Lost Man's River (2 page)
Authors: Peter Matthiessen
2nd Wife (1884): Jane S. “Mandy” (Dyal) Watson, ca. 1864â1901
Carrie Watson Langford, b. Fort White, Fla., 1885â
Edward Elijah “Eddie” Watson, b. Fort White, Fla., 1887â
Lucius Hampton Watson, b. Oklahoma Territory, 1889â
3rd Wife (1904): Edna “Kate” (Bethea) Watson, 1889â
Ruth Ellen Watson/Burdett,
â
b. Fort White, Fla., 1905â
Addison Watson/Burdett,
â
b. Fort White, Fla., 1907â
Amy Watson/Burdett,
â
b. Key West, Fla., 1910â
Common-law Wife: Henrietta “Netta” Daniels, b. ca. 1875â?
Minnie Daniels, b. ca. 1895â?
Common-law Wife: Mary Josephine “Josie” Jenkins, b. ca. 1879â?
Pearl Watson, b. ca. 1900â
Infant male, name unknown, born May 1910. Perished in hurricane,
October 1910.
EJW's sister: Mary Lucretia “Minnie” Watson, b. Clouds Creek, S.C., 1857
Married William “Billy” Collins of Fort White, Fla., ca. 1880
Billy Collins died in 1907, Minnie in 1912 (both at Fort White).
The Collins children:
Julian Edgar, 1880â1938
William Henry “Willie,” b. ca. 1890â
Maria Antoinett “May,” b. ca. 1892â
Julian and Willie's “descendants”:
Ellen Collins
â
Hettie (Hawkins) Collins
â
April Collins
â
ALSO:
EJW's Great-Aunt Tabitha (Wyches) Watson, 3rd wife and widow of Artemas Watson's brother Michael; instrumental in marriage of Elijah D. Watson and Ellen Addison. Born 1813, S.C. Died at Fort White in 1905.
Her daughter Laura, childhood friend of Ellen Addison.
Married William Myers ca. 1867 (Myers died at Fort White in 1869).
Married Samuel Tolen ca. 1890. Died at Fort White in 1894.
*
Apparently he changed his second initial to
J
in later life, dating roughly from his return from Oklahoma, ca. 1893.
â
Not real name.
DEPOSITION OF BILL W. HOUSE
October 27, 1910
My name is William Warlick House, residing at Chokoloskee Island, in Lee County, Florida
.
On October 16, this was a Sunday, some fishermen came to Chokoloskee and told how a Negro had showed up at the clam shacks on Pavilion Key and reported three murders at the Watson Place and advised the men that Mr. E. J. Watson ordered his foreman to commit these killings. This foreman was a stranger in our country name of Leslie Cox. When Watson's friends and kinfolk in the crowd got hard with him, the Negro changed his story, saying Cox done it on his own, but the men concluded Watson was behind it
.
Ed Watson was at Chokoloskee when the story came in there about the murders, so Watson said he would fetch the Sheriff from Fort Myers. He swore that Cox had done him wrong, and not only him but them three people he had murdered. This was the eve of the Great Hurricane of October 17. He left in storm before the men got set to stop him, and we thought for sure we'd seen the last of him
.
Three days after the storm, Watson showed up again at Chokoloskee. The men advised he better stay right there until the Sheriff came, and Watson advised he didn't need no Sheriff, said he knew his business and aimed to take care of it his own way. He bought some shotgun shells in the Smallwood store, where my sister Mrs. Mamie H. Smallwood advised him how them shells was still wet from the hurricane
,
and Watson advised, “Never you mind, ma'am, them shells will kill a rattlesnake just fine.” He aimed to go home to Chatham River “and straighten Cox out before he got away”âthem were his very words. To show he meant business, he promised to return with Cox's head
.
Watson was red-eyed in his appearance, very wild, and nobody didn't care to interfere with him. So Watson headed south down Chokoloskee Bay. We stood on the landing at Smallwood's store and watched him go, we reckoned he'd keep right on going for Key West, we figured we'd seen the last of him for sure. But four days after that, October 24âlast Monday eveningâhe came back. We heard his motor a long way off to south'ard, and a crowd of men went down to the landing to arrest him. E. J. Watson seen them armed men waiting but he come on anyway, he was that kind
.
The hurricane had tore the dock away, weren't nothing left of her but pilings, so he run his launch aground west of the boat way and jumped ashore real quick and bold almost before that launch came to a stop. He had got himself set before one word was spoken, holding his shotgun down along his leg
.
Watson waited until all of us calmed down somewhat and got our breath. Then he told the men he had killed Cox as promised but the body had fell off his dock into the river and was lost. He showed us Cox's hat, showed us the bullet hole from his revolver. He put his middle finger through the hole and spun the hat on it and laughed. He was laughing at us so nobody laughed with him
.
My dad, Mr. D. D. House, was not the ringleader, never mind what some has said, but because no other man stepped forward, it was D. D. House who done the talking. I and my next two brothers, Dan Junior and Lloyd House, was in the crowd. I don't rightly recollect no other names. Mr. D. D. House reminded Watson that a head was promised and a hat weren't good enough. He said the men would have to go down there, look for the body. And he notified Watson that until Cox was found, or the Sheriff showed up, it might be best to hand over his weapons. An argument sprung up over that, then Watson swung his shotgun up to shoot D. D. House and would have done it only them wet shells misfired. The men opened up on him all in a roar, the bullets spun him all the way around, and some of 'em claim they seen the buckshot roll right out them double barrels as he fell
.
Watson's neighbors that had straggled in from the Lost Man's River country after the hurricane, them men stayed out of it, they stayed back up there by the store and watched. There wasn't a one of them raised a hand to stop it. Them fellers from Lost Man's never raised no sand about their friend Ed Watson till after he was dead, which was kind of late to start a argument
.
Some has been trying to point fingers, claiming us Chokoloskee men was laying for Watson, fixing to shoot him down no matter what. Or some has give hints that so-and-so panicked and fired the first shot, and that this man was the only one responsible. I don't rightly know who fired first, and they don't neither. I will only say
that Mr. Watson was not lynched nor murdered. We took his life in self-defense, and the whole bunch was in on it from start to finish
.
Ain't none of us was proud about what happened. We was shocked to see our neighbor laying there, face down in his mortal blood, with his young wife and little children not fifty yards away in the Smallwood store
.
Nobody having much to say, we went on home. Next morning we took the body out to Rabbit Key and buried it. By the time we got back to Chokoloskee, Sheriff Tippins had showed up lookin for Watson and was waiting on us there at Smallwood's landing. We was took in custody and brought north here to Fort Myers to give testimony
.
Transcribed and attested:
X
William W. House [his mark]
Witness: (signed) E. E. Watson, Dep. Ct. Clerk
Lee County Courthouse, Fort Myers, Florida
October 27, 1910
The Bill House deposition had arrived in the mail unaccompanied by note or return address (the postmark was Ochopee, Florida) in response to Lucius Watson's ad in the Fort Myers
News-Press
and also in the Lake City
Advertiser
in Columbia County, where his Collins cousins were still living.
Historian seeks reliable information for a biography of the late sugarcane planter E. J. Watson, 1855â1910
What had startled Lucius most about the deposition was his brother Eddie's signature as the deputy court clerk who had witnessed and transcribed Bill House's testimony. He had forgotten that. But as a researcher concerned with the substance of the documentâhe was preparing a biography of his late fatherâhe had found no significant new information beyond what could be inferred between its lines. On the other hand (as he noted in his journal, doing his best to maintain an objective tone), the document was critical as the one firsthand account of E. J. Watson's death that had come to light:
The Bill House testimony makes clear that the Chokoloskee men killed E. J. Watson despite the testimony of the unidentified “Negro” that the brutal slayings
two weeks previously at Chatham Bend had been committed not by Watson but by his foreman, Leslie Cox, a convicted murderer and fugitive from justice who had turned up a few months earlier at the Watson Place
.
According to this deposition, his neighbors shot E. J. Watson down in self-defense. Though this claim has been made for more than a half century by the participants, others in the community assert to the present day that at least some of those involved had planned the killing, justifying the lynching with the claim that otherwise Watson might evade justice, “as he had so often in the past.” Combinations of these theories have also been suggestedâfor example, that the crowd was at the breaking point of fear and exhaustion in the wake of the murders at Chatham Bend, then the Great Hurricane, and that even if Watson had not meant to harm them, he had made a desperate bluff with shotgun or revolver which was met by the nervous crowd with a barrage
.
The document leaves open another urgent questionâdid one man execute him with the first shot, and the others fire reflexively in the confusion? Though House denies this, the evident need to deny itâand a certain defensive toneâsuggests some missing circumstance behind the rumor. If there is truth in it, then who was this man who fired first? Whom was Bill House trying to protect?
The most critical question is whether or not Cox killed those people under the influence or direction of Mr. Watson, as “the Negro” first stated but subsequently denied. Another much debated question is whether or not Watson executed Cox (as he would claim) when he returned to Chatham Bend after the hurricane. If so, did he act in a spirit of justice or in retribution? Or did he do itâas some continue to maintainâto eliminate the only man who might testify against him, knowing that if he came to trial, the black man would be discounted as a witness?
In the climate of fear in the community, almost no one believed that Leslie Cox had been killed by E. J. Watson. For many years afterward, a dread persisted that Cox was still alive back in the rivers, ready to strike again. But if Watson did not kill Cox, then what became of him? With the passage of years it seems less and less likely that we shall learn the fate of that cold-blooded killer who appeared so suddenly and wreaked such havoc, then vanished into the backcountry of America. Somewhere in the hinterland, a man known in other days as Leslie Cox may still squint in the sun, and spit, and revile his fate
.
