The tough Calusa Indians were there at the time Christ was born, building storm shelter islands out of the shells of the oysters and clams they ate, leaving a staggering enough tonnage of shells by the time the Spaniards totally eliminated them that miles and miles of the first rude roads into the edges of the Glades were paved with those shells.
This is the land of the great enduring myth of the Seminole. They were a ragtag ethnic jumble, driven all the way down from Georgia and the Carolinas, until finally after the forced resettlement of most of them in the southwest, there were not two hundred and fifty left-scattered, hiding, demoralized-not worth any further military effort. For fifty years their numbers remained about the same. Then slowly they reestablished a new culture composed of remembered fragments of many old ones, speaking pidgin versions of old tongues. They had even begun to acquire a kind of plaintive dignity, but then the white man pushed the Tamiami Trail across the Glades from Naples to Miami, eliminating them as a tribe, turning them into roadside merchants of such a vast gypsy cynicism that of all the artifacts they manufacture and sell to the tourists-not one hears any relation to their customs, habits, or prior way of life. They are the carnival Indians, degraded by commerce, curious heirs to the big colorful lie that they were never Whipped, never made a truce. They are the comedy Indians who, never having used tomtoms in their history, never having used the tomahawks or bows and arrows like the Plains Indians, now make vast quantities of each and sell them to people from Ohio.
Now, of course, having failed in every attempt to subdue the Glades by frontal attack, we are slowly killing it off by tapping the River of Grass. In the questionable name of progress, the state in its vast wisdom lets every two-bit developer divert the flow into the draglined canals that give him “waterfront” lots to sell. ’As far north as Corkscrew Swamp, virgin stands of ancient bald cypress are dying. All the area north of Copeland had been logged out, and will never come back. As the Glades dry, the big fires come with increasing frequency. The ecology is changing with . egret colonies dwindling, mullet getting scarce, mangrove dying of new diseases born of dryness.
But it will take a long time to kill it. And 'years from now foolish men will still be able to kill‘ themselves off within miles of help, hopelessly :lost among islands which all look exactly alike. It is a black land, and like every wilderness in the world, it punishes quickly when a mistake is made, quickly and with a casual, savage indifference.
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