Florida’s Remote 10,000 Islands
By Doug Alderson
Excerpt from an upcoming book about Florida’s coast to be published by Pineapple Press
When Florida’s coast dips into the remote Ten Thousand Islands, the white sandy beaches end and a maze of undeveloped islands and tidal creeks begin. It is a world unto its own. Once serving as a refuge for Seminole Indians followed by recluses and outlaws, the Ten Thousand Islands and Everglades is now a haven for wilderness lovers, and there is a rich history to explore.
Historic landmarks remain, such as Chokoloskee’s Smallwood Store where proprietor Ted Smallwood once traded with dugout-paddling Seminole Indians. The Indians swapped pelts and silver money for tools, guns and staples. The store is now a museum, seemingly frozen in an earlier time, and the vast watery wilderness of islands, sawgrass, mangroves, forests, waterways and open water of the coastal Everglades and Ten Thousand Islands appears little different than when dugout travelers fished the waters and set up villages and camps on the islands. The name Chokoloskee means “old house” in the Seminole-Creek tongue, so the large island was surely used by Seminoles before the first white settlers arrived in the 1870s.
Before the Seminoles, Calusa Indians are believed to have reached down into these parts and dug canals and built up and even created some of the islands. And because most of the land and waters in this vast wilderness are now protected by Everglades National Park, visitors arrive from throughout the United States and world.
One way to explore the 10,000 Islands and Everglades wilderness is to paddle a canoe or kayak in the same spirit as early Native Americans and Seminole Indians. Paddlers can observe a unique combination of subtropical and tropical plants, creatures from marine and estuarine environments, and both alligators and crocodiles since this is the only place in the world where the two reptiles co-exist. Bird life includes bright pink roseate spoonbills, soaring ospreys, white pelicans and wood storks. Sea turtles can often be seen poking up their heads in the Gulf and Florida Bay. If fortunate, a paddler might glimpse a rare sawfish. Its long, flat snout contains twenty-four or more pairs of sharp teeth that resembles a two-bladed crosscut saw.
Paddlers have two main choices for long-distance trips. The 99-mile Wilderness Waterway between Everglades City and Flamingo follows a series of tidal rivers, streams and lakes until emptying into Florida Bay around Cape Sable. The other route is along the edge of the Gulf and Florida Bay, with campsites mostly on undeveloped islands. Both are part of the statewide Florida Circumnavigational Saltwater Paddling Trail.
Along the Gulf islands route, bugs tend to be less bothersome since breezes are more prevalent, although raccoons have even been known to chew through thin plastic water jugs to retrieve fresh water, especially during dry periods. Paddlers doing either route must bring enough fresh water for seven to eight days—and they should guard it well.
Paddling either the Wilderness Waterway or the coastal islands route can be challenging, especially if encountering swarms of mosquitoes, strong winds, thunderstorms, and adverse tides. You can better appreciate what Native Americans and pioneers endured while living or traveling through the region, and why Seminole Indians and outlaws once sought refuge along the sometimes bewildering, twisting waterways. As Nevin O. Winter wrote in 1918, “Down in the mazes of the Ten Thousand Islands, one will sometimes meet men who turn their faces away and will merely smile if you ask them their names. Sometimes they kill men whom they fear are after them, and occasionally they slay each other either in a drunken quarrel or for the purpose of robbery.”
Many Everglades residents followed an unwritten code: Suspect every man.; Ask no questions.; Settle your own quarrels.; Never steal from an islander; Stick by him, even if you do not know him; Shoot quick, when your secret is in danger; Cover your kill.
The most infamous outlaw of the region was Ed Watson, immortalized by Peter Matthiessen in his trilogy of novels, Killing Mr. Watson, Lost Man’s River and Bone by Bone. A beast of a man with an enormous red beard, “Emperor Watson,” as he was sometimes called due to the wealth he accumulated, had allegedly killed Belle Starr in Oklahoma and a man in Arcadia before calling the Ten Thousand Islands home in the early 1880s. He continued to have various run-ins with the law for attempted murder and alleged murder—trouble just seemed to show up wherever he went.
As described in my book Wild Florida Waters, Watson had a habit of hiring people and not paying them at his farm on a chunk of uplands called Chatham Bend Key that he had purchased from a widow of another outlaw. When the crops were all in, cords of buttonwood gathered, and the cane juice had been squeezed, boiled down into syrup and packed in tins, the workers demanded pay. At this point, Watson thought it best to offer early retirement by knife or gun rather than part with scarce cash. It was a business decision. A new crew—usually consisting of transient men with few family ties and some who were wanted by the law—could easily be hired the next season. Numerous graves were later uncovered. Many other victims likely lay at the bottom of the swamps and Florida Bay.
Finally, in the fall of 1910, the fine citizens of Chokoloskee had had enough. They were tolerant of moonshining, smuggling, hunting birds for their plumes and other illegal activities. And if a man wanted to hide out from the law in the remote maze of islands, creeks and swamps like the Seminoles once did, that was fine—no questions asked—as long as they didn’t murder folks for no good reason. Enough was enough. So, when Watson tied up his boat at the town’s boat landing, a crowd gathered and Watson was publicly accused of killing another of his hands. They demanded his gun. Watson’s short temper flared. He raised his shotgun and pressed the trigger.
Unknowingly, Watson had purchased water-damaged shells from Smallwood’s Store in Chokoloskee a few days before, so the gun misfired. The crowd, using good shells, then opened fire. It was as clean a community execution as you’ll find in Florida’s history. One witness observed he had never seen a man so dead. Watson’s body was buried on Rabbit Key, the same mangrove island of our campsite, but it was later moved to Ft. Myers to rest alongside his wife’s grave. No need to lure trouble from the afterlife.
The stories didn’t end there. After Watson, the infamous mobster Al Capone is believed to have run a huge moonshining operation deep in the Everglades in the 1930s. The Lost City, also known as “Ghost Village,” allegedly supplied spirits to a nearby saloon and dance hall. It was also the site of a Native American village and a place where Confederate soldiers might have hid out after stealing Union gold during the Civil War. Stories are thick, but facts are sketchy, similar to tales of the elusive skunk ape some say lurk in the great swamp. The official Skunk Ape Headquarters sits along the Tamiami Trail in tiny Ochopee, also site of the smallest post office building in the United States.
Historically, residents of the region have had a gift for tale-telling, such as Panther Key’s Juan Gomez, affectionally called Old John by those who knew him. Born in the 1770s, Gomez claimed to have met Napoleon, served with the pirate Jose Gaspar (Gasparilla), fought in the Second Seminole War, and operated as a blockade-runner during the Civil War. He named his home Panther Key because panthers would swim to the island and eat his goats. Juan Gomez attracted many visitors and writers to Panther Key, and one visitor in 1898 mentioned that Gomez had a young wife and that at age 120, Gomez was surprisingly vigorous: “his complexion was brown, dark and rich [in] color as century old mahogany; his thick white hair, bushy and plentiful, framed a face seamed and lined but keen and full of vigor.” Gomez died in 1900 at age 122. Some say he had been the oldest person in the United States.
While human history is highly colorful in the Everglades region, most of the waterways and islands belong to nature. More than 360 species of birds have been spotted in these unique southwest Florida habitats. Numerous fish, dolphins and manatees frequent the channels, bays and coves of the area. Rich seagrass beds are nursery grounds for a variety of fish, shellfish and crustaceans, and they also provide food for manatees and sea turtles.