Red Grass River

sawgrass glades to Pompano on the coast. In them days only a Indian or a hardshell cracker could make a trip like that across the Devil’s Garden.

Those who first saw them come out on this side of the glades with Old Joe driving the mules along with his whip popping like gunshots said both the family’s wagons was near covered with the hides of all the diamondbacks they’d killed along the way and not a hide under six feet. Old Joe always wore a rattlesnake hatband and a rattlesnake belt. Carried a rattle in his pocket about the size of a kazoo and liked to come up quiet behind an ole boy and shake it hard and laugh like hell to see the fella jump five feet in the air and whirl around all bigeyed. Some called him Rattler Joe and said he never did seem to mind the name a bit.

He told folks he’d made the move because he was tired of trading in hides and furs for a living and wanted some of the steady wages Henry Flagler was paying his railroad workers. Maybe so. But there was a bunch of stories that followed right behind him when he come over from the west side and one of them was that he’d started cutting in on the wrong people’s whiskey business in Lee County. When he didnt take their warnings to quit they busted up his operation and whipped his nigger helper near to death and threatened to burn down his house with everybody in it if he didnt clear out. According to this story Joe and the family was in the wagons and on their way east by the next sunup. That story’d been whispered around for a couple of years when some fella named Witliff in Pompano made the mistake of telling it out loud to a bunch of old boys that included a friend of Joe’s who took it back to him. Joe went to Witliff’s house and called him out and beat him senseless right there in his yard and in front of his family. Told him if he ever told tales about him again he’d cut out his tongue.

Another story said he’d left Lee County after clubbing a young fella near to death with a grub hoe handle for getting improper with one of his daughters. They say he gave that boy a stutter and a useless left arm and a droop-eye the rest of his life. Trouble was, one of the boy’s best uncles was a rich Fort Myers cattleman who was related by marriage to the high sheriff and was friends with all the local judges. Joe didnt much care for the odds, so he packed up the family and headed out on the Caloosahatchee trace. Story has it that the cattleman sent a couple of roughs after him but they never come back. Could be they simply made off with the money they was paid to deal with Joe. Or could be they had the bad luck to catch up to him.

Joe Ashley paid bottom dollar for an abandoned half-burned-down house in the deep pineywoods just west of Pompano and pretty soon him and his boys fixed it up good. They were a tight family that mostly kept to itself but they were friendly enough whenever they came into town or met with a neighbor out on the Old Dixie Highway, which at that time wasnt much more than a bunch of ruts packed with rock in some stretches and with shell in others and hardly wide enough for a pair of wagons to pass each other by. Most who got to know the Ashleys liked them fairly well. But there were some who were quick to believe every mean story ever told about them and thought the whole family was a bunch of naturalborn outlaws. Such folk were just too flat afraid of them not to hate them. The Ashleys always would have admirers, bunches of them, but they’d always have bad enemies too. Everybody who knew them was pretty much one or the other.

For a time after they first got to Pompano, Joe and two of his boys—Frank and Ed—worked as woodchoppers for Flager’s railroad. The eldest boy Bill worked as a chopper a few months too but pretty soon gave up axing to go work in a general store. Not long after the Ashleys moved to Pompano he took Bertha Rodgers to wife. He was the brainy one, Bill, the most serious, though they say he could play the banjo like he’d been born to it and he’d sometimes take a turn with a string band at a local dance. You’d see him around town more often than his brothers, reading magazines or the newspaper in the cafes, coming and going from banks and lawyer offices, taking care of Old Joe’s business matters. He never did get in such bad trouble as his daddy and his little brothers did, but some say it’s only because he did all his crimes with a pen instead of a gun.

All five of the Ashley brothers were close, but Frank and Ed were said to be fraternal twins and so naturally they was extra tight. And John and Bob were special-close because they were the youngest and grew up together hunting and trapping in the Everglades from the time they were big enough to shoot a rifle. John wasnt but eleven at the time the family moved to Pompano and Bob about a year older, and while Frank and Ed were cutting railroad ties with their daddy the two pups were bringing home meat for the table and gator and rattler hides to sell at the trading posts. Trapping and hunting was what they liked best but they could do lots of other things real well. Old Joe always could do damn near anything with his hands and he taught his boys the same. John was fourteen when a doctor down in Miami hired him and Bob to roof his house and over the next thirty years that roof never lost a shingle, not even in a hurricane. They worked in a Pompano packinghouse for a time and were said to handle a butchering knife as good as anybody in the place. But they didnt much like working for wages and went back to trapping for their daily bread. They got to know their way all over the Glades even better than their daddy—and Old Joe was as much at home in the Devil’s Garden as a cottonmouth. John and Bob were the wildest of the Ashleys, everbody pretty much agreed on that, though John wasnt nearly the hot-head Bob was. They say John was generally one to think a thing through before acting on it, leastways if he had the chance. Bob, he was always quick as a struck match to flare and burn. Which is exactly why he died the way he did.

They were the best shooters in the family too, John and Bob—not counting their daddy. They said Bob could shoot the whiskers off a rabbit at over a hundred yards with his old lever-action Winchester, but John was even more of a deadeye. At a traveling show in West Palm one time there was a .22 rifle shooting gallery with a line of little tin ducks steady moving across the far end of the tent on a conveyor belt in front of a backboard. The five brothers had a contest and by the time John and Bob were the last two left they were shooting at the ducks from forty feet outside the tent. They’d drawn a crowd by then and Old Joe was looking on too. When John finally won from some fifty feet out, the onlookers gave him a big hand and he bowed like an actor on a stage. He wasnt but fifteen at the time and loved to show off. Then Old Joe took the little .22 from him and backed up another ten feet and bang-bang-bang he knocked down a line of twelve ducks without a miss. Then he gives the rifle back to John and the boy didnt hit but nine of his twelve. The crowd gave Joe a bigger hand than they had John. When it came to showing off, Old Joe never was one to be outdone by his boys.

They’d been in Pompano about six years when word got around that Joe had set up a still somewhere in the pines and gone in the whiskey business. Gone back in the whiskey business is what most said. And because Bill had such a good head for account books and such, Ole Joe made him his business manager. The Ashleys didnt have any local rivals in the trade except for a couple of swamp-rat shiners named Runyon and Aho who’d been around for years and years although hardly anybody ever saw them because they never come into town but once in a blue moon. They had a cabin somewhere in the Devil’s Garden and shared an Indian woman who lived with them. She never come to town. After Joe started making and selling whiskey on this side of the state neither Runyon nor Aho ever come to town again and nobody ever saw them anywhere else either. And somewhere along the way Joe took over their stills as abandoned property. There were some mean stories told about what might of happened to the swamp rats, but the plain and simple of it was that nobody knew if the Ashleys had anything to do with their disappearances and nobody cared a thinker’s damn anyhow. The only thing for sure was that Old Joe’s product was way better than what the swamp rats had been peddling. Everybody who ever tasted the stuff will tell you that Joe Ashley’s shine was the finest ever made in the south of Florida. He soon had a steady line of customers from Stuart to Lauderdale and was using his boys to deliver the loads. And it wasnt much of a secret that he was selling to the Indians.

There’s something more to tell about Runyon and Aho. It was a common story that one or the other of them sired a child by the Indian woman who lived with them, a boy they named Hector. When the kid grew up he used the name Runyon but that dont mean Runyon was his daddy. Some say he just ruther have that name than Aho, and who could blame him. You’d see him roundabout the Indian River towns a lot more than either of the two men because he was the one they sent in to get whatever supplies they needed. Like most breeds he looked more Indian than white. He was brownskinned and his hair was as black as ink and he wore it long from the time he was a child. But he had blue eyes and the inside of his forearms was pale as any white man’s.

He was bad-dog mean, that boy, everybody said so. Sometimes he’d come into a town for no reason but to pick a fight with another boy and then just tear him up. He’d as soon gouge out your eye in a fight as not, as soon bite off your ear, your damn nose. The only boy who wasnt afraid of him was Bobby Baker, who was a few years older and some bigger, and for some reason they got along. Far as anybody knows, Bobby was the closest thing to a friend Heck Runyon ever had.

When he was about fourteen he was accused of stealing a farmer’s horse off a farm and the man wanted him throwed in jail. Sheriff George went out in the Glades to look for him and came back saying he couldnt find hide nor hair of him anywhere. But there was some who said he’d found him all right—and then helped him to get away to DeSoto County where he got work as a cowhunter, which is what they called a cowboy in Florida in them days. That