For Sale —American Paradise (16 page)

The judge agreed to postpone the trial until February 1923, and signed an order allowing Mobley, Matthews, and Middleton to be temporarily transferred to a jail in Fort Lauderdale because repairs and renovations were being made to the Palm Beach County Jail.

Mobley and Matthews would not be around for the new trial date, however. On December 14, the young daredevils forced open a skylight in the Fort
Lauderdale jail. They went through the opening and, using sheets and blankets tied together as a rope, lowered themselves out of the jail and made straight for the Everglades.

Mobley was off for more excitement.

It was starting to seem unlikely that construction crews would ever be able to push a road through the Ashley Gang's hideout. By early 1923, it was clear that Lee County was not going to be able to pay for its stretch of the Tamiami Trail. But Barron Collier, the young advertising millionaire from Cincinnati, was buying hundreds of thousands of acres of land in Lee County, and he was determined to make his investments pay.

He couldn't get a return on his huge investment, however, if no one could get to the land. And completing the Tamiami Trail would be the best way—the only way, really—to open his land for development.

So if Lee County couldn't pay for building the Trail, Collier would. But first he wanted his own county.

In February 1923, Collier bought a dredge that had been used on the construction of the Florida East Coast Railway. The dredge's one-
cubic-yard bucket could move about one-quarter of a ton of dirt with every bucketful. Collier moved the dredge to the Gulf Coast to go to work on the Tamiami Trail.

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 through 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.”