For Sale —American Paradise (12 page)

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 managed 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 parties 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.