The Orchid Thief

by Susan Orlean

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  “Florida Indians” are the descendants of the Yuchi, Creek, and Cherokee Indians who lived in Georgia and Alabama until the eighteenth century, when white settlers forced them off their fertile land. Once the Indians relocated to Florida they began calling themselves Seminole or Miccosukee, which means “wild wanderers” or “outlanders” or “runaways.” After the United States took possession of Florida from Spain in 1821, white settlers made their way south to Florida and soon coveted that Indian land, too, and the federal government responded by spending more than $40 million in three Seminole “subjugation and removal efforts.” The last of the three Seminole Wars, the Billy Bowlegs War, ended in 1848; by then the U.S. Army had “subjugated and removed” more than 90 percent of the Seminoles to Oklahoma. The remaining 10 percent—about three hundred members—fled to the Everglades and the Big Cypress Swamp and set up chikee-hut camps on the edge of the wetlands. The government persisted in the removal efforts, at one point offering Chief Billy Bowlegs $215,000 to lead the remaining tribe members to Oklahoma. He refused. He was later persuaded to come to Washington for negotiations. Along with another Seminole chief and a team of government “removal specialists,” Chief Billy Bowlegs traveled to the capital on horseback. The group stopped along the way in Tampa, Palatka, Orange City, and in Savannah, Georgia. At hotels Chief Billy registered as “Mr. William B. Legs.” The summit was unsuccessful in persuading the Seminoles to leave, as was a law passed in 1853 that made it illegal for them to live in Florida, as were further incursions by government soldiers. In 1858 Secretary of War Jefferson Davis admitted that the Seminoles had “baffled the energetic efforts of our army to effect their subjugation and removal.” Because they never surrendered, the Florida Seminoles came to refer to themselves as the Unconquered. To this day their descendants have never signed a peace treaty with the United States.

  One of the leaders of the Unconquered was a young fighter named Osceola, the son of a white British trader and a woman who was part Creek Indian, part black, and part Scottish. Osceola was born in northern Alabama. In 1818 he and his mother were captured by Andrew Jackson’s soldiers. When they were released they moved to Silver Springs, Florida, where they lived with his mother’s Creek relatives. Osceola’s given name was Billy Powell. “Osceola” probably derives from his Creek ceremonial title, “asi yahola,” which means Black Drink Crier. Black drink was a strong, bitter purgative brewed from holly leaves. A “yahola,” a sort of altar boy, would pass out the black drink at religious ceremonies and sing. Osceola was tall and slender and nice-looking, and had a taste for fine jewelry, red leggings, and feathered turbans. He had no hereditary claim to leadership and therefore was not technically a chief, but he won supreme respect from the tribe because of his passion for the tribe, his skill at the popular Indian game of stickball, and his personal confidence. As a young man, Osceola quickly built a distinguished reputation as an Indian warrior. Nonetheless, he also had many white associates and admirers. He was close friends with a white lieutenant stationed at Fort King in Florida whom he had met during the Second Seminole War, and was very friendly with Frederick Weedon, the white physician who attended him after he was captured and put in a military prison. Osceola also had many supporters among white abolitionists who believed the Seminole Wars were unjust and were being waged only to benefit plantation owners and to punish the Indians for giving sanctuary to escaped slaves. Coincidentally, the Seminoles owned a large number of slaves themselves, although the relationship between the Seminole master and black slave was unusual—slaves commingled and intermarried with tribe members, and both groups lived equally humbly. One of Osceola’s wives was a descendant of a fugitive slave who was later recaptured, rousing Osceola’s commitment to his war against the white man. Nonetheless, when the Civil War broke out, the tribe entered into a treaty with the Confederacy, probably because they were living in the South, but at least partly because, like the Confederate states, they permitted slavery.

  Osceola was esteemed by his tribe for being a clever attacker and a ruthless avenger, and yet he was also admired by both Indians and whites for his fairness and gentlemanly conduct and his disdain for petty terrorism. It is said he never stole a single possession from a white settler or soldier—not even a horse, which was a customary war trophy. He loathed disloyalty and corruption and lack of principle in anyone, white or Indian. The act of which Osceola was proudest and for which he was most famous was his assassination of Charley Emanthla, the Seminole chief who had caved in to the government and agreed to move the tribe to Oklahoma. Emanthla had accepted bribes in exchange for his cooperation. After Osceola killed Emanthla, he took the bribe money out of Emanthla’s purse and scattered it over his dead body.

  In 1837 Osceola and another Seminole leader, Coa Hadjo, agreed to attend peace talks at Fort Peyton, Florida, with General Thomas Jesup. Osceola may have decided to negotiate because he was hoping to buy time for the tribe or perhaps because he felt he could not endure another year of fighting. He and Coa Hadjo traveled to Fort Peyton with a delegation of seventy-one warriors, six women, and four black Seminole tribe members. Osceola had made the arrangements in good faith, but Jesup had not: he had secretly ordered Joseph Hernandez, the Florida delegate to Congress and a general in the Florida militia, to seize the Seminoles when they arrived. As soon as Osceola’s delegation reached the fort, they were all hit on the head, bound, and imprisoned. Osceola was put on board the SS Poinsett, a steamer, and arrived at the military prison at Fort Moultrie, South Carolina, on New Year’s Day. He was removed from Florida because Jesup feared his influence on other Seminoles, even from behind bars. Osceola was a strong figure. Even as a prisoner he was charismatic, and he quickly became a celebrity at the fort. He was permitted to walk freely around the grounds and was always well dressed, especially when the many artists who admired him came to paint his portrait. Two of his wives lived with him in prison. He often visited with Dr. Weedon, chief physician at the fort. According to historical reports, Osceola and the other Seminole warriors were sometimes even allowed to travel outside Fort Moultrie; once they were escorted to Charleston to see a play called either Halfmoon or Honeymoon. Osceola was only in his early thirties at the time of his arrest, but he was already worn-out and sickly, suffering from a number of grave diseases, including malaria. He developed quinsy, a kind of abscessed tonsillitis, in 1838 and asked for a medicine man to treat him rather than Dr. Weedon. When his illness was at its peak Osceola roused himself from his sickbed and dressed himself in his favorite outfit of large silver earrings, a feathered turban, red war paint, ostrich plumes, silver spurs, a decorated powder horn, a fancy bullet pouch, a striped blanket, and a whalebone cane. As soon as he finished dressing he died. Dr. Weedon prepared Osceola’s body for burial in the ordinary fashion, but then when no one was looking he cut off Osceola’s head. For the funeral, Weedon put the head back into the casket with the body, concealing the severance with a colorful scarf. The body and detached head were buried at the fort in South Carolina, in spite of Osceola’s wish to be buried in Florida.

  After the funeral, Weedon sneaked back to the burial site and reopened the casket, removed the head, and smuggled it out of the fort. There exists no authoritative explanation for why he took Osceola’s head, but it is true that one of Weedon’s great-granddaughters wrote in a memoir that the doctor was “an unusual man.” He embalmed the head using his own homemade embalming formula, and for a while displayed it in the window of the drugstore he owned in St. Augustine, Florida. Weedon kept the head at home for a number of years, and would hang it over his young sons’ beds as punishment whenever they misbehaved. Eventually Weedon gave the head to one of his sons-in-law, Daniel Whitehurst, who also was a doctor. Whitehurst had studied with a Dr. Valentine Mott, who was then the country’s preeminent surgeon and pathologist. Mott was accustomed to dealing with renowned figures; he once examined Edgar Allan Poe for brain lesions. Mott owned a large medical library and an anatomical-specimen museu
m in New York City that was the largest of its kind in the country and was said to be “particularly rich in tumors, aneurisms, and diseased bones, joints, arteries, and bladders,” most of which were products of the doctor’s own surgeries; he is said to have amputated more than one thousand body parts in the course of his career. Whitehurst wrote to Mott in 1843 and sent him Osceola’s head for inclusion in the museum’s “cabinet of heads.” The 1858 illustrated catalog of the museum noted that Specimen No. 1132 was “Head of Osceola, the great Seminole chief (undoubted). Presented by Dr. Whitehurst, of St. Augustine.” (The word “undoubted” referred to the three authentications of the head that Weedon had solicited from army officers who had known Osceola and who were willing to attest that the head was indeed Osceola’s.) Mott apparently worried that the specimen was too valuable to keep in the cabinet of heads and, as he wrote to Whitehurst, “the temptation will be so strong for someone to take it” that he promised to keep it in his study at home instead. It is unclear whether he did indeed keep the head at home or whether he kept it in the museum. The museum was located in the University Medical College on Fourteenth Street. It burned down in 1866 and most people believe the head was destroyed in the fire. The rest of Osceola’s body remains in its Fort Moultrie grave.

  Osceola fought on principle, was captured ignominiously, died prematurely, and left behind an unconquered people. Even though he led the Seminoles only briefly he has never been forgotten. Walt Whitman celebrated him in poetry, the portraits painted of him in prison toured galleries across Europe, his artifacts were preserved in museums around the world. At least twenty towns and counties around the country named themselves Osceola in his honor, and almost half of the Florida Seminoles use Osceola as their last name.

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  Laroche maintained that one of Osceola’s many legacies was the right of the Seminoles and their agents—namely, himself—to harvest ghost orchids out of the Fakahatchee Strand. The day after the judge released her ruling he called me to gripe. “I was crucified!” he yelled and then started coughing like a seal. “I told you I would be crucified. Fuckin’ crucified. The judge is a moron. She didn’t know shit about Indian rights and she doesn’t know shit about shit. And if she thinks she can keep me out of the swamp she’s insane. And let me tell you something. I swear to you, Buster is going to get himself a bulldozer and go back into the Fakahatchee and tear the whole place apart if he don’t calm down.” He stopped coughing and started to chuckle. The sound dragged out of his throat slowly as if it were traveling over gravel. Talking to Laroche was always a bountiful aural experience: there was his cigarette hack, and the funny round pronunciation he gave to certain words such as “well,” which came out sounding like “wahl,” and “Fakahatchee,” which came out as “Fok-uh-hawchee,” and then there were all his nuanced laughs, such as his “ah-huh-huh-huh,” which meant he’d just given a description of himself outsmarting someone, and his “Ha!” which meant something like Wait a minute! and his scratchy chuckle, which he used to highlight something he thought was crazy, which was inevitably something that someone else had done. I thought it was fascinating that a guy who could have easily been considered crazy himself considered so many other people crazy. I was coming to realize that Laroche believed all human beings, with the sole exception of one John Laroche, were afflicted with constricted and unsubtle minds—that, for instance, park rangers couldn’t think about anything broader than the preservation of the park, and the Seminoles couldn’t see beyond their sense of injured pride, and the judge had no grasp of anything outside conventional legal boundaries. Laroche prided himself on possessing flawless logic and reason—the way he saw it, he did poach orchids, which is illegal and unethical, but he would poach only a limited number at a time and he would never strip every one off a single tree and, most important, he would be poaching so that he could help the species in the long run by propagating it in his lab and making the orchids cheap and available. He trusted himself alone to balance out pros and cons, to disregard rules and use real judgment instead. He thought that no one else in the world could see things his way because other people had attitudes that were as narrow as ribbon and they had no common sense at all. For a single-minded lunatic like John Laroche, this seemed like a very bold position to take.

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  I first met Buster Baxley, Laroche’s boss at the Seminole nursery, when I’d been at the court hearing in Naples, and I had eaten a steak dinner with him at my hotel the following night. I liked him right away because he seemed smart and funny, but I could never figure out what he made of me. Buster was a husky man with puffy jowls and some freckles and longish hair the color of a basketball. Most of the times I saw him he was dressed in casual cowboy-style clothing, amulets, and mirrored aviator sunglasses. There was an air of deep seriousness about him. He had an unnerving sidelong glance and a skew of his head that felt strongly opinionated. Whenever I’d ask him a question, he would pause a really long time before he answered—during the pause I had no idea whether he was going to mock me or refuse to talk at all or be chatty and cordial and tell me interesting things about his life and the tribe. One time, when he was chatty and cordial, he took me to lunch at a restaurant near the reservation called the Black-Eyed Pea. We ordered tacos and iced tea, and while we were eating he told me that he was a member of the Seminole Panther clan and his wife is a member of the Bird clan, and that it had been a controversial match because cross-clan marriages were regarded skeptically; that Seminole clans were matrilineal, so his kids were Birds, not Panthers, but mostly he worried that they wouldn’t stay in any clan or in the Indian life at all; that he himself was actually three-quarters white, but he’d grown up on the reservation and felt entirely Indian—maybe even more than people who were all Indian and took it for granted, since they’d never had to choose the way he had to; that he was in charge of the tribe’s business, which meant he spent much of his workday dealing with the white world, with white people, feeling like just another south Florida businessman, not a Seminole businessman, but as soon as he was done with work and on his way home he saw himself once again entirely contained within the shell of Indian life.

  One of the businesses Buster oversaw was the nursery, so that day at lunch I asked if he’d show me around. He shook his head and said, “Well, I can’t right now. I’ve got those Japanese investors here and I’ve got to take care of them.”

  “Is that keeping you busy?”

  “Too busy,” he said. He picked up the little cardboard tepee listing the desserts of the day and started to read it. He looked up and said, “I told those Japanese to fly from Japan to Orlando so they could have a day at Disney World. Then I picked them up there and drove them to my ranch up in Brighton, and I fed them just a huge feast of Indian barbecue and swamp cabbage and fry bread and pumpkin bread. They were sort of in shock. They’d never seen so much food in their lives.”

  A couple of days later he called and said the Japanese were gone, the lemon deal had fallen through, and he had a little time, so he could take me to the nursery. I drove over to meet him at the tribe offices, a group of trailers and small buildings off Stirling Road. Across the street from the offices was a huge construction site where the new permanent tribe headquarters were being built. When I pulled in, there were about half a dozen vehicles in the parking lot, and all except one of them were pickup trucks. The receptionist told Buster I had arrived and then went back to cracking her gum. I thumbed through a couple of rodeo magazines and listened to someone in a nearby office on the telephone saying, “Look, you said you’d be done with it by now and when someone tells me he’ll be done with something I assume they mean they’ll be done with something, do you see what I mean?” After a while Buster came out of his office. He looked a little grouchy and he didn’t say much. He led me back to the parking lot and into his pickup truck and turned the ignition, unwrapped a piece of chewing gum, and then roared onto the street. After a series of turns under a highway overpass we drove past a little buil
ding with a sign saying INDEPENDENT BIBLE BAPTIST CHICKEE CHURCH and past blocks with new sidewalks and small houses that he said belonged to members of the tribe. At a traffic light he took a long look at me and then said, “So what did you think of that judge at that hearing in Naples?”

  “I guess she was okay.”

  “No way was she okay,” he said, drumming his fingers on the steering wheel. “By the way, you know, don’t you, that the Seminoles have never signed a peace treaty with the government. We’re still at war with the United States.” The light changed. We rode along for a moment, and then Buster said, “Look, I know everyone thought John was exploiting those Indian boys so he could do his poaching and set his own nursery up. Well, I was the one who authorized it. I told them to go out and gather what they needed. John brought me the statute he found saying Indians were exempt from laws about plant gathering, and we thought the nursery should have some wild plants for propagation and display. I asked John about it several times because I wanted to be sure about it. I made him wait a month so I could go do the research myself. What we did was within the law. It’s our right. The state of Florida better not mess around with what’s my right.” He took a deep breath and said, “Otherwise, if they mess with me, I’ll go in there and take every single thing in the Fakahatchee that’s alive.”