THE LAND OF THE SEMINOLE
The Caucasian has battered at the gates of this great American Jungle for nearly four centuries, but some impregnable force, directed by a Higher Power than commercialized graft or the greed of selfish men, has kept the gates secure.It is the Land of the Seminole!
The Seminole knows every foot of this interminable morass. The stars are his compass; the fantastic tracery of canals, cut by his ancestors through this chaotic tangle of grass water country, are his highways. The appearance of the remote recesses of the Everglades is unlike that of any other region on the globe and is certainly the most bewildering and remarkable on this continent.
Were we to unroll the reel of a photo-drama of the Everglades, we would go back thousands of years, when the great billows of the ocean rolled over the space now occupied by this territory; we would see the millions of busy builders of that age, the tiny coral polyps, working on the reefs andshoals; we would look again and see the tempestuous storms and hear the thunder of the circling winds and behold the “breaking up of the great fountain of the deep,” forcing the sand from its depths, until a giant dam was built and the great ocean was excluded. Then it was that the shimmering waters of Lake Okeechobee, “the place of the Big Water” in Seminole dialect, became an inland sea.
We may turn the slide and see the animals of prehistoric days basking in the sunshine or bathing in the limpid waters. The fame of Florida as a health resort was not unknown to the animals of those ancient days, for the remains of these monsters are exhibited today in national museums, with labels reading that “they belonged to animals, probably mammoths, that lived 10,000 to 50,000 years ago.”
Film makers delight in taxing the flights of the mind and Florida’s drama was silenced for thousands of years. The reel makes another turn and we see a Twentieth Century renaissance of adventure, optimism and commercialism. Engineering expeditions entered this region to make surveys for drainage and land selling corporations—the land was sold from the enticing blue paper plat—but according to America’s best engineering corps a large area of this tropic jungle still remained terra incognita—unsurveyed—each surveying corps wisely barricading against criticism of failure by publishing to the speculative world, that upon “800 square miles of this unexplored country no white man had ever placed foot.”
Coacoochee. (Wild Cat.)COACOOCHEEFrom an old print
COACOOCHEEFrom an old print
From an old print
Like a bolt of lightning from a clear sky came the demand—from the United States Government, in 1913, to Florida’s high officials—“Investigate—investigate!”
Twenty thousand purchasers of lands in the Everglades, backed by the power of American democracy, haddemandedtheir lands or the return of their good American dollars. The Federal Government, through Congress, exposed the crooked deals (the lands still being under water and unsurveyed) made by the vampire speculator, with the result that another survey was ordered and the Florida State government put sixty men into the Everglades at an expense of $40,000. The citizens paid for the survey and “800 square miles” still remain—unsurveyed! Less is known and, it can be said without fear of contradiction, less is “told” to the reading world of inquiries in this 20th century than was given to history four hundred years ago.
For best accounts touching the interior of the Everglades we must have recourse to historical documents. From French delineations upon old maps as well as from Spanish and English authorities, we learn that more than three hundred years ago Florida’s Everglade country was cut up by large rivers, extensive ponds, lagoons and lakes which connected with each other.
That the drainage of the Everglades was contemplatedby the authorities of the Spanish government, is an established historical fact and as late as 1840, during the Seminole War, a canal was found large enough to float a large craft. This piece of engineering work is credited to the Spaniards, but owing to the treacherous straits of Florida’s coast, interior navigation was abandoned and the Spaniards and the Frenchman left the country to the intrepid and enterprising Indian, whose knowledge of the water world of the Glades was then, as is now, superior to his white engineering brother; for the Indian knows every foot of this interminable morass and travels through these uncharted waters in his “dugout” canoe, with no compass but the stars overhead, as he is guided by the whispering winds brought him from the Great Spirit.