I swore softly and pushed away from the bar. In my mind, I was picturing the Flatiron’s buildings, the two lone colored women left at home to keep the place in order. “You said three days ago?”
“Late in the day. Jacob and the four that stayed with him spent the night down by the river, but those six that he sent north took off that same evening.” He looked down, started to reach for his drink, then pulled his hand back. “About how far is it to the Flatiron, Boone?”
“Two days, pushing hard.”
“So if they were heading for your daddy’s place . . .”
“Seems like,” I said heavily, setting my glass on the counter, its contents untouched. Casey and the others did the same. Only Pablo swallowed his, downing it quick, then stepping away from the bar.
“We riding, Boone?” Casey asked.
“You damn’ right we’re riding,” I replied grimly. “Hard.”
Excerpted from
Journal of a Military Physician:
A New Yorker’s Experiences
in Florida During the Late Hostilities
by
Capt. Robert Winterton, 110th NY Inf., Ret.
The Potomac Press, 1950
Chapter Eight
A Hanging On the Caloosahatchee
[Ed. Note: Captain James Doyle, of the 110th New York Infantry, was Garrison Commander at Fort Myers during its occupancy of 1863–1865. Captain Robert Winterton was chief surgeon there under Doyle’s command; the son of Dr. William B. Winterton, of Mexico, New York, Robert Winterton was commissioned a captain upon his enlistment at Oswego, in July 1862. Lieutenant Oliver Hodges was commissioned a Second Lieutenant at Oswego by then state Senator Cheney Ames that same month.
The 110th was mustered into service on August 25, 1862. By March of 1864, Fort Myers, Florida was home to a detached company of the 110th New York, a detached company of the 2nd United States Colored Infantry, and the 2nd Florida Cavalry, made up primarily of local Union sympathizers and Confederate deserters.]
* * * * *
. . . the garrison was rendered quite livid as news of the treatment suffered by Sergeant Moore and his men spread throughout the post and its surrounding colony of refugees. Captain Doyle took immediate steps to launch a punitive expedition against the perpetrators of this act of cowardice and at once ordered Lieutenant Hodges into the field with a force of eight mounted Infantry to apprehend and “settle the mettle” of the guilty party. Identification was made possible by certain collaborators sympathetic to the preservation of the Grand Union.
* * * * *
The traitors were identified as Bone(sic) McCallister, Casey Hawes (sic), Roy Turner, Arthur Hawes (sic), Richard Langley, Calvin Oswald, a dark-skinned accomplice of either Spanish or Indian blood, and a notorious killer known only as “Punch,” so named for his prowess with a revolver.
* * * * *
[Lieutenant] Hodges was given explicit orders, overheard by myself, to apprehend these men and see to their immediate executions by either rope or firing squad, the method to be at the discretion of the lieutenant and as circumstances dictated.
Session Five
I was thinking at breakfast this morning about how I kind of started this story with Dave Klee’s death and then just kept going from there without filling you in on the whens and whys and what-fors. Maybe I ought to do that now, so that you have a better understanding of how this all came about.
My daddy’s name was Jefferson Thomas McCallister. He was born in Wilkes County, Georgia on July 5, 1798, but moved to the Lower St. Johns River in Florida with his parents in 1807 or 1808, as best he could remember. Pa had two brothers, Franklin Benjamin and Adam Samuel, and if you think you’re seeing a trend there, you ain’t mistaken.
Neither Frank nor Adam saw any need to continue the tradition begun with Grandpappy McCallister, but our pa thought it was a fine idea. My full name, in case you haven’t guessed by now, is Boone Daniel, the second youngest of the six surviving sons of Jefferson and Julia McCallister.
Pa wasn’t as much a fan of the Revolution as he was the old-time frontiersmen and named his boys accordingly. The oldest was Lewis Meriwether, followed by Clark William, then Crockett David, Kenton Simon—who we called Bud for some reason I was never made privy to—then me, and lastly, Stone Michael, named after Michael Stoner, who probably isn’t as well-known as those others, but was still a rip-roarer from the Allegheny country.
Maybe it was Pa’s fascination with those early explorers that put such a lust for wandering in his soul. Or else it was the other way around. Whatever the cause, Pa had it bad, that bug to see what lay beyond the next bend in the river or behind that distant hammock of cypress trees. By the time he was fourteen, he’d explored most of that country along the lower St. Johns River and was a right-fair hunter and trapper, too, although I guess there wasn’t a lot of money in it in those days, what with the war with England pulling the rug out from under the fur trade. [Ed. Note: McCallister is referring to the War of 1812 here, with Great Britain.]
When he was sixteen, Pa finally set out on his own, traveling all the way up the St. Johns in a dug-out he’d hollowed and shaped himself. I guess he was gone for more than a year, and my grandparents had pretty well given him up for dead when he finally came back with his dugout nearly overflowing with hides, pelts, and plumes. He had him a sturdy raft in tow, as well, carrying even more pelts, along with several hollow-log casks filled with honey.
Pa made a chunk of money off that trip and kept on doing well for himself with his hunting and trapping and trading, until Grandpappy finally conceded the boy wasn’t lazy, as he’d originally thought, but just not cut out for farming, like most of the McCallister men before him.
Over the next decade, Pa explored just about every nook and cranny northern and central Florida had to offer, and there are some who said, not even that many years ago, that Jeff McCallister was the first white man to see those vast, cattle-rich prairies along the upper Pease and Caloosahatchee Rivers, although it was a claim Pa always dismissed.
“Every time I thought I was the first to do something or see something, I’d bump into someone who had been there before me or done it earlier,” he once remarked to us boys.
But if he wasn’t the first—not counting the Spaniards and Indians, of course—then he sure as heck was one of the first. Even Pa will admit to that.
“It was like Eden in those days,” he’d reminisce, then go on to tell us about how fine the hunting and trapping was, about how he sometimes got along just fine with the local tribes, but at other times had to shoot quick to keep his scalp intact.
“It was a damn-fine life.” He’d usually finish with a faraway look in his eyes.
Then, when Pa was twenty-eight, he met Ma, and his wandering days were over. Well, not altogether, but as far as taking off on his lonesome for months or even years at a time, those days were behind him.
My ma was born Julia Silkhart in 1811, the only daughter of Joshua Silkhart, of Jacksonville. Joshua was a merchant in that port city until his death in 1836. Ma’s mother died in childbirth, leaving me without much kin to speak of on that side of the family, but with cousins aplenty on my paternal side.
I mentioned six surviving sons, but didn’t say anything about those siblings who didn’t live. There were six of those, too—four sisters and two brothers, all of whom passed away before their fifth birthday of one ailment or another. That Florida frontier was hard on women and kids, and it finally took Ma when she was barely forty. I was six at the time; Stone was just two.
Ma and Pa lived in Jacksonville for nearly a year after they were married, then moved upriver, where Pa opened a trading post south of St. George Lake, a place not unlike Pete Dill’s, he said. Pa mostly traded with the Seminoles, taking in pelts and hides from raccoons, otters, bears, deer, bobcats, and wolves, plus all kinds of plumes, from egrets to ibises. In exchange, he carried just about anything a son or daughter of the wilderness might want—flint and steel, muskets, traps, b
lankets and cloth, silver and copper geegaws, jewelry, knives, tomahawks, beads—you name it. Pa’s business went under for good during the Second Seminole War, which is when he gave up trading to become a rancher.
He settled in the Kissimmee area first, which was prime cattle range in those days, but moved his operation over to the west side of the Highlands in 1848, when cattle ranged free for the taking and the market was barely one hundred miles away in a little, hick cow town outside of Fort Brooke called Tampa. Back in those days, smaller ports like Punta Rassa and Punta Gorda didn’t get much cattle trade at all, but of course that changed with the North’s invasion of the Confederacy.
If Pa wasn’t the first white man to lay eyes on that Upper Pease River country, I think it’s safe to say he was the first to settle on it permanently. It was Ma’s idea to set up camp on the banks of the Pease until Pa located a likely spot for a home. I think she was hoping it would be the last time we ever had to move, and for her, it was.
The place they settled on was about two miles back from the main river, atop a little hammock of live oaks with a good spring not fifty feet from the main house. They built their own cabin first, then a shack for the slaves. They had three by then, Jim and Josie and Joe-Jim, tottering around on his chubby-little bowed legs, while Stone followed him everywhere our ma would allow. Then Pa set about putting his mark on any unbranded cow, hog, or horse he could wrestle to the ground long enough to slap an iron to.
People sometimes ask where Pa got the idea for the Flatiron brand, since it’s a difficult one for cattle rustlers to alter, but he’d be the first to admit it wasn’t born from foresight so much as necessity. They needed something to identify their stock and didn’t have enough unused iron on the place to forge their own, nor time to ride all the way into Kissimmee or Tampa to buy one. What they did have was a part of Ma’s dowry, a trio of flatirons in varying sizes for pressing shirts and such. There not being a whole lot of call for fancy out in the scrub, Pa confiscated the largest of those irons for his own needs, and the Flatiron ranch was born. It was made official when Pa finally got to Tampa to register his brand and marks at the courthouse there. [Ed. Note: The marks McCallister is referring to are the notches cut into the ears and dewlaps of livestock to further identify ownership; the McCallister marks were a notch in the lower right ear with a moon-shaped cut in the outer ear of cattle, and two notches, one in the upper right ear and the other in the lower right ear, on hogs; horses carried just the brand.]
You don’t have enough recording disks in your satchel for me to relate what it was like to start a ranch in those days, all the back-breaking labor, the successes that only barely outnumbered the failures, until Pa had the Flatiron rooted firmly enough to believe it was real. Then the War of Northern Aggression broke out, throwing a kink in everyone’s plans before the dust at Fort Sumter had even settled in Charleston Harbor.
By the time Pa started driving herds north to supply the Confederacy, the Flatiron was pretty well established. We’d long since moved out of the original cabin, building a bigger house near it, a long log structure with eight rooms—every two-room section separated by its own dogtrot—and a wide veranda across the front. Pa turned the old cabin over to Jim and Josie, and warned us boys to stay out of it unless we were invited inside.
By ’64 we also had a twelve-stall barn with a melding of corrals and small pastures out back, a limestone milk house where we kept the dairy products from a pair of Guernseys Pa had brought back from Tampa some years before, a chicken coop, smokehouse, summer kitchen, a small blacksmith shop, sheds for wagons and tack, and a four-bed bunkhouse for the hired men—when we had any. With six grown sons and a pair of slaves at his beck and call, Pa generally had more than enough hands to run an outfit even as large and far-flung as the Flatiron. Yet it seemed like there were always a few men staying on for one reason or another, either drifters on their way through to some place else or temporary hands like Casey and Pablo.
Pa’s pride and joy, though—and Ma’s, too—was the pitch-sealed water tower he and Jim had built just north of the kitchen, made of cypress planks hauled in from a mill in Kissimmee, then put together onsite. It stood about twelve feet above the ground, with the water pumped in by a windmill standing over the spring about fifteen yards away. A pipe from the tank ran fresh, cool water into a galvanized sink under the kitchen’s north window with just a twist of a valve.
I’ll tell you what, Ma loved that tower, and she loved Pa all the more for building it for her. They’d had a rough life, those two, raising a family out in the wilderness, creating a small kingdom of sorts where only palmetto and cabbage palm had grown before. I think for Ma, that water flowing straight into the house was a reward beyond measure for all the grief and sacrifices she’d endured while following her husband into the heart of a lonely frontier.
For Pa, it was a means to show his appreciation for the woman who had stood at his side through all those rough years. The fact that she loved it so much made it extra special to him. To all us boys, for that matter. For its time, the Flatiron was a pretty prosperous ranch, although there would be larger ones before the heyday of the cattle industry was smothered out by citrus groves and tourism.
It was that water tower that first caught my attention when the seven of us rode in on badly jaded horses. Pete Dill’s words, repeating Jacob Klee’s admonition to his kin to—Let ’em know you were there, boys—still rings in my mind to this day.
They’d let us know, all right, and my heart sank at the breadth of the destruction. The stables, summer kitchen, and bunkhouse had been burned to the ground, the Guernseys and their calves killed in their pasture. The chicken house had been pulled over in a crumbled heap. I could see several crushed hens from the ranch entrance and figured those that hadn’t been killed outright had scattered into the forest behind the house, where they wouldn’t last long in that wild thicket filled with foxes, large snakes, and wildcats.
But what hit me hardest was that they’d pulled down the water tower. It lay on its side, splintered beyond redemption, the ground still muddy from where the cool spring water had splashed across the ranch yard. Staring dully at the wreckage, I felt tears brim at my eyes and angrily knuckled them away.
Negro Jim jumped off his horse as soon as we entered the yard and raced toward the cabin he shared with Josie. He was shouting as he ran, but she wasn’t answering, and any feelings I’d had for a stack of lumber and pine pitch that could be replaced with a week’s worth of labor vanished in an instant. Jim darted inside the cabin, only to reappear a few seconds later, his eyes wide with dread.
With my own gut-numbing terror growing, I leaped from the back of my lathered mount. “Spread out and find them,” I snapped to the others.
Casey took charge of the crew—ordering some of the boys into the trees, the others to start searching the outbuildings—while I headed for the main house. My pulse thundered as I paused outside the kicked-in kitchen door. Then gingerly I stepped inside.
Klee’s boys had been there, too, and torn the place apart in their search for . . . well, at first I couldn’t fathom what they might have been looking for. Then it occurred to me. I’ve already mentioned how in those days we dealt mainly in Spanish gold—doubloons, reales, even pesos—money that Pa kept in a metal chest buried inside a hollow tree at the edge of the forest. It was our gold Klee’s men had been grubbing for, and they must have thought we’d hidden it in the house. The kitchen was a shambles, and I’d soon learn the rest of the place hadn’t fared any better, although at that moment it was neither gold nor mossy water towers nor broken dinnerware that was nearly crushing me under its weight. Licking at lips gone as dry as a dead mouse, I advanced on the big bedroom next to the kitchen, where Pa slept. I hadn’t quite reached the door when I heard a shout from the trees behind the house.
Drawing my revolver, I ran through the dogtrot to the rear of the house, my knees turning kind of mushy at the sight of Josie running out of the woods. Jim was laughing
and crying at the same time as he swept her up in his arms and spun her in circles. Holstering the Navy, I jumped off the porch and ran out to where they stood hugging one another with fat tears spilling across their black cheeks. It wasn’t long before the others showed up, everyone grinning from ear-to-ear and making silly jokes to vent off some of the tension. They were still jabbering when it dawned on me that Josie was alone.
Jim must have realized it at the same instant, because he eased her back a step and said: “Where’s Lena, honey? Where’s our little Lena?”
Josie turned to me, her expression collapsing. “Oh, Marse Boone, they took her. They took Lena.”
“Who took her?” Jim demanded, shaking her gently until her eyes came back to his.
“Them men,” she sobbed. “Them ones what come here and set fire to the buildin’s and kicked ever’thin’ to pieces.”
“What men, Josie?” I interrupted, my voice harsher than I meant for it to be. “Did you get a look at them?”
“I did, marse, I surely did, but I didn’t recognize them a bit. Not none of ’em.”
“Did you see which way they came from?” Casey asked. “Or which way they went when they left?”
“Yes, suh. They come from the south, but went off to the east.”
“How many were there, Josie?” I asked more gently.
She held up six fingers. “Was this many, marse, all of ’em big, mean-lookin’ men, too. Like they could eat little baby children for breakfast, was they hungry enough.”
“Klee’s men,” Casey said.
“The ol’ devil, Judah Klee?” Josie asked.
“His son, most like,” Jim replied. “We had us a tangle with them on our way to Punta Rassa, and they’s plenty mad about it still.”
Taking Josie’s arm, I led her toward the main house. “Are you all right?” I asked. “Did they hurt you?”
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