Lost Man's River (12 page)

What can we conclude about his years on the frontier, apart from the widespread allegation that Watson was the “Man Who Killed Belle Starr”? At least three of Mrs. Starr's biographers declare that after his departure from Oklahoma, the same Watson was convicted of horse theft in Arkansas and sentenced to fifteen years in the penitentiary, and that he was killed while resisting recapture after an escape. (Here as elsewhere they follow the lead of
Hell on the Border,
first published within a few years of the events, and considerably more accurate than many of the subsequent accounts, despite its report of Watson's death.)

Watson's destination after his escape from the penitentiary remains unknown, though he later related to his friend Ted Smallwood at Chokoloskee that he headed west to Oregon, where he was set upon by enemies in a night raid on his cabin. Obliged to take a life, possibly two, he fled back east. Another account asserts that Watson, on his way to Oklahoma, passed through Georgia, where he killed three men in a fracas. Like the many false rumors from south Florida—including the allegation that he murdered the Audubon warden Guy Bradley in 1905—these seem to be “tall tales” unsupported by known evidence or even anecdotes within the family
.

Ed Watson reappears in Florida in the early nineties, in a shooting at Arcadia in which, by his own account (as reported by Ted Smallwood), he slew a “bad actor” named Quinn Bass. In the rough frontier justice of that period, our subject was permitted to pay his way out of his troubles, according to one of Belle Starr's hagiographers, who asserts that “a mob stormed the [Arcadia] jail, determined to have Watson, but the sheriff beat them off.”

As Ted Smallwood recalls in his brief memoir:

Though Watson is rarely identified as an “outlaw,” it should be noted that in those days, range wars and cattle rustling and general mayhem were rife in De Soto County, and gunmen and bushwhackers from the West found steady work. It is also true that Watson turned up at Chokoloskee Bay not long thereafter with enough money to buy a schooner, despite his alleged recompense to the Bass family. Considering that he was penniless when sent to the penitentiary and had no known employment after his escape, it is difficult to imagine where that money came from
.

In his first years in southwest Florida, while establishing his plantation at Chatham Bend, Watson assaulted Adolphus Santini of Chokoloskee in an altercation in a Key West auction house, and this knife attack, which did not prove fatal, was also taken care of with a money settlement considered very substantial for that period. Again, our subject's source of funds, after long years as a fugitive remains unexplained. One cannot dismiss the possibility that from the time of his prison escape in Arkansas until the time he took refuge in the Ten Thousand Islands, E. J. Watson made his living as an outlaw
.

Until his final summer on the Bend, when he was twenty, Lucius Watson had never perceived his father as other than a bold choleric man, abounding in energy and generosity, good humor and intelligence, more instinctive with crops and farm animals, work boats and tools, than any other man in all the Islands. Even today he felt haunted and constrained by that powerful human being he called Papa, the doomed man he had seen for the last time in September of 1910, waving somberly from the riverbank at Chatham Bend. But as his biographer, he understood that his task must be to set aside love and admiration and reconstitute a more objective figure, much as a paleontologist might re-create some ancient creature from scattered shards of bone, pieced together on a rickety armature of theory. Mistrusting the warp of his own memory, he hoped to collect the more critical fragments of the “truth” from the common ground in the testimonies of his subject's friends and enemies, retaining those which seemed consistent with the few known facts.

In the popular accounts (and there were very few others), the material was largely speculative as well as sparse. Most stories about Edgar Watson related to his last decade in southwest Florida, with which Lucius himself was already familiar. There was virtually no mention of South Carolina, where Papa had spent his boyhood and early youth, nor even of north Florida, where he would live well into early manhood, marry all three of his wives, and spend almost half of his entire life.

To judge from his own correspondence with the last Watsons in Clouds Creek, his father's branch of that large Carolina clan was all but forgotten now in Edgefield County. As for Fort White, the Collins cousins went knife-mouthed at the very mention of Uncle Edgar, and tracking down the last few scattered elders who might still hoard a few poor scraps of information was a poor alternative, since in Papa's day, these hinterlands had been little more than frontier wilderness, with meager literacy and without the libraries and public records already available in less benighted regions. As in southwest Florida, much local lore, with its blood and grit and smells, had simply vanished.

The biographer's difficulties were made worse by the immense false record—“the Watson myth”—and also by the failure to correct that record on the part of the subject's family and descendants, whose reluctance to come to his defense by testifying to the positive aspects of his character was surely one reason why his evil reputation had been so exaggerated. In the absence of family affirmation of that warmth and generosity for which E. J. Watson had been noted even among those who killed him, he had evolved into a kind of mythic monster. Yet as Lucius's mother had observed not long before her death, “Your father scares them, not because he is a monster, but because he is a man.”

Long, long ago down the browning decades, in the sun of the old century in Carolina, walked a toddling child, a wary boy, a strong young male of muscle, blood, and brain who saw and smelled and laughed and listened, touched and tasted, ate and bred, and occupied earthly time and space with his getting and spending in the world. If his biographer could recover a true sense of his past, with its hope and longings, others might better understand who that grown man might have been who had known too much of privation, rage, and suffering, and had been destroyed.

Driving north to Columbia County, Arbie Collins picked through Lucius's research notes, fuming crossly over certain phrases. Flicking the pages with a nicotined fingernail as yellow as a rat tooth, he coughed and rolled his eyes and whistled in derision, all to no avail, since Lucius ignored his provocations, scanning the citrus and broad cattle country as they drove along.

“ ‘We cannot make an innocent man out of a guilty one!' ” Arbie declaimed, slapping Lucius's notes down on his kneecaps. “Well, you're sure trying! ‘E. J. Watson was known from Tampa to Key West as the finest farmer who ever lived in the Ten Thousand Islands'—
that's
what he is known for?!” Moments later, he burst out, “You're saving that house as a state monument to Pioneer Ed?” He was actually yelling. “All that house has
ever been is a monument to dark and bloody deeds! As for the so-called Watson family which is supposed to help out on this land claim, some of them don't know they're Watsons and the others don't admit it, so who's going to help you?”

The old man hurled the notes onto the dashboard, and Lucius swerved the old car onto the shoulder as a few pages wafted out the window. He jumped out and chased down his work as Arbie poked his head out, yelling after him, “You're twisting the evidence to make it look like your father never hurt a fly! Well, take it from me, the man was a killer!”

Out of breath, Lucius got back into the cab. “Don't toss my work around like that, all right?”

“I know what I'm talking about! You don't! Have you ever
seen
anyone killed? It's not pretty, goddammit! It's terrible and scary! And once you've seen it—and heard it, yes, and
smelled
it!—it's not so easy to make some kind of a romantic hero of the killer, I can tell you that!”

The old man turned away from him, taking refuge in some loose pages of notes on Lucius's conversations with the attorney. “Watson Dyer!” he said, disgusted. “Jesus H. Christ!” He looked up. “I know how much you loved your father, Lucius, and I sure am sorry, but there's no way you can write your way around the man he was!”

Before their departure for Columbia County, Attorney Dyer had telephoned to say that court hearings on the Watson claim had been scheduled for the following week at Homestead. He also mentioned, not quite casually, that one of his “major accounts” was United Sugar, a huge agricultural conglomerate near Lake Okeechobee, and that this company had recently discovered that the first cane ever planted in the Okeechobee region had apparently come from a hardy strain developed originally on Chatham River by Mr. E. J. Watson.

“I guess they ‘discovered' that in my
History
—”

“They
discovered
this fact,” said Watson Dyer, who was not to be interrupted when speaking judiciously, “in
A History of Southwest Florida
, by L. Watson Collins.”

Nettled, Lucius had to wonder if Dyer himself had not pointed the sugar people to the reference. He had already told him that during World War I, his friend Rob Storter and Rob's brother-in-law Harry McGill had grubbed out a mess of cuttings from old cane on Chatham Bend and run a boatload up the Calusa Hatchee to Lake Okeechobee and across to Moore Haven, where Big Sugar, as the industry became known, would have an auspicious start a few years later. Thus it seemed likely, he told Dyer, that the strain developed by
E. J. Watson had provided the seed cane for all those green square miles at Okeechobee—

“That's what your history claims, all right,” Dyer interrupted. And if this claim was true, United Sugar stood ready to help in the promotion of the Watson Place as a state monument.

Lucius's pleasure in this news was tainted almost immediately by misgivings. When the Hurricane of '26 had broken down the Okeechobee dikes and drowned over a hundred souls around Moore Haven, church voices had been raised on high to blame the devastation on the curse of “Emperor” Watson, whose cane was doubtless “steeped in human blood.” Even today, there were people who would say (and Lucius considered this out loud when Dyer remained silent) that cane plantations were accursed—no blessing but an abomination, notorious for the dreadful living conditions and misery of their field workers and the cause of widespread chemical pollution. To help Big Sugar grow ever more obese, no matter the cost to common citizens, the federal government was abetting the state in its rampant draining of the Glades, including the construction of immense canals to shunt away into the sea the pristine water that had formerly spread south through the peninsula from the Kissimmee River and Lake Okeechobee—