Academic Paper: Sapiens in the Swamp: Culture and Landscape in the Everglades Region
From miles of wet grasslands to
thick mangrove swamps, the Everglades was an expanse of biodiversity prior to
major development interest in the early 1900s. Originally covering over 4,000
square miles, the Everglades encompassed habitats ranging from dense, hot, and
dry pine flatwoods to miles of open grasslands to endless tangles of mangrove
forests. It was here, within the daunting swamp of the Southwest region of the
Everglades, where Seminole, gladespeople, freed or escaped African-American
slaves, white European settlers, outlaws, moonshiners, rum- and whiskey-runners
all inhabited, adapted, and recreated the natural landscape, it's impossible
habitats becoming intangibly ingrained in the establishment and identity of
these various peoples. As the “politics of nature” altered the use and
perception of the Everglades, these cultures have changed or disappeared,
forcibly adapting to a reconfiguration and regulation of the natural landscape
forcing a redefinition of their former identities (Ogden 95). Ultimately
dissipating and dispersing as development encroached and regulations
restricted, evidence of Everglades culture today exists mostly in museums,
historical societies, and occasionally in oral tradition or photographs from
descendants, with loose semblances of their cultures appearing in tourist
attractions like swamp buggy rides and alligator feedings. The landscape and
habitats of the Everglades were essential to the creation and existence of the
unique cultures that claimed it as home. It is within this framework that one
can understand the role natural landscape plays in culture development and
heritage.
Before I continue this exploration,
I would like to preface that the intention of this paper is not at all to
downplay the development advancements and immense conservation efforts this
region has made by advocates, scientists, politicians, grassroots groups,
laborers, and engineers. The Everglades provided a challenge for our industrial
forces to create and execute massive infrastructure plans that changed the way
our nation paved new paths in our land and understood how to occupy that land.
This ecosystem and landscape also welcomes nationwide efforts for invasive
species eradication and boasts unparallelled research for the tropical and
subtropical regions, benefitting habitats around the world. I commend my
associates that work in conservation for this region, as well as those who work
to make our nation more connected and accessible through advancements in
technology and infrastructure. My intention with this paper is to academically
highlight the unique populations and cultures that once inhabited this region
by showing how physical changes to their circumstances outside of their control
altered their potential for existence. My research takes a subject-centered
standpoint that acknowledges the habitats and landscapes that defined and
provided refuge for these cultures.
1. Inhabiting the Everglades
Today, people laughably acknowledge
Florida as the “Weirdest State,” which is no surprise if you have ever visited.
Florida has an identity crisis, due in part to it’s tumultuous and expansive
history and in part to it’s current populus.
The original inhabitants of the
Everglades region were indigenous people, occupying the physical landscape for
thousands of years before colonial presence. Covering a majority of the Gulf
Coast and interior Everglades, the Calusa kingdom was one of the first recorded
in the region. Predominantly hunter-gatherers, the Calusa lived off the
landscape, consequently developing advanced techniques to survive in the
extreme tropical environment. Estimated to be about 50,000 in total, they
controlled the majority of Florida and protected their territory fiercely, of
which the earliest conquistadors bore
testament in 1513 (500 Years of Discovering
Florida). The indigenous population of the Florida peninsula in its
entirety, estimated at 200,000 in 1500, is less than 3,000 today, while the
total population of Florida totals almost 21.5 million, populated predominantly
by Caucasian seasonal residents and retired elders, and a typically
visa-holding, smaller, and younger multicultural populus from the Caribbean,
Southeast Asia, Central and South America, and Africa. The story of the
indigenous in Florida is not an unfamiliar one told and read about in U.S.
history, sadly. “By the time the English gained control of Florida in 1763, the
Tequesta and Calusa tribes had been severely decimated by incoming European
diseases. According to early settlers, the remaining native people retreated
deeper into the Everglades, while others migrated to Cuba to begin new
settlements there in the late 1700s” (National Park Service). By 1821, the
political ownership of Florida would change again, now in the hands of the
United States as a territory.
In the ensuing years, President
Andrew Jackson’s Indian Removal Act, The Civil War, and immigration of white
European settlers would change Florida into a refuge for the marginalized,
escaped, and adventurous. “Settlers and Native Americans had both started
moving southward; settlers for a better climate, Indians to escape being sent
to reservations in Oklahoma by the Federal government” (Repko 3). In the wake
of these political chapters, indigenous peoples were relocated from the
Southeast and Midwest, grouped together regardless of pre-established tribal
identities, and named Seminole, settling in the most remote hammocks and
cypress heads of the Everglades. Meanwhile, European settlers founded dispersed
fishing, hunting, and trading communities along the coasts and well-known
natural landmarks, such as Calusa shell mounds and inlets. For the subsequent
years, until about the mid-1800s, the Everglades region and its occupants
assumed very little presence in the national dialogue, deemed uninhabitable and
undesirable, at least until it was seen as a potential resource.
2. Development and destruction of the
landscape
When the developers’ dream of
draining the swamp took hold, it served as the start of the physical
destruction, alteration, and eventual salvation of what was left of the
Everglades landscape, disrupting the Glades cultures already established in the
region. Thoughts about draining the Everglades started as early as the 1830s,
with measures readily available to alter the landscape for the public as soon
as the 1850s. The first major drainage project began in 1881, similar efforts
sprouting up all over for the following decades. Massive machinery from all
over the country was brought in, revolutionizing engineering history with
unique technology fit for the wetlands, an advancement that parallelled the
disruption and destruction of the rare ecosystem. The Bay City Walking Dredge,
located in Collier-Seminole State Park, is the “last remaining dredge in the
United States with [a] unique propulsion system, designed for a wetlands
environment” and is responsible for 10 miles of the Tamiami Trail (ASME). It is
hard to overlook the irony of displaying this massive, destructive piece of
engineering history in a protected natural site. The Tamiami Trail, Central and
South Florida Project, Atlantic Coast Line, and other major construction
efforts crept in, supported by the government to rid the U.S. of what was
perceived as a useless swamp. By 1851, land within the Everglades region was
permitted to be sold by the state on the condition that “proceeds of the sale
of any of the lands so granted should be applied exclusively to the purposes of
reclaiming the swamp and overflowed lands” (qtd. in Repko, 3). Untouched
tropical wilderness, purchased in chunks of a few thousand to a few million
acres, proceeded to turn into industrial logging camps, shiny new cookie-cutter
developments, multi-lane roadways, and comprehensive and ineffective drainage
systems and adjusted waterways, leaving a massive environmental footprint from
Florida newcomers claiming to be doing this unruly landscape a favor. “Without
reclamation, the Everglades was considered miasmic, dangerous, uncivilized, and
certainly worthless” (Ogden 12). Developers even went so far as to introduce an
invasive species, Melaleuca quinquenervia,
a tree species endemic to Australia that is especially effective at absorbing
water, naturally well-supplied by the wetlands of the Everglades that have
since dried up and become a massive aerial quilt of prime development land.
However, as the Everglades became more accessible due to development,
especially the connection of the East and West coasts via the Tamiami Trail, so
did the understanding of the rich biodiversity and uniqueness the region held.
3. Reclamation and regulation of the
Everglades
The Everglades is unlike anything
else that exists in the world, and that statement is not an exaggeration. The
distinct tropicality of the Everglades region contributed greatly to the
immense and passionate conservation efforts put forth by scientists and
activists (Ogden 109-110). Home to unique habitats such as hardwood hammocks,
mangrove jungles, remnant slough, pine flatwoods, and coastal scrub, and with
animal species like manatee, alligator, snowy egret, and Gulf toadfish, and
plant species like the ghost orchid and the giant Tillandsia, the Everglades gained enough support to become a
National Park in 1947, conveniently during the height of state-sponsored
drainage projects, just one year prior to authorizing the Central & South
Florida Project (Ogden 15). Other protected sites such as Collier-Seminole
State Park, Big Cypress National Preserve, National Panther Refuge, Fakahatchee
State Strand, and others were established throughout the 20th Century and today
serve as a conglomerate of varying levels of protection and access to the
natural landscapes that were severed off. Initially, the scientists and
naturalists employed to survey the Everglades focused on highlighting the
biodiversity of the region, intentionally excluding the human narrative within
their field accounts. This is especially notable for the Seminole and
gladespeople. While it can be argued establishing a National Park is a strong
step forward for conservation, the U.S. government and National Park Service
are no strangers to indigenous displacement. In this case, it applied to more
than just the Seminole, as it also inhibited local settlers’ access to the same
land that those cultures' livelihoods depended on. Territory that was once a
tropical frontier was now regulated and restricted. Isolation from the
landscape forced many locals to the margins, leaving newly developed space for
a wave of tourism and recreation in the area.
Gladesmen, Seminole, and other local
settler populations were greatly affected by changed access to the land, which
contributed towards the dissolving of their intimate and unique relationships
with the landscape. Former trading posts grew into residential oases, some even
being absorbed entirely by the National Park like Flamingo, others abandoned as
industries moved or changed. The region was now mostly established and
supported by local land developers:
Prosperity of a sort reached
Everglades City in the 1920s when Barron Collier made it his headquarters for
the building of the Tamiami Trail across south Florida...Chokoloskee did not
have a road until a causeway was built from the mainland in 1956...Flamingo,
still marking the end of the main park road, is now a park community with a
campground, ranger station, marina and lodge. Chokoloskee, surrounded by park
waters at the end of Highway 29, is still home to fishermen, with a few motels
and a resort having been added for park visitors. Although the tiny cane farms
and fishing shanties are gone, both areas maintain the tranquil beauty for
which they are famous. (National Park Service)
Smaller cities like Everglades City and Chokoloskee were
mostly spared the overwhelming influx of development that is evident in nearby
places like Marco Island, Golden Gate Estates, and Naples. Today, Tamiami Trail
and Interstate 75 are peppered with billboards for airboat rides, Seminole and
Miccosukee craft shops, RV parks, wildlife encounters, and the identifiable
Indian Villages with their saw palmetto (Serenoa
repens) chickees peeping out of the greenery. These attractions provide
small pockets of insight into the Everglades that once was, their presence
remaining, albeit in dwindling numbers, but their practices and relationships
diluted, managed, or packaged for consumption by tourists.
The Everglades of today serves an
important scientific role for conservation, housing some of the most unique
biodiversity known to the world, yet Glades culture has been almost lost with
the disappeared landscape. Locals keep the stories, heritage, and history of
their ancestors alive, many historic locations still being occupied such as the
Smallwood Store in Chokoloskee and Rod & Gun in Everglades City, two
historical sites that played roles in the narrative of Glades culture. Cultural
heritage for Gulf Coast small towns is most commonly visible through their
historic public buildings, of which the Everglades Society for Historic
Preservation has multiple projects (Everglades Society for Historic
Preservation). Cultural events include annual ongoings that maintain the
nostalgia of the pre-development era, such as the Blessing of the Stone Crab
Fleet which has become a large family tradition, and annual hunts supporting
conservation efforts such as the Python Bowl and the Statewide Alligator
Harvest Program put on by Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Committee, the
latter event repackaging a former livelihood into a sportsman’s weekend
activity of killing this mostly protected pest species. Mystery and intrigue
remain, though the protagonist that was once the unforgiving landscape and elusive
wildlife is now overshadowed by python encounters and Skunkape myths. The
Everglades of today are a third of its original size, home to infringing
cookie-cutter developments and “eco”-thrills from swamp-buggy racing to
souvenir alligator tooth necklaces.
4. Cultural establishment and
relationship with the landscape
Understanding more deeply the
cultural and natural value, as well as the various types of interactions
inhabitants had with the Everglades exemplifies how distinct landscape
relationships were produced, starting with the earliest known inhabitants.
4.1 The first inhabitants
Nicknamed “The Shell Indians,” the
Calusa were adept fisherpeople and utilized shells for tools, weapons,
ornamentation, and most notably for their massive earthworks, shell mounds
piled high and upon which the Calusa established satellite communities of their
kingdom (National Park Service). “Calusa adaptations included...engineering
skills that improved living conditions and enhanced cultural connections, and
buffering mechanisms that allowed the resilient Calusa to survive, and even to
prosper, during periodic episodes of resource deprivation,” including shaping
and working massive shell mounds to create shallow tidal pools for fishing and
weaving durable nets of red mangrove (Rhizophora
mangle) propagules that were strung in the marshes to capture larger fish
(Florida Museum). Their practices learned from the land were copied by
following occupants, as is seen in the use of the bald cypress (Taxodium distichum) log dugout canoes by
the Seminole and gladesmen and the establishment of settler communities and
trading posts upon shell mounds like Marco Island and Chokoloskee. The Seminole
established a close and discreet relationship within the landscape of the
Everglades out of necessity and resourcefulness. Isolated to smaller satellite
encampments within hammocks and cypress heads to avoid run-ins with legal
bodies, Seminole interaction was limited to local settler populations, but
their use of surrounding resources remains a legacy today, as they and the
Miccosukee remain the experts in chickee hut construction, built from native
saw palmetto fronds and bald cypress. Tourists can be caught sipping on a
tropical drink under one of these today, unbeknownst to them that just over 100
years prior, Native Americans evading capture while fleeing the Trail of Tears
built and sought refuge beneath these makeshift yet indescribably sturdy
structures. The Seminole are a lasting populus that ties our modern Florida to
it’s past. “Hunting, trapping, fishing and trading with the white man at
frontier outposts provided the Seminoles with their only significant economic
enterprise of the era” (Seminole Tribe). They remained self sufficient,
isolated, and hardly interacted due to their justified mistrust of the white
man. The Seminole were intimately familiar with the landscape out of necessity,
yet their representation by naturalists hints at the deprecated “savages”
mentality. “...naturalists treated indigenous people as somehow within the same
romanticized conceptual space as landscapes they considered wilderness” (Ogden
101). Considered as objects part of a landscape rather than as humans entwined
with and agents of that landscape, their categorization and recorded
interaction were completely opposite from their racial counterparts such as the
gladesmen and outlaws who were seen as “out-of-place” (Ogden 101). These
narratives and policy contradictions in regards to land development “embody
well-known Western traditions bifurcating ‘natural’ and ‘human’ landscapes,”
ultimately leading to a difference and bias in how that land was managed by
government bodies (Ogden 15, 17). In the case of the Seminoles, the territory
they occupied was now federally protected land, meaning they could no longer occupy
it. Reparations for the Seminole were attempted by the U.S. government but
included a catch that would entirely change how the Seminole lived:
By 1938, more than 80,000 acres of
land had been set aside for the Seminoles...and the invitation to move in, to
change from subsistence farming and hunting/trapping to an agriculture-based
economy, was offered. Few Seminoles moved onto these Indian reservation lands,
however, mistrusting the government that had hunted their forebears. (Seminole
Tribe)
Today, the Seminole and Miccosukee territories exist in
pockets throughout Southern Florida in Fort Lauderdale, Hollywood, and the
outskirts of Miami along the Tamiami Trail and I-75 that run casinos, museums,
shops, and, most notably for being “Floridian”, the gator wrestling of the
Miccosukee. While their current relationships with the local and federal
government are amicable, their Everglades territory now overlooks a horizon of
dams and water management infrastructure.
4.2 White settlers and gladesmen
Gladesmen spent hours, days, and
weeks in the Everglades region, becoming intimately aware of and adapting to
its ways and habits, the timely late afternoon rains of the summer or the fiery
burns of early spring. While burning buttonwood for charcoal and domestic
farming supported families year-round, trading their goods in nearby posts and
in Key West, hunting was a significant source of food, income, and identity for
the gladesmen, the white settlers whose identities were intimately entwined
with the landscape. Immersing themselves in the swamp, they built camps and
outposts throughout the Glades that served as temporary shelters for the weeks
it took to pursue alligators, becoming one with the landscape and their
targets. “Through the acoustics of becoming alligator, hunters embodied the
territorial practices of adult alligators,” often imitating young alligator
calls to bait adult alligators, standing still for hours while calling to them
in rivers, marshes, or alligator holes (Ogden 60). The tools of their trade
came from learned skills and the surroundings, often manipulating the landscape
to their advantage, working with natural seasonal phenomena and knowledge of
the habitats:
In the Everglades, hunters were
simply “crazy for setting fires,” as one glades hunter told me. As they moved
through and across the landscape, hunters left fire in their wake. When the
mosquitoes were bad, they kept smudge pots of black mangrove [Avicennia geriminans] slowly burning,
blanketing their camps and their boats...They set fires to mark their trails,
to drive animals out of the saw grass [Cladium
jamaicense], to encourage deer to fresh growth, and to make traveling
easier in a “hard walking” landscape. (Ogden 55)
Some famous gladesmen even settled in the hammocks deep in
the Everglades, creating small satellite farms that were entirely
self-sufficient and completely isolated. Ed Booker was one such gladesmen,
giving up town life around 1916 and moving to a remote island in the
backcountry, farming beans and tomatoes in the center of a cleared hardwood
hammock (Ogden 87). There came a great sense of pride and identity in providing
for one's family in this harsh environment, as exemplified by an anecdote
shared with Laura Ogden, author of Swamplife:
When Whidden was four or five years
old, his father...was thrown from the car. The accident left Whidden’s father
with a silver plate in his head and paralyzed on the right side of his body.
For the rest of his life, Whidden’s father used a crutch, dragged his right
leg, and kept his right arm tucked in his shirt. Whidden ended his story
saying, “He go and camp in the woods by himself and he could skin a gator, or
otter, ‘coon.”...His father was a man who, against all odds--crippled, living
in a remote settlement in the Corkscrew Swamp during the lean years between
World Wars I and II--could still provide for his family. He did this by
skinning animals. (63)
This independence and success over adversity made for
intimate knowledge and recognition of the natural surroundings, as well as a
distinct hardiness and durability of character. Gladesmens’ local knowledge and
skills were often tapped by visiting scientists and naturalists, although they
were rarely credited or seen as worth the knowledge they provided. Naturalists
would use “selective recognition” when accounting their discoveries, often
discounting “the relationship between local landscape practices and place-based
knowledge, constructing these forms of residential knowledge as being
distinctly inferior to understandings gained through fieldwork” (Ogden 119). In
this way, the accounts of the locals were rarely esteemed or taken into
consideration as development sites and protection sites changed public access
and presence in the region. If their accounts, along with those of the
Seminoles, factored in the developmental and political decisions of the era,
the Everglades region infrastructure could have looked quite differently today.
Now, gladesmens’ heritage lives on in accounts and stories of near-escape from
death-by-alligator, passed down generationally and locally. “These stories
serve as vectors of escape from the territorial boundaries of the Everglades
and the messy, physically exhausting, and often mundane tasks of killing. They
link the hunter’s landscape to the larger canon of the man-beast encounter...”
(Ogden 66). It could be argued that their cultural heritage lives on in oral
history, but the truth is that the story is only the account, not the
experience, struggle, or actual hunt, learned skills that descendants of
gladesmen are not permitted to revive due to restricted and regulated access,
infringing development, and the gradual loss of open, non-regulated land.
4.3 Outcasts and outlaws
The Everglades was also a refuge for
criminals, bootleggers, and other transgressors of society, the confusing
landscape infamously and comically deterring the law. Gangs, bootleggers,
escaped convicts, and others from the underbelly of society at the time found
the Everglades to be “hush-hush” and civilized, remote and private. “With all
avenues for the legal sale of alcohol closed in the county, bootleggers
received vast supplies of liquor from moonshine stills throughout south Dade
and the Everglades, and from other "wet" areas of Florida” (George
37). The Everglades provided good cover, the mangrove tunnel forests,
waist-deep cypress swamps, and flooding plains embodying solitude,
independence, and sequestration. “The Everglades...was a place where people
suffering through hard times could escape their personal tragedies and where
silence about those tragedies was expected” (Ogden 155). Outcasts and
marginalized peoples migrated to Florida, many homesteading on virgin land,
many not wanting to be found again. The remoteness also made it difficult for
lawmen to pursue criminals, especially escaped prisoners. Florida has a
reputation for unjust prison laws, which supported the developer’s dream at the
time as prisoners could be leased out to private entities to perform labor, many
of which dug through the Everglades region:
In 1877, Florida’s Governor George
Franklin Drew codified the convict leasing system, whereby prisoners were
leased out to private entities and industries...The convict leasing system was
especially harsh in Florida, where convicts worked long days mining phosphate
and turpentine, clearing out tropical landscapes, and laying roads in hellish
temperatures without adequate food, water, or shelter. (Goyanes)
If prisoners were lucky and escaped, pursuits were not common
given the unruliness and unpredictability of the natural landscape. Fame still
reached the Everglades, however, where whiskey and rum runners operated during
Prohibition era and cocaine and marijuana smugglers in the 1980s, using the
landscape as camouflage against the law. It was “as if the Everglades gave
birth to a sort of culture of transgression,” leaving myth and lore behind
(Ogden 92). Most notably was the Ashley Gang, who used their home--the
landscape of the Everglades--as their hideout during their criminal activities.
The Bill Ashley Jungles is a name that is rarely used anymore, now a historical
tidbit in reference to the specific mangrove jungle in the Everglades where the
gang sought refuge, named after the gang leader’s brother, an gladesmen and
recluse himself. Faded and water-logged lore and intrigue is what is left of
the outlaw legacy in the Everglades, with the occasional moonshine or rum
barrel displayed in a museum or historical center, though thankfully Florida’s
legacy of welcoming all walks of life has not changed one bit, much to the
amusement of non-Floridians that understand the curiosity that is the “Florida
man challenge.”
5. Conclusion
As Florida’s landscape was physically changed, the cultures that claimed it as home subsequently had to as well. The adversity the landscape of the Everglades provided became ingrained in the spirit and adaptability of these cultures, forming a unique lifestyle that claimed the landscape as the natural wonder it was, not just as physical land and opportunity. As that original landscape disappeared, either through access or physical development, the state of existence of these cultures also began to disappear, ultimately forcing them to adapt to a regulated and less intimate relationship with their surroundings. Ultimately, while these populations exist in oral history and local fame, some prior characteristics of pre-development Everglades are incorporated into modern experiences. The case of Glades culture also serves as a reminder for all humanity on how destroying or altering natural landscapes can deprive us of more than just our surroundings, but our connection and relationship with that manifestation of nature.
Works Cited
500 Years of Discovering Florida. University of South Florida
Library, 2012, www.exhibits.lib.usf.edu/exhibits/show/discovering-florida.
Everglades Society for Historic
Preservation. Our Projects. Pamphlet.
Florida Museum, South Florida
Archeology and Ethnography. 4 December 2019,
www.floridamuseum.ufl.edu/sflarch/.
George, Paul S. Bootleggers, Prohibitionists, and Police: The Temperance Movement in
Miami 1896-1920. Digital collections, Florida International University.
http://digitalcollections.fiu.edu/tequesta/files/1979/79_1_04.pdf.
Goyanes, Rob. The secret history of Florida prison labor. The New Tropic, 4
January 2016, Miami, Florida. www.thenewtropic.com/prison-labor-florida/.
National Park Service, Everglades
National Park. People. National Park
Service, 14 April 2015, www.nps.gov/ever/learn/historyculture/people.htm.
Ogden, Laura. Swamplife. University of Minnesota Press, 2011, Minneapolis,
Minnesota.
Repko, Marya. A Brief History of the Fakahatchee. ECity Publishing, 2009,
Everglades City, Florida.
Seminole Tribe. History. Seminole Tribe of Florida.
www.semtribe.com/STOF/home/history/introduction.
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