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 Press, these patriot-profiteers shipped three thousand head from Punta Rassa to their Key West slaughterhouse for butchering and delivery to Cuba.
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-Because I love her!
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 the tips that gives him a thoughtful air, or rueful, maybe. Around his horses he looks quite at home in the boots and battered hat from his days as a cow hunter in the Big Cypress-that's where he and Walter became friends. My new admirer has told me more than once, I fear, how that poor old hat had sheltered him from sun and rain and served as a water vessel for bathing. He might still bathe in it, for all I know!
Frank is thinking he might run for sheriff. His black and bag-kneed Sunday suit, a once-white shirt, bowtie and waistcoat, with the broad hat and boots, give him the look of "Wyatt Earp of the Wild West," a book much admired by the modest reading circle of our town. Like his Western colleagues, he seems calm, courteous, and soft-spoken, easy with firearms and horses, if not females, and a religious man with only his Maker to fear.
From Mr. Jim Cole's point of view, says Walter, Frank Tippins would make us a good sheriff mainly because, as a onetime cowhand for the Hendrys, he was sure to sympathize with cattleman problems in regard to rustling, disorderly conduct by the cowhands, undue enforcement of cattle-roaming ordinances, and the like. That's what Mr. Cole, who acts like he discovered Frank, promised the cattlemen. And the cattlemen like Frank because he is so amiable with our rare Yankee visitors, making a virtue of the flies and cow dung and dirt streets that all the rest of us afflicted citizens perceive as our city's greatest liability. (To Walter, that highest honor falls to our disgraceful lack of even so much as a road north, far less a railroad, that might permit our isolated town to follow the rest of the nation into the Twentieth Century.)
Walter imitates Frank Tippins very well: "You bet! This here is the leading cow town in the second largest cattle state in the whole U.S. and A.! The only state that got us beat is Texas. Second largest! I was a cowhand once myself!"
Mr. Tippins says that when he arrived here from De Soto County, in the early eighties, Fort Myers had no newspaper, its school was poor, its churches were irregularly attended. Visiting ships were mostly small tramp schooners in the coastal trade, beating upriver from Punta Rassa. The last Florida wolves still howled in the pinelands to the east, and panthers killed stoc
k at the very edge of town.
"Be grateful, Mr. Tippins," Mama told him. "Your city seems splendid, I do declare, after life in the Ten Thousand Islands, not to speak of the Indian Territory-!" She shook her head. "Or even Fort White, where Mister Watson found me!" She stopped right there, having quickly sensed Mr. Tippins's peculiar craving to know anything we might reveal about dear Papa. "Fort Myers is wonderful!" she finished, already exhausted.
As a young man Frank worked at the Press, and learned something of local history and good grammar, though he affects a rough, bluff style of speech. When Mama and I first came to town, it was the ex-cowhand at the livery stable who informed us that Spanish Franciscans in the north part of the state had the first cattle ranches in the country. The first real cowboy-and-Indian fight occurred in Florida in 1647, he said, when Spanish vaqueros ran a herd through the Indian plantings.
Doubtless Mr. Tippins guesses that learning is the way to show a former schoolteacher how serious he is, how deserving of her handsome daughter, even if that young flibberty-jibbet is already engaged! And he speaks carefully, wishing to expose his attainments in a modest fashion that might captivate the Watson ladies' hearts.
And of course, Mama is mildly interested in what he has to tell her of Fort Myers history, and so he brought her an account of our small "Eden" that appeared in the New Orleans Times-Democrat after its Everglades expedition of 1882, which had Captain Francis Hendry as its guide. Mama observed graciously that the Calusa Hatchee, with its banks of large wild trees set off by the bountiful coconuts and guavas, by the flowering species-planted, Frank says, before the Indian Wars were ended and the Civil War begun-must surely be the most beautiful river in all Florida. (Fact is, the river water is unhealthy, and both dysentery and malaria-"chillin and shakin," for which the approved remedy is Blue Mass pills and turpentine balls-are epidemic.)
"Yes, ma'am, this was a cattle town right from the start"-news we both found less astounding than our own sudden interest in the ways of cattle. Until this century, he said, there was no farming, nothing but cattle and a little citrus and some fishing on the coast. Immokalee was an Indian settlement, but pretty soon it became a cow town, too. "Immokalee, that means 'my home.'"
He paused to see if he had rustled up some interest in his Indian lore, then hurried on. "Indians are mostly gone," he said. "Hendrys and Langfords ran cattle in that area when there was no bridge over the creeks; pony carried your gear, and you piled your gun and grub and bedroll on your head and waded.
"Old Fort Thompson was a cow town, too. Captain Hendry had a ranch, got a county separated off from Lee, called it Hendry County, then renamed the town for his daughters, Laura and Belle. Fort Thompson is La Belle, Florida, today."
"Laura and Belle! You don't say so!"
"Yes, ma'am. Course cowboys are pretty much the same wherever you find 'em. Called us cow hunters around these parts because we had to hunt so many mavericks-some of them older riders called 'em hairy dicks, cause they wouldn't stick with all the others-"
"Heretics," Mama corrected him quickly, a rose-petal flush on her pale cheeks, and Mr. Tippins glared down at his boot tops as if he had half a mind to chop his feet off.
"Yes, ma'am! Your hairy ticks or whatever you'd want to call 'em, they'd lay low in the woods and hammocks, that's why we were known as cow hunters. Sometimes they called us cracker cowboys because we cracked long hickory-handled whips to run the herd. Besides his whip, every man carried rifle and pistol to take care of any two-legged or four-legged varmints we might have to deal with. A good cow hunter can snap the head clean off a rattler and cut the fat out of a steak-you can hear that whip pop two-three miles away. We rode what we call woods ponies, which is a tough small short-eared Spanish breed. Had us our cow dogs to run the herds, and at branding time we threw the steers by hand. Otherwise we weren't so much different from cowpokes you might come across in Texas or Montana."
I watched him, eyes wide, biting my lip in fond amusement. He knew I was teasing him but could not stop talking, like a show-off boy running downhill who gets himself going much too fast. But my heart went out to him all the same. His way of expressing some of the things that Walter never appreciated was almost beautiful, even when he couldn't find the words.
"Between the wolf howl and the panthers screaming, and the bull gators chugging in the spring, the nights were pretty noisy in the back country, and weekends were always noisy in Fort Myers. The boys would ride in on Saturday to gamble and get drunk, shoot up the town, just like cowboys were supposed to do, but we didn't have any houses of ill fame like the east coast, or at least none I was able to find out about."
I had to giggle at Mama's little hymph! and Mr. Tippins glared down at his boots again, convinced he had fatally offended the prim Watson ladies. But kind Mama cried, "I pray you, please continue, Mr. Tippins!"
"Well, the churches were pretty strong here, which means good strong women," Mr. Tippins said, to recapture some lost moral ground. "Maybe that's why some of the boys went so darn wild! Oh, this was a wild cow town, sure enough! One time the cowboys rode their horses right into a restaurant, shot up every bowl. Course the fact that the new owner was a Yankee might have had something to do with it. That restaurant closed down then and there, for good, and later the owner took work as a yard hand, and him a white man-never saw that before!"
"Were you one of those cowboys, Mr. Tippins?" I said, knowing he wasn't. And when he shook his head, I said, "But your friend Walter was, isn't that true?"
"I don't rightly know, Miss Carrie," Frank Tippins said.
"Well, you're certainly quite a talker, Mr. Tippins!" tactful Mama declared, at which I tittered and had to flee the room. Of course I stopped to listen at the door.
Our would-be sheriff was explaining, more and more desperate, how our town had made small progress since his youth, when he had drifted down here from Arcadia.
Mr. Tippins informed Mama that Arcadia was his birthplace. "Tater Hill Bluff, we called it then."
"Tater Hill Bluff! you don't say so!"
"Yes, ma'am!"
Fort Myers was still a cow town, that was the trouble. "Course the Hendrys and Langfords-I mean, these days, ma'am, the cattlemen are making a hog-killing off the Spanish War, same as Summerlin made in the War Between the States."
"Dr. Langford was a wonderful man," Mama warned when he drew breath so he wouldn't come out with any criticism of her benefactor. "When I arrived so ill from Chatham River, Dr. Langford made me promise I would never return to those islands under any circumstances. He offered kind care and hospitality to a perfect stranger-"
"And the perfect stranger's daughter!" I said, popping back in with Delamene's tea and cookies from the kitchen. "You are perfect, dear Mama!"
"-until Mister Watson could prepare this house. When poor Dr. Langford became ill he was scarcely a year older than my husband! He certainly took me by surprise when he beat me to the grave!" Knowing how much that remark would delight Papa, she did her best to keep a straight face, but her funny little smile, self-mocking, twitched one corner of her mouth. "You could have knocked me over with a feather," she added, to amuse herself, closing her eyes so as not to see me giggle.
"Mama!" I murmured. "How silly you are!" And we burst out laughing merrily, having made Frank Tippins too uncomfortable to join in.
"What was your maiden name, ma'am?" he asked Mama, going red again over this loose talk of maidens. Maybe he knew that in another life he would have fallen hopelessly in love with my sweet mama, not just me.
"Jane Susan Dyal. From Deland," said Mama. Jane Susan Dyal from Deland spread her fingers on her shawl, smiling prettily in pantomime of her lost girlhood. "As a young woman I was known as Mandy, but there is no one left who calls me that." She smiled again, faintly annoyed by her own bittersweet flirting with the past.
"Except Daddy," I reminded her.
"Except Mister Watson."
When Frank Tippins said, "I reckon a visit to Deland would do you good," s
he shook her head. "No, I think not. I'd already escaped Deland when Mister Watson found me teaching in Fort White's new school."
"That was before Mister Watson got in trouble?" His innocent expression didn't fool us, and he knew it.
"That was before we went away to Arkansas."
After a cool pause that she let serve as a rebuke Mama looked up over her knitting. "Carrie's father is very generous, Mr. Tippins. He is not a small man. He takes good care of his family, helps his neighbors, pays his bills. How many of our civic leaders can say the same?" She resumed her work. "I don't think this color suits me, what do you think, Mr. Tippins?" She held up a swatch of the blue wool shawl. "I shall give it to Carrie."
FRANK B. TIPPINS
One evening in 1901, Little Jim Martin, former sheriff of Manatee County, came to my office to report that Mister Watson had went on a rampage, killed some people down at Lost Man's River. I knew Jim Martin for a man that did not care to back up, but all the same he had moved his family out of their new house on Possum Key, took 'em all the way north to Fakahatchee. I told Jim that Lost Man's River being Monroe County, I had no jurisdiction unless the Monroe sheriff gave it to me. Next morning, in came the young man from the telegraph with a request from Sheriff Frank Knight at Key West that I detain a certain E.J. Watson.
Most mornings, I went unarmed in Fort Myers, but that day in late 1901, I had a revolver holster strapped under my coat. Usually I tipped my hat politely, saying "Howdy" to everybody who came by, but today I wore a squint to warn the citizenry that their sheriff was on serious business and would squander no public time shooting the breeze.
In order to locate Mister Watson it made more sense to go directly to his house, but since Miss Carrie's beloved mother was on her deathbed, I decided halfway to Anderson Avenue that I would not trouble that sad family. Instead I headed for Walter's office to see what kind of information he could give me. If Walt Langford took advantage of my questions to warn Mister Watson, that was not the responsibility of the sheriff's office, and anyway, I had no warrant for an arrest.
Killing Mister Watson Page 22
