Killing Mister Watson

drainage schemes, said he hated waste so he aimed to take every last gator in the Glades. Three years later, that was 1908, the gator trade was pretty close to finished. And the Injuns was close to finished, too, cause they didn't have good guns or traps, they only took enough to go and trade with. They never killed them critters out, not the way we did.

Ted never said if killing all them gators was in God's service or not, but he sure had some nice cash set aside. Two years later, him and his father bought the whole Santini claim on Chokoloskee. Them Santinis and the son-in- law Santana, they was Catholics, but they was one of our pioneer families, and folks was surprised to see 'em pull up stakes. Nicholas-that's Tino-his wife was Mary Ann Daniels, sister to Aunt Netta, who kept house for Watson, and maybe that led to something ugly Dolphus said to Watson that he wished he hadn't. Tino moved up to Fort Myers, and as for Dolphus, he lit out for the east coast, about as far from E.J. Watson as he could get.

According to Ted Smallwood's reminiscences, E.J. Watson had not been in the Islands long before he assaulted 'one of our best citizens,' Adolphus Santini of Chokoloskee Island, at Key West. (See the excerpts from the Bill House interviews, which describe the Santini episode in detail.)

In her memoirs, Mary Douthit Conrad corroborates Smallwood's version of the Highsmith/Davis killing, which strengthens one's confidence in the accuracy of his 'Ed Watson Story,' cited above. She also provides additional details from the perspective of the fair sex. 'After all this excitement the Village Improvement Association of Lemon City [now subsumed by Greater Miami] put on a box supper and ice cream social at the church to raise enough money to send Mrs. Davis and her two boys back home to Texas.'

In the last year of his life, Jean Chevelier made an ill-advised attempt to arrest Mr. Watson, assisted by his aforementioned associate Elijah Carey, and a plume hunter and moonshiner named Ed. Brewer. The arrest attempt was entirely unsuccessful, and the posse fled.

Due to the paucity of Key West records, there is little to be learned about Captain Carey, but Brewer turns up in Florida frontier literature as early as 1892, in an account of a journey up the Calusa Hatchee from Ft. Myers that voyaged across Lake Okeechobee and emerged at the Miami River. 'At the hotel [the Hendry House in Fort Myers] we talked with several men who had been in the employ of the Disston Drainage Co. and who claimed to be familiar with the border of the Everglades. They said no man other than an Indian had ever been through the 'Glades except one 'Brewer' who had been arrested for selling whiskey to the Indians and released on bond, when the Indians in order to effect his escape had carried him across to Miami.'

Brewer later served as guide to a Navy lieutenant Hugh L. Willoughby, who crossed the Everglades in 1896. Willoughby recorded this high opinion of the man, despite warnings about his desperate reputation:

Ed. Brewer… had always made a living by hunting and trapping. He would sometimes be in the woods, and partly in the Everglades, for six months at a stretch without seeing a soul except an occasional Indian. He was a man of medium height, heavily built without being fat, black hair, black eyes, inured to hardship, and able to make himself comfortable in his long tramps, with a canoe, a tin pot, a blanket, a deer-skin, a mosquito-bar, and a rifle, with perhaps a plug or two of tobacco as a luxury. My experience in hunting with him the year previous had shown that he was just the man to face with me whatever dangers there might be in store in my attempt to cross the Everglades. Although warned by some of my friends that he was a dangerous character, I preferred to rely upon my own judgment of human nature rather than unproved stories about him. In our solitary companionship, far from the reach of any law but that of our own making, I always found him brave and industrious, constantly denying himself, deceiving me as to his appetite when our supplies ran low that I might be the more comfortable, and many a night did he stay up an extra hour while I was finishing my notes and plotting work, that he might tuck me in my cheesecloth from the outside.

Ed. Brewer is treated with less reverence in a useful book about the south Florida backcountry of that period, which belittles Willoughby's accomplishment (pointing out that the Glades had already been conquered several times, dating back to the Harney crossing in 1842). And he has been remembered elsewhere, usually in reference to the Willoughby journey or his chronic troubles with the law. Whatever his merits, Ed. Brewer was someone to be reckoned with, despite his humiliation at the hands of Watson.

RICHARD HAMILTON

What took the fight out of my old friend the Frenchman was some news that come from Marco Key back in the spring of '95. Bill Collier was digging garden muck for his tomatoes from a little mangrove swamp between shell ridges, just down the Caxambas trail from his Marco property, when his spade come up with some Indin war clubs, cordage, and a conch-shell dipper, and some peculiar kind of old wood carving. Cap'n Bill always made a profit out of everything he touched, and it might seem he just had the luck to stumble on what Old Jean searched for all his life. But Bill Collier was also the one man on this coast with enough ambition to report it, and if you was Indin, you would not doubt that he was guided by Calusa spirits on account it was time them old things was brought to light.

For saying such heathen things to her innocent children, Mary cussed me for a idle worshipper, cussed her poor old husband black and blue. Mary lost her Indin heritage before she found it-her daddy John Weeks seen to that-but in her heart she knew that what I said was true.

Captain Bill Collier showed this stuff to some tarpon-fishing Yankee, and this one told another, and next thing you know, them sports was in there shoveling for fun. They take what they don't break back North for souvenirs, and some scientists up that way heard about it, and a famous desecrator named Frank H. Cushing came down to Caxambas right away. Mr. Cushing visited Cap'n Bill's diggings that same spring and come back again, winter of '96, took out a whole pile of carved objects, religious stuff, that the Old Calusas had whittled out of wood and shell. There was bone jewelry and shell cups, ladles, a deer head, a carved fish with bits of turtle shell stuck into it, and some terrible wood masks worn by the shamans. Mr. Cushing lugged all these treasures back to Pennsylvania, and Hamilton Disston of Philadelphia, man made such a mess of dredging the Calusa Hatchee, paid for everything.

Them Yankees had gone and stole the Frenchman's glory. I sure hoped nobody would be fool enough to tell him that, least not before I took him out and showed him what he was hunting for close to ten years. He might as well have a look at it before he died. But by that time he was old and poorly, rotting in his bed, with John Leon and Liza trying to tend him. When I told him it was time to show him a Calusa burial, he stared at me like I was crazy, same way he used to. 'Throw tar,' he said sadly, something like that.

What really twisted up the Frenchman was a wood carving of a cat kneeled like a man. A drawing of that cat was in the papers, and when Lige Carey took them papers up to Possum Key, Chevelier give it one hard look, then sat back hard. After staring out the door a little while, he whispered the one word 'Egyptian!' and begun to weep. He was like a man shot through the spine, didn't move for days.

Finally he said to Captain Carey, 'I know right away what I am looking, from vair first time I see big foking mounds! But I am looking in wrong foking place!' He never went back to Gopher Key again, he just give up on life. Didn't have no fight left in him, didn't last the year.

'I am… homesick?' he would tell my children, to explain his tears. 'That is how you say it? Sick of home?'

When the kids visited, they would set him outside like a doll while they cleaned the cabin, but he never noticed nothing, in or out, just set there on his little stoop staring at the sun till he couldn't see no more. Struck his self blind. Might let out a yelp once in a while, but that's about all. Wouldn't let them bathe him, just waved 'em off, that's how furious he talked inside his head. Showed no interest in his feed, just wasted away. Jean Chevelier died of his own spleen, he choked on life.

Young Bill House had been gone a while from Possum Key, and Elijah P. Carey only came and went. Toward the end, as lonely as he was, the old man got tired of Cap'n Carey. 'I am alone,' he said one day, 'no matter he is here or isn't. Silence is better.'

Cap'n Carey weren't such a bad feller, but he told himself too many lies. He was a man needed to talk, couldn't stand no silence very long, and when that old man paid him no more mind, didn't hardly notice he was there, the poor man took to giving speeches to the wild things that watched from the green walls that was closing in. He was getting so crazy back in there with that silent old man glaring at the sun that he could hear the sun roar and the trees groan in the night, that's what he told us. Had to listen to God's silence, and what he heard put a bad scare in him, is what it come to. He weren't cut out for solitude, and anyway