Peter Matthiessen: Killing Mister Watson

Sir-

The enclosed material relating to E.J. Watson is culled from interviews with pioneer Floridians made years ago for the History of Southwest Florida which drew your attention to my modest researches in the first place. Though I placed no emphasis upon our subject, these interviews (arranged here in a rough chronology) contain a remarkable amount of comment on "Mister Watson." Decidedly they affirm his eminence in the imagination of his wilderness community, so isolated from the new century on these coastal islands.

Also included are pertinent clippings from the American Eagle and the Fort Myers Press, including excerpts from their local news columns. These contemporary accounts seem more dependable than the many magazine articles and books in which E.J. Watson's name has since appeared, which tend to contradict one another on small points as well as large, and fail to represent a picture consistent with the man remembered in these narratives by those who knew him best. Indeed, they raise as many questions as they answer concerning the enigmatic figure who looms behind the few hard facts of his dark history.

The following sketch of Watson's life is submitted in the sincere conviction that is it truthful in its general statement as well as in significant particulars. It is largely based on two brief chronicles published in the 1950s, each of them considerably more accurate than any of the better-known accounts. One appeared in a letter submitted to a "Pioneer Florida" column in the Miami Herald by the late Dr. M.B. Herlong, "a pioneer physician in this state," who apparently knew the Watson family in his younger days, both in South Carolina and later in north Florida. The other, by the late Charles Sherod "Ted" Smallwood, who was raised not far from Mr. Watson's district in north Florida and became his friend in the Ten Thousand Islands, turns up among Smallwood's reminiscences. The absence of contradictions in these two accounts (by firsthand sources entirely unacquainted with each other) seems to strengthen the reliability of both.

Edgar Watson was born on November 11, 1855, in Edgefield County, South Carolina, just across the northeast Georgia line. According to Dr. Herlong, who was also born in Edgefield County, Edgar's father was Elijah Watson, a sometime state prison employee and celebrated brawler, known, from a knife scar that encircled his eye, as Ring-Eye Lige. The doctor says that Ring-Eye Lige so brutalized his family with his drinking and intemperate behavior that Mrs. Watson felt obliged to flee with her two children to relatives in northern Florida.

The family traveled to the Fort White region of Columbia County rather early in our subject's life, since both Herlong and Smallwood state that he was raised there. Dr. Herlong relates that Edgar and his sister, Minnie, "grew up and married in that section."

"One bright moonlight night," Dr. Herlong continues, "I heard a wagon passing our place. It was bright enough to recognize Watson and his family in the wagon. The report was that they settled in Georgia, but it couldn't have been for long." Probably Ted Smallwood was correct in saying that Mr. Watson married three women from Columbia County, and one may assume that the people in the wagon included a son by the first marriage, Robert or "Rob" Watson; his second wife, Jane S. Watson; his daughter, Carrie, born in 1885; and an infant son, Edgar E., born in 1887. Another son, Lucius, would be born out West. Whatever its cause, Watson's flight occurred sometime before early 1888, when the Watsons are first reported in the Indian Territory. Popular accounts of his career assert that before this departure from Columbia County, he had killed his brother-in-law, who was "cut to pieces." Another account specifies "two cousins." Smallwood mentions "a shooting" involving a brother-in-law but does not say that this shooting was fatal. Herlong mentions no killing in Columbia County in this period, but neither does he speculate on why Edgar Watson set out on his long journey in the dead of night.

Though the facts of this episode are probably lost, the many reports of his subsequent association with Belle Stan, "Queen of the Outlaws," in the Indian Territory, are unanimous in the claim that when Mr. Watson departed for the West, he was wanted for murder in the State of Florida.

I am in correspondence with historians and librarians in Arkansas and Oklahoma in the hope that some details of Mr. Watson's sojourn in Oklahoma can be salvaged from the great amount of myth and nonsense that has been written about Mrs. Starr. Should this material be forthcoming, copies shall be sent along at once…

At the end of his stay in Oklahoma, Mr. Watson apparently returned to Arkansas, where he was tried and imprisoned as a horse thief. Apparently he escaped from prison, at which time he returned to Florida, though some accounts speak of an intervening stay in Oregon. (There is also occasional mention of an earlier sojourn in Texas, for which no evidence whatever has come forward.) For several years after 1889, his movements are obscure, though it seems clear that he had parted with his family.

Mr. Watson told Ted Smallwood that upon his return to Florida in the early 1890s, he visited Arcadia, at that time a wild cattle town on the Pease River (on some maps "Peace," after the treaty in 1842 that ended the Second Seminole War), where he slew a "bad actor" named Quinn Bass. "Watson said Bass had a fellow down whittling on him with a knife and Watson told Bass to stop, he had worked on the man enough, and Bass got loose and came toward him and he began putting.38 S &W bullets into Bass and shot him down." (Though Mr. Watson is apparently the source of the Bass story-and presumably the Oregon reference, too-we must decide for ourselves if he told the truth.) According to Smallwood's chronology, this event took place not long before he appeared in southwest Florida "in 1892 or '93."

From Arcadia, Mr. Watson proceeded to Everglade and Half Way Creek, two small farming communities on Chokoloskee Bay, in the northern part of the Ten Thousand Islands. These pioneer outposts on the swampy mainland, together with nearby Chokoloskee Island, were the last points of civilization on the southwest coast.

I done a lot, lived a long time, and seen more than I cared to. I remember what I seen, and learned some from it, but I was born on the run like a young deer and never had no time for improvement. What little I come by I owed to that Frenchified old feller who was Mister Watson's closest neighbor next to me.

First time I met that mean old man I tried to run him right off Chatham River. That was the winter of '88, two-three years before the day Mr. Ed Watson come around the bend. We was living at Pavioni then, which is the Watson Place today. There was forty acres on that Pavioni mound, but we farmed just the one, for our own use. We was making a fair living, salted fish, cut buttonwood, took plumes in egret breeding season, took some gator hides, some otter, done some trading with the Indins, and eased on by.

That morning I felt something coming, though I never heard a thing. Looking south across the field, I see my old woman, Mary Weeks, and it is like looking at a stranger. In a queer shift of wind and light off of the river, what I see is not my Mary but a big dark cruel-mouthed woman in long gingham, hard bare feet, bad scowl half-hid in the shadow of her sunbonnet. She is out on the river-bank and she is pointing, like she seen a vision in that glaring sky out toward the Gulf. Though I can't hear, she is hollering into the wind, her mouth round as a hole.

Big Mary is the kind who don't come hunting you, just hollers what she wants from where she's at. Sometimes I play deaf, pay her no mind. But this day I had sign of something, so I set down my hoe and come in from the sweet potatoes, telling my two older fellers to keep at it.