The History of Florida (77 page)

other state, and in storm floods. Average annual rainfall reached between

fifty and sixty inches, with south Florida’s portion usual y slightly higher. In

wetter years, some parts of the state could endure up to 100 inches. Florida

was well known for pregnant clouds pulling a gray wall of rain across blue

afternoons, leaving behind several inches in a matter of hours. Where the

ground had been dry the day before, a river, wetland, or lake would soon

appear.16

Water was another obstacle to the advance of white settlement. Florida

had plenty of it, fresh and salt. The state is surrounded by so much of the

latter that the Spanish for many years mistook the peninsula for an island.

Only Alaska’s 6,640 miles of coastline beats Florida’s 1,350 (Florida’s tidal

shoreline is 8,426 miles). Yet there was a time when saltwater and sandy

beaches were not yet the marvel that bewitched visitors. Interior Florida

stirred imaginations, as it did that of the early American naturalist William

Bartram. It was, as he put it in the published journal of his explorations,
The

Travels
(1791), an enchanting living natural museum of the most amazing

specimens of plants and animals. Contemporary readers of
The
Travels
ac-

cused him of engaging in fiction writing because he recorded such incred-

ible things in Florida: 25- to 30-pound large-mouth bass; water thick with

proof

al igators, a primordial beast unknown to most fel ow colonists; and 125

species of flora not known to whites. Historian Tom Berson argues that as

much as prairies, mountains, and deserts formed the aesthetic of the con-

tinent’s interior, springs, rivers, and wetlands did the same for Florida’s. In

his famous 1907 travelogue,
The
American
Scene
, the prickly Henry James

expressed misgivings about Florida’s principal city, Jacksonvil e, and its

beaches; they “in especial were to acquire a trick of getting on one’s nerves!”

Yet a trip up the St. Johns left him “Byronical y foolish” about the interior

river.17

Before major drainage projects and development booms in the twentieth

century, half of Florida’s surface area was covered with freshwater, too much

from the point of view of settlers. To deal with it, the state lobbied aggres-

sively for the passage of the 1850 Swamp Land Act, congressional legislation

that al owed states to annex and drain federal y owned wetlands. In the

end, the act nearly doubled the landmass belonging to the state of Florida.

But the actual historical agent here is water. Indians and European settlers

alike tended to settle near freshwater sources. There was the obvious need of

sustenance, and there was utility in waterways as avenues of transportation

Florida by Nature: A Survey of Extrahuman Historical Agency · 369

for people and trade. As the population grew, water got in the way. The state

wanted to open more land and to expand railroad service, which was pa-

thetical y insufficient. The Swamp Land Act was the answer. But false starts

hampered successful drainage operations until the early twentieth century.

In the meantime, the long coastline and 11,000-mile infrastructure of rivers

lessened the urgency of railroad development.

Somewhere along the winding course of many of those rivers is a fresh-

water spring. The Spanish called them fountains. They were the sparkling,

animated centerpieces of Florida’s vast water endowment. The Suwannee

River alone has 200 springs. Geologists have counted more than 900 in

the state, giving Florida the highest concentration of springs in existence.

Thirty-three are first-magnitude springs, meaning each discharges 100 cubic

feet or more per second. The daily output of all springs combined reaches

7 billion gallons. That is a lot of water boiling, gushing, and bubbling from

down below and feeding rivers and streams above. The source of much of

this effusiveness is the Floridan Aquifer, one of the world’s most productive

artesian systems. All of Florida and parts of Georgia, Alabama, South Caro-

lina, and Mississippi sit atop the Floridan, where more than a quadrillion

gallons of water winnow unseen through cracks, crevices, and corridors of

this fossilized limestone underbel y, and through time itself. Some of the

proof

water has been around since the Middle Ages. In the twentieth century, mu-

nicipal utilities—including those in Jacksonvil e, Tal ahassee, Gainesvil e,

Daytona, Tampa, and St. Petersburg—and the fields and groves of agricul-

ture came to depend on that ancient source.

Suffused with wetness, Florida’s natural richness captivated the nation.

Ornithologist Mark Catesby and artist Titian Ramsay Peale were among the

earliest to affirm in their work the exotic, the paradise, the Eden Bartram

had discovered. They were followed by John James Audubon, who early in

the nineteenth century was lured by Florida’s most remarkable bird popula-

tion, profuse and colorful and unique in North America. It was the artists

and writers—the famous and the not-so famous, the newsprint and book

il ustrator, the journalist, the literary writer, and the travelogue writer—

who crafted the lyrical imagery of Florida. It leaped into the imagination

of not only Stowe and James but Sidney Lanier, Stephen Crane, Edward

King, and the former slave turned poet Albery Al son Whitman. Win-

slow Homer, James Wel s Champney, John Singer Sargent, Thomas Moran,

Laura Woodward, and Martin Johnson Heade, artists general y associated

with other places and themes, traveled south to capture Florida’s living

370 · Jack E. Davis

aesthetic—panthers and birds, palm and hardwood hammocks, river ox-

bows and wet prairies, orange light and dark silhouettes at sunset. Descrip-

tions of these sorts, il ustrated and literary, appeared in countless magazine

and newspaper articles beginning in the nineteenth century, and Florida’s

tourism industry was born.

The first tourists harbored the hope of catching a glimpse of the wildlife

and wilderness they had read about or seen in artwork. They did encounter

it, most often from the deck of sternwheel riverboats steaming up the St.

Johns River, into the Ocklawaha and Silver Rivers. Lanier called the Ockla-

waha the “sweetest water-lane in the world”; King said it coursed through

“sylvan peace and perfect beauty.” The tourists’ final destination was Silver

Springs, Florida’s first major commercial attraction. Fifty thousand visitors a

year made the river voyage to peer into the spring’s glassy depth, unwittingly

down into the Floridan Aquifer, that fountain of life if not youth. The same

mystique that enraptured Bartram endured two centuries later when the late

Florida writer Al Burt put down these thoughts.18

Those old Spanish conquistadors who came here in the 16th century

looking for the fountain of youth found one but they were looking for

the wrong thing. Though they never understood it, this real y was a

proof

place of rejuvenation, but it was not located in a single magical spring

as they had hoped. Instead, it was in the nature of this place. Rather

than one spring that restored youth there was a dazzling array of natu-

ral gifts—
many
springs, rivers, and lakes and an extraordinary range

of geography, climate, plant and animal life.19

Floridians who had to contend with water frequently checked their

enthusiasm. There often seemed too much where it was not wanted and

too little where it was wanted. In the early days of statehood, leadership in

Tal ahassee was intent on removing excess water to open up fresh land to

prospective farmers, ranchers, and growers. No place in Florida was more

inundated than the Everglades, and beneath their shal ow, limpid waters,

boosters claimed, lay the most fecund soil in the world. In the 1880s, Phila-

delphia saw manufacturer and Florida land speculator Hamilton Disston

launched a private venture to reclaim the Everglades. The drainage canals

his dredges dug redirected millions of gallons a day to the Gulf of Mexico,

but in terms of agricultural expansion and capital return, the Disston proj-

ect was a failure. The state followed with its own initiative two decades later,

Florida by Nature: A Survey of Extrahuman Historical Agency · 371

only to meet with its own limited success. It sent even more water into the

Gulf and into the Atlantic. But when the inevitable heavy rains came, thou-

sands of drained acres reflooded. The people who had been lured by the idea

of a prosperous life on Everglades farmland found themselves living and

working in a dangerous place.

Hurricanes struck with this harsh reality. One of the worst in history

did so on September 16, 1928. It pushed up a fifteen-foot storm surge and

breached the state’s flood-control dike along parts of the 750-square-mile

Lake Okeechobee, the headwater of the Everglades. More than 2,000 peo-

ple, most of them black farmworkers, drowned. The federal government

afterward helped the state build a bigger and better dike. But that was not

enough. When hurricanes careened across the peninsula in September and

October 1947—accompanied by a rainfall of 100 inches for the year—it was

clear that the new dike had given false security to the continued settlement

of the Everglades. The human toll reached only twenty-three deaths, yet the

storms washed away 178 homes and drowned 4,298 domestic animals. The

public outcry was loud enough to prompt the Army Corps of Engineers to

move quickly to devise a comprehensive flood-control and drainage project

that was unprecedented in size and scope. By the time the Corps completed

the last phase of the flood-control project in 1971, it had destroyed nearly

proof

half of the Everglades and wrested the remaining ecosystem under the con-

trol of a fossil-fuel-powered system consisting of pumps, dams, locks, le-

vees, and canals.

By then, the Corps had realized that much that had been done needed

to be undone. The control of nature had gone too far; the Everglades were

on the verge of extinction. Unyielding activism, protective legislation, and

consistent bureaucratic wheel spinning at the state level culminated in the

congressional authorization of the Comprehensive Everglades Restoration

Plan (CERP) of 2000. Although controversial for its $8 bil ion price tag

(with escalating costs estimated to reach $30 bil ion), CERP represented

a renewed environmental commitment similar to the enthusiasm of the

1970s. It was then that the American people launched Earth Day, Congress

adopted rigorous clean water and air legislation, and a worthless swamp

and abject wasteland—the Everglades—gained new credibility as a vital and

valued natural endowment. Yet restoring the ecosystem, environmentalists

revealed, was not the top priority in Everglades restoration. The huge invest-

ment in CERP was for the benefit of the ever-expanding human popula-

tion along the coast of south Florida. Water management and ecological

372 · Jack E. Davis

destruction had spoiled the very natural system on which the big, morphing

cities relied for freshwater.

Long before, recreational interest in Florida’s interior had flagged. Tour-

ists had begun heading to the coast, and joining them there was an intense

interest in developing seaside areas. Like citrus, beaches soon became part

of Florida’s identity.

Their popularity is relatively recent in the long course of history. In the

days of sailing ships, the sea was the perilous sea, and beaches were its outer

edge. They suggested cold isolation and danger, not rest and relaxation.

When the Spanish came to Florida, the beach was the threshold to new land,

and not always an inviting one. Beaches were typical y lined with tall sand

dunes, behind which were long wal s of jungle-like vegetation. Behind this

natural bulkhead, stil , were natives with spears and poison arrows capable

of piercing chain mail. For their part, the Spanish may have claimed to have

come in peace, but they came ashore in full armor, often with war dogs, and

bearing the weapons and disease of conquest. The beach was battleground.

Even upon securing their position against natives, international rivals tested

Spanish claims. A “succession of dons and governors regarded the coast

dispassionately,” writes Gary Mormino, “nervously watching for marauding

Protestants.” Remember Menéndez, who butchered French Protestants on

proof

the beach. The place where it happened is stil cal ed Matanzas, a Span-

ish word for massacres. Centuries were required for playground to replace

battleground. When vacationing was becoming vogue in the nineteenth

century, Americans initial y flocked to lakeshore but not seashore. North-

ern Michigan was a far more popular vacation spot than beachfront Florida.

Middle- and upper-class easterners joined the Grand Tour, a vacation ex-

cursion that took them to natural attractions in the continental interior—to

odd spectacles of nature, such as a geyser, or to natural monuments, such