"It's the principle of the thing!" Ol' Lige cries out. "The principle!" And the Frenchman wags a finger-"Le pran-seep!"
Them two gentlemen are frowning at me kind of outrageous, but I seen from his wink that Ed Brewer thought the same way I did, being a common swamp rat, same as me.
To make a long story somewhat shorter, this Brewer could shoot him a blue streak, and he was a man without no fear of man nor beast, or so he advised us by the time we had his liquor polished off. Chevelier and Carey could shoot pretty good, too, and it sure looked like this deadly bunch had Watson's number. But Cap'n Lige from start to finish had no heart for the job. Maybe he seen that one of his partners was a drunk outlaw with his eye on Watson's property, and the other a loco old Frenchman so fed up with life he couldn't see straight, let alone shoot.
Every few minutes Ol' Lige described Ed Watson cutting loose down in Key West, shooting out light bulbs in the saloons, never known to miss. If he said it once he said a hundred times that drunk or sober, E.J. Watson was no man to fool with, but his partners was just too liquored up to listen. First light, they fell into the skiff and pushed off for Chatham Bend, figuring to float downriver with the tide. Cap'n Lige never had the grit not to go with 'em.
Come Sunday, I snuck off to Chatham Bend. Henry Thompson and me tied up to a mangrove and baited us some snappers while we compared our lowdown on that posse. I told Henry how them three deputies was up all night getting their courage up, and he told me what happened the next morning. Maybe they was bad hung over and their nerves wobbly, he said, because what they done was stand off on the river and holler out, "E. Jack Watson, come out with your hands up! You are under arrest!" That river is pretty broad there on the Bend, and they was way over on the farther side, so they had to shout with might and main just to be heard.
Watson got up out of bed and poked his shooting iron through the window. He knowed Ed Brewer from saloons down to Key West, so Henry said, knowed him for a moonshiner and durn east coaster, and he also knowed that the Key West sheriff weren't likely to appoint no wanted man to be his deputy. So when Brewer reared up in the boat and hollered, Watson let a bullet fly that clipped that feller's handlebar on the left side. When that bullet sang and Brewer yelped, Cap'n Carey and the Frenchman near fell out of the skiff, that's how hard they put their backs into them oars.
What he should of done, Watson told Henry, was give them varmints a bullet at the waterline, sink the old skiff and let 'em swim for it, cause there weren't nowhere but the Watson Place for them to swim to. When he cooled off some and got to laughing, he let on how he had skinned Brewer a-purpose, and Henry Thompson testified for the rest of his long life that Watson never aimed to kill Ed Brewer or he would have done it. Course Ed Brewer claimed that E. Jack Watson tried to blow his head off. After Watson died, he liked to tell about his shoot-out with the most fearful desperado as ever took a life around south Florida.
When them men slunk back to Possum Key, Ed Brewer shaved off what was left of his mustache, bellering when the razor bit on his burned lip. Although they was feeling weak and poorly, he cussed his partners up and down, he wouldn't talk a civil word to nobody. Before noon he was headed east for the Miami River. At Lemon City, Brewer accused E.J. Watson of attempted murder, which made Watson's reputation even worse. Lige Carey took the story to Key West, where Watson got the name the Barber. That was the first nickname they give him. A few years later they were calling him the Emperor-the Frenchman said it first-because of his big ambitions for the Islands. It was only after he was safe under the ground that anyone dared to call him Bloody Watson.
Ed Brewer's posse weren't the last that went into them rivers after Watson. After all his scrapes down at Key West, the law had enough of him and called for a volunteer to bring him in. Only deputy spoke up said, Well, now, Sheriff, if I go to all that trouble, I might's well run for your job when I come home. Guts was all that poor feller had going for him, because Watson got the drop on him soon as he got there, took away his hardware, and put him to work out in the cane. Got two weeks hard work out of the long arm of the law before he give him back his gun and told him he were lucky to be alive. That deputy must have thought so too, cause he went away with no hard feelings, told everybody in Key West how the Watson Place was the only so-called plantation in the Islands that amounted to more'n a small squirt of sawfish shit. Why, by God, he would say, he was proud to have worked for such a man as Ed J. Watson! Watson were chortling over that till the day he died.
In one way, Henry Thompson said, Watson was riled by being blamed for killings that he didn't do, but he also encouraged them bad stories-not encouraged, exactly, but he never quite denied them, neither. His reputation as a fast gun and willing to use it kept deputies and other nuisances off Chatham Bend and helped him lay claim to abandoned plantations, which was pretty common on the rivers by the time he finished.
So long as he stayed in that lonesome river, he would be all right. All the same, he remained watchful, and when he sailed up to Fort Myers, he went quick and he went armed. Got there after nightfall and laid low. Lee County sheriff, ol' Tom Langford, didn't want no part of him, and as for Frank Tippins, who come in as sheriff round the turn of the century, he didn't know just what he wanted, unless it was Ed Watson's handsome daughter.
For the next few years, after his family come, Mister Watson settled down, stayed out of trouble. He run a fine plantation and successful syrup business and helped his neighbors anywheres he could.
Sometimes of a Sunday them young Hamiltons would sail up Chatham River on the tide, visit the Frenchman, and drop back down to Mormon Key when the tide turned. Mary Elizabeth and John Leon was just youngsters at the time, but Liza was as pretty put together as anything I ever saw, made me ache to look at her, and Leon was a fine big strapping boy. He stuttered a little, but he learned early how to grin at life and never lost that.
Maybe them two was brother and sister but they looked like vanilla and chocolate in the boat. Henry Thompson used to tell that Leon's daddy was a white man, Captain Joe Williams, who got into the pen when Richard Hamilton lived at Fakahatchee, he heard that from the Daniels clan up there. A lot of Island people had it in for Old Man Richard, so I don't know if that story's true or not-can't even figure how folks knew it unless Joe Williams had made a claim on Leon, which he didn't. But the truth don't count for much after all these years, cause folks hang on to what it suits 'em to believe and won't let go of it.
Leon and Liza grew pretty close to that old Frenchman after I left there, right up until the time he died. Nobody knows too much about that. One day he was snapping like a mean old turtle and the next day he was gone for good. This happened when Watson's fame in other parts was catching up with him, so naturally the Frenchman's death was laid on Watson, who was known to have his eye on Possum Key.
Henry Thompson don't believe that. Henry said that Watson took a liking to the Frenchman, took his wife to meet him. Watson called Chevelier the Small Frog in the Big Pond, Henry didn't know why. Henry never was much help when it come to jokes. Anyway, that poor heartbroke old foreigner was dying pretty good without no help.
Ted Smallwood knowed Mr. E.J. Watson from their first days at Half Way Creek, they was always friendly. Families both come from Columbia County, up in the Suwannee River country of north Florida. Ted come down this way from Fort Ogden, near Arcadia, and he worked for us on Turner River for a while. He married our Mamie back in '97, bought a small place from the Santinis when he came over to Chokoloskee that same year. About the only settlers on the island then was McKinneys, Wigginses, Santinis, Browns, and Yeomans. There was still a half dozen families at Half Way Creek, another half dozen at Everglade, and a few more perched here and there down through the Islands.
McKinneys started out the same as we did, farming back in Turner River, set up a sawmill. Wonderful soil there the first year, but once it was cleared, and the sun burned down and killed that land, C.G. McKinney couldn't make a living. So he cleared another mo
und downriver, made a bumper crop, and the next year it wouldn't grow a onion. Old C.G. had comical names for everything, called that place Needhelp.
McKinney come on to Chokoloskee, built a house and store, got in his supplies from Storters' trading post in Everglade. His billhead said, "No Banking, no Mortgaging, no Insurance, no Borrowing, no Loaning. I Must Have Cash to Buy More Hash." Made no bones about what he sold; called his bread "wasp nest." Had him a gristmill, started the post office, done some doctoring when old Doc Green left Half Way Creek.
C.G. McKinney was a educated man according to our local estimation, and Mr. McKinney didn't hold with plume hunting. Jean Chevelier used to rant and rave at everybody except himself that hunted plumes, but he also hollered "Eepo-creet! Eepo-creet!" about McKinney, who went on just one egret hunt before he give it up for good. C.G. seen all them abandoned nestlings and the crows picking on 'em and figured what he was doing there was not God's will.
Ted Smallwood felt the same way as McKinney when it come to plume hunting, but I guess he had a blank spot in his heart when it come to gators. The year after he married our Mamie was the great drought year of '98, when every gator in the Glades was piled up into the last holes, and a man could take a ox cart across country. Tom Roberts out plume hunting come on a whole heap of gators near the head of Turner River; he went up to Fort Myers for wagons and a load of salt, then got a gang together and went after 'em. There was Tom and me and Ted and a couple of others, we took forty-five hundred in three weeks from them three holes that make up one lake in the rains. That's Roberts Lake, and that's how it got that name. Didn't waste bullets on 'em, we used axes. Skinned off the bellies, what we call the flats. Don't reckon them buzzards got it cleaned up yet today. Floated 'em down Turner River to George Storter's trading post at Everglade, we got in early and we got good money. That year R.B. Storter's schooner carried ten thousand gator hides up to Fort Myers out of Roberts Lake alone.
After that, it was war against the gators, the hides was coming from all over, otter pelts, too. Bill Brown from the Boat Landing trading post east of Immokalee, he brung in one hundred eighty otter on one trip, got a thousand dollars for 'em, and he brought gator skins by the ox-wagon load. One trip he hauled twelve hundred seventy into Fort Myers, might been the record, that was in 19 and 05, and he'd brought eight hundred not three weeks before. Even gators can't stand up to that kind of a massacre.
Yessir, a lot of God's creation was left laying dead out there, it give me a very funny feeling even then. Bill Brown said all them water creatures was going to die off anyway soon as Governor Broward got going on his drainage schemes, said he hated waste so he aimed to take every last gator in the Glades. Three years later, that was 1908, the gator trade was pretty close to finished. And the Injuns was close to finished, too, cause they didn't have good guns or traps, they only took enough to go and trade with. They never killed them critters out, not the way we did.
Ted never said if killing all them gators was in God's service or not, but he sure had some nice cash set aside. Two years later, him and his father bought the whole Santini claim on Chokoloskee. Them Santinis and the son-in-law Santana, they was Catholics, but they was one of our pioneer families, and folks was surprised to see 'em pull up stakes. Nicholas-that's Tino-his wife was Mary Ann Daniels, sister to Aunt Netta, who kept house for Watson, and maybe that led to something ugly Dolphus said to Watson that he wished he hadn't. Tino moved up to Fort Myers, and as for Dolphus, he lit out for the east coast, about as far from E.J. Watson as he could get.
According to Ted Smallwood's reminiscences, E.J. Watson had not been in the Islands long before he assaulted "one of our best citizens," Adolphus Santini of Chokoloskee Island, at Key West. (See the excerpts from the Bill House interviews, which describe the Santini episode in detail.)
In her memoirs, Mary Douthit Conrad corroborates Smallwood's version of the Highsmith/Davis killing, which strengthens one's confidence in the accuracy of his "Ed Watson Story," cited above. She also provides additional details from the perspective of the fair sex. "After all this excitement the Village Improvement Association of Lemon City [now subsumed by Greater Miami] put on a box supper and ice cream social at the church to raise enough money to send Mrs. Davis and her two boys back home to Texas."
In the last year of his life, Jean Chevelier made an ill-advised attempt to arrest Mr. Watson, assisted by his aforementioned associate Elijah Carey, and a plume hunter and moonshiner named Ed. Brewer. The arrest attempt was entirely unsuccessful, and the posse fled.
Due to the paucity of Key West records, there is little to be learned about Captain Carey, but Brewer turns up in Florida frontier literature as early as 1892, in an account of a journey up the Calusa Hatchee from Ft. Myers that voyaged across Lake Okeechobee and emerged at the Miami River. "At the hotel [the Hendry House in Fort Myers] we talked with several men who had been in the employ of the Disston Drainage Co. and who claimed to be familiar with the border of the Everglades. They said no man other than an Indian had ever been through the 'Glades except one 'Brewer' who had been arrested for selling whiskey to the Indians and released on bond, when the Indians in order to effect his escape had carried him across to Miami."
Brewer later served as guide to a Navy lieutenant Hugh L. Willoughby, who crossed the Everglades in 1896. Willoughby recorded this high opinion of the man, despite warnings about his desperate reputation:
Ed. Brewer… had always made a living by hunting and trapping. He would sometimes be in the woods, and partly in the Everglades, for six months at a stretch without seeing a soul except an occasional Indian. He was a man of medium height, heavily built without being fat, black hair, black eyes, inured to hardship, and able to make himself comfortable in his long tramps, with a canoe, a tin pot, a blanket, a deer-skin, a mosquito-bar, and a rifle, with perhaps a plug or two of tobacco as a luxury. My experience in hunting with him the year previous had shown that he was just the man to face with me whatever dangers there might be in store in my attempt to cross the Everglades. Although warned by some of my friends that he was a dangerous character, I preferred to rely upon my own judgment of human nature rather than unproved stories about him. In our solitary companionship, far from the reach of any law but that of our own making, I always found him brave and industrious, constantly denying himself, deceiving me as to his appetite when our supplies ran low that I might be the more comfortable, and many a night did he stay up an extra hour while I was finishing my notes and plotting work, that he might tuck me in my cheesecloth from the outside.
Ed. Brewer is treated with less reverence in a useful book about the south Florida backcountry of that period, which belittles Willoughby's accomplishment (pointing out that the Glades had already been conquered several times, dating back to the Harney crossing in 1842). And he has been remembered elsewhere, usually in reference to the Willoughby journey or his chronic troubles with the law. Whatever his merits, Ed. Brewer was someone to be reckoned with, despite his humiliation at the hands of Watson.
RICHARD HAMILTON
What took the fight out of my old friend the Frenchman was some news that come from Marco Key back in the spring of '95. Bill Collier was digging garden muck for his tomatoes from a little mangrove swamp between shell ridges, just down the Caxambas trail from his Marco property, when his spade come up with some Indin war clubs, cordage, and a conch-shell dipper, and some peculiar kind of old wood carving. Cap'n Bill always made a profit out of everything he touched, and it might seem he just had the luck to stumble on what Old Jean searched for all his life. But Bill Collier was also the one man on this coast with enough ambition to report it, and if you was Indin, you would not doubt that he was guided by Calusa spirits on account it was time them old things was brought to light.
For saying such heathen things to her innocent children, Mary cussed me for a idle worshipper, cussed her poor old husband black and blue. Mary lost her Indin heritage before she found it-her daddy John Weeks seen to that-but in her heart sh
e knew that what I said was true.
Captain Bill Collier showed this stuff to some tarpon-fishing Yankee, and this one told another, and next thing you know, them sports was in there shoveling for fun. They take what they don't break back North for souvenirs, and some scientists up that way heard about it, and a famous desecrator named Frank H. Cushing came down to Caxambas right away. Mr. Cushing visited Cap'n Bill's diggings that same spring and come back again, winter of '96, took out a whole pile of carved objects, religious stuff, that the Old Calusas had whittled out of wood and shell. There was bone jewelry and shell cups, ladles, a deer head, a carved fish with bits of turtle shell stuck into it, and some terrible wood masks worn by the shamans. Mr. Cushing lugged all these treasures back to Pennsylvania, and Hamilton Disston of Philadelphia, man made such a mess of dredging the Calusa Hatchee, paid for everything.
Them Yankees had gone and stole the Frenchman's glory. I sure hoped nobody would be fool enough to tell him that, least not before I took him out and showed him what he was hunting for close to ten years. He might as well have a look at it before he died. But by that time he was old and poorly, rotting in his bed, with John Leon and Liza trying to tend him. When I told him it was time to show him a Calusa burial, he stared at me like I was crazy, same way he used to. "Throw tar," he said sadly, something like that.
What really twisted up the Frenchman was a wood carving of a cat kneeled like a man. A drawing of that cat was in the papers, and when Lige Carey took them papers up to Possum Key, Chevelier give it one hard look, then sat back hard. After staring out the door a little while, he whispered the one word "Egyptian!" and begun to weep. He was like a man shot through the spine, didn't move for days.
Finally he said to Captain Carey, "I know right away what I am looking, from vair first time I see big foking mounds! But I am looking in wrong foking place!" He never went back to Gopher Key again, he just give up on life. Didn't have no fight left in him, didn't last the year.
Killing Mister Watson Page 11
