The Everglades
Nowhere else in the world can a “river of saw grass” seventy miles wide be seen. This is the heart and soul of the Everglades. Southern Florida is formed like a teaspoon tipped lightly toward the south. Around its rim are the great cities of Miami to the east and Fort Myers and Tampa to the west. In the rainy summer season, water flows slowly, at the rate of a half-a-mile a day, over this vast river of grass in the center, renewing the cycles of the plants and animals and continuing the weather pattern that has existed in southern Florida for thousands of years.
In the center of the teaspoon, only slightly shallower than the limestone rock of the coast is a pot-holed rocky ancient sea bed covered with black muck. Walking off established paths is treacherous because of foot deep pot holes under the muck. The highest parts of Everglades Park are only ten feet about sea level. In these higher hammock islands are small hardwood forests of mahogany, oak and maple. Other hammocks are home to slash pines. In pre-colonial times, several tribes of Indians lived in these hammocks and grew crops, coontie (a plant grown and ground into flour) and some corn. In the wet season they moved about through the saw grass in cypress log canoes. In the dry season the canoes needed to be poled. They went about nearly naked and smeared themselves with fish oils to ward off mosquitoes and sandflies. Shellfish were abundant. The land stayed the same for thousands of years.
The Spanish found them fierce fighters because by 1514 they had heard of Spanish cruelty. Ponce de Leon was killed by an Indian arrow tipped with poisonwood sap. The Spaniards had to content themselves with small settlements along the coasts and the people of the glades” continued their life in the central hammocks and cypress forests.
In 1830, after the United States had acquired Florida by treaty, Congress decreed that all the Indians east of the Mississippi be relocated “far beyond the possibility of any contact with white men.” Many Native Americans were forced to travel west on the Trail of Tears. Some refused and fled to Florida where the Seminole Wars of 1835 - 1842 and 1855 - 1859 were fought with heavy losses to both sides. Finally, most of the Indians agreed to leave, but about 150 remained in the Everglades where their descendants still live today.
Around the turn of the century, the Everglades became home to plume hunters. Plumes of great egrets and snowy egrets were in demand for the fashionable women’s hats. The Audubon Society aroused public opinion against the slaughter of these beautiful birds and the destruction of their rookeries, and in 1916 a small area of the southernmost tip of the Everglades was given protection by the creation of Royal Palm State Park.
Lake Okeechobee the third largest freshwater lake in the United States, is in the hollow of the teaspoon. In the twenties, the water cycle was changed. Developers saw the potential for growing crops in the rich black much south of Okeechobee and money was borrowed to build the Tamaimi Trail across southern Florida. This dammed the water coming through the saw grass from Lake Okeechobee into a canal running along its length. A small muck dam was built on the southern side of the lake. In the fall of 1928, a hurricane swept the water over this dam and killed eighteen hundred people. As a consequence, a vast dike was built around the western, southern and eastern sides of the lake and the water was at last controlled. Vast sugar cane fields and vegetable crop plantations were developed in the rich muck and frost-free environment.
Everything was worked out with scientific exactitude as directed by the Experiment Station or the sugar company’s laboratories. The huge fields are set with dikes and irrigation ditches from which pumps bring up the required water level every twenty-four hours. More and more of the water was diverted to sugar cane fields and vegetable crops. The level of the lake fell five feet.
The muck, as it dried out, blew away. In some places it lost over a foot the first five years of cultivation. More minerals needed to be replaced each year. Because of the great lake levee, no more water seeped over the lake edges to the remaining saw grass in the Everglades.
In 1945 the fires began, spreading in the cane and roaring, crackling and hissing in the dry saw grass. Blowing mountains of heavy, cream-colored smoke spread over the whole Everglades, palmettos burst in the fiery heat as it spread from pine to pine. The flames ate the ancient saw grass muck down to the rock and smoldered and glowed orange at night for weeks. People in the cities were overcome with smoke.
Another problem became critical. As water was removed from the center of south Florida, salt water invaded the land, 230 feet a year in the first years, and then faster, spreading through levees and soil nearly 1,000 feet a year. It invaded the wells in the southeast and Miami’s wells had to be moved closer to the Everglades.
People all over south Florida became aroused. Laws were passed taking the control of water out of the hands of state politicians. The US. Department of Agriculture, the Soil Conservation Service and the US. Geological Service determined a plan for the whole region. It was shown the productivity of the muck varied with the distance south from Lake Okeechobee, and the depth of the muck over its rock base. Any soil with less than five feet of muck was considered unproductive for farming. Thus, the scientific foundation was laid for the state of Florida to grant to the Federal Government the land that became the Everglades National Park, roughly, the land south of the Tamiami Trail.
New cooperative arrangements have developed between the agricultural interests of the state and the need to protect South Florida from disastrous changes in its water table and protect the habitat of the plants and animals of Everglades National Park.
Note: Most of the above material was taken from The Everglades: River of Grass written by Marjory Stoneman Douglas in 1947. Next week we will share our ten day experience of the Everglades when we visited in January.
– Percy and Mary