EVERGLADE GEYSER
Let the captain of an air ship rest his craft in mid-air and through his glasses gaze down upon this aquatic jungle. Near the centre of the Glades, according to public documents filed in Washington, is an immense spring rising from the earth, covering an extent of several acres and throwing up large quantities of water with great force, supplying the Everglades with torrential quantities of water.
THE LATEST PHOTOGRAPH OF BILLY BOWLEGS,Taken in 1911
THE LATEST PHOTOGRAPH OF BILLY BOWLEGS,Taken in 1911
With the sun’s rays glinting on this “Everglade Geyser,” with the evaporation caused by the intense heat of this tropical land, as it meets the coolingwaters of some underground cavern, a grey mist is formed and hangs over the area. As the white, wandering clouds from the fathomless cavern meet the starry skies, the Seminole sees in this phenomenon of nature the “Breath of the Great Spirit.”
When the torrential rains, a characteristic of the Everglade country, come, flooding the entire area, the Queen of the Water Kingdom picks up the rippling waters as they course over the rock-bound bottom and like an elfish sprite hurls them into the lakes and rivers, where they dash relentlessly on until they reach the subterranean outlets.
Until the white engineer finds ways and means to control subterranean flood gates, to control water forces whose source lies hundreds of miles away, or to toss away lightly the very God of Nature’s balance wheel, Everglade drainage in the heart of the Big Cypress must continue to be a stupendous operation.
The subject of the reclamation of this “The Least Known Wilderness of America” has been a “political football” for more than a score of years and has become a theme of nation-wide discussion. Until Florida populates her millions of tillable and untenanted acres, certainly she need not allure with tempting word pictures the problematical and uncertain Everglades.
Thousands of purchasers of lands in these tropical swamps—lands unsurveyed and submerged—still wait for the answer to the riddle of the Okee-cho-beeSphinx, who alone holds fast the key to this “Egypt of America.”
Florida’s Everglade disaster, which was commercialized with land grabbers’ outfit in entering the Seminoles’ heritage, violated every humane and brotherly law of a commonwealth. The chaotic days that followed the Federal investigation, retarded the progress of the State fully a decade of years, and Florida, the land of singing birds, limpid waters and “golden apples,” learned the bitterness of the prophet’s rebuke when he said:“Thou shouldst not have entered the Gate of my People in the day of their calamity nor have laid hands on their substance in the days of their distress.”