For Sale —American Paradise

by Willie Drye

  Still, by early April, work on the road was flagging. In Fort Myers, civic and business leaders decided that something had to be done to revive public interest in finishing the Trail. So at 7:30 a.m. on April 4, with much fanfare, about two dozen business boosters set out from Fort Myers to cross the Everglades in seven automobiles—even though there was no road where they would be going. They would be joined by two Seminole Indian guides.

  They called themselves the Tamiami Trailblazers, and they expected their ambitious stunt to get the attention of newspapers and provide a much-needed publicity boost for the construction project. The Trailblazers said they thought it would take three days to get through the Glades and reach Miami.

  They were right about the publicity they would receive, but, like John King in 1917, they were way off on how long it would take them to complete their journey. And the length of that journey and the uncertainty of their fates would be what got newspapers’ attention.

  Heavy rains soaked the Everglades shortly after the Trailblazers left. On April 7, the day the Trailblazers were due in Miami, there was no sign of them. A search party from Miami went into the Everglades looking for the missing men, but couldn’t find a clue as to their whereabouts.

  Newspapers across the country picked up the story of the Trailblazers missing in the mysterious Everglades. Some thought that the drenching rain had made it impossible for them to continue, so they’d turned around and headed back to Fort Myers.

  Others, however, speculated that they’d met the type of fate that only the Everglades could have dealt them.

  “The outside world had no knowledge of how the trail blazers were faring in their undertaking,” recalled Russell Kay, who’d been one the Trailblazers. “Exaggerated stories were released from Miami by a few news service writers, who, drawing on their imagination, pictured the men as lost in the wilderness and fighting for their lives against wild animals, alligators, and snakes.

  “Most reports concluded that the convoy was hopelessly lost, without food or help,” Kay said. “This was all ‘hogwash’ and untrue; the men knew generally where they were all the time, and they were only delayed because of the difficult terrain.”

  To describe the terrain as “difficult” was an understatement. During much of the trip, the Trailblazers were able to travel only a mile or so each day, and traveling after sunset was out of the question. Sometimes the cars bogged down in mud to their axles, and had to be pushed and pulled out. Sometimes streams had to be forded, and when they were too deep, primitive log bridges had to be built.

  There was saw grass that tore at the men’s clothing. And there were also the native denizens of the Glades—snakes, alligators, panthers.

  The Trailblazers came across dozens of water moccasins in a large pool near the Turner River. Frightened by the sight of so many poisonous snakes, one of the men killed two with a shovel.

  “This so angered the Indians, they threatened to desert then and there,” Kay said.

  One of the Trailblazers was Stanley Hanson, an agent for the federal Office of Indian Affairs. Hanson managed to calm the infuriated Seminole guides, then explained their anger to the Trailblazers.

  “He explained that the Indians never kill wantonly, and that they respected the snakes because they contended that the reptiles had more right to be there than humans,” Kay said.

  The Seminoles believed it was a crime to kill the snakes without cause. One of them walked barefoot among the moccasins. He didn’t look down at the snakes and kept a steady pace as he walked through them.

  The moccasins didn’t touch the Seminole, Kay said.

  On April 11, the Miami Herald sent a reporter aloft in an airplane to look for the Trailblazers. After three hours of zigzagging at perilously low altitude, the pilot and reporter saw no sign of the men.

  The Trailblazers, however, had seen the plane. They tried quickly to get a signal fire started to attract the attention of the fliers, but couldn’t get it lit in time.

  The men realized that people were worried. They were days overdue, and no one had heard a word from them since they’d left Fort Myers.

  So while most of the men continued wrestling the cars through the Everglades, three men pushed ahead to Miami to let the world know that the Trail-blazers were unharmed and still working their way to Miami. The small advance party reached Miami early on the morning of April 12, but the main group was still several days behind them.

  As the Trailblazers coaxed their cars through the Everglades, fretting about water moccasins and alligators as they drew nearer to their destination, tempers were flaring in Fort Myers and Tampa. Barron Collier was mounting an all-out effort in the Florida state legislature to persuade the lawmakers to create a new county that would be named after him.

  In Fort Myers, people were furious that two of the men among their delegation to the legislature were showing signs of supporting Collier’s effort. On April 18, dozens of angry Lee County residents gathered at a public meeting in the county seat of Fort Myers to protest Collier’s political manipulations.

  The following day, an irate telegram was dispatched to legislator Walter O. Sheppard. The opponents called the effort to create a new county a betrayal of their trust, claiming that “90 percent” of the people in Lee County opposed the move.

  That same day, the Fort Myers Press confidently reported that Collier might be losing his effort to carve out a new county.

  “Barron Collier, of New York and the Everglades, seems to have gone about as far as he can get,” the Press said on its editorial page. “His plan for the county of Collier was so unfair on the face of it that it seems to be losing.”

  The Press said plans for chopping up Lee County would be “nothing short of a mutilation” of “this grand old county.”

  Lee County, named after Confederate general Robert E. Lee, had been formed in 1887, right about the time that Northerners were starting to notice Florida’s balmy winters. More counties were formed as the state’s population continued to grow in the early twentieth century. Between 1905 and 1921, sixteen new counties had been created, and Lee County voters had already approved creating another new county, Hendry, from a portion of Lee County.

  But Collier taking another chunk of Lee for another new county had not been publicly discussed, nor had it been put before the voters, the Press noted.

  Allowing Barron Collier to have his county, the Press said, would make the residents of that new county “subject to the autocratic whims and fancies of one man, benevolent though he might be.”

  The Tampa Tribune also had some reservations about creating a county for Barron Collier. The Tribune acknowledged that Collier had promised to bring industry and jobs to southwest Florida. But, the newspaper said, he should be required to make some of those improvements first, noting that “it would seem to be a bad idea to create a new county for the benefit and at the request of one man.”

  Meanwhile, on the other side of the peninsula, the Tamiami Trailblazers—bruised, ragged, insect-bitten, hungry, and sore—finally emerged from the Everglades, nearly three weeks after they’d started their “three-day” trip. Their cars were battered, dented, and dirty. They’d realized that such luxuries as running boards and fenders on automobiles were an inconvenience when they were trying to cross a swamp, so those parts had been removed and discarded long ago.

  But they’d kept the automobiles in good operating condition otherwise, and around six p.m. on April 19, the Trailblazers finally rolled into Miami. The Miami Herald said that the Trailblazers had made history, and proclaimed that “the last frontier of the United States was crossed by the automobile party.”

  The publicity stunt had paid off. The uncertainty about the fate of the Trail-blazers lost in the infamous Everglades had attracted cameramen from Warner-Pathé News and Fox Movietone News, who accompanied the Trailblazers for the last fifty miles or so of their trip. Soon, movie audiences across the country would be learning about the effort to build the Tamiami Trail throug
h Florida’s wild, exotic Everglades.

  Still, the conquest of the Glades was nowhere near complete.

  Back on the Gulf Coast, the fracas about whether to create a county for Barron Collier was heating up. The Tampa Times commented that Collier’s first name was indeed appropriate, for he was “one of the real old-time barons of the middle ages, who took what they wanted by virtue of the ‘mailed fist,’ and asked nobody.”

  Like several other Gulf Coast newspapers, the Times did not trust the wealthy Yankee advertising tycoon, and wanted him to spread around some of his wealth before he was given his own county.

  “Some of the Lee County folks, who have less money and less gall than the northern baron, suggest that the development should come first,” the Times opined. “They would like to see the color of his money before they hand over to him the best part of Lee County for a principality of his own.”

  “The state should be suspicious of the wealth that seeks to monopolize the land of the people,” the Times concluded.

  On April 21, a state House of Representatives subcommittee voted six to three to make an unfavorable report on the bill to create Collier’s county. Collier apparently realized he was losing the battle of public opinion. On April 24, he arrived in Tallahassee and immediately went into a long meeting with state representative R. A. Henderson and others whom the irate Fort Myers Press referred to as “henchmen.”

  The following day, the committee voted to reopen its hearings on the bill so that Collier could make a statement to the panel.

  Late that evening, it appeared that Collier, the public relations genius, was turning the legislature his way. Legislator S. Watt Lawler Jr. telegraphed Collier opponents in Fort Myers: “Collier forces very active. Things are getting complicated. Additional hearing this afternoon. We need reinforcements.”

  On Friday, April 27, the Press was practically foaming at the mouth at Collier’s “monarchistic” plans and the new developments in Tallahassee that seemed to be going in Collier’s favor.

  Who will build schools for the new county, the Press asked, and who will support them? What might happen if, God forbid, Barron Collier were to die soon after the new county was formed? Would the promised development happen then? And how would the Tamiami Trail be completed?

  Even Fort Myers ministers got involved in the fight, sending a letter to Governor Cary Hardee saying they had “grave concerns” that the creation of the county would imperil the “moral welfare” of all citizens of southwest Florida. The preachers didn’t say it outright in the telegram, but there had been rumors circulating that Collier intended to open gambling casinos once he got his county, and since he would be boss of his domain, who knew what other sinful pleasures he might bring to his fiefdom?

  The fight dragged on into May, when two giants of American industry came out strongly against the creation of the county. Thomas Edison, the wizard of science who’d been wintering in Fort Myers since 1885, joined his winter neighbor, Henry Ford, in hiring lobbyists to go to Tallahassee to try to convince the legislature to turn down Collier’s request.

  The Press reported that neither Edison nor Ford thought there were enough people or development prospects to justify forming a new county. But even the opposition of these two titans couldn’t sway the Florida legislature. On Thursday, May 3, 1923, both houses approved the creation of Collier County by wide margins. The new county would come into existence on July 9, 1923. The small town of Everglade, renamed Everglades, would become the county seat.

  Collier immediately started transforming the isolated, backwater hamlet into a modern town, building docks, laying out streets, providing electricity and phone lines. Eventually, he built a school, a movie theater, a fire department, and a courthouse, among other amenities.

  After the legislature voted, Collier granted his first interview to one of his most bitter opponents, the Press. He told the reporter that he didn’t think he’d been fairly treated by newspapers on the Gulf Coast, but he didn’t hold a grudge against anyone who had opposed the creation of the new county.

  He wanted the new county created because he thought he could accomplish more with a group of county administrators who were friendly to his efforts rather than administrators who were more concerned with Fort Myers’s interests.

  Collier went through a list of improvements he planned to make. He pledged to start a steamboat connecting Collier County with Miami and to improve railroad connections in the county as well. He also promised to add telephone lines.

  And he vowed to buy new machinery and work it around the clock to complete the Tamiami Trail through Collier County to the Dade County line.

  “I do not blame the people of Fort Myers and the rest of Lee County for the attitude they have taken,” Collier told the Press, “but want to assure them that the development that will be made in Collier County will help all of the West Coast of Florida; and I believe that I have relieved the rest of Lee County of a section that they might not have been able to do as much with as I can.”

  After his life-changing accident in the chemistry lab at Washburn College in 1915, Edwin Menninger moved to New York, studied journalism at Columbia University, and went to work for the New York Tribune. But during the winter of 1921–22, he came down with a severe case of the flu. His doctor told him that the only way he’d recover was to get out of the bitter New York winter and go to Florida.

  Menninger went to West Palm Beach and was hired as the night city editor at the Palm Beach Post.

  After a few months on his new job, Menninger learned that the Post published a weekly newspaper called the South Florida Developer. The Developer had been launched two years earlier as a public relations tool for the Model Land Company, which had been formed by Henry Flagler in 1896 as he extended his railroad down Florida’s east coast.

  To launch the Developer, the land company paid for ten thousand subscriptions for its customers, but after a couple of years the company stopped paying, and the subscriptions had dwindled to about 1,200.

  Learning about the Developer stirred Menninger’s boyhood memories of his well-managed newspaper routes and rekindled his ambition to own his own newspaper. So he talked to Donald H. Conkling, who published the Developer for the Palm Beach Post.

  After some discussion, Conkling essentially gave the Developer to Menninger. The deal was finalized on January 1, 1923. No cash actually changed hands in the transaction, although Menninger agreed to pay Conkling $500 for the Developer’s list of subscribers and another $500 for an old printing press. Conkling told Menninger he could pay off that debt by printing the Palm Beach Post for him.

  Menninger moved to Stuart in August 1923, borrowed $400 from one of his brothers, put $200 down on a linotype machine, and was in business as the publisher of the South Florida Developer.

  Menninger, the former newspaper delivery boy who had run his routes with such precocious efficiency, had an unusual combination of talents, being both a savvy journalist and a shrewd businessman.

  Florida was about to undergo a dramatic transformation from a rowdy frontier to a stylish national fad. Edwin Menninger, an ambitious young journalist, would become a chronicler of, a participant in, and a commentator on an outlandish and colorful episode of unfettered American capitalism in all its grandeur and delusion. He would become caught up in the mania and hysteria of the wild real estate speculation that was about to engulf Florida, yet he would also display his down-to-earth Kansas common sense. Occasionally, he would step back from the dreams and chaos swirling around him and, like the classic Greek chorus, make insightful comments in the South Florida Developer. And like a character in a novel, he would evolve as he watched events unfold.

  When it was over, he would realize the harsh lesson that he and others had learned as they’d watched what they thought was a permanent paradise plunge into bottomless ruin.

  But in the late summer of 1923, he was a young man only twenty-seven years old, about to embark on the adventure of running his own newspape
r.

  Apparently there wasn’t a jail in Florida that could hold John Ashley.

  After his arrest in Wauchula for transporting whiskey, he had been sent to a state prison in Holmes County in the western Florida Panhandle between Tallahassee and Pensacola. On September 27, 1923, Ashley and another convict, a US Navy deserter who was doing time for grand larceny, found a few loose bars in a jail cell. They forced the bars out and climbed through.

  Once again, John Ashley was free. He vowed never to see the inside of a jail again, and his reasons likely went beyond merely not wanting to be confined.

  The prison work camps run by the state of Florida in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries were quite different from a county jail where friends and family lived nearby. The work camps were hellholes in which prisoners were treated like slave labor.

  The same year Ashley escaped the prison in Holmes County, the state’s prison system was engulfed in scandal when Martin Tabert, a twenty-two-year-old North Dakota farm-boy who was traveling through Florida, ran out of money in Tallahassee. He was arrested for vagrancy. His parents sent him money, but by the time it reached Tallahassee, the young man had been sent to a prison work farm for a sixty-day sentence.

  He died from a whipping administered by a prison guard. In 1923, flogging prisoners was legal in Florida.

  So Ashley’s life may well have been as much in danger at the hands of wardens and guards in the prison as it was from sheriffs and police officers on the outside.

  Ashley worked his way across the Panhandle and down the peninsula, and soon he was back in his familiar hideout in the wilds of Palm Beach County. He was reunited with his partners in crime. It was just like old times again.

  “Automobiles were stolen, burglaries committed, and general terror reigned in the territory in which they operated,” author Hix Stuart wrote.