woods pony, a small short-bodied roan. Race could find the short way home from Hell, 'could turn on a dime and give back nine cents change,' as the old hands said. Had me a good cow dog, Trace, for turning cattle, and was a fair hand with the braided buckskin whip that served us cow hunters as lariat.
Each time our cattle pens were moved, an Indian family would move in behind and plant new gardens in that fertile, sod-broke ground, sweet potatoes the first year, then corn and peanuts. Because they were forever watching, they came in almost overnight. I used to wonder what Indians thought of the Disston Company's rusting dredge far out to the east toward Okeechobee, that looming shape on the sparkling horizon of what the Seminoles called Grass River, Pa-hay-okee, and the hellish noise and smoke and smell of it, all gone now, and not one damned thing accomplished, only the unholy ruin of the beautiful Calusa Hatchee. The old silence had returned, but the white man's machine still rose above that river of white sacred sand that had filled with mud and would never come clear again. This was the dredge Ed Watson aimed to use at Lost Man's River.
In the nineties, I became friendly with Walt Langford, who was a cow hunter for his father's partners. Young Walt was a hard rider, too, with the sharpest eye south of the river for a stray cow hidden in the scrub. But Walt always wanted to be liked too much, he aimed to show he was not just a rich cattleman's son but a regular feller, so he led in the boozing and the brawling, the whooping, galloping, and gunfire, that kept nice people shuttered up on Saturday afternoons. Fort Myers was never so uproarious as Arcadia, we never had real cattle wars or hired guns. All the same, this Saturday pandemonium reminded the upset citizens that our new Lee County capital was still a cow town, on the wrong side of that slow broad river, falling farther and farther behind the country's progress.
Many a long day I spent alone out in the Cypress, but the lonely day was Saturday, when the other riders, already half-drunk, yipped and slapped off through the trees to spend their week's pay in the saloons of Fort Myers.
On Sundays I helped serve the flock at the Indian mission at Immokalee, riding twenty miles or more to attend the service. The Indians could not follow the sermon, but they came anyway to watch the white people. They sat in circles on the floor. Pretty soon, I quit my job for full-time work at the Indian mission. I was still there in 1897 when I first heard how this E.J. Watson, a leading planter in the Islands, was supposed to be the killer of Quinn Bass, and the lovely young girl at Doc Langford's house was this outlaw's child. Carrie, going on thirteen, was a strong, willowy young lady with big dark eyes, black hair to her waist, and a high bosom. When I first saw that vivacious young creature skipping rope in front of Miss Flossie's notions store, I knew that she and I were some way fated. When the time came, I would ask her daddy for her hand in marriage, and shake his desperado's hand at the same time.
Cattlemen had run this town before it was a town at all, starting way back with Old Jake Summerlin at Punta Rassa. Old Jake was ruthless, people said, but at least he had cow dung on his boots. These new cattlemen, Jim Cole especially, worked mostly with paper, brokering stock they had never seen, let alone smelled. In recent years, with Doc Langford and the Hendrys, who bought out the Summerlins at Punta Rassa, Cole made a fortune provisioning the Rough Riders. One July day of 1899, according to the
Meanwhile, Jim Cole made a second fortune on Cuban rum, smuggled in as a return cargo on his cattle schooners, and naturally the cattlemen led the fight against liquor prohibition that the Women's Christian Temperance Union was supporting. The 'drys' won in 1898, thanks to the accidental shooting death of a drunk cowboy. The saloon of Taff O. Langford was shut down, and two years passed before the 'wets' could put Taff back in business. But the cattlemen still lived by their own rules, and Sheriff Tom Langford drank bootlegged rum at the wedding party in July when Walt Langford took the hand of Miss Carrie Watson.
Though I opened my livery stable that same year, I had some ideas about running for sheriff in the 1900 elections. I was shoeing a horse when this Jim Cole, who had got wind of my ambition, came in and offered me his help, having already figured what I hadn't understood, that I was pretty sure to win without him. Folks was real restless under the rule of cattle kings who ignored all protests against cattle in the streets, and the lard-assed incumbent, Sheriff Langford, had lost most of his support for covering up for the cowboys in that shooting.
Walt Langford and some other riders had caught an old black man outside Doc Winkler's house and told him he must dance for them or have his toes shot off. People next door had closed their shutters but they heard it. And this old nigra close to eighty, white-haired, crippled up, bent over, cried out, No, boss, Ah cain't dance, Ah is too old! And they said, Well, you better dance! and started shooting at the earth around his feet.
Doc Winkler came running with his rifle. He hollered, Now you boys clear out of here, let that old man alone! And he ordered the nigra to go behind the house. But the cowboys kept right on shooting into the ground behind him, so Doc Winkler fired a shot over their heads, and just at that moment a horse reared, and the bullet caught a cowboy through the head and killed him.
At Jim Cole's request, Sheriff Langford called the episode an accident. Walt Langford and his friends were not arrested, and there was no inquest; Doc Winkler was left alone to chew the guilt. But the flying bullets and senseless death brought new resentment of the cattlemen, also a new temperance campaign to make Lee County dry, and the Langford family took Cole's advice to marry off young Walter, get him simmered down.
Of the town's eligible young women, the only one that Walter had an eye on was a pretty Hendry whose parents forbade her to receive 'that young hellion' in the house. This caused stiff feelings in both families, and led eventually, from what I heard, to the bust-up of the Langford & Hendry store.
Well, my friend Walt couldn't help but notice-since she lived right in his house-the beautiful girl from the Ten Thousand Islands. Her mother was a lady by Fort Myers standards, a former schoolteacher and a religious person, cultured and well liked, whose husband would buy her a house on Anderson Avenue so that their three children might attend the Fort Myers school. But a recent book being passed around the town claimed that one Watson had killed the famous outlaw queen, Belle Starr, and it appeared that this bad man was none other than the husband of the refined and delicate Mrs. Jane Watson. The lucky few who had met Mister Watson had been thrilled to find that this 'dangerous' man was handsome and presentable, a devout churchgoer when in Fort Myers, a prospering planter and shrewd businessman of good credit among the merchants, and altogether more genteel than the frontier gentry who gossiped about his reputation.
Out of the blue, the Watsons announced the engagement of their beloved daughter to Walt Langford. It was all so sudden that some people figured this young hussy had accommodated Walter and was already in a family way. Well, naturally, she wasn't any such a thing! I spoke up loudly every time I heard loose talk about a shotgun wedding, I was so fierce about her purity that folks began to look at me in a queer way. Probably wondered if Frank B. Tippins was the father, which he wished he was!
Knowing Walt Langford, I guess that marriage was inevitable. No doubt Mister Watson's shady past made Carrie Watson all the more romantic to this good-hearted, rambunctious young man. But Carrie was not yet thirteen, and no one quite knew how agreement had been reached whereby such a young girl would be married the following year. From what we heard, it was Jim Cole who persuaded both families of the advantages of such a union. He had even met privately with E.J. Watson in a salon at the Hendry House, though what those two discussed was only rumor.
Walt and Carrie were married in July of 1898, in the great new day for the Fort Myers cattlemen that began when the Spanish War got under way. I went to the wedding and mourned for my lost bride, with her big wondering eyes and soft full mouth-a different creature altogether from the horse-haired thin-mouthed cracker women I was used to. When the minister asked if anybody present knew why Carrie and Walter should not be united in holy matrimony, a wound widened in my heart-
Love, love, love-well, who knows anything about it? Not me, not me. I never got over her, I do know that much. I wouldn't have gone to that wedding at all except to see what Carrie's father looked like, and I never saw him. The noted planter, Mr. E.J. Watson, failed to appear.
CARRIE WATSON
MAY 10, 1898. Frank Tippins thinks he loves the girl who is engaged to his friend Walter!
Mr. Tippins is nice-looking, I'll confess, tall and lanky, in his early thirties, black handlebar mustache down at
