Richard Hamilton asked the Frenchman to be godfather when Leon and Mary Elizabeth, called Liza, got baptized by a traveling priest. Seemed peculiar that Daddy Richard chose the Frenchman in spite of the way Chevelier ranted on against the Church, and even more peculiar that a man in cahoots with the Devil would agree to it. But both those old fellers were mischievous to start with, and Daddy Richard, once in a long while, liked to stick a pin in that big wife of his to hear her scream. As for the Frenchman, he esteemed Richard Hamilton without ever admitting how much he depended on his kindness. Them two was a couple of old misfits, sure enough, but Daddy Richard stayed real calm, never tangled with nobody, while the Frenchman was thorny as old cat-claw, raked everyone who come across his path except Liza and Leon.
Richard Hamilton was dead honest, and there ain't too many who can handle that. Never said what he did not know to be a fact, he'd tell you no less than the truth but not one word more. He was very cut and dried, never added and he never took away. When Leon's fool brother got all lathered up, yelling what he would do to this one, say to that one, and working himself into a uproar, his father would just set there looking innocent, like he was listening to a bird or something. "That so, Gene?" he'd say. He believed in live and let live, and if Eugene wanted to holler, let him do it. But if you asked him straight if there was anything to what Gene said, he'd shake his head. "No, there sure ain't," he'd say, and spit, case you missed the point.
Right to his end, and he lived close to a hundred, Leon's pap was a no-nonsensical old man. He wore a white mustache and beard on skin smooth as mahogany, wore a round straw hat and galluses, and he went barefoot. Pap walked away from his last pair of shoes back in '98 and his feet still thanked him every day, is what he said. His boys took after him. Up until the day we left the rivers, 1947, there weren't one self-respecting pair of shoes in the whole family.
The way Mother Mary always told it, Richard Hamilton's mother was a Choctaw princess who got wooed out of her doeskins by an English gentleman, a gun dealer, back in Oklahoma. "Booze peddler and his squaw woman is more like it," Pap said. All the same, Pap had narrow English features to go with his mother's skin, which you might call dusty. He was reared up around a Catholic mission, and he read the Catholic Bible and lived by it, too, till the day he died, and called himself a Oklahoma Indin.
My mother-in-law, she was Seminole on her mother's side, but because her daddy was old John Weeks, the pioneer settler at Chokoloskee, she seen herself as white as a nun's buttocks. She always acted like she done her man a favor to run off with him, though to my mind just the opposite was true. My husband, John Leon, was her baby boy and her favorite among her children, and mine, too. That was about the only thing I ever did agree upon with that gruesome female, and even on that one, our reasons were not the same.
I loved that big strong boy because he stuttered when he got excited, and had him a generous heart under all that roughness. But his mama liked him mostly for his looks, and his fair skin especially. However, I will say for that woman, she was loyal to all her children, even Gene. To hear her tell it, they were the only children in southwest Florida that was worth their keep. She'd say, Folks is always carrying on about how lonely it must be for womenfolk in them awful islands, rain and mud and nothing but skeeters and sand flies to keep you company. And I just say, Heck no, it ain't lonely! Don't need no company when you got children like mine!
John Leon was born the year the Hamiltons give up farming Chatham Bend and went fishing for a year on Fakahatchee. The next year they came back to Chatham Bend, but they were fishermen from that time on. Walter, Gene, and Liza was all born on Chatham Bend in the 1880s, then Ann E. on Possum Key about the time Mister Watson first showed up. Walter was oldest, Eugene in the middle, and then John Leon-they were all two years apart. Gene was fair-haired, and as fair-skinned as Leon, but his nose and lips was kind of thick, you know, and his hair had a kind of little wave to it.
Them long-tongues up in Chokoloskee called Leon Hamilton a white man, but that was just their way to swipe at Daddy Richard, who started the fracas by going off with John Weeks's daughter. The one reason Leon was white, they said, was because a white man got into the pen when the family spent that year at Fakahatchee.
Mother Mary always said, "John Leon is a Weeks." She didn't want her baby boy called Hamilton, and that was because she was a cruel and stupid woman, and didn't care if she humbled her own husband, broke his heart. Daddy Richard would have gone along according to his peaceable philosophy, but John Leon said Heck no, he was Leon Hamilton, even though being a Weeks might have made his road in life a whole lot smoother. But she made Eugene ashamed of his own father, and for a while there, as a boy, he tried to call himself Gene Weeks, but nobody took that very serious except his mother. It was his own Weeks cousins had to beat it out of him.
Loving mother though she was, Mary Weeks cared less for her darker ones-for Liza, who was coffee-color, and for Walter, her firstborn, whose skin drank every drop that wasn't white in both his parents. Walter had his daddy's narrow features-he was handsome!-but that poor feller could of passed for colored anywhere he wanted. Walter Hamilton was a loner, came and went in silence, and later in life he moved back out of sight, up Lost Man's River.
Walter Hamilton kept so quiet, and he moved so quiet, that it was easy for Gene to pretend he wasn't there. Gene spoke in his rough way whether his own brother heard or not, and sometimes I think that's the way both of 'em wanted it. In a boat, Walter was always in the bow, and never looked around if he could help it. Had his own world in his head to keep him company, poor Walter did.
Leon always loved his brother Walter, and when they were boys, Gene and Leon were good brothers, too, but as life went on, they grew to hate each other, and the seed of the trouble, Leon told me, was Gene's bad attitude toward Walter, which came from a bad attitude about himself. Once in a while one of his Weeks or Daniels cousins would get drunk and tease Eugene-Your brother Leon, now, he looks almost like a white man, don't he, Gene?-and all Gene's rage would get roiled up, he'd fight to prove that he was white till he was black-and-blue, and in the end, it was Walter got the blame. In later years, when Walter stayed off by himself, Leon held that against Gene, he came right out with it. Said, "Gene, if your own brother ain't good enough for you, then you ain't good enough for me." Just wouldn't tolerate it. We moved across to Plover Key till Leon cooled a little.
Cruel Mary Weeks claimed to be color-blind, pointing at her husband as her proof, but in her heart it was her own color she despised. Dark blood was not the poison that was passed down in the family, it was that despising.
These Cypress Indins, or Mikasukis, were Creeks same as the Seminoles, Daddy Richard said, only their language was Hitchiti, not Muskogee, they were more hunters than farmers, kept no cattle. They stayed apart from white people, and was real strict. Back in the old days they used to put half-white babies to death, and the parents, too. Today most Indins want to be whites, and seeing that whites look down on blacks, they have got so they think they are somewhat better than what blacks are. Don't matter what color their own skin is, they have that poison. Mary Weeks come down from that poisoned kind, in my opinion.
So she said her husband was descended from a Choctaw princess, and her own Seminole mother was a princess, too. Come right down from Chief Osceola, straight as an arrow. She was no kind of kin at all to any real flesh-and-blood Indins that you could point at, she would not admit to a single redskin relative that ever peed a drop on Florida soil.
This whole darn foolishness of blood will be the ruin of this country. As Old Chevelier told Daddy Richard, human beings was all one shade when they first appeared on earth, and only turned into different-colored races when they scattered out across the continents. The way they breed around these days, the Frenchman said, they were sure to wind up all one color again, and the sooner the better, too, he'd say, because life was terrible enough without this useless misery of color.
We had all colors in the Hamilton clan, and that's for sure. Jean Chevelier called Hamiltons "the true New World family," because Richard Hamilton never thought about your color. If you came along and you were hungry, why he fed you, and he made Old Mary go along with that, and Eugene, too. Otherwise he would not bother his head, he let his wife make the decisions. Leon and me, we felt the same way as his daddy, we shared our table with all kinds and creeds. For that we was called nigger-lovers by the ones that didn't come right out and call us niggers. Course folks with manners, they might say mulattas.
My mother was a Holland, Irish Catholic, and my daddy Henry Gilbert Johnson was no kin at all to the Charley Johnson bunch at Chokoloskee nor that Christ Johnson from Mound Key whose bad son Hubert run off later on with Liza, nor Johnny Johnson who was one of Josie Jenkins's seven husbands. Chokoloskee people called my dad a conch from the Bahamas, but he come from the Channel Isles of England to trade some furs and feathers off the Indins. I showed up in '89, same year as Lucius Watson. Later in life, me'n Lucius was always just a little bit in love, but not so's anyone would notice, even him.
Gilbert Johnson used to camp at Lost Man's before the Hamiltons came on south from Chatham River. I recall the day we found the Hamiltons at his Wood Key camp. I was just thirteen, Leon a few years older, and we took one look and my heart was throbbing and everything else too. My sister Rebecca felt the same for Eugene, so my dad got us out of there, but after a year, those two boys came and took us.
Mother Mary said, All right, but we had to marry-being the white person, she naturally made all the decisions in the family-so Gene and Leon married us nice and proper in the old Ocean Chapel in Key West. I never regretted it, I married a good man. But Becca's man was sly and ornery, and by the end of it, his own daddy wouldn't have one thing to do with him.
I guess Daddy Richard missed old Jean Chevelier, cause after he moved down to Wood Key, he got the same kind of scrappy friendship going with my daddy. Even when Dad come to roost alongside Hamiltons on Wood Key, spent his old age fooling with fish and boats, he'd look at Richard and just shake his head. "How I rue the day," he'd sigh, "that I ever fell afoul of these bloody Hamiltons!" I been saying that to Leon all my life!
A critical asset in E.J. Watson's tumultuous career was his strong connection with the powerful cattlemen and bankers of the west coast city of Fort Myers, Florida, commissioned as Fort Harvie during the Third Seminole War, then reactivated during the Civil War as a base for Union raiders harassing the cattle trains that were still supplying beef to the Confederacy. Should you care to inspect it, the following material from my History of Southwest Florida may give some indication of why the marriage of Mr. Watson's daughter to W.G. Langford had such profound reverberations on Watson's life.
Fort Myers's first cattleman, Jake Summerlin, had worked cattle from the age of seven, bartering the twenty slaves in his inheritance for his first herd of six thousand head in the 1840s. He was a veteran of the Seminole Wars and a pioneer cattleman on the Alachua Prairie, moving huge herds with his cowboys and a grub wagon all the way from the St. Johns River southwest across Florida to the Calusa Hatchee. In the Civil War, Jake Summerlin sold cattle on the hoof to the Confederacy and smuggled cattle through the Union blockade to sell in Cuba. In the last year of the War he sold herds to the Union, which paid better.
After the War, Fort Myers was abandoned, but by 1869, Summerlin and his partners were moving their herds south once more and swimming them across the Calusa Hatchee and down to the pens and docks at Puma Rassa, where Summerlin took over the old Army barracks. Leasing pens and docks from the International Ocean and Telegraph Company, he made a fortune, shipping ten thousand head of his wild range cattle to Cuba every year. The Spaniards came up the Calusa Hatchee to buy his longhorns at Cattle Dock Point, paying Old Jake in gold doubloons, which he left about in sacks, old wool socks, and cigar boxes.
Already the homesteaders were descending on south Florida, creaking through the woods in covered wagons hauled through the hot sand by two or three yokes of mules or oxen. The pistol shot of their cracked whips, echoing across the hot dry landscape, could be heard a country mile away. At the Calusa River these Baptist "crackers" found good river-bottom land and built thatch houses, grew good crops, experimented with pineapples and coconuts, sugar cane and cabbage, and citrus plantations. But with the Key West market so far to the south, perishable produce could not survive the slow hot schooner voyage, and the pioneer farmers subsisted on hunting and fishing, living off the land. One day, the railroad would surely arrive, erupting with Yankee tourists and investors waving new green bills, and these trains would carry the bountiful winter produce to the northern markets. The Calusa Hatchee would be dredged and the Everglades drained, and Fort Myers would take a leading place in the new century.
These were the intoxicated years when Hamilton Disston, tycoon of Philadelphia, contracted with the State of Florida to acquire four million acres of the Glades for one million dollars, on the condition that his Atlantic and Gulf Coast Canal and Okeechobee Land Company drain the Kissimmee-Okeechobee region by way of the Calusa Hatchee to bring this natural wonder under man's dominion. Already Disston's mighty dredge was far upriver, past the Calusa mounds of clear white sand, past the ancient canals that joined the mounds to the clear and tranquil flow of the silent river. Churning out clouds of smoke and noise that drifted for miles across the shining waters, the dredge had shifted and resettled the vast muds of the Everglades in a mighty paroxysm of misdirected progress. By 1888, the dredge project had foundered, but not before the fragile water system had been broken, and the whole Okeechobee drainage opened to settlement, driving the remnant Indians farther southward into the Big Cypress. Through raw canals, the detritus and overflow of Okeechobee poured away westward, down the old Calusa River, which only a few years before had run black and clear over shimmering white sands of ancient shell.
Soon that white sand was covered over in dead mud and slime. The only one who seemed to care was the proprietor of the Punta Rassa Hotel, renamed the Tarpon House after a New York sportsman caught the first "silver king" an rod and reel in '85. Ever since, rich Yankees had flocked here in winter migration, pursuing the tarpon, Spanish mackerel, and kingfish, the snook and redfish that flashed through the emerald passes of the barrier islands. The millionaires paid handsomely to "rough it" at the Tarpon House, with its manly fare and rude bare floors, tin washbowls, china slop jars, and frontier spittoons. But now the Okeechobee muds, clouding the river, were turning the flow of silver fishes farther and farther offshore into the Gulf.
A newcomer, Jim Cole, was pleased by this evidence of human progress. Cole was soon in business with Captain Francis Hendry and son James in Cole & Hendry's general store, which in those days specialized in lumber. He called himself a cattleman, though from the start, this man seems to have been a dealer, less interested in cattle than quick sales. Cole also called himself a "boomer," since he aimed to make a boomtown of Fort Myers. His was the first place of business to install a kerosene street lamp and a sidewalk of white shell, barged from the gouged Indian mounds upriver. The year after his arrival, he pushed through the incorporation of the town, and within two years, his name-by now synonymous with the town's progress-was chronically cited in the Fort Myers Press for bold and exemplary civic deeds. He soon sold his share of Cole & Hendry to another cattleman, Dr. T.E. Langford, and the year after that he bought a Langford & Hendry cattle schooner, the old Lily White, after which he dubbed himself "Captain Cole," though never a soldier or ship's captain in his life.
With the Democratic victory in 1886, Cole organized the cattlemen in a crusade to create a brave new county named in honor of the Confederate general Robert E. Lee. Frustrated by lack of roads and rail, by the withholding of Monroe County funds for a bridge to the north bank of the river, and by the lack of interest shown by Monroe County officials in faraway Key West, the cattlemen sought to separate the north part of Monroe as Lee County, with Fort Myers as the county seat. The "county fathers," Captains F.A. Hendry and Jim Cole, were made county commissioners, and it was Cole who rammed through Doc Langford's cousin as first county sheriff, a job "ol' T.W." performed without risk or distinction until a young cowhand named Frank B. Tippins swept him out of office twelve years later.
In 1887, a west coast railroad terminus was finally established, not at Fort Myers but at Punta Gorda, thirty miles off to the north. As cattleman-trader Francis Hendry would observe, "America is moving, and Fort Myers has been left behind." With no bridge across the Calusa Hatchee and no roads, the town on the broad tranquil river remained cut off from the rest of the country except by sea, and commerce was limited to nonperishable export products-otter and raccoon pelts, deer and alligator hides, bird plumes, taxidermy specimens, sugar and molasses, and beef cattle. The cattle trade to Cuba was worth far more than all the other businesses combined.
In the year of the financial panic, 1893 (when E.J. Watson arrived in the region), the cattle industry on which the town depended suffered badly, and so did the growing trade in wild animal parts. But the following year, big freezes farther north in Florida drove many citrus growers south to the Calusa River. A rise in land values, a first rush of investment, was consolidated a few years later by new cattle profits from the Spanish-American War.
Without a railroad or a road bridge to link it to the outside world, Fort Myers remained a muddy cow town, or a dusty one, depending on the season. The cattle docks at Punta Rassa that T.E. "Doc" Langford and James Hendry had bought in the eighties from Jake Summerlin were still the foundation of the Fort Myers economy, as the cattlemen-traders extended their concerns to land development, rail commerce, and banking.
Under the circumstances, you will understand how significant it was that within five years of his arrival in the region, Mr. Watson's daughter Carrie married T.E. Langford's son.
Meanwhile, Mr. Watson's bouts of violent carousing were restricted to the seaports of Key West and Tampa. There is no report of intemperate behavior in Everglade or Chokoloskee, where his friends and neighbors had most chance to observe him, nor in Fort Myers, where his genteel family came to live. His son-in-law, Walter G. Langford, was a friend of Sheriff Frank B. Tippins from their cowboy days, which doubtless encouraged a certain lenience towards Langford's father-in-law. In addition, Mr. Watson was protected by Langford's powerful friends, including the aforementioned Jim Cole.