Killing Mister Watson

pretend he wasn't there. Gene spoke in his rough way whether his own brother heard or not, and sometimes I think that's the way both of 'em wanted it. In a boat, Walter was always in the bow, and never looked around if he could help it. Had his own world in his head to keep him company, poor Walter did.

Leon always loved his brother Walter, and when they were boys, Gene and Leon were good brothers, too, but as life went on, they grew to hate each other, and the seed of the trouble, Leon told me, was Gene's bad attitude toward Walter, which came from a bad attitude about himself. Once in a while one of his Weeks or Daniels cousins would get drunk and tease Eugene-Your brother Leon, now, he looks almost like a white man, don't he, Gene?-and all Gene's rage would get roiled up, he'd fight to prove that he was white till he was black-and-blue, and in the end, it was Walter got the blame. In later years, when Walter stayed off by himself, Leon held that against Gene, he came right out with it. Said, 'Gene, if your own brother ain't good enough for you, then you ain't good enough for me.' Just wouldn't tolerate it. We moved across to Plover Key till Leon cooled a little.

Cruel Mary Weeks claimed to be color-blind, pointing at her husband as her proof, but in her heart it was her own color she despised. Dark blood was not the poison that was passed down in the family, it was that despising.

These Cypress Indins, or Mikasukis, were Creeks same as the Seminoles, Daddy Richard said, only their language was Hitchiti, not Muskogee, they were more hunters than farmers, kept no cattle. They stayed apart from white people, and was real strict. Back in the old days they used to put half-white babies to death, and the parents, too. Today most Indins want to be whites, and seeing that whites look down on blacks, they have got so they think they are somewhat better than what blacks are. Don't matter what color their own skin is, they have that poison. Mary Weeks come down from that poisoned kind, in my opinion.

So she said her husband was descended from a Choctaw princess, and her own Seminole mother was a princess, too. Come right down from Chief Osceola, straight as an arrow. She was no kind of kin at all to any real flesh-and-blood Indins that you could point at, she would not admit to a single redskin relative that ever peed a drop on Florida soil.

This whole darn foolishness of blood will be the ruin of this country. As Old Chevelier told Daddy Richard, human beings was all one shade when they first appeared on earth, and only turned into different-colored races when they scattered out across the continents. The way they breed around these days, the Frenchman said, they were sure to wind up all one color again, and the sooner the better, too, he'd say, because life was terrible enough without this useless misery of color.

We had all colors in the Hamilton clan, and that's for sure. Jean Chevelier called Hamiltons 'the true New World family,' because Richard Hamilton never thought about your color. If you came along and you were hungry, why he fed you, and he made Old Mary go along with that, and Eugene, too. Otherwise he would not bother his head, he let his wife make the decisions. Leon and me, we felt the same way as his daddy, we shared our table with all kinds and creeds. For that we was called nigger-lovers by the ones that didn't come right out and call us niggers. Course folks with manners, they might say mulattas.

My mother was a Holland, Irish Catholic, and my daddy Henry Gilbert Johnson was no kin at all to the Charley Johnson bunch at Chokoloskee nor that Christ Johnson from Mound Key whose bad son Hubert run off later on with Liza, nor Johnny Johnson who was one of Josie Jenkins's seven husbands. Chokoloskee people called my dad a conch from the Bahamas, but he come from the Channel Isles of England to trade some furs and feathers off the Indins. I showed up in '89, same year as Lucius Watson. Later in life, me'n Lucius was always just a little bit in love, but not so's anyone would notice, even him.

Gilbert Johnson used to camp at Lost Man's before the Hamiltons came on south from Chatham River. I recall the day we found the Hamiltons at his Wood Key camp. I was just thirteen, Leon a few years older, and we took one look and my heart was throbbing and everything else too. My sister Rebecca felt the same for Eugene, so my dad got us out of there, but after a year, those two boys came and took us.

Mother Mary said, All right, but we had to marry-being the white person, she naturally made all the decisions in the family-so Gene and Leon married us nice and proper in the old Ocean Chapel in Key West. I never regretted it, I married a good man. But Becca's man was sly and ornery, and by the end of it, his own daddy wouldn't have one thing to do with him.

I guess Daddy Richard missed old Jean Chevelier, cause after he moved down to Wood Key, he got the same kind of scrappy friendship going with my daddy. Even when Dad come to roost alongside Hamiltons on Wood Key, spent his old age fooling with fish and boats, he'd look at Richard and just shake his head. 'How I rue the day,' he'd sigh, 'that I ever fell afoul of these bloody Hamiltons!' I been saying that to Leon all my life!

A critical asset in E.J. Watson's tumultuous career was his strong connection with the powerful cattlemen and bankers of the west coast city of Fort Myers, Florida, commissioned as Fort Harvie during the Third Seminole War, then reactivated during the Civil War as a base for Union raiders harassing the cattle trains that were still supplying beef to the Confederacy. Should you care to inspect it, the following material from my History of Southwest Florida may give some indication of why the marriage of Mr. Watson's daughter to W.G. Langford had such profound reverberations on Watson's life.

Fort Myers's first cattleman, Jake Summerlin, had worked cattle from the age of seven, bartering the twenty slaves in his inheritance for his first herd of six thousand head in the 1840s. He was a veteran of the Seminole Wars and a pioneer cattleman on the Alachua Prairie, moving huge herds with his cowboys and a grub wagon all the way from the St. Johns River southwest across Florida to the Calusa Hatchee. In the Civil War, Jake Summerlin sold cattle on the hoof to the Confederacy and smuggled cattle through the Union blockade to sell in Cuba. In the last year of the War he sold herds to the Union, which paid better.

After the War, Fort Myers was abandoned, but by 1869, Summerlin and his partners were moving their herds south once more and swimming them across the Calusa Hatchee and down to the pens and docks at Puma Rassa, where Summerlin took over the old Army barracks. Leasing pens and docks from the International Ocean and Telegraph Company, he made a fortune, shipping ten thousand head of his wild range cattle to Cuba every year. The Spaniards came up the Calusa Hatchee to buy his longhorns at Cattle Dock Point, paying Old Jake in gold doubloons, which he left about in sacks, old wool socks, and cigar boxes.

Already the homesteaders were descending on south Florida, creaking through the woods in covered wagons hauled through the hot sand by two or three yokes of mules or oxen. The pistol shot of their cracked whips, echoing across the hot dry landscape, could be heard a country mile away. At the Calusa River these Baptist 'crackers' found good river-bottom land and built thatch houses, grew good crops, experimented with pineapples and coconuts, sugar cane and cabbage, and citrus plantations. But with the Key West market so far to the south, perishable produce could not survive the slow hot schooner voyage, and the pioneer farmers subsisted on hunting and fishing, living off the land. One day, the railroad would surely arrive, erupting with Yankee tourists and investors waving new green bills, and these trains would carry the bountiful winter produce to the northern markets. The Calusa Hatchee would be dredged and the Everglades drained, and Fort Myers would take a leading place in the new century.

These were the intoxicated years when Hamilton Disston, tycoon of Philadelphia, contracted with the State of Florida to acquire four million acres of the Glades for one million dollars, on the condition that his Atlantic and Gulf Coast Canal and Okeechobee Land Company drain the Kissimmee-Okeechobee region by way of the Calusa Hatchee to bring this natural wonder under man's dominion. Already Disston's mighty dredge was far upriver, past the Calusa mounds of clear white sand, past the ancient canals that joined the mounds to the clear and tranquil flow of the silent river. Churning out clouds of smoke and noise that drifted for miles across the shining waters, the dredge had shifted and resettled the vast muds of the Everglades in a mighty paroxysm of misdirected progress. By 1888, the dredge project had foundered, but not before the fragile water system had been broken, and the whole Okeechobee drainage opened to settlement, driving the remnant Indians farther southward into the Big Cypress. Through raw canals, the detritus and overflow of Okeechobee poured away westward, down the old Calusa River, which only a few years before had run black and clear over shimmering white sands of ancient shell.

Soon that white sand was covered over in dead mud and slime. The only one who seemed to care was the proprietor of the Punta Rassa Hotel, renamed the Tarpon House after a New York sportsman caught the first 'silver king' an rod and reel in '85. Ever since, rich Yankees had flocked here in winter migration, pursuing the tarpon, Spanish mackerel, and kingfish, the snook and redfish that flashed through the emerald passes of the barrier islands. The millionaires paid handsomely to 'rough it' at the Tarpon House, with its manly fare and rude bare floors, tin washbowls, china slop jars, and frontier spittoons. But now the Okeechobee muds, clouding the river,