it isn't -- particularly in the middle parts, with Watson going to Arkansas and then escaping from jail there and returning to Florida -- it often seems to be piling up events for their own sake. But the latter half shifts back toward the eerie energy of the first book. One of the cool, scary things about "Killing Mr. Watson" was not knowing whether Watson was as bad as his neighbors painted him. Hearing the story from Watson himself, we know pretty much what he did and didn't do. Yet Matthiessen has Watson tell enough lies to keep us off balance. The
tougher task, at which Matthiessen succeeds intermittently, is showing
Watson's inability to make sense of himself, so that what we know never
completely trumps what we suspect. The book's final episode finds him
so bewildered that he can no longer distinguish what he's willed from
what he hasn't. As he leaves his place for the last time, on his way to
his fateful encounter with his neighbors, he kills a doe, intending to
eat it; but "the flesh smell seeped into my sinuses, and after that,
I could not get the taint of it out of my lungs." That image applies
to the whole trilogy: The taint lingers after it's done. The second volume in a developing trilogy, Lost Man's River takes a long view of the same events studied close on in Killing Mr. Watson (1990). On October 24th, 1910 Mr. E.J. Watson was gunned down by a posse of panicky neighbors on Chokoloskee in the Ten Thousand Islands off the swampy Everglades coast of southwest Florida. This rough act of frontier justice took place in the wake of a devastating hurricane and a series of brutal murders laid, rightly or wrongly, at Watson's door on the grounds of his aggressive bearing, his conduct, and rumors about his desperado past. The earlier novel presented a vivid and powerful fictional reimagination of the Watson legend based on Matthiessen's research in the meager historical records and on extensive interviews with descendants both of the families involved in the killing and of Watson himself, who had offspring by three spouses and at least two common-law wives. Research is the operative word underlying this also-fictionalized sequel, whose protagonist is Lucius Watson, E.J.'s third son born in 1889. Late in life, Lucius, an historian of mediocre local renown, has taken it into his head to revive an abandoned project and make another stab at pruning away the flamboyant folklore myth surrounding his father's memory. He intends to establish Mr. Watson as no more than a prominent southwest Florida pioneer who had done much to expand the cane-syrup industry. He also wants to get to the bottom of the killing and find out whether the posse had deliberately assembled and which of those present fired the first shot--inevitably the fatal shot, given Watson's prowess with guns, swift and deadly reactions, and ever-ready wariness. Unfortunately for Lucius' endeavor, a lot of water has flown under the bridge and, with the exception of a few old folk, none of the eye-witnesses or participants are still alive and kicking. Lucius' situation, in fact, is comparable to Matthiessen's and he solves the problem by the same methods. Hence we follow Lucius around, rather like a docile party of tourists behind their guide, as he wanders about visiting scenes from his father's life in various parts of Florida and attempting to interview his own estranged relatives and descendants of the men in the posse. These last are particularly leery of him because Lucius has got something serious to avenge. Or ought to have, if he's a right-minded man. For Lucius is pitting himself against a clutch of tightly-knit and touchy back-country clans with a blood-feud mentality who find it hard to credit that, with an ominous list of posse members tucked in his pocket, he merely wants to gab about whatever their grand-dads might or might not have handed down in the family about the good old days. Colorful characters are encountered, marvelous frontier stories are told in the local vernacular, and Lucius is reunited with his runaway older brother Rob, who has witnessed events blasting Lucius' premises to smithereens. Yes, Lucius will discover some hard facts about his father and he will finally manage to get the truth out of old Henry Short, the only black man in the posse and the one who shot Watson down, receiving Henry's deathbed confession. All this is very fine, but there are definite drawbacks to the general concept of this novel. Although attempts are made to invigorate the 1950s storyline, such as having old Rob kidnapped by the violent Daniel’s clan, there is a limit to the amount of action that senior citizens like Lucius can handle and too much of the book consists of garrulous and repetitive third-hand testimony. The historian's plight, to be sure, but anyone already familiar with the luminous text of Killing Mr. Watson will find lengthy portions of this sequel to be mighty slow and sloggy going. This reader is a diehard admirer of Matthiessen's work and expected anything of Lost Man's River but that it would require gritty determination to plough through. A minor note: despite two prefaces, the author fails to comment upon the abrupt metamorphosis of the mixed-blood Hamilton clan of Killing Mr. Watson into the Lost Man's River Hardy clan. The book does come alive in sustained flashes of brilliant story-telling when Matthiessen applies the bellows to the embers of his primary material. And the rewards in accurate education about an obscure niche in American history are immense. Yet one wonders longingly what Lost Man's River might have been if the author had seen fit to set it earlier in time, say during Lucius' first foiled efforts to obtain answers, before he matured into an aging loner with a failed and inconclusive life behind him. But perhaps this middle period will be reserved in the trilogy for the exploration of a few remaining dark corners, chiefly the fate of Watson's murderous sidekick Leslie Cox whose disappearance in 1910 has still to be accounted for and whose disquieting background comes to light during Lucius' quest for information. Surely a significant reason for Matthiessen's choice of period is his desire, indeed his burning mission, to contrast the glorious Everglades wilderness of the early 20th century with what it later became as a semi-developed park with the lawless homesteaders evicted from their hardscrabble perches in the Keys, natural species dying or extinct, and a delicate ecology irrevocably compromised. Lost Man's River is also an incontrovertible, impassioned, and pertinent manifesto on this major underlying theme. The
smell of smoking mullet belches from the rusting black cooker not far
from the steps up to J.T.'s Island Grill & Grocery -- a place where
a fisherman can pay another day for a 12-pack of Bud and patrons tally
their own lunchtime eats at the register near the door. In Chokoloskee, they still keep each other's secrets Wells, whose white handlebar mustache makes him look wise beyond his 52 years, has plotted the unmarked graves in the small town cemetery on a piece of poster board smudged with coffee drops and the fingerprints of a working man. He keeps it behind the counter. He's talked with the old timers about whose bodies lay under the crude cross markers with no names. He's asked to hear the stories of the pioneer settlers and remembered them. Chokoloskee, a 150-acre island enveloped by tanin-stained waters that dim into scattered patches of green mangrove tufts, sits in the Ten Thousand Islands on the edge of the Everglades. Back on October 24, 1910, the day more than two dozen settlers confronted their own Edgar "Bloody" Watson with a hail of lead, Chokoloskee was just an island on edge. The first white settlers made their homes on Chokoloskee (pronounced Chukaluskee by the natives) in the late 1800s. Many of the pioneers who made their way to the Florida frontier sought isolation -- from the law and the rest of society -- that the wild landscape provided. Charles
Sherod "Ted" Smallwood, one of the island's most influential
residents, is buried in the small graveyard dotted with gumbo limbo trees
and markers bearing names like Brown and McKinney and House and Demere. In 1906, Smallwood took over from C.G. McKinney as postmaster and served in the position for 35 years before his retirement in 1941. At that time, he gave the store to his eldest daughter, Thelma, and his youngest daughter, Nancy. Nancy Smallwood Hancock, now 76 and still a resident of Chokoloskee, remembers her father trading hides and venison with the local Seminoles. "'Nachajavana,' he would say," Hancock said, translating the phrase to mean "What do you want?" Flipping through old photos and postcards with hands trembled by Parkinson's disease, Hancock recalled her father selling carbide lights -- like the ones coal minors used -- to local fisherman who would use them while cleaning out their nets at night. During the Depression, Ted Smallwood lost $26,000, Hancock said. The store sold cloth and medicine, sugar and wheat. Each day when the mail would arrive by boat, Smallwood would blow on a homemade conch shell horn to alert the islanders. A lot of the islanders didn't write. "We'd have to make out the money orders for them," Hancock said. When Ted Smallwood came to the island there were five other families there including the Santinis -- a Catholic family whose patriarch, Adolphus, was an able farmer with more than 200 avocado trees on the island. Santini shipped produce like cane, bananas and cabbages to Key West, where he tangled with Watson at an auction house. During the argument, Watson cut Santini's throat and nearly killed him, betraying his violent temper to his neighbors, who soon got word back on Chokoloskee. Shortly thereafter, Chokoloskee residents learned from the investigation that Watson was charged with murdering outlaw queen Belle Starr in the Oklahoma Indian territory in 1889. Later, they would learn much more -- truth and rumor. It was next to Smallwood's store on that day in 1910 that about two dozen men and about half a dozen women gathered as they watched Watson approaching in his pop-popping motor boat coming up the bay from his 40-acre cane farm on Chatham Bend. Hancock remembered what her father told her about that day. "My daddy wasn't in it," Hancock said of the killing party. But Ted Smallwood heard what Watson's much younger wife said: "My God, they are killing Mr. Watson." After the killing, Mrs. Watson and her three young children stayed with Smallwood's wife for a time. "She had no place to go," Hancock said. Clifton Goff, whose 76 years old, grew up on Fakahatchee Island and dropped out of school at Everglades at the age of 14 in the fifth grade. He put in only half a term a year to help his father fish for mullet. For the greatest part of his life -- 45 years -- he worked as a fishing guide, for a time out of Everglades' Rod & Gun Club and on his own and later for executives of the chemical company SCM Corporation. As a kid growing up in the Chokoloskee Bay country, Goff remembers riding with rum-runners, the boats weighted down to the waterline. The infamous gangster Al Capone, who liked to sport fish in the area, handled most of the liquor during prohibition, Goff said. Some of the locals would haul liquor from Bimini and once on shore take it in trucks to Carnestown. "There was railroads there. They'd load a box car with cases of liquor and cover it with tomatoes," Goff said, to send the shipment undetected up north. For nearly a century, the islanders have rebelled against the law -- plume hunters sought feathers literally worth their weight in gold; rum-runners and moonshiners bucked the restrictions of prohibition; gator poachers and trappers evaded game wardens in Everglades National Park, and in later years commercial fishermen turned to hauling marijuana when environmental restrictions increasingly squelched their livelihoods. Chokoloskee remained a wild frontier with the law far away in Key West and Fort Myers until 1923, when Barron Gift Collier created his namesake county and made nearby Everglades the county seat. Goff, like many old timers, didn't attend the Everglades National Park dedication 50 years ago. He saw the park as a threat to the Chokoloskee way of life. He once turned down a job with the park catching gator hunters. "I knew when they was going and coming, but if I caught 'em they'd be kin," Goff said, while taking a drag on a filterless Camel. He estimates he's related to two-thirds of the folks on the island. "I had a hard time finding a woman I could marry," Goff said, laughing. Clifton Goff's father Jessie wasn't in the party that killed Watson. "He got there just as they were towing Watson out of the pass," said Goff, who has a wide view of Chokoloskee Bay from the rocking chair on his front porch. The settlers didn't want to put Watson's body in a boat, so they towed him from a rope out to Rabbit Key and buried him. Later, family members moved Watson's body to the Fort Myers cemetery. Mostly,
Watson got along with his neighbors, who admired his farming skills. Goff's
uncle, Tant Jenkins, ran produce to Key West on Watson's schooner. "He
never had no problems with Watson," Goff said of his uncle Tant.
But Watson's reputation spread. A squatter named Tucker would not leave
his claim on Lostmans Key. The man reportedly wrote Watson a sassy letter
and a few days later, Tucker and his nephew were killed. "They laid
it on Watson," Smallwood wrote in his memoirs. Watson left Chatham
Bend for a time and went home to Columbia County, Fla., where he was blamed
for another killing. He had also reportedly killed men in Oregon and Arcadia,
Fla. Edith Hamilton doesn't recognize her hometown anymore. Chokoloskee and Everglades have changed so much, she says. She remembers seeing hundreds of Seminoles at Smallwood's store, sitting crossed-legged around a big pot of grits and passing a large spoon between them. Once a week, her family would buy venison from the Indians. One night, Hamilton saw Seminole women near the glow of a campfire, the light glinting off the glass beads piled from their breast bones to their chins. "I've never seen anything so beautiful in my life," she said. As a first romantic gesture, her husband, Sammy Hamilton Sr., gave her Seminole beads. Not long after, they were married and camped at Lostmans River for their honeymoon. "We stayed there three weeks until we ran out of food." She was 13 at the time. Getting married at that age wasn't uncommon. Life on the edge of the Everglades was a struggle. "I loved the wildness of it," Hamilton said. There was always work to do -- tacking coon hides, digging oysters from the bar and hauling them in her skiff, and later hanging nets for the mullet fishermen. "I worked hard like a man. I just loved workin'," she said. Despite the work, "Nobody had any money," Hamilton said. But there was always food -- fish, grits and iced tea, oysters every other day. Now, people don't talk about how bad the mosquitoes were and the burning cow dung the settlers used to keep them away, Hamilton said. "Everything smelled like cow manure. Your house, your clothes." As a girl, Edith Hamilton lived for a time at the Watson place on Chatham Bend. The house held traces of a violent past. "All that blood in the house wouldn't come up," she said. Her father, Nelson Noble, was coming around the corner in a skiff when the crowd drew their guns on Watson. Earlier that fall, when Hannah Smith's toe floated up in the river, the residents of Chokoloskee feared a killer loose on Chatham Bend. Watson blamed the killings of Smith and two men named Waller and Melvin on Leslie Cox, according to Smallwood. Watson went to Fort Myers to fetch Sheriff Frank Tippins, who got as far as Marco before he turned back. Smallwood's memoirs say Watson resolved to kill Cox himself. He claimed to have done so that day when he arrived at the landing on Chokoloskee. Smallwood had sold Watson some shotgun shells dampened by the hurricane that blew through on Oct. 17. More than 100 drowned chickens lay stuffed under his house and dead mullet a foot deep littered the beach. Henry Short, the island's first black resident and an excellent shot, fired first, after Watson had reportedly drawn his gun on D.D. House. "None of them had the nerve to do it. But he did," Hamilton said. After that, the men unloaded their guns on Watson. "They said his wife was screaming all over the island," Hamilton said. The roots of families on Chokoloskee cross and entwine like so many mangrove trees forming a dense and often impenetrable forest. That's because people want to stay in Chokoloskee. Wells has fifth generation shoppers in his store, which was first established by C. G. McKinney in 1890. These days, the island is home to 240 people. "It's a way of life people want to hold onto," says Wells, during a tour of the graveyard where he pointed out markers for Ted Smallwood, C.G. McKinney, and Loren G. "Totch" Brown. Wells, a former real estate man, has filed away in his memory a catalog of rich tales. He points out the cross of one of the Rice brothers, a Miami bank robber who died at the hands of Chokoloskee vigilante justice when he came ashore for supplies in 1915. A man named Raleigh Wiggins shot him in the back. He
points out the grave of D.D. House, the one some say touched off the events
that led to Watson's killing. The family is still sensitive about it,
Wells says. "There's things you don't talk about around here,"
says Wells. That is because folks don't want to step on the feelings of
their neighbors, he says. People don't talk much to outsiders because words like family and loyalty have deep meaning in Chokoloskee. Spirits seem to linger on the island and reach out to the present, Wells says, even the spirits of the Calusa Indians who built the great mounds of shells there before vanishing. The children who do leave want the protection of roots. "They want to come back home and they want to make a living," Wells says. Death in the Lawless Everglades In the Everglades of southern Florida, if the swamps don't get you, the people who live there probably will. The Glades are a forbidding labyrinth of mangroves, sluiced with tea-brown water and home to poisonous snakes, spiders, alligators, crocodiles, the odd panther and enough mosquitoes to drive a person mad. As the locals say, 'One night out here is worse than a month in Hell.' It seems inconceivable that anyone would choose to live there. People do, and the kind of people they become is the subject of Peter Matthiessen's new novel, Lost Man's River. It is the second in a promised trilogy, which began with Killing Mr Watson. Killing Mr Watson was based on an actual murder that took place in the Everglades in the first years of this century. In Lost Man's River, Watson's son, Lucius, returns to the Everglades to discover the truth about who killed his father, nicknamed Emperor Watson. Despite the fact that Lucius is dismissed as 'romantic and impractical' by other family members, and warned to 'let sleeping dogs lie', we quickly learn that this search has more to do with him than it does with the ghost of Emperor Watson. It promises to be the one thing in his life at which he might be able to succeed. In his youth, he was, by his own admission, 'a broken-down drunk fisherman and chronic loser'. Nowadays, he is not doing much better as a worn-out college professor, having written a book about southern Florida in which he only adds to the misinformation concerning his father. He sets out to reclaim his family's lost dignity, and in the process find some of his own. He gets off to a bad start. The first thing he does is change his name to L Watson Collins, ostensibly because he is afraid no one will talk to him if they know who he is. But for a man in search of the truth, this rather public lie does little to inspire confidence in his character. The second thing he does is sleep with his research assistant, Sally Brown, a former pupil and wife of a man who later goes to great lengths to help Lucius in his quest. The swamp itself provides a perfect metaphor for what happens next – Lucius quickly becomes tangled in a maze of stories about his father, told to him by people who can no longer remember enough to separate truth from local legend. What becomes clear is that Emperor Watson did a great deal of killing before being riddled with more than thirty bullets by a posse of acquaintances who hated him almost as much as they feared him. He is reputed to have cut a man's throat for complaining that the peas on his dinner plate were not fresh. He hired migrant workers to work on his farm, then killed them rather than pay their wages at the end of the season. Watson may or may not have shot the notorious cowgirl Belle Starr, and he may or may not have done about a dozen other outrageous deeds in his short life. In the interviews Lucius conducts, which are presented throughout the book as a series of testimonials, a picture of Watson develops: 'Mr E J Watson was not a man you were likely to forget...a friendly man, jolly man, full of ginger, full of get up and go...affectionate with puppies, chicks and piglets...a gentleman and a Christian.' About the murders Watson is said to have committed, one says: 'Them people needed some killing, wouldn't surprise me. They say he shot a few niggers too – probably had it coming.' Another admits: 'Watson had a screw loose in his brain. If Emperor Watson was guilty of even a fraction of these crimes, it might at first be hard to understand why he lived in the Everglades as long as he did, and was not hauled off to prison for life or shot out of hand by some six-gunned lawman. The reason is simple, and it sums up the people of the Glades in a way, which Lucius Watson himself fails to see. They are an isolated, law-defying society such as present-day Americans simultaneously despise for their brutality and worship for the kind of individuality that won them the country in the first place. They hate the police as much as they learn to hate each other in their backwater feuds and atrocities against the blacks and the Indians. 'There weren't no law 'cept what you made.' The men complain about the alligators they have hunted to near extinction in the same breath as they admit that they would go back to hunting them if only the 'gators could be found. Meanwhile, they complain about the government that is trying to prevent the extinction. They are a people filled with small hypocrisies that intertwine into one much larger contradiction – that they live in a world, which has moved on and left them behind. The habitat that once tolerated them only because of its inhospitality to others is growing smaller, and they are becoming extinct, like the animals they once pursued. It is this decline, rather than the truth about his father, that might have offered Lucius Watson a clear reason for his own apparent failure in life. He is a product of the wildness of the Everglades, and his forays into the outside world have failed because he himself failed to understand what made him different. Matthiessen captures perfectly the drawl of the American South, a technique he perfected in Far Tortuga, a novel of Caribbean fishermen which is written entirely in the patois of the Cayman Islanders. While the novel offers a challenging look into the collision of fact and myth, the truth about Emperor Watson is that the truth no longer matters. He is a legend, larger than life, and that is where he is needed by the people who created the myth, or he simply would not be there. This fact, which is the core of the novel, is reached quite early on, as is a general consensus about Watson's psychotic behavior. It is then reiterated so often that by the time the truth comes out about who fired the first shot at him, the reader no longer cares. The story has ceased to fit together as one larger work. It becomes instead an assembly of unreliable anecdotes. Added to this is a bewilderingly large list of characters. Finally there is Lucius Watson himself. His character is marked by an apathy from which he never completely emerges. Watson has lived for too long in the shadow of his father and lacks the strength to come out from under it. While this might make him credible, he is not passionate enough to lead the reader successfully through the many tellings of his father's history. Peter Matthiessen is a great writer, one of America's best, and most deserving of the National Book Award, which he received for The Snow Leopard. The Everglades trilogy is an ambitious and worthwhile endeavor, but Lost Man's River leaves the reader with a nagging suspicion that the conclusions which Lucius Watson never reaches might also have been missed by his creator.
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