Lost Man's River

by Peter Matthiessen

  Ask ’em, then!

  This old feller makes me shout my questions through a glass storm door that would hold out a tornado. No matter what I ask him, he shouts back at me, “Shit, no!”

  “Shit, no!” he hollers. “This damn place is named for a old Injun used to farm it. Hoyt Bottom! Belle Starr got killed over yonder under the mountain, by Frog Hoyt’s place! Shit, no, you cain’t find it! Ain’t even a road out there no more! Be knee-deep in mud and water, just gettin near to it!

  “Shit no. Ain’t nobody knows who killed her! I’m just tellin you where she got killed at! What? Shit, no! Ain’t never heard of him!”

  Next, I tracked down this old widow who owns Belle’s cabin site above Younger’s Bend, on the north side of the Canadian. This widow has no storm door, only a rusty screen, but she won’t open up for love nor money, never mind that I could walk right through it. The widow says she’s been down sick so she won’t let me on the property, but before I can reason with her, she decides she trusts me; if I will pay her one dollar up front, I can go trespass on her historical-type property, with a look at her old photo of Belle thrown in. The photo was kind of hazy through that rusty screen, but it sure looked like the same one you can see in every book and article ever written about Belle—egret plume hat, pearl-handled guns, and a face that would stop the Mississippi, as the old folks said.

  When I shook my head over Belle’s dead dog appearance, the widow thought I might be losing interest, so she told me I could take a gander at a picture of herself—the way she looked “back then,” she says, meaning back in Belle’s time, from the look of her. Says, “Thet’s me settin right thyar with my hy-ar fuzzed up, way I’m s’posed to look!” Between the widow before and the widow after, there wasn’t really all that much to choose.

  “Now,” says she, “you go on down yonder under the mountain till you see a real purty yeller trailer, and a real purty brick ranchette up in the holler, and you foller that road up to where them trespissers has destructed our iron gate.” I did as she bid me and sure enough, the iron gate is face down in the mud. A path goes east along the ridge to a fenced grave in a hackberry grove that overlooks the river, which flows down around under the mountain. There’s no cabin up at Belle’s place anymore, and not one brick or broken bottle left to steal, which made me wonder why that widow was so nervous about trespissers. Course a body can’t be too careful around strangers.

  The river has been dammed since Watson’s time. The dam must kill fish in the turbines, because ten or more bald eagles were flapping up and down the river or setting in the winter trees. That’s a lot more eagles in one place than I have seen anywhere since a boy, and it sure did my heart good to see them. I had figured they were mostly gone out of America.

  Here’s the opinion of the latest book on Belle at the nearest library, which turned out to be about sixty miles east, on over the state line at Fort Smith, Arkansas:

  “The case against Watson was exceedingly weak, only Jim Starr seeming anxious to secure an indictment of murder. Belle’s son, Ed Reed, refused to testify against Watson, saying he knew nothing against the man, and neighbors of Watson testified that the accused was a quiet, hardworking man of refinement and education, well-liked, and never before in trouble of any kind.”

  If you will believe that, Professor, you will believe anything!

  (signed) R. B. Collins

  What can we conclude about his years on the frontier, apart from the widespread allegation that Watson was the “Man Who Killed Belle Starr”? At least three of Mrs. Starr’s biographers declare that after his departure from Oklahoma, the same Watson was convicted of horse theft in Arkansas and sentenced to fifteen years in the penitentiary, and that he was killed while resisting recapture after an escape. (Here as elsewhere they follow the lead of Hell on the Border, first published within a few years of the events, and considerably more accurate than many of the subsequent accounts, despite its report of Watson’s death.)

  Watson’s destination after his escape from the penitentiary remains unknown, though he later related to his friend Ted Smallwood at Chokoloskee that he headed west to Oregon, where he was set upon by enemies in a night raid on his cabin. Obliged to take a life, possibly two, he fled back east. Another account asserts that Watson, on his way to Oklahoma, passed through Georgia, where he killed three men in a fracas. Like the many false rumors from south Florida—including the allegation that he murdered the Audubon warden Guy Bradley in 1905—these seem to be “tall tales” unsupported by known evidence or even anecdotes within the family.

  Ed Watson reappears in Florida in the early nineties, in a shooting at Arcadia in which, by his own account (as reported by Ted Smallwood), he slew a “bad actor” named Quinn Bass. In the rough frontier justice of that period, our subject was permitted to pay his way out of his troubles, according to one of Belle Starr’s hagiographers, who asserts that “a mob stormed the [Arcadia] jail, determined to have Watson, but the sheriff beat them off.”

  As Ted Smallwood recalls in his brief memoir:

  Watson said Bass had a fellow down whittling on him with his knife and Watson told Bass to stop; he had worked on the man enough and Bass got loose and came towards him and he begin putting the .38 S+W bullets into Bass and shot him down.

  In a different account:

  Watson and Bass, another outlaw, became involved in a dispute over the spoils of a marauding expedition, and Bass was shot through the neck.

  Though Watson is rarely identified as an “outlaw,” it should be noted that in those days, range wars and cattle rustling and general mayhem were rife in De Soto County, and gunmen and bushwhackers from the West found steady work. It is also true that Watson turned up at Chokoloskee Bay not long thereafter with enough money to buy a schooner, despite his alleged recompense to the Bass family. Considering that he was penniless when sent to the penitentiary and had no known employment after his escape, it is difficult to imagine where that money came from.

  In his first years in southwest Florida, while establishing his plantation at Chatham Bend, Watson assaulted Adolphus Santini of Chokoloskee in an altercation in a Key West auction house, and this knife attack, which did not prove fatal, was also taken care of with a money settlement considered very substantial for that period. Again, our subject’s source of funds, after long years as a fugitive remains unexplained. One cannot dismiss the possibility that from the time of his prison escape in Arkansas until the time he took refuge in the Ten Thousand Islands, E. J. Watson made his living as an outlaw.

  Withlacoochee

  Until his final summer on the Bend, when he was twenty, Lucius Watson had never perceived his father as other than a bold choleric man, abounding in energy and generosity, good humor and intelligence, more instinctive with crops and farm animals, work boats and tools, than any other man in all the Islands. Even today he felt haunted and constrained by that powerful human being he called Papa, the doomed man he had seen for the last time in September of 1910, waving somberly from the riverbank at Chatham Bend. But as his biographer, he understood that his task must be to set aside love and admiration and reconstitute a more objective figure, much as a paleontologist might re-create some ancient creature from scattered shards of bone, pieced together on a rickety armature of theory. Mistrusting the warp of his own memory, he hoped to collect the more critical fragments of the “truth” from the common ground in the testimonies of his subject’s friends and enemies, retaining those which seemed consistent with the few known facts.

  In the popular accounts (and there were very few others), the material was largely speculative as well as sparse. Most stories about Edgar Watson related to his last decade in southwest Florida, with which Lucius himself was already familiar. There was virtually no mention of South Carolina, where Papa had spent his boyhood and early youth, nor even of north Florida, where he would live well into early manhood, marry all three of his wives, and spend almost half of his entire life.

  To judge from his own corr
espondence with the last Watsons in Clouds Creek, his father’s branch of that large Carolina clan was all but forgotten now in Edgefield County. As for Fort White, the Collins cousins went knife-mouthed at the very mention of Uncle Edgar, and tracking down the last few scattered elders who might still hoard a few poor scraps of information was a poor alternative, since in Papa’s day, these hinterlands had been little more than frontier wilderness, with meager literacy and without the libraries and public records already available in less benighted regions. As in southwest Florida, much local lore, with its blood and grit and smells, had simply vanished.

  The biographer’s difficulties were made worse by the immense false record—“the Watson myth”—and also by the failure to correct that record on the part of the subject’s family and descendants, whose reluctance to come to his defense by testifying to the positive aspects of his character was surely one reason why his evil reputation had been so exaggerated. In the absence of family affirmation of that warmth and generosity for which E. J. Watson had been noted even among those who killed him, he had evolved into a kind of mythic monster. Yet as Lucius’s mother had observed not long before her death, “Your father scares them, not because he is a monster, but because he is a man.”

  Long, long ago down the browning decades, in the sun of the old century in Carolina, walked a toddling child, a wary boy, a strong young male of muscle, blood, and brain who saw and smelled and laughed and listened, touched and tasted, ate and bred, and occupied earthly time and space with his getting and spending in the world. If his biographer could recover a true sense of his past, with its hope and longings, others might better understand who that grown man might have been who had known too much of privation, rage, and suffering, and had been destroyed.

  Driving north to Columbia County, Arbie Collins picked through Lucius’s research notes, fuming crossly over certain phrases. Flicking the pages with a nicotined fingernail as yellow as a rat tooth, he coughed and rolled his eyes and whistled in derision, all to no avail, since Lucius ignored his provocations, scanning the citrus and broad cattle country as they drove along.

  “ ‘We cannot make an innocent man out of a guilty one!’ ” Arbie declaimed, slapping Lucius’s notes down on his kneecaps. “Well, you’re sure trying! ‘E. J. Watson was known from Tampa to Key West as the finest farmer who ever lived in the Ten Thousand Islands’—that’s what he is known for?!” Moments later, he burst out, “You’re saving that house as a state monument to Pioneer Ed?” He was actually yelling. “All that house has ever been is a monument to dark and bloody deeds! As for the so-called Watson family which is supposed to help out on this land claim, some of them don’t know they’re Watsons and the others don’t admit it, so who’s going to help you?”

  The old man hurled the notes onto the dashboard, and Lucius swerved the old car onto the shoulder as a few pages wafted out the window. He jumped out and chased down his work as Arbie poked his head out, yelling after him, “You’re twisting the evidence to make it look like your father never hurt a fly! Well, take it from me, the man was a killer!”

  Out of breath, Lucius got back into the cab. “Don’t toss my work around like that, all right?”

  “I know what I’m talking about! You don’t! Have you ever seen anyone killed? It’s not pretty, goddammit! It’s terrible and scary! And once you’ve seen it—and heard it, yes, and smelled it!—it’s not so easy to make some kind of a romantic hero of the killer, I can tell you that!”

  The old man turned away from him, taking refuge in some loose pages of notes on Lucius’s conversations with the attorney. “Watson Dyer!” he said, disgusted. “Jesus H. Christ!” He looked up. “I know how much you loved your father, Lucius, and I sure am sorry, but there’s no way you can write your way around the man he was!”

  Before their departure for Columbia County, Attorney Dyer had telephoned to say that court hearings on the Watson claim had been scheduled for the following week at Homestead. He also mentioned, not quite casually, that one of his “major accounts” was United Sugar, a huge agricultural conglomerate near Lake Okeechobee, and that this company had recently discovered that the first cane ever planted in the Okeechobee region had apparently come from a hardy strain developed originally on Chatham River by Mr. E. J. Watson.

  “I guess they ‘discovered’ that in my History—”

  “They discovered this fact,” said Watson Dyer, who was not to be interrupted when speaking judiciously, “in A History of Southwest Florida, by L. Watson Collins.”

  Nettled, Lucius had to wonder if Dyer himself had not pointed the sugar people to the reference. He had already told him that during World War I, his friend Rob Storter and Rob’s brother-in-law Harry McGill had grubbed out a mess of cuttings from old cane on Chatham Bend and run a boatload up the Calusa Hatchee to Lake Okeechobee and across to Moore Haven, where Big Sugar, as the industry became known, would have an auspicious start a few years later. Thus it seemed likely, he told Dyer, that the strain developed by E. J. Watson had provided the seed cane for all those green square miles at Okeechobee—

  “That’s what your history claims, all right,” Dyer interrupted. And if this claim was true, United Sugar stood ready to help in the promotion of the Watson Place as a state monument.

  Lucius’s pleasure in this news was tainted almost immediately by misgivings. When the Hurricane of ’26 had broken down the Okeechobee dikes and drowned over a hundred souls around Moore Haven, church voices had been raised on high to blame the devastation on the curse of “Emperor” Watson, whose cane was doubtless “steeped in human blood.” Even today, there were people who would say (and Lucius considered this out loud when Dyer remained silent) that cane plantations were accursed—no blessing but an abomination, notorious for the dreadful living conditions and misery of their field workers and the cause of widespread chemical pollution. To help Big Sugar grow ever more obese, no matter the cost to common citizens, the federal government was abetting the state in its rampant draining of the Glades, including the construction of immense canals to shunt away into the sea the pristine water that had formerly spread south through the peninsula from the Kissimmee River and Lake Okeechobee—

  “Lord!” Dyer’s bark of derisive mirth had a hard ring of anger. “Why don’t we leave all that negative stuff to those whining left-wingers!” Dyer moved swiftly to his point about corporate sponsorship of Lucius’s biography in progress. “Assuming of course that your book makes clear E. J. Watson’s connection with the industry.” United Sugar, he declared, was eager to promote any worthwhile literature about pastoral traditions on the pioneer plantations of the nineteenth century, so a book by a well-known historian that mentioned the prominence of sugarcane in Florida agriculture—why heck, that would hit the nail right on the head!

  Setting down Lucius’s notes again, the old man groaned. “I mean, what good is a land claim way to hell and gone inside the Park? Let ’em burn that damn house to the ground, if you ask me!”

  Lucius ignored this. “Dyer wants to bargain for full repair and maintenance of the house as a Park ranger station or state monument—”

  The old man stiffened like a dog on point. His burnsides bristled. “How about a murder monument? Big-time tourist attraction! First monument to bloody murder in the U.S.A.!” Unable to to maintain the huff and pomp of indignation, Arbie grinned. “Murder museum and snack bar! White rubber skeletons and black skull T-shirts, red licorice daggers! Maybe gore burgers and some nice ketchup specialties!”

  But Arbie stopped smiling when he happened upon the offer from the Historical Society of Southwest Florida to pay for a lecture on the legendary planter “Emperor” Watson. Professor Collins’s name, the letter said, had been suggested by one of their esteemed sponsors, the United Sugar Corporation, which had also agreed to underwrite his honorarium.

  Arbie’s worst suspicions were borne out. “They got you cheap.” He slapped the pages down. “L. Watson Collins, Ph.D.! If it ever comes out, down the road, that Wat
son Dyer is your bastard brother—” The old man lifted his palm to ward off protest. “No, L. Watson, I cannot prove that your daddy mounted your attorney’s mama. But I do know her ex-husband Fred has been hollering for fifty years: That goddamn Watson put the horns on me!”

  Lucius was aware of Fred Dyer’s claim, and his daughter Lucy had confirmed the story, confided to her by the late Mrs. Sybil Dyer. Nevertheless, he had been sworn to secrecy, which was why, in these notes on Arbie’s lap, there was no mention of a Dyer son born out of wedlock.

  “Course, Dyer don’t want this to come out,” Arbie was warning him. “According to Speck, this feller means to run for politics one of these days. It’s bad enough being Watson’s bastard without voters suspecting that he might have a crazy streak like his old man!”

  Lucius turned to him at last. “How about me, Arb?” he said quietly. “You think I have a crazy streak like my old man?”

  “Well, I’d sure say so!” Arbie yelled recklessly. “Got to be crazy to be wasting all these years trying to redeem a man like E. J. Watson! And now his bastard is slipping you right into his dirty pocket, and you so damn fanatic you don’t even notice!”

  “Why would he do that? Give me one good reason.”

  “How would I know! Maybe he wants the southwest Florida historian to clean up Watson’s ugly reputation before the truth of his own ancestry gets out! By the time you boys get done with Planter Ed, you’ll have all us dumb local folks rolling our eyes to the high heavens and thanking our Merciful Redeemer for that kindly old farmer who put our sovereign state of Florida where she’s at today! Yessir, old-timers all over the state, reading this stuff, will repent about all their mean tales about him, and how they done him wrong: So maybe Ol’ Ed was a little rough around the edges, but so was Ol’ Hickory Andy Jackson, right? First redneck president in the U.S.A. to hail from the backcountry! First of our good ol’ redneck breed that made this country great!”