Once we was down on Chatham River, that place was our own Hamilton territory. White was welcome at my table, but not no more than any other color. Might been the one place in the country I could get away with it, but that don't mean it was forgiven. Mary's sister Sally married Jim Daniels, and later on their daughter Blanche married Frank Hamilton, whose daddy, James, moved to Lost Man's River along about that time. James Hamilton weren't no kind of kin, I don't believe that were his lawful name no more'n it was mine, but his boy married right into our family. So James Hamiltons was kin to us, and they was our neighbors down that way for many years, but they told people they was no relation.
Long ago I give up trying to explain. I look at my hand and know there's seasoning in my blood, can't get away from it. But John Leon would be a white man anywhere, and Eugene, he has white skin, too, also Annie, the youngest. But Walter, he is pretty dark, good narrow features but his skin is shadowed, and my older girl is a pretty shade of coffee. That color could be my mother's side, from times when Indins and slaves was on the run together all across north Florida. But that old woman was Indin to the heart, she never thought nothing but Indin way.
As for Mary Weeks, her mother Elizabeth was full-blood Seminole, supposed to be, the granddaughter of Chief Osceola. They can call us mulattas all they want, but we are Indin. Why heck, if this Hamilton bunch ain't Indin, then they ain't no Indins left in the U.S.A.
That first year, 1888, the Frenchman bought my claim on Chatham Bend. Said kind of gruff that we was welcome to stay on, but I had sign that it was time to go. I never felt right at Pavioni, never liked the feel of it. Pavioni had some old bad history, back to early times. It was what Indins call a power place, but it was bad power, something dark.
Indin people go by sign, they don't need no excuse to leave someplace that don't feel right, they just pick up their hind end and move it elsewhere. In them early years, we owned no more than we could pack into one boat, we traveled light. Get up and go and throw up a lean-to when you get there, and lash together a thatch hut where you might rest a spell.
Where we went was Possum Key, which wasn't but a few miles up the river. Had seven-eight good acres there, a lot more garden than we ever needed. That spring I was plume hunting for the Frenchman, and Possum was close to the big rookeries up the Glades creeks back of Alligator Bay, and handy to the Mikasukis, too, trading plumes and otter. The last Mikasuki renegades was hid in the Big Cypress on them hammocks back in Lost Man's Slough, and they was about the last wild Indins left. They never signed no treaty with no Great White Father. One dugout that come in to trade at Everglade in the late eighties was the first Indins seen by white people in thirty years. But they was spying around Possum Key maybe two years before that, they brung us turkeys, venison, and such, and we took their furs and bird plumes in to Storter's, got 'em trade goods, ordered a few guns from Colonel Wall's hardware store up in Port Tampa, and gave 'em a little cane liquor, too, to keep things lively.
Chevelier slept bad at Pavioni, same as we did, but it took him a whole year to admit it, that's how scientifical he was, and how cranky about giving up so much good ground. That was the greed in him. When I told him Pavioni was no good to him if he didn't farm it and couldn't get no sleep there, he'd shout at me, waving his arms. My kids could imitate him pretty good: "What you tek me for to be? A soo-paire-stee-shee-us domb redda-skin?" Pretty quick most everybody on the coast was imitating Jean Chevelier, we could speak his lingo near as good as he did.
Jean Chevelier sold his rights to the very first hombre who showed up, man named Will Raymond. "Is only for I cannot farm this forty ay-caire, is only for is foking shame is going to waste!" So we took the Frenchman home to Possum Key, built him a house to shelter all them books and bird skins and keep his old skeeter-bit bones out of the rain, and never got so much as a thank-you. When we was done, he shooed us out, acted tickled pink to see the end of us.
Oh yes, we kept the Frenchman in our family, though he didn't know it. To the very end, he frowned and squabbled like a coon. For a while he had a young boy helping, Henry Thompson, and after Henry left, he had Bill House, but he never trusted neither of 'em, never let 'em in too close, for fear them boys might let on about the treasure that any day now he was sure to find on Gopher Key. He yanked them boys hard, by the ear, and kept them scared of him. He was just too strong for a man his age, which is why folks always said the Devil owned him.
The Frenchman come right out and said he didn't hold with no Father Who art in Heaven. "Man is made in God's ee-mage? Who say so? Black man? Red man? Which man you talk about? White man? Yellow man? God is all these color? Say tabsurde! Homo sapiens, he got to shit, same like any foking animal. You telling to me your God got to shit too?" And he would glare all around at the green walls, the white sky and the wet heat, the summer silence, nodding his head. "Well, maybe you got something, Ree-chard. Maybe this foking place is where He done it."
Or that old man might point quick at the sun, point at a silver ripple in the water, saying, "Look quick! See there? That is God! That is le Grand Mees-taire!" He meant "Big Mister," case you don't speak French.
Being a Catholic, Mary Weeks hated that French heathen talk worse than the blasphemy. Even a God who moved His bowels was better than one who popped up every time you turned around. "Is right? Birt shit on your head, that is God too!" To keep the peace, I just shook my head over his terrible French ways, but I knew the truth of what he said all the way back in my bones, about sun and silver ripples, yes, and bird shit, too. However, for my Mary's sake, I told him what he sounded like was a dumb Indin.
So Pavioni went over to Chevelier, then Will Raymond. For a while it was called the Raymond Place, like Will was some kind of upstanding citizen. Don't think he was. I ain't pointing fingers, so I will say that the Frenchman and Old Man Atwell, back up Rodgers River, they was damn close to the only ones down in the Islands in them last years of the century that wasn't wanted someplace else.
Probably Will Raymond should have picked him a new name, got a fresh start. His widow sold his claim off to a stranger, and that stranger stayed here in the rivers close to twenty years, give or take a few years in the middle. If that bad power at Pavioni bothered him one bit, I never heard about it. I got friendly with him and took some pains to keep it that way, cause them years Mister Watson was our closest neighbor, never much more than a rifle shot away.
Mister Watson was a real good neighbor, yes, he was. Good farmer, too, the first to make the most of that good soil. Went right to work on a palm-log house, built two big rooms. Had hogs and two cows and red chickens, brought in a bay mare for plowing, set up a syrup mill, run his schooner from Port Tampa to Key West, and done just fine. Later on he brung in carpenters and good pine lumber, built him a fine frame house painted white, built docks, built sheds. Only ones between Fort Myers and Key West had anything to stand up to the Watson Place was Bill Collier at Marco and George Storter there in Everglade, both of 'em outstanding men along this coast. Well, Ed Watson kept right up with 'em most of the way.
All the same, I kept my distance, and warned my gang they was to do the same. If Mister Watson needed help we would be neighborly, you know, the same as he was, but all the times we was up and down his river, we never stopped to pass the time of day.
The day come when we had enough of Possum Key. The skeeters plagued the younger children, and their mother couldn't hardly fight 'em off, not when she cooked meals outside and done her chores with nothing but a smudge pot. So I moved my family to an island off the river mouth, where that sea wind kept them skeeters back into the bushes. I always called that place Trout Key, cause of all the sea trout on the grass banks off the shore, but the crackers called it Mormon Key, on account of that no-account old Richard Hamilton had other children by a common-law wife who was still living up around Arcadia. And after a while that fool name stuck, we used it too.
Them Chokoloskee boys called me mulatta, and they got that put down in the 1880 census. Talked
against me not so much because my skin was dark, but because a dark man had him a white wife. Well, Mary Weeks, who was writ down as white, she was darker than I am and still is, but she was daughter to John Weeks, so nobody paid her color no attention. John Weeks was white, and Mary's mother was Seminole Indin, so that dark come from her mother's side, unless there's something Old Man John ain't telling. My Mary, she tells our kids I am Indin, but when we are drunk and get to scrapping, she likes to recall how her daddy swore I was mulatta, and got that writ for all to see right on the 1880 census. She rues the day, as she often says, that a "colored man" went and stole a white girl's heart.
Henry Short was one of 'em who heard her say that, and I seen that muscle twitch along his jaw. Later I challenged him, inquiring what that wince was all about, and finally Henry blurted out how he didn't intend no disrespect, but some might say that running off with Richard Hamilton made my wife the shiftless one, not me. I reckon there is different ways that I could take that.
Henry Short would come visiting Bill House, who worked with Chevelier a year or two, and later years he'd stop over with us at Mormon Key. Big fine-looking young feller, color of light wood, looked more like a Indin than I did. He was lighter than all of us except Gene and Leon, and his features weren't so heavy as what Gene's were, but the Bay people called him Nigger Henry, Nigger Short. Gene didn't like it that he ate with us, said if Hamiltons had a nigger at their table, folks was bound to say that we was niggers too. And his own dark brother Walter would just look at Gene until Gene looked away. "I guess I can eat with Henry Short," he'd say, "if Henry Short can eat with me."
Which don't mean that Gene was wrong about what folks would say. He wasn't.
According to Jean Chevelier's way of thinking, there ought to be a law where any man who don't marry a different color would get castrated. That way Homo sapiens would stop his misery and plain damn stupidhood about his races and go on back to the color of First Man, which in Chevelier's opinion would work out pretty close to Richard Hamilton. Said the Hamiltons was making a fine start cause we had almost every shade of color, all we needed was a whisker of Chinese.
If you live Indin way, then you are Indin, color don't matter. It's how you respect the earth, not where you came from. Mary Weeks, she's a kind of Catholic, and our kids is Catholic, and I go along with it somewhat, and read my Bible, because I was raised up in a Catholic mission back in Oklahoma. But in my heart I am still Indin, which is why I kept on drifting south to Lost Man's River, as far from those mean-mouthed cracker folks as I could get.
Crackers don't know nothing about Indins cepting to shoot at, and most of these Indins you see today don't know nothing neither. Back in the First Seminole War, the runaway slaves fought side by side with Seminoles, and lived as Indins, a lot of 'em. You take some of them ragtag Muskogee Seminoles up around Lake Okeechobee, a lot of 'em's got a big swipe of the tarbrush, but you'd never know it from the way they act toward colored people.
These Cypress Indins, who are Mikasuki Creeks, some of 'em still know a little about Indin way. They can't keep it going too much longer, and they know it, and maybe that's why they sometimes act so desperate. In the old days, if a Mikasuki woman trafficked with a black man, or a white man, either, her people might take and kill 'em both, and leave the child to die out in the cypress. Maybe that made 'em feel a little better, but it never made a spit of difference in the long run. People move around these days, get all mixed up. Don't matter what our color is, we all going to be brown boys when the smoke clears.
After Bill House left, Old Man Chevelier kind of adopted Leon and young Liza and they visited with him and took care of him and kept an eye on him, and he stayed right there on Possum Key until he died.
Until the second half of the nineteenth century, the southern half of the Florida peninsula, and in particular its far southwestern region, was scarcely known. This rainy and mosquito-ridden labyrinth of mangrove islands and dark tidal rivers was all but uninhabited, despite the marvelous abundance of its fish and game. "The Ten Thousand Islands," as one naturalist has written, "is a region of mystery and loneliness: gloomy, monotonous, weird, and strange, yet possessing a decided fascination. To the casual stranger each and every part of the region looks exactly like the rest; each islet and water passage seems but the counterpart of hundreds of others. Even those… familiar with its tortuous channels often get lost… wandering hopeless for days among its labyrinthine ways."
Of the thousands of islands, less than a hundred-mostly in the north-rise more than one foot above sea level, and on most of these, the high ground is too limited to build upon: the more or less habitable barrier islands include perhaps thirty on the Gulf with sand banks up to six feet high and about forty "hammock" islands farther inland. On these, as a precaution against hurricane, the Calusa constructed substantial shell mounds-or, more properly, hilly ridges-up to twenty feet in height, on which pockets of soil suitable for farming had accumulated. There were also extensive mainland mounds at Turner River that were later farmed by Chokoloskee pioneers.
Chatham Bend, the largest shell mound between Chokoloskee and Cape Sable, is first described in the journals of Surgeon-General Thomas Lawson, who in February of 1838, during the First Seminole War, led a U.S. Army expedition against "the Spanish Indians"-people of Calusa ancestry returned from Cuba to Florida by the Spanish-to discourage smuggling of guns and ammunition from Cuba to the Seminoles.
We anchored opposite the mouth of Pavilion River, near which we saw a smoke, and on the banks of which, six or eight miles up, the Pilot stated positively that we would find twenty families of Indians, and perhaps others from the interior of the country… Here again we were doomed to meet with disappointment, for the town was tenanted by no living thing, man or beast… The site of this village is very beautiful… and the ground on both sides of the river more valuable than any I have seen in this section of the country. The only objection to it is, that there is no fresh water on it, or in its vicinity…
A later Army expedition found a village of twelve palm-thatch houses and a large forty-acre garden, but which Indians these were was not determined; they may have been the last wild band of Mikasuki under Arpeika, catted Sam Jones, or perhaps a remnant of the "Spanish Indians." In the late eighties Pavioni, as the Indians called it, was occupied briefly by Richard Hamilton, who sold his claim to a Frenchman, M. A. LeChevallier, who sold it in turn to a fugitive, Will Raymond.
Richard Hamilton and Mr. Chevallier, who settled nearby islands, were Mr. Watson's closest neighbors for many years. Hamilton was rumored to be a grandson of the great Spanish Indian war chief Chekaika, who perpetrated the massacre of Dr. Perrine and others at Indian Key in 1840 and who was subsequently shot, then hung, by Lieutenant Colonel Harney's expedition of pursuit from the Miami River into the Everglades.
Our tent was pitched within a short distance of the tree on which Chakika was suspended. The night was beautiful, and the bright rising moon displayed to my view as I lay on my bed the gigantic proportions of this once great and much dreaded warrior. He is said to have been the largest Indian in Florida, and the sound of his very name to have been a terror to his Tribe.
The expedition continued south and west, emerging at last at what is now called Harney River-the first white men ever to traverse the peninsula of southern Florida.
On the Coast and Geodetic Survey charts for 1889, Chatham Bend is identified as "the Raymond Place," but Will Raymond gave up Chatham Bend a few years later, having been killed by sheriff's deputies from Key West. Why Richard Hamilton, then Chevelier, abandoned that large mound so speedily is more mysterious. But Pavioni had a malevolent reputation, and E.J. Watson, who acquired the rights from the Widow Raymond, was the only white man ever to remain more than a year or two; he farmed the Bend for nearly twenty years.
Monsieur LeChevallier, known familiarly along that coast as "Jeen Chevelier" (pronounced "Shovel-leer") or simply "the old Frenchman," was a significant figure in Mr. Watson's early ye
ars in southwest Florida. Monsieur Chevelier (as we may as well call him, since "Chevelier Bay" commemorates this spelling in the Ten Thousand Islands) was probably the first large-scale commercial hunter in that region of egret and other species killed for their decorative plumes. In 1879, he established a bird plume operation at Tampa Bay which apparently occupied him for about five years. In 1885, he hired the sloop Bonton to conduct his party from the new settlement on the Miami River around the Keys to the Ten Thousand Islands. The party included Louis and Guy Bradley, young plume hunters of the region. (Guy Bradley later became the first Monroe County game warden, with salary paid by the Audubon Society. He was murdered by a former associate in 1905-one of the several local killings popularly attributed to Mr. Watson, who by that time had become notorious.) Charles Pierce kept a lively journal of the voyage, which took place in the spring and summer of that year.
I had heard a great deal about an old Frenchman, M. LeChevelier, a taxidermist, collector of bird skins and plumes, who was living up the Miami river… Mr. Chevelier is French and cannot talk good English… Pelican skins are the main object of the trip, plumes next, also cormorant skins, in fact all kinds of birds. Mr. Chevelier has a market for all of them in Paris. He gets fifty cents for the pelican skins, twenty-five cents for least tern, $10 for great white heron and $25 for flamingo. Great white herons are scarce and flamingos more so. If it was not for that we would soon make the old man rich.
Despite a right hand crippled by his own gun, Chevelier blazed away with his young associates. The Bonton log is a catalogue of destroyed birds, relieved here and there by lively accounts of storm and wayfarers, mosquitoes, and old Key West, where the party was welcomed and assisted by Chevelier's associate, "Capt. Cary." Presumably this is Elijah Carey (see House and Hamilton interviews), who would later join Chevelier in his plume-birding operations.
Killing Mister Watson Page 5