Peter Matthiessen - Killing Mister Watson

By the turn of the century, the wild things was so scarce and wary that a lot of the trappers went over to fishing. Some guided Yankees in the winter, then come back mullet-seining in the summer, shot all our curlews off Duck Island, set their trout nets right there on the grass northwest of Mormon Key. They wanted our key for their own camp, they'd shout ashore at night-You damn mulattas ain't got no damn claim to it! They took to crowding us so much we was fixing to shoot one, give the rest something to think about. And it got so they wanted us to shoot, give 'em their excuse to put an end to us once and for all.

Already the fish was getting few because every creek down in the Islands was crawling with plume hunters and gator skinners, never mind the sports off them big yachts in winter and gill netters all summer and moonshiners the whole damn year round. You'd see some stranger once a month where you'd never seen a man every other year, and you'd be leery of that stranger, too, never wave or nothing, just watch him out of sight and go your way.

So Daddy sold Mormon Key to E.J. Watson, and nobody pestered a man like that about no claim. We bought Tino Santini's Lost Man's claim when Tino moved north to Fort Myers, but before settling, we went on south to Flamingo for a year so's Mama could be with granddaddy John Weeks before he died. When we come back, we settled on Wood Key, raised good board houses, put in gardens. Dried salt fish until 1905, when run boats started coming in with ice, took our fresh fish away.

It was 1901, same year we got well started in the fisheries, that E.J. Watson followed us down south, bought the claim to Lost Man's Key from Shelton Atwell. That island lies in the mouth of Lost Man's River, seven-eight acres, enough high ground for a garden, with good charcoal timber, black mangrove and buttonwood, and one of the few springs along that coast. Has a little cove on the east side we called Home Creek where the old Frenchman's maps showed buried treasure.

Atwells was first real settlers in that section, come up from Key West back in the seventies, and they was first ones had a claim on Lost Man's Key. But when they was pioneering, Shelton said, they seen the damage up and down the coast from the hurricane of '73, and they was cautious. Up Rodgers River they located some good hammock ground with protection from the wind and common tides. Later on, when some years passed without no hurricane, Shelton's two boys got to thinking about Lost Man's Key, out on the Gulf, a lot less skeeters with that sea wind and very handy to fresh water, but some way they never got around to it. Said the move might be too much for the old woman, so they best leave well enough alone. Meanwhile they let squatters come and go, to keep the key cleared off. Ones that was on there in 1901 was young Wally Tucker from Key West and his wife, Bet, who had worked the year before for E.J. Watson.

Now Hamiltons had their eye on Lost Man's Key, but Ed Watson wanted it much worst and made sure we knew it. What he aimed to do was salvage that old Everglades dredge that the Disston Company abandoned up the Calusa Hatchee, ship it on a barge to Lost Man's River, deepen the channel, dig out a good harbor, set up a trading post like Old Joe Wiggins had at Sand Fly Key, give work to everybody. Stead of shipping our produce to Key West and losing half of it to spoilage, we would sell direct to E.J. Watson. He aimed to supply fresh vegetables and syrup, meat and fish, fresh water, dry goods, fish hooks, bullets, to hunters and fishermen and the Yankee yacht trade, make Lost Man's Key the most famous place on the southwest coast. If his friends farmed the few pieces of high ground, he would control the whole Ten Thousand Islands. Ideas like this one got him that name Emperor Watson, and they weren't crazy, cause on the east coast Everglades development was well started.

Watson's plan depended on that key in the mouth of Lost Man's River, and the Emperor told everybody who would stand still that he aimed to nail down Lost Man's Key just as soon as Old Man Atwell saw the light. The Atwells never rightly knowed just what he meant by that, and they weren't so anxious to find out. Not wanting to be unneighborly to Mister Watson, they passed the word they was thinking the deal over, and after that, they just set tight back up in Rodgers River, never went anywheres near to Chatham Bend.

It weren't that the Atwells didn't like Ed Watson, they sure did. One time when their cane got salt-watered by storm tide, Shelton and his older boy, one we called Winky, went to Watson for some seed cane for replanting, and Watson treated 'em like kings. Put 'em up for four days at the Bend and sent 'em home with hams and venison, anything they wanted. Atwells never did stop talking about how kind Mister Watson was when Winky and his dad went up to Pavioni. Well, everybody in our Hamilton clan had the same experience. Come to old-fashioned hospitality, you could not find a better neighbor in south Florida.

Them Atwells was twenty-five years in the Islands, longer'n anyone before our time. They had two plantations and a lot of fruit trees, grew cabbages, onions, pumpkins, melons, sweet potatoes, and Irish potatoes, too. They got them Irish potatoes off Ed Watson. All the same, and before that year was out, they moved back to Key West. Old Mrs. Atwell upped and said that twenty-five years in the mangrove was enough, she was going back where she was born and die in peace. Said she didn't mind getting bled to death by the dang skeeters, but she'd be darned if she would end her days having her throat slit or her head shot off by some darn bushwhacker from the Wild West. Anybody who wanted to tag along was surely welcome, but she was leaving home sweet home whether the rest of 'em went along or not. Turns out the whole bunch was raring to go, but nobody had wanted to come right out and say so.

They needed a grubstake for their new life, so the first thing Winky and his brother done was go up to the Bend and sell the claim on Lost Man's Key to E.J. Watson. Then they come to say good-bye to us before they left. How come you never offered it to us? we said. Cause we didn't want to cross him, they admitted. They didn't let on they was leaving the Islands, being scared that Mister Watson would take advantage. But taking advantage was not E.J. Watson's style, he was not a small man in that way. He was so excited to get hold of Lost Man's Key, and happy that his Island plan was working out without no trouble, that he just nodded at their asking price, he never blinked.

Yes, Mister Watson was very excited- too excited, Winky said. Not till he'd pocketed the cash did Winky tell him that the Atwells was leaving the Islands for good. Swamp angels finally got the best of us, ol' Winky said-that was Old Man McKinney's name for the damn skeeters-and Watson told 'em in a jolly way how grateful he was that "sharpshooters" and not him had run 'em off.

That day the Atwells paid their call at Chatham Bend, Mister Watson was the perfect gentleman, he went so far as to put on his frock coat before offering 'em a toast of his best whiskey. Yessir, said he, he seen Lost Man's Key as the heart of his whole scheme for this wild coast. Surveys was needed, he explained, because most all of southwest Florida was "swamp and overflowed" land turned over to the state back in 1850, and the state gave most of it to the railroad companies for laying rails into north Florida. The Everglades and the Ten Thousand Islands were still wilderness, and nobody knowed what was where nor who owned what. But he was in close touch with his friend Joe Shands, Lee County surveyor at Fort Myers, and Shands had told him this, that, and the other… and so on and so forth, waving his arms like our old Frenchman used to do when he got his wind up.

Course Storters in Everglade and Smallwoods at Chokoloskee, they knew how to work them land claims, and them families are well-to-do today. But in the Islands, E.J. Watson was the only feller ever wanted paperwork. The rest of us went down there to avoid it. Didn't want no surveys nor preemption, didn't want to know what preemption was. Never got it through our heads that if we didn't file a claim we'd wind up handing it over to outsiders who had paid off politicians to make it legal to steal it out from under us. Some feller would show up waving a paper that proved he owned the land we'd done the work on-damn rock-hard mound we had cleared and hacked and hoed all them long years before that city feller ever heard of southwest Florida-and a couple of sheriff's deputies right beside him to make sure them squatters got off his land quick, didn't try no mulatta tricks on this here city sonofabitch that called himself the rightful owner.