leading one to suspect that their numbers are exaggerated. Indeed, the only ones identified by his neighbors during his sojourn in the Ten Thousand Islands were old Jean Chevelier and the two Tuckers, and the first seems problematical, at best. Local people assert that Mr. Watson murdered 'the old Frenchman,' but when questioned closely, none of them seemed to believe it, least of all the Hamilton clan, which was close to Chevelier as well as Watson.
In their native courtesy and hospitality, one's informants imagine that the most sensational interpretation of the Watson legend is the one that the visitor wishes to hear, and one may suppose that this was true in the Dimocks' day as well. Not that the Dimocks were naive; they had traveled widely in south Florida over many years, they knew the country and its people as well as might be expected of Yankees and outsiders, and they took an ironical view of all they saw. Nonetheless, the Watson legend may be counted among their Florida enchantments.
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 E.J. 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.
Mr. Watson is considerably more intriguing than John Ashley, who was, in the end, a very ordinary sort of outlaw. By all accounts, Edgar Watson was a good husband and a loving father, an expert and dedicated farmer, successful businessman, and generous neighbor. Such virtues-not usually associated with notorious killers of the common type, who tend to be stunted and uninteresting in their social relations as well as in outlook and mentality-command our attention and explain why Mr. Watson is so fascinating, not only to the Dimocks and later writers but increasingly-dare I admit this?-to the undersigned. As a professional historian, I had thought myself beyond such subjectivity, yet the enigma of our subject's character grows rather than lessens with each new fact unearthed, however much the vulgar legend is deflated. How else to explain that, seven decades after his death, Ed Watson remains the most celebrated citizen the southwest coast of Florida ever produced?
Of the 'seven mysterious murders' cited by the Dimocks, we are left with the suspicious deaths of 'Tucker and his nephew,' as these victims are usually described by local people. The precise identities of the Tuckers remain vague, together with the circumstances. According to the Hamilton family, who were the Tuckers' neighbors and friends, they were Walter Tucker and his wife Elizabeth, known as Wally and Bet. Despite friendship with Watson, the Hamiltons assume that he killed these young newcomers from Key West, which he himself appears to have confirmed by his hasty departure from the region.
Thus only two out of these seven unsolved killings may safely be laid at Mr. Watson's door, and probably this is a fair ratio of truth to legend when considering his lifelong career. The highest figure I have come upon is fifty-seven-Mr. Watson's own figure, it is said, as recorded in a notebook allegedly once seen by his son Lucius, who later described it to my informant, Mr. Buddy Roberts of Homestead. (Mr. Roberts's uncle Gene was a friend of Mr. Watson, and the whole family was involved in the Guy Bradley case.) There are many good reasons for doubting this story, among them Lucius Watson's well-known reluctance to discuss his father. Yet Sarah Hamilton recalled, quite separately, not only that Mr. Watson kept a journal but that it was entitled 'Footnotes to My Life.' And Buddy Roberts mentions a detail that could only have been known by someone close to the family, to wit, that Lucius's father had a tiny foot, and wore a size seven shoe.
There is a widespread local rumor that Mr. Watson forced one of his sons to assist him in the Tucker killings, ordering him to pursue and kill the Tucker 'nephew,' who fled down the beach. If such an episode took place, the victim must have been Bet Tucker and the accomplice was Rob Watson, since in 1901 young Eddie and Lucius were living with the family in Fort Myers.
Shortly after the Tucker deaths, it is related, Rob Watson fled in his father's schooner to Key West, where he sold the ship in order to finance his ongoing flight and final disappearance. Mr. Watson pursued him to Key West and, failing to find him, assaulted one Collins, who seems to have abetted young Rob's flight. Shortly thereafter, Mr. Watson himself departed southwest Florida, not to return for several years. A letter of unknown provenance written to the Smallwoods in 1904, mentioning that 'friend Watson' has been in touch with the Lee County surveyor, Joseph Shands, is the first indication known to me of his return into the region.
I heard tell of E.J. Watson long before his family came to live here. I was born in Arcadia and was back there on a cattle drive at the time of the De Soto County range wars in the early nineties. One day a local gunslinger was killed in a saloon brawl by a stranger. Quinn Bass was a local boy from the large cattle clan on the Kissimmee River, and the hired guns Quinn rode with led a crowd of rowdies and Bass relatives to storm the new jailhouse and lynch 'the stranger'-more in the spirit of hell-raising than justice, since even his partners never denied that ol' Quinn asked for what it turned out he had coming. The mob was slowed by the new bricks and brave demeanor of De Soto County sheriff Ollie H. Dishong, who smiled and waved from the second story as if he was up there running for reelection. But he wasn't calm inside, he told me, because as that moonless night went on, the crowd grew so unruly that Sheriff Ollie came to doubt he could save his prisoner to go to trial. However, he reckoned that, no matter what befell this Watson, no great injustice would be done, and rather than see his brand-new jail torn up, he unlocked the cell and told the prisoner he might as well get going 'while the going's good.'
The prisoner looked out the window at the crowd, then went back into his cell and lay down on his bunk. Sheriff said, What is the matter, and the stranger said kind of ironical he didn't think the going looked so good. Not enough evidence to hold you, Sheriff Ollie explained, and this way, you got you a fighting chance. Lock that door, his prisoner said. I'll sleep better behind bars.
But later the stranger sent some money to treat the crowd at a saloon some distance up the street, and toward daybreak, with the mob distracted, the sheriff rode him to the edge of town, told him to go to hell and stay there. The stranger grinned into the sheriff's face. Said, What makes you think we ain't arrived already?
Remembering those words, Sheriff Ollie shook his head. 'That damn Jack Watson was the most friendliest sonofagun I ever met,' he told me.
'You mean Ed Watson, don't you?' I said. 'Ed Watson?' Sheriff Dishong shook his head again. 'Must be gettin old. Did I say Jack?'
That story got me kind of interested in being a lawman, but I had a career or two before that time, had some education. I was fifteen years of age when I took work as a printer's devil for the new Fort Myers Press, which in a town of about three hundred people was glad to come up with any news at all. That was 1884, when a typical headline story was the Debating and Literary Society's first meeting to decide the question 'Are Women Intelligent Enough to Vote?' (Stamping their feet, the panel voted in the affirmative, at least in regard to the fair sex of Fort Myers.) In that same year I set in type the first advertisement for Roan's general store, offering top prices for deerskins, gator hides, and bird plumes. It was also the year of the first visit to 'our fair city' of America's 'electrical wizard,' Thomas Alva Edison, who bought Sam Summerlin's place on Riverside Avenue-that's MacGregor now-and would one day make Fort Myers his winter home. And it was the year Jim Cole showed up in town. In those days, even Jim Cole was a 'first.'
The following year, the Press covered the big celebration at the river-balloons, fireworks, and oyster roast-when Grover Cleveland became the first Democratic president in a quarter century. That put an end to Reconstruction, those terrible dark years when nigras got treated better than the white people.
After four years as a printer's devil, I was sick of indoor life. I took a job with the Hendrys as a 'cow hunter,' rounding up the long-horned cattle scattered through the Cypress. Sometimes I rode all the way east to the Everglades, long silent days under the broad sky in the hard fierce light of the Glades country, lost in the creak of my old worn-out saddle and my horse blowing and hot wind whispering in the pines. For long years afterward I missed the stillness of the Big Cypress, the slow time of those horseback days, the hunting and fishing for the cow camp, the slow cooking fires, the simple sun-warmed tools of iron, wood, and leather, the resin scent of the pine ridges, the stomp of hoof and bawl of cattle, the wild things glimpsed, wild creatures, the echoing silence pierced far and near by the sharp cry of a woodpecker or the dry sizzle of a rattler, and always the soft blowing of my
