For Sale —American Paradise

by Willie Drye

  A few days into the trial, the prosecution brought in a surprise witness who sent defense attorneys into paroxysms of protest. His name was Homer Tindall, and he’d talked with John Ashley when Ashley dropped by his campsite a few days before Desoto Tiger was killed.

  Tindall had not testified during Ashley’s first trial that had ended in a hung jury in West Palm Beach. After hours of heated arguments that stretched over two days, Judge Branning ruled that Tindall’s testimony could be heard by the Miami jury.

  Homer Tindall and his father had been camped about a mile and a half from the Caloosahatchee, the dredge that had been working on the drainage canal. Ashley spent the night of December 19 at the Tindalls’ camp.

  Around noon the following day, Ashley and the younger Tindall watched two Seminoles glide past their camp in a canoe in the canal.

  “The Indians were coming up to the camp and they were some little distance away, and he, Ashley, asked me if I knew them and I told him I did not,” Tindall testified, “and he asked me if I reckoned they had any hides, and I told him I didn’t know, and he said, ‘If they have let us kill them and get the hides.’ He said, ‘We can do it and no one will ever know it,’ and I told him ‘No,’ and he said, ‘If I could find one with a large quantity of hides I wouldn’t any more mind killing him than I would of shooting a buzzard,’ and at that time the Indians were at the camp and there wasn’t any more said.”

  Tindall said Ashley had stayed in their camp until December 21 and then left; he’d had no further contact with him.

  The jury also heard James Girtman testify that he had bought eighty-four otter pelts from Ashley for $584.

  When Ashley took the stand, he said he and Desoto Tiger had discussed the hides privately in Ashley’s tent, and that Ashley had wanted to buy the pelts but first wanted to get an opinion about what they were worth. Ashley said he told Tiger that he’d go to Fort Lauderdale to get an estimate, and that Tiger had insisted that he bring back whiskey.

  Ashley said when he returned, he paid Tiger $400 for the hides on December 28, and this transaction also was in the privacy of his tent. He denied saying to Tindall that he would as soon shoot a buzzard as an Indian, and accused Tindall of accepting a bribe in exchange for his testimony.

  Ashley told the jury that he’d shot Desoto Tiger in self-defense while they were in Tiger’s boat. The Seminole had pointed a pistol at him and threatened to kill him unless he gave him whiskey.

  “He had his pistol pointing at me, and I, hearing the click of the pistol, grabbed my gun and started shooting as fast as I could,” Ashley told the jury.

  Desoto Tiger tumbled out of the canoe and into the canal, Ashley said.

  But the jury didn’t buy John Ashley’s story. On April 8, 1915, they pronounced Ashley guilty of murder. The following day, Judge Branning sentenced Ashley to hang. When he heard the sentence, Ashley looked toward the attorney who had led the prosecution’s case against him. A cool, chilling smile slowly came to his lips.

  Ashley’s court-appointed defense attorney, Crate D. Bowen, said he would appeal the conviction. In the meantime, Ashley would be held in the Dade County Jail in Miami awaiting trial on charges of robbing the Bank of Stuart a few months earlier.

  Some people who were acquainted with Joe Ashley attributed his contempt for the rule of law to the fact that he grew up in the post–Civil War South during Reconstruction, when US troops occupied the former Confederate States for more than a decade. Whatever the reason, he certainly did not respect traditional boundaries of behavior and property ownership.

  He saw no harm in robbing banks. In fact, he considered it a public service. The money they took was insured and would be replaced by “some damned Yankee insurance company.” So the bank did not lose anything, the depositors didn’t lose anything, and since the Ashleys would spend the money locally, it was actually a form of economic stimulus. So instead of forming posses to chase them down, “Everybody ought to help us,” was the way Joe Ashley saw it.

  So it stood to reason that Joe Ashley and his family were not going to allow the state of Florida to hang his son for the murder of a Seminole.

  Dade County Sheriff Dan Hardie knew he had a slippery prisoner on his hands, and that John Ashley’s family was likely to try to free him. He added locks and chains to increase security.

  The Ashleys’ jailbreak attempt came in a sudden, brutal, and deadly fashion on June 2, 1915.

  Workers at a multistory parking garage across the street from the Dade County Jail talked to three men—one older, the other two younger—who were hanging around the garage that morning as though they were waiting for something to happen.

  The men wanted to make sure a Ford automobile parked in the garage would start with no problems. They bought new batteries for the car and installed them.

  “I tried to talk to them but none of them seemed very talkative and our conversation was not long,” E. T. Wells, who worked at the garage, told the Daily Tropical Sun later. “The men all seemed to be nervous, and I remember now that one or the other frequently went to the doors or windows and looked out.”

  One of the younger men was Bob Ashley, John Ashley’s kid brother. Ashley had bought a bottle of whiskey earlier that day, and he was carrying a curious package, something long and slender and wrapped in blue paper. A garage employee later said Ashley occasionally went to a window or door of the garage to communicate in sign language with someone in the jail across the street.

  Around 12:30 p.m. Bob Ashley made a daring move. He crossed the street from the parking garage to the jail and knocked on the door of the adjoining house, where Deputy Sheriff Robert Hendrickson, the jailer, lived with his wife. When Hendrickson came to the door, Bob Ashley shot him dead with a rifle that had been wrapped in the blue paper. He grabbed the keys to the jail, and ran.

  Hendrickson’s wife grabbed a shotgun and aimed at the fleeing Bob Ashley, but the gun either misfired or wasn’t loaded.

  In the parking garage across the street, Joe Ashley and Kid Lowe were talking to employees on the second deck of the building when they heard a gunshot. Ashley and Lowe ran to a window. They watched for a few moments, then started down the stairwell, one of them remarking that Miami didn’t seem to be a very safe town, and that they’d better leave and go home.

  Across the street, the gunshot that had killed the jailer was attracting a crowd, and Bob Ashley apparently lost his nerve. He dropped the keys and fled back into the garage. Not seeing his father or Kid Lowe, he ran to the Ford with the recently installed new batteries.

  But Bob Ashley couldn’t operate a car. He pointed his gun at a man standing nearby and ordered him to get in the car and drive it. The man replied that he did not know how to drive a Ford.

  Ashley leveled his gun at a second man and demanded that he get in the car to drive. But that man also said he did not know how to drive a Ford.

  So Ashley accosted a third man and shouted to him to get in the car. But the man was hard of hearing, and when he cupped his hand around an ear and asked Ashley to repeat what he’d said, the young gunman gave up and ran from the garage and out onto the street.

  Ashley waved his gun and stopped a man driving a cycle car, a small, cheap automobile with room for only the driver and a passenger or two. Ashley shoved the gun in the driver’s face and ordered him to drive him out of town. The driver realized the police were after Ashley and refused, but Ashley became enraged and threatened to kill him. Reluctantly, the driver made room for Ashley in his small car and drove away.

  But after going a few blocks, the car stalled and the driver got out, raised the hood, and started tinkering with the engine. By this time, Miami police officer Robert Riblett had overtaken Bob Ashley. Riblett pointed his gun at Ashley and ordered him to surrender.

  Again, there are varying accounts of what happened next. Some say that Riblett and Ashley grappled hand to hand before the shooting started. Others say Ashley whirled and fired twice at Riblett, and then the police officer manage
d to get off a shot that hit Ashley in the abdomen.

  Both men were mortally wounded. Riblett died shortly afterward at a hospital. Bob Ashley was examined by a doctor, who said there was nothing he could do. He was taken to a jail cell. Sheriff Dan Hardie sat down on his bunk, hoping to get deathbed information from Ashley. Ashley admitted he’d planned to break his brother out of jail, but he refused to tell Hardie anything more about his family, and soon he was dead.

  John Ashley, of course, denied knowing anything about a plot to spring him. Jailers then discovered that he’d secretly been using a spoon to tunnel his way out of his cell, and was on the verge of succeeding. He was moved to a more secure cell, presumably to await his date with the hangman’s noose. But the Florida Supreme Court had agreed to hear the appeal of his conviction for the murder of Desoto Tiger, so he had escaped the gallows—at least for the time being.

  A few days later, Sheriff Hardie received a crudely written letter, addressed to “Mr. Dan Hardie, high sheriff of Dade County.”

  “Dear Sir,” it began, “we were in your city at the time one of our gang young Bob Ashley was brutally shot to death by your officers and now your town can expect to feel the results of it any hour. And if John Ashley is not fairly delt with and given a fair trial and turned loose simply for the life of a god damned Seminole indian, we expect to shoot up the hole god damned town, regardless of the results might be. We expect to make our appearance at an early date, signed, Ashley gang.”

  The letter was signed “Kid lowe Arizona kid ike Mitchell and others name not mentione.”

  Nothing came of the threat, and Hardie dismissed it as a hoax. Apparently, the Ashleys were willing to wait for the state Supreme Court to decide on the appeal.

  While lawmen in Miami and Palm Beach counties tried to contain and curtail the crude but crafty savagery of the Ashley clan, local politicians moved forward with plans to try to tame a natural force that was wilder than the Ashleys—the Everglades.

  A week after the gunfight in downtown Miami, in which three men were killed, a group of businessmen met in Orlando to form the Florida Highway Association. Among the discussion items on their agenda was the proposed highway through the Everglades, linking Tampa and Miami. It needed a catchy name. The Tamiami Trail—a clever name that managed to be both alliterative and combine the names of the cities that would be linked—emerged from the discussion.

  Preliminary plans called for the Trail to go through only two counties, Dade on the east coast and Lee on the Gulf Coast. Each county would be responsible for paying for the portion passing through it.

  In 1915, the boundaries of Lee and Dade met in the middle of the state near the tip of the peninsula. Both were large counties, and in 1915, Lee County—which included Fort Myers—was bigger than the state of Delaware. Dade County’s segment of the Trail would be around thirty-five miles. Lee County’s portion would be more than twice that. Lee did not have the rapidly growing population and tax base that Dade had, and thus had fewer resources to pay for its share of the highway.

  On September 8, the Dade County Board of Commissioners—who would have to approve any plan to pay their county’s share of the construction costs—heard from some of the doubters about building the Trail. J. H. Tatum told the commissioners that draining the Everglades to build the road would flood Dade County, and he was unalterably opposed to spending so much money to simply flood the county. He also had doubts about whether Lee County would ever build its share of the highway, and that would mean all the money Miami spent on the road would be wasted because it would be a road to nowhere.

  At times the debate over whether to build the road grew heated. Then the meeting was interrupted by a telegram. The Lee County Board of Commissioners had just decided to hold an election on October 19 to determine whether the county would issue bonds to pay for its portion of the Tamiami Trail. Dade County voters would decide the same issue on the same date.

  Around the same time that Dade and Lee County leaders were discussing the Tamiami Trail, representatives from the ten states through which the Dixie Highway would pass, from Michigan to Florida, met in Chattanooga, Tennessee, to discuss the road’s route. Regardless of where the highway meandered from its origin in Montreal, however, it would end in Miami, functioning like a pipeline for winter-weary Midwesterners seeking sunshine.

  Lee County and Dade County voters approved issuing bonds to build the Tamiami Trail. Miami boosters were ecstatic about the bond approval. The day after the vote, the Miami Herald predicted that, within eighteen months, “the traveler may go over a splendid road from this city to Tampa.”

  Surveyors had the Dade County portion of the highway laid out by March 1916, and on August 15, giant excavators started hacking westward toward the Dade-Lee county line.

  In Miami, Dade County jailers kept a close eye on their most infamous prisoner, as John Ashley’s murder conviction awaited consideration by the Florida Supreme Court. On August 4, A. J. Rose, one of Ashley’s court-appointed attorneys, received a telegram from Tallahassee. It was from the clerk of the state Supreme Court. Ashley’s conviction had been reversed, and a new trial was ordered.

  There was no explanation in the telegram for why the court had made this decision.

  On September 14, Palm Beach County Sheriff George Baker, accompanied by a judge and a newspaper reporter, arrived in Miami to pick up Ashley. The old gentlemen’s agreement about no handcuffs was forgotten. Ashley left the jail handcuffed between two of the Palm Beach County delegation. He was taken back to West Palm Beach for his fourth trial for the death of Desoto Tiger.

  The following afternoon, an Overland touring car with four riders rolled to a stop in front of the Bank of Homestead, about forty miles southwest of Miami.

  Two men got out of the car and walked into the bank. One of the men wrote a check for $10 to Thomas Dice, signed it Dan Wilson, and the two men stepped up to a teller’s window and presented the check.

  The teller didn’t know the men and called the bank’s cashier over to take a look at the check. As the cashier was examining the check, the men each pulled out revolvers.

  “Hands up, gentlemen,” one of them said. “We have been in the Glades long enough.”

  The men left with all of the cash in the bank—about $6,500. They headed west in the Overland—toward the Everglades.

  For the next two weeks, the robbers fought a running gun battle with a posse that pursued them through the Everglades and into the Florida Keys. Three members of the posse were killed by “friendly fire” from other posse members in a shoot-out with the bandits on the morning of Sunday, September 17. But by October 2, two of the robbers were dead and the other two were in jail. There were reports that Kid Lowe, who was still wanted for the Bank of Stuart holdup, had planned the Homestead stickup.

  John Ashley sat in the Palm Beach County Jail for two months until the date for his fourth trial arrived in November. But apparently no one saw any point in putting him on trial again for murder in a county where one previous trial had ended in a hung jury, and a jury couldn’t even be seated for a second trial. Prosecutors agreed to drop the murder charge if Ashley would plead guilty to robbing the Bank of Stuart in February 1915.

  He was sentenced to seventeen years in the Florida State Prison in Raiford, about forty miles north of Gainesville.

  In early 1917, Tamiami Trail boosters got a jolt of reality about how difficult it was going to be to push a highway through the Everglades. On February 10, Miami engineer John W. King, his son, John Jr., and eighteen-year-old William Catlow Jr. left Miami to survey land that had recently been purchased from the state for the Trail’s right-of-way. They thought it would take them about two weeks to work their way through the Glades to the Gulf Coast.

  By late February, they hadn’t reached their destination, nor had they been heard from since they left Miami. On February 27, two experienced Everglades guides—a trapper and a Seminole Indian—went looking for the group.

  Other search parti
es joined the hunt, but after more than a week, the three missing surveyors still hadn’t been found. On March 9, aviator Phil Rader and surveyor Burt Tubbs took off in a Curtiss military biplane and flew over the Everglades. It was a risky flight. Pilots had learned to avoid flying over the Everglades because of treacherous air currents over the vast swamp that could cause planes to suddenly drop hundreds, or thousands, of feet.

  Rader pushed his plane to an altitude of 14,000 feet—a record for that time—partly to add a margin of safety in case he encountered a sudden down-draft, partly so that he and his passenger could see a bigger expanse of land. They saw a few people moving through the Glades, but they turned out to be search parties.

  King and his two young companions were indeed having a rough time. The story of their trek through the Glades became the subject of an eight-part series by writer W. Livingston Larned that was published in 1918 in Forest and Stream magazine, a popular mass-circulation magazine that included among its contributors former president Theodore Roosevelt.

  The elder King badly miscalculated what it would take to cross the formidable Everglades. He was “fairly familiar” with the outer edge of the Glades, and had not expected any major problems, Larned wrote.

  But the interior of the great swamp was far different from what King had anticipated—impassable in some places, bewildering in others, and always eerily quiet, despite the obvious presence of so much wildlife.

  “It seems past belief that, almost within hearing of Miami’s church bells, we should thus face absolute helplessness,” King wrote in the diary that formed the basis for Larned’s stories. “My faith in my own knowledge of the area is beginning to weaken.”

  The story of the men lost in the Everglades made national headlines, and raised such concern for their safety that a group of Miami spiritualists offered their assistance in finding the lost exploration party. And J. F. Jaudon, for whom King was doing the exploration, seriously considered taking them up on their offer.