Killing Mister Watson

by Peter Matthiessen

  BILL HOUSE

  I had the names of his plume buyers from the Frenchman, and done my best to keep up the good work. For a time, before the birds give out, my neighbors was collecting for me, cause people was dirt poor in Chokoloskee, all but Smallwood. Trap male redbirds, sell 'em to Cuban cigar kings in Key West-them Cubans had 'em cooped in little cages, liked to hear 'em sing. That was before the two bad hurricanes around the end of Watson's time blew that whole cigar business clear north to Tampa. (Many's the Tampa Nugget I have smoked since them days.)

  The Injuns was taking some egrets, trading 'em in with their otter pelts for gunpowder and whiskey. The rookeries over by Lake Okeechobee, they was shot out in four years, and by the turn of the century the west coast birds was giving out, from Tampa all the way south to Cape Sable. If you recall that plumes would bring exactly twice their weight in gold, you can figure out why men fought over rookeries, and shot to kill. The Roberts boys went partners with the Bradleys, and those fellers was still doing pretty good around Flamingo, but most places birds had grew so scarce that us regular hunters set guards around what few poor rookeries was left. Them Audubons was agitating harder'n ever, and in 1901, the year that Watson disappeared, plume hunting was forbid by Florida law. Yessir, our own state of Florida passed laws against our native way of living!

  All that ever done was put the price up. Them laws was passed to quiet down them Yankee bird-lovers, but nobody give a good goddam about enforcement. Only man paid them laws any mind was young Guy Bradley, who got to be first warden in the state of Florida and took his job too serious for his own good.

  Guy Bradley was shot in 1905, not long after Ed Watson had showed up again, and when that bad news come in from Flamingo, Ed Watson got the blame for it, as usual. When another warden got axed to death in 1908, near Punta Gorda, that one was laid on Watson too, but every man at Punta Gorda knew who done it. No one ever got arrested, far as I know. I ain't saying that's good, I got my doubts, but in these parts any judge knows better than to mess with an old clan that is only taking what is theirs by God-given right. Wiped out a third warden along about that time, in Carolina.

  Before Pap crippled himself with his ax, and I went home again to help him out, I went to work for a Yankee sportsman, Mr. Dimock. Had his son along with him snapping pictures, that boy spent most of every day with his head in a black bag. A.W. Dimock was a pretty old feller by that time, but like most sports, he would shoot anything in sight, not only deer and birds but gators, crocs, and manatees. We even took sawfish out of House's Bay, where my family had our cane farm north of Watson's place. We'd cut the saws off, sell 'em for souvenirs, that's what the old gentleman wanted. Mr. Dimock made out as how he had a good market up North, so we'd hack the saws off them big fish, leave the rest to rot. Lost his shirt, not that he needed money. Trying to sell saws was his excuse for all that killing, made him feel better about his life some way, but the only good it done was save some turtle nets, which sawfish used to mess up something terrible.

  We harpooned sawfish from Chatham River all the way south to Cape Sable, and in that time I told Mr. Dimock a fair amount about Ed Watson. Seemed like Watson was about all us local people talked about in them days. Mr. Dimock put them tales into his book. Never read it myself, didn't know how, but I was told about it pretty good. Called him J.E. Wilson cause E.J. Watson was still going strong and might have took him into court for heartburn, but there weren't no doubt at all who he was talking about. Told the barber story on Ed Brewer, too.

  Well, Dimock's book hinted pretty plain that this J.E. Wilson had killed seven in these parts. Damn if I know who them seven could of been, less they was stray nigras that we never knowed about. And if us natives never knowed about 'em, how did that old Yankee find it out? For quite a spell after Atwells went away from Rodgers River, and them Tuckers was found killed at Lost Man's Key, there weren't but hardly seven people down there, not if you left out them two big clans of Hamiltons. Their men was hard. If Watson killed any Hamiltons, them families never said too much about it.

  Ed Watson were not by any means the only feller in our section who had took a life. There was murdering aplenty back in them days, but the law never bothered with it hardly cept to say good riddance. Sheriffs never did find out who was living back into the Glades, too damn hard to keep track of men who traveled very light and kept on moving. Some of these men were real old fellers, very wary, never let you near, just slipped like otters through them rivers where they could always scoot away into the Glades. One old feller come from England, Ted Smallwood called him the Remittance Man. Ted would have a check for him every six months there at the post office and he'd fix himself up with six months' worth of shine. Wanted to get away from it all, looked like to me.

  Mr. Dimock wrote up his adventures in a famous book called Florida Enchantments. That Yankee must of got delirious, too many skeeter bites or something, to be enchanted by these godforsaken swamps. Well, we was partial to 'em, too, never knowed why. He sent me the book, and I got my intended, young Miss Nettie Howell, to read it out to me. There was a picture of a sawfish guide in there, kind of murky but it might been me.

  After I quit Mr. Dimock, the feller who took my place got pulled overboard by a sawfish, split his guts out, died before he'd figured out his own mistake. Man from the east coast, y'know. Wasn't familiar with the way we done things in the Islands.

  Nine years after Mr. Watson's death, an article in the Home and Farm, published in Louisville, extolling the wonderful sport fishing out of Chokoloskee, was still warning its readers to avoid a very dangerous islander named Watson. The charge of multiple murders in the swamps (and at Key West) would be repeated many times, with varying degrees of exaggeration and pure fantasy. But in every case, as the Dimocks acknowledged, positive proof was lacking, and this is true in regard not only to Mr. Watson's guilt but to the numbers of killings that actually occurred.

  In a day when Negroes were discounted, it is scarcely surprising that not one of the names of his alleged black victims has been recorded. On the other hand, some supposed white victims are also nameless, leading one to suspect that their numbers are exaggerated. Indeed, the only ones identified by his neighbors during his sojourn in the Ten Thousand Islands were old Jean Chevelier and the two Tuckers, and the first seems problematical, at best. Local people assert that Mr. Watson murdered "the old Frenchman," but when questioned closely, none of them seemed to believe it, least of all the Hamilton clan, which was close to Chevelier as well as Watson.

  In their native courtesy and hospitality, one's informants imagine that the most sensational interpretation of the Watson legend is the one that the visitor wishes to hear, and one may suppose that this was true in the Dimocks' day as well. Not that the Dimocks were naïve; they had traveled widely in south Florida over many years, they knew the country and its people as well as might be expected of Yankees and outsiders, and they took an ironical view of all they saw. Nonetheless, the Watson legend may be counted among their Florida enchantments.

  The most lurid view of Mr. Watson is the one often perpetuated by the islanders themselves, for as Dickens remarked after his visit to this country, "These Americans do love a scoundrel." Over long decades in lonely remote islands, where notable citizens have been few, Mr. Watson's venerable contemporaries and their descendants have arrived at an "ornery" sort of reverence for E.J. Watson, who has transcended his original role as a notorious cold-blooded killer to become a colorful folk hero, the west coast counterpart of the bank robber and killer John Ashley, whose gang terrorized eastern Florida after World War I.

  Mr. Watson is considerably more intriguing than John Ashley, who was, in the end, a very ordinary sort of outlaw. By all accounts, Edgar Watson was a good husband and a loving father, an expert and dedicated farmer, successful businessman, and generous neighbor. Such virtues-not usually associated with notorious killers of the common type, who tend to be stunted and uninteresting in their social relations as well as in outlook and
mentality-command our attention and explain why Mr. Watson is so fascinating, not only to the Dimocks and later writers but increasingly-dare I admit this?-to the undersigned. As a professional historian, I had thought myself beyond such subjectivity, yet the enigma of our subject's character grows rather than lessens with each new fact unearthed, however much the vulgar legend is deflated. How else to explain that, seven decades after his death, Ed Watson remains the most celebrated citizen the southwest coast of Florida ever produced?

  Of the "seven mysterious murders" cited by the Dimocks, we are left with the suspicious deaths of "Tucker and his nephew," as these victims are usually described by local people. The precise identities of the Tuckers remain vague, together with the circumstances. According to the Hamilton family, who were the Tuckers' neighbors and friends, they were Walter Tucker and his wife Elizabeth, known as Wally and Bet. Despite friendship with Watson, the Hamiltons assume that he killed these young newcomers from Key West, which he himself appears to have confirmed by his hasty departure from the region.

  Thus only two out of these seven unsolved killings may safely be laid at Mr. Watson's door, and probably this is a fair ratio of truth to legend when considering his lifelong career. The highest figure I have come upon is fifty-seven-Mr. Watson's own figure, it is said, as recorded in a notebook allegedly once seen by his son Lucius, who later described it to my informant, Mr. Buddy Roberts of Homestead. (Mr. Roberts's uncle Gene was a friend of Mr. Watson, and the whole family was involved in the Guy Bradley case.) There are many good reasons for doubting this story, among them Lucius Watson's well-known reluctance to discuss his father. Yet Sarah Hamilton recalled, quite separately, not only that Mr. Watson kept a journal but that it was entitled "Footnotes to My Life." And Buddy Roberts mentions a detail that could only have been known by someone close to the family, to wit, that Lucius's father had a tiny foot, and wore a size seven shoe.

  There is a widespread local rumor that Mr. Watson forced one of his sons to assist him in the Tucker killings, ordering him to pursue and kill the Tucker "nephew," who fled down the beach. If such an episode took place, the victim must have been Bet Tucker and the accomplice was Rob Watson, since in 1901 young Eddie and Lucius were living with the family in Fort Myers.

  Shortly after the Tucker deaths, it is related, Rob Watson fled in his father's schooner to Key West, where he sold the ship in order to finance his ongoing flight and final disappearance. Mr. Watson pursued him to Key West and, failing to find him, assaulted one Collins, who seems to have abetted young Rob's flight. Shortly thereafter, Mr. Watson himself departed southwest Florida, not to return for several years. A letter of unknown provenance written to the Smallwoods in 1904, mentioning that "friend Watson" has been in touch with the Lee County surveyor, Joseph Shands, is the first indication known to me of his return into the region.

  FRANK B. TIPPINS

  I heard tell of E.J. Watson long before his family came to live here. I was born in Arcadia and was back there on a cattle drive at the time of the De Soto County range wars in the early nineties. One day a local gunslinger was killed in a saloon brawl by a stranger. Quinn Bass was a local boy from the large cattle clan on the Kissimmee River, and the hired guns Quinn rode with led a crowd of rowdies and Bass relatives to storm the new jailhouse and lynch "the stranger"-more in the spirit of hell-raising than justice, since even his partners never denied that ol' Quinn asked for what it turned out he had coming. The mob was slowed by the new bricks and brave demeanor of De Soto County sheriff Ollie H. Dishong, who smiled and waved from the second story as if he was up there running for reelection. But he wasn't calm inside, he told me, because as that moonless night went on, the crowd grew so unruly that Sheriff Ollie came to doubt he could save his prisoner to go to trial. However, he reckoned that, no matter what befell this Watson, no great injustice would be done, and rather than see his brand-new jail torn up, he unlocked the cell and told the prisoner he might as well get going "while the going's good."

  The prisoner looked out the window at the crowd, then went back into his cell and lay down on his bunk. Sheriff said, What is the matter, and the stranger said kind of ironical he didn't think the going looked so good. Not enough evidence to hold you, Sheriff Ollie explained, and this way, you got you a fighting chance. Lock that door, his prisoner said. I'll sleep better behind bars.

  But later the stranger sent some money to treat the crowd at a saloon some distance up the street, and toward daybreak, with the mob distracted, the sheriff rode him to the edge of town, told him to go to hell and stay there. The stranger grinned into the sheriff's face. Said, What makes you think we ain't arrived already?

  Remembering those words, Sheriff Ollie shook his head. "That damn Jack Watson was the most friendliest sonofagun I ever met," he told me.

  "You mean Ed Watson, don't you?" I said. "Ed Watson?" Sheriff Dishong shook his head again. "Must be gettin old. Did I say Jack?"

  That story got me kind of interested in being a lawman, but I had a career or two before that time, had some education. I was fifteen years of age when I took work as a printer's devil for the new Fort Myers Press, which in a town of about three hundred people was glad to come up with any news at all. That was 1884, when a typical headline story was the Debating and Literary Society's first meeting to decide the question "Are Women Intelligent Enough to Vote?" (Stamping their feet, the panel voted in the affirmative, at least in regard to the fair sex of Fort Myers.) In that same year I set in type the first advertisement for Roan's general store, offering top prices for deerskins, gator hides, and bird plumes. It was also the year of the first visit to "our fair city" of America's "electrical wizard," Thomas Alva Edison, who bought Sam Summerlin's place on Riverside Avenue-that's MacGregor now-and would one day make Fort Myers his winter home. And it was the year Jim Cole showed up in town. In those days, even Jim Cole was a "first."

  The following year, the Press covered the big celebration at the river-balloons, fireworks, and oyster roast-when Grover Cleveland became the first Democratic president in a quarter century. That put an end to Reconstruction, those terrible dark years when nigras got treated better than the white people.

  After four years as a printer's devil, I was sick of indoor life. I took a job with the Hendrys as a "cow hunter," rounding up the long-horned cattle scattered through the Cypress. Sometimes I rode all the way east to the Everglades, long silent days under the broad sky in the hard fierce light of the Glades country, lost in the creak of my old worn-out saddle and my horse blowing and hot wind whispering in the pines. For long years afterward I missed the stillness of the Big Cypress, the slow time of those horseback days, the hunting and fishing for the cow camp, the slow cooking fires, the simple sun-warmed tools of iron, wood, and leather, the resin scent of the pine ridges, the stomp of hoof and bawl of cattle, the wild things glimpsed, wild creatures, the echoing silence pierced far and near by the sharp cry of a woodpecker or the dry sizzle of a rattler, and always the soft blowing of my woods pony, a small short-bodied roan. Race could find the short way home from Hell, "could turn on a dime and give back nine cents change," as the old hands said. Had me a good cow dog, Trace, for turning cattle, and was a fair hand with the braided buckskin whip that served us cow hunters as lariat.

  Each time our cattle pens were moved, an Indian family would move in behind and plant new gardens in that fertile, sod-broke ground, sweet potatoes the first year, then corn and peanuts. Because they were forever watching, they came in almost overnight. I used to wonder what Indians thought of the Disston Company's rusting dredge far out to the east toward Okeechobee, that looming shape on the sparkling horizon of what the Seminoles called Grass River, Pa-hay-okee, and the hellish noise and smoke and smell of it, all gone now, and not one damned thing accomplished, only the unholy ruin of the beautiful Calusa Hatchee. The old silence had returned, but the white man's machine still rose above that river of white sacred sand that had filled with mud and would never come clear again. This was the dredge Ed Wat
son aimed to use at Lost Man's River.

  In the nineties, I became friendly with Walt Langford, who was a cow hunter for his father's partners. Young Walt was a hard rider, too, with the sharpest eye south of the river for a stray cow hidden in the scrub. But Walt always wanted to be liked too much, he aimed to show he was not just a rich cattleman's son but a regular feller, so he led in the boozing and the brawling, the whooping, galloping, and gunfire, that kept nice people shuttered up on Saturday afternoons. Fort Myers was never so uproarious as Arcadia, we never had real cattle wars or hired guns. All the same, this Saturday pandemonium reminded the upset citizens that our new Lee County capital was still a cow town, on the wrong side of that slow broad river, falling farther and farther behind the country's progress.

  Many a long day I spent alone out in the Cypress, but the lonely day was Saturday, when the other riders, already half-drunk, yipped and slapped off through the trees to spend their week's pay in the saloons of Fort Myers.

  On Sundays I helped serve the flock at the Indian mission at Immokalee, riding twenty miles or more to attend the service. The Indians could not follow the sermon, but they came anyway to watch the white people. They sat in circles on the floor. Pretty soon, I quit my job for full-time work at the Indian mission. I was still there in 1897 when I first heard how this E.J. Watson, a leading planter in the Islands, was supposed to be the killer of Quinn Bass, and the lovely young girl at Doc Langford's house was this outlaw's child. Carrie, going on thirteen, was a strong, willowy young lady with big dark eyes, black hair to her waist, and a high bosom. When I first saw that vivacious young creature skipping rope in front of Miss Flossie's notions store, I knew that she and I were some way fated. When the time came, I would ask her daddy for her hand in marriage, and shake his desperado's hand at the same time.