For Sale —American Paradise (40 page)

“First a crew went forward through sawgrass and water and rocky hammocks with axes and machetes, cutting a trail,” Douglas wrote. “They worked up to the armpits in water, tormented with mosquitoes in the season, always watchful for rattlesnakes and the uncounted dark heads of moccasins. They lived, ate, and slept in muck and water.”

The men lived in rolling sheds that were moved along as the work progressed. It took men of unusual toughness and determination to stick with this type of construction and see it through to the end.

At one point, Collier was asked how many shifts he had at work building the Tamiami Trail.

Three, he replied—one shift on the road down from Tampa looking for work, one shift working on the construction project, and one shift who'd quit the project and were going back to Tampa.

“The men on the job were wonderful,” Otto Neal told the
Collier County News
in 1928. “Many would work all night Saturday and Sunday to get their machines in perfect order for the new attack Monday. The men seemed to realize the proportion of the work and the benefits that would be derived by the travelling public and wanted to see the thing through. They did their part—and they did it exceptionally well.”

Undoubtedly there was some truth to Neal's glowing recollection of his fellow workers. But the men who built the Tamiami Trail were not saints.

Ray Crews, who would become the father of Harry Crews, a legendary writer and instructor at the University of Florida, followed a childhood friend from Georgia to join a Tamiami Trail construction crew. He was seventeen years old.

“They were not violent men, but their lives were full of violence,” Harry Crews later wrote about his father's experience. “When Daddy first went down to the Everglades, he started on a gang that cut the advance right-
of-way and, consequently, was out of the main camp for days, at times for more than a week.”

During one of their expeditions away from the camp, Ray Crews was nearly killed when a steel cable broke. It looked like an accident, but the teenager was certain that it was deliberate.

“When he almost got killed working out there on the gang, [his friend] Cecil almost killed a man because of it,” Harry Crews wrote. “Daddy's foreman was an old man, grizzled, stinking always of chewing tobacco and sweat and whiskey, and known through the construction company as a man mean as a bee-stung dog. He didn't have to dislike you to hurt you, even cripple you.”

There were few comforts for the construction gang, most of them rough young men with no outlet for their hormones. Since Ray Crews could not have what he wanted, he tried to want what he could have, his son wrote.

Ray Crews worked at that job for six years, and one of the few times he left the swamp was to seek treatment in the town of Arcadia for a case of gonorrhea after an ill-
considered tryst with a woman—whose name he never learned—who'd snuck into the work camp.

“He had not wanted her, but they had been in the swamp for three years,” Harry Crews wrote. “They worked around the clock, and if they weren't working or sleeping, their time was pretty much spent drinking or fighting or shooting gators.”

Someone had a camera, and when they had a few moments, Ray Crews and his friends shot photos of their adventures deep in the swamp.

Moonshine was another source of diversion for the construction gangs. And it wasn't hard to find. The late Ashley Gang had not operated the only stills in the Everglades.

Ellis, the former dredge operator, admitted seventy years later that he kept a jug of moonshine at hand on his machine.

Roan Johnson was another young Georgian who worked on the Trail. He left his home in Quitman, a few miles north of the Florida border, in 1926 to join a cousin working on the construction crew. He was eighteen.

Like all new hires, Johnson started out working on the crew that hacked through the woods and swamp to lay out the right-of-way for the Trail.

“I remember the water was everywhere . . . clear, clear water, just everywhere,” he told the
Miami Herald
in 2003.

The men constantly had to pull off their boots and dump water out of them, Johnson said.

Johnson also remembered the insects—hordes of horseflies and mosquitoes so thick that it was like the construction workers “had stumbled into a biblical plague.”

At night, mosquito netting protected the men's bunks. The nights were “dark as only a swamp can be dark,” Crews wrote.

Johnson said the construction workers didn't worry too much about the presence of alligators.

“You knew they were there, but they didn't bother you,” he told the
Herald
.

Still, foremen slung high-
powered rifles across their shoulders and constantly scanned the woods and swamps for danger while their men worked.

The men were fed in the work camps, but Meece Ellis said the workers often didn't eat the meat that was provided because by the time it reached the camp, it
had gone bad. So the workers bought wild game such as turkeys, wild hogs, and deer from Seminole Indians who lived in the Everglades.

Occasionally, the scent of fresh meat enticed Florida panthers—a smaller subspecies of the American cougar that lives only in South Florida—to prowl around the camp.

The work gang that followed the crew clearing the right-
of-way laid down a crude sort of railroad, using cypress logs for crossties and rails. A drilling machine had been rigged up to ride this cypress railroad. The wheels were automobile tire rims, which fitted over the logs so the drill could be pulled across the wet, soggy muck.

“Sometimes the drills stuck in the mud and there would be days of back-breaking man-labor, with heavy hand jacks, to set them up again,” Marjory Stoneman Douglas wrote.

It's hard to imagine that the soggy Everglades has a base of solid rock beneath the black water and muck, but it does. And engineers eventually realized that the only way to build a road through that swamp was to clear away the muck and build the road on top of the limestone that lay beneath the water, muck, and saw grass.

So the drilling crew dug holes every one hundred feet—thousands of holes. The men who worked behind the drill crew led ox teams pulling wagons of dynamite on the cypress railroad. They dropped dynamite into those holes. Every so often, the workers backed well away from the recently drilled holes, and the dynamite was ignited.

From late 1926 until the Tamiami Trail was completed in 1928, more than two million sticks of dynamite were used to break up Everglades limestone. In its November 1928 issue,
Explosives Engineer
magazine reported that the Tamiami Trail construction crew was using about twenty tons of dynamite per mile.

After each blast, the walking dredge was brought up, and the operator scooped up the limestone fragments, 2,800 pounds at a time, and piled them alongside the canal that was formed by the explosions.

The limestone was crushed and compacted and eventually became a surprisingly smooth road. Working under these awful conditions, the construction crews built a mile or two of road each month.

On April 10, 1927, Collier's construction gang achieved a milestone—they reached the Dade County line.

“Just ten days behind the schedule that we set for ourselves, and I tell you, that isn't so bad,” Otto Neal proudly told the
Collier County News
. “After that we dug our way four miles on through the other side of the Dade County line to meet the dredges coming from the east coast, and the most difficult rock of all was found in this four-mile stretch in Dade County.”

It was around this time that Ray Crews and his friend Cecil quit their jobs with the Tamiami Trail construction crew and headed back to Georgia.

They had money in their pockets, and each had a gold watch engraved with their name and “Pioneer Builder of the Tamiami Trail.”

With a bottle of whiskey on the floorboard of a Model T Ford, Crews and his friend took nearly three weeks to amble up the Dixie Highway from Miami to Jacksonville.

“In the car with him as they drove, there was a shoebox full of pictures of my daddy with five or six of his buddies, all of them holding whiskey bottles and pistols and rifles and coons and leashed alligators out here in the rugged dug-out sea of sawgrass and mangrove swamp through which they had built the Tamiami Trail,” Harry Crews wrote. “His is the gun that is always drawn; his is the head that is turned back under the whiskey bottle.”

They had been deep in the swamp while the real estate speculation mania had swept across Florida and crested, and it had started to ebb by the time they finally came out of the Everglades. And while Florida's economic conditions probably held little interest for two young men with money in their pockets, time on their hands, a bottle of booze, and years of pent-up libido, there were deepening signs of trouble all around them.

About the same time that Ray Crews and his friend Cecil started their leisurely trip up the Florida coast, a heavily guarded armored car left Miami, bound for West Palm Beach. It was carrying $2 million in cash.

Miami banks were sending the money to prevent three West Palm Beach banks from failing.

The
New York Times
of March 8, 1927, reported that banks in Palm Beach County had been struggling since shortly before the hurricanes of September and October 1926. Bankers in Miami feared a domino effect that would drag down more banks if they didn't step in and help.

Three banks in Palm Beach County had failed in June 1926, the
Times
reported. The continued slump in real estate, an upheaval in local politics, and the recent failure of another bank “have created a feeling of unrest and lack of confidence resulting in persistent and continual withdrawals on the part of depositors,” the
Times
said.

The First American Bank and Trust Company, one of the banks teetering on the brink of failure in March 1927, had been hemorrhaging deposits, losing more than $10.5 million in withdrawals in less than a year.

“Consistent withdrawals averaging $1 million a month brought deposits in The First American Bank and Trust Company from $13.5 million down to less than $3 million in ten months' time and was responsible for its failure to open this morning,” the
Times
reported.

The slumping real estate market also caused problems for smaller investors, including a star Major League baseball player.

On March 16 at the Boston Braves' spring training camp in St. Petersburg, first baseman Jacques Fournier—who had a reputation for being as quick with his fists as he was with his bat—punched out a man who tried to talk to him after an exhibition game against the New York Giants. Unfortunately for Fournier, the man he clipped on the jaw was a deputy sheriff trying to serve him with a court summons.

“The version I got was that [the man] didn't announce himself nor his intentions but proceeded to get in an argument with Fournier,” Braves manager Dave Bancroft told reporters. “My first baseman resented his manner and punched him.”

Fournier was being sued for $5,000 by a real estate firm in Sarasota. Fournier had put down a binder on some real estate in Sarasota, Bancroft said. “Later he decided to call the deal off, and my understanding is that both parties agreed,” he said. “I suppose the other party figured he could hold him to the contract.”

“Fournier did not know he was socking an officer, and furthermore, he thought the whole matter was settled long ago,” Bancroft said. “A hearing on the charges has been set for next week in Sarasota, but we hope to fix it up before that.”

Bancroft kept his slugger out of jail by posting a $1,000 bond and guaranteeing that Fournier would show up in court.

One Florida commodity whose demand and prices had not been affected by the real estate downturn was whiskey. Fierce—and sometimes deadly—battles still were being fought between bootleggers and the Coast Guard off the Florida coast.

On August 7, 1927, Horace Alderman and his partner Robert Weech took on a load of booze at Bimini, the westernmost island of the Bahamas, and headed back to Florida in broad daylight. They were spotted by a Coast Guard patrol about thirty-four miles off Fort Lauderdale. The two bootleggers were captured, but three Coast Guard crewmen were killed in a struggle with Alderman.

Alderman would be convicted of murder and, in keeping with the maritime tradition of execution, hanged, but the jury that convicted him also rebuked the Coast Guard for the tactics it was using against rumrunners.