Untamed: The Wildest Woman in America and the Fight for Cumberland Island (8 page)

Homer Moore’s strings were firmly attached to Hurst, and he was a shoo-in until Jimmy Carter decided to challenge him. Hurst was irate. Nobody dared challenge one of Hurst’s minions, especially a south Georgia boy on Hurst’s home turf. On election day, Hurst destroyed registration rolls, removed voter booths, instructed voters to strike Carter’s name from the ballot, and stuffed the box with up to eight votes at a time, often folded together.

When Carter visited the polling site and witnessed Hurst’s fraud, he immediately called the local newspaper in Columbus, Georgia. They sent a reporter who was already chummy with Hurst and had no intentions of writing a story about election improprieties.

Carter demanded a recount but was ignored. He traveled to the state capitol to ask for help but made little headway. Exasperated, he reached out again to the media, but no one was concerned about voting irregularities in a rural corner of the state—except John Pennington.

When Pennington arrived, just a few days after Homer Moore had been declared the winner, he discovered that there had been more votes cast than actual voters in the district. Dead people and prisoners had cast ballots in alphabetical order. Voter rolls and stubs were missing. Pennington found 102 votes that had all been cast for Moore neatly rolled in a rubber band. The ballot box itself had a gaping five-inch hole in the top that made it easy to remove ballots, and numerous witnesses attested to the fraud, saying that Hurst and his poll managers told voters who to vote for.

Pennington’s exposé brought national attention to south Georgia politics. As a result of Pennington’s stories, a superior court judge ordered a new election, and Carter won by a landslide. In 1962, he was sworn in to his first elected office as state senator. Ten years later, Carter became governor of Georgia.

“John Pennington probably saved my political career,” Jimmy Carter told Carol.

On an April morning in 1973, Carol and Jimmy climbed into a canoe on the Chattahoochee River, just below the perimeter bridge where Carol used to catch crawfish. They paddled over rocky ledges and haystacks of rowdy, curling water.

Unlike the tense guard trailing them with an automatic weapon and scuba equipment strapped to his chest, Jimmy was perfectly at ease in the canoe. He was lean and athletic, in his forties, with a shock of wind-tossed sandy hair. A lifelong fisherman, he had spent his childhood reeling in redbellies and jack on tributaries of the Chattahoochee River in south Georgia. Carol hoped that Jimmy would cherish the Atlanta stretch of the Chattahoochee as much as his home waters downstream.

“He was such a laid-back, cool guy,” Carol said. “I didn’t have to try to convince him. He was already on board.”

A few miles downriver, the bluffs rose steeply, casting wide shadows across the river. They banked their canoes and climbed up to an old Cherokee cave about one hundred feet above the river.

“Who owns this place?” Jimmy asked.

“A bank director. And he hasn’t even slept here,” said Carol.

“Have you slept here, Carol?” he asked.

“Many times. With a dog named Catfish.”

They hiked back down to their canoes and paddled another mile downriver before landing beside an iron bridge, in a clear, cold eddy where Carol used to wash her hair. They stood beside the water in comfortable silence. Turtles basked on sun-warmed boulders. A blue heron stabbed its bayonet bill at minnows in the shoals.

“The river is great,” Jimmy said. “I hope we can keep it this way.”

A few months later, Governor Jimmy Carter signed the Metropolitan River Protection Act of 1973, which laid the groundwork for safeguarding the Chattahoochee River corridor as a national park unit. The proposed Chattahoochee National Recreation Area stalled under President Nixon but, a few years later, President Jimmy Carter signed the bill into law himself. Carol’s cave, the ancient bluffs, and forty-eight miles of river were permanently protected.

Also in 1973, John McPhee published “Travels in Georgia” in
The New Yorker
, highlighting Carol’s roadkill adventures. Overnight, Carol became a national celebrity, and D.O.R. became a ubiquitous acronym.

Mademoiselle
magazine named Carol Ruckdeschel one of its Women of the Year in 1974, along with Barbra Streisand, Wilma Rudolph, and Audrey Hepburn. She was invited to attend
Mademoiselle’s
Women of the Year banquet in New York City but decided not to go.

“I would have been miserable trying to act what they call civilized and breathing all that smoke and pollution,” she said. “Besides, they probably just wanted to look at that freak from Georgia that eats roadkill.”

At the height of her popularity, Carol fled the limelight. She didn’t want cameras and noise. She sought a quiet life immersed in nature.

She was still living in a run-down house in suburban Atlanta, crammed with injured animals, aquariums, and posters of scenic landscapes. It was a cheap imitation of the natural life she had imagined for herself. Returning to her cave beside the river with Jimmy Carter had reminded her of the promise she had made years earlier to live wild and free.

“The highest and best thing I can do is to find a place and know it as deeply and intimately as I know myself,” she wrote in her journal.

Where was that place? She had explored the wildest pockets of Georgia, waded through its wetlands, climbed its highest peaks, paddled its thundering whitewater, and bushwhacked through its old-growth forests. But one place had stayed with her. She couldn’t resist its gravitational pull. Like water tumbling headlong toward the ocean, Carol felt herself tugged downstream to the source of her wild longings from years before: Cumberland Island.

“I’ve gotta get out of the city. It’s grinding me down,” she told Sam Candler on their last trip together.

“Where will you go?”

“I don’t know yet. Maybe the mountains. Maybe the coast.”

“Can you buy some land?”

“Can’t afford it.”

“You mean
Mademoiselle
doesn’t pay its Women of the Year?”

“
Mademoiselle
didn’t even give me a free subscription.”

Sam scratched his salt-and-pepper beard. “My family needs a caretaker to look after our property on Cumberland Island,” he told her. “I don’t know if it’s what you’re looking for. It pays even worse than the state. You’d be cleaning toilets and washing dishes.”

“When do I start?”

part two

turtle island

7

Carol wiggled her toes in the warm sand. She was thirty-two and finally back on Cumberland, the largest barrier island in the East—a wild tangle of marsh, forest, and seashore. It felt like coming home. She stood atop the wild dunes at dawn, watching the shining sea lift and fall beyond the breakers. The sun’s first embers warmed the horizon. Sand blew in loose swirls over the beach. The wind drizzled through the deep forest behind the dunes, suffusing its wet, green, animalic musk.

Carol wasn’t the first feisty female to set foot on Cumberland Island. Women have dominated Cumberland ever since its first inhabitants settled here thirteen thousand years ago. Island women were powerful even among the native Timucuan people, whose society was matrilineal: relatives were traced through the mother’s family, and women held important positions in their clan and community.

The Timucuan natives were as beautiful as their island. They stood six and a half feet tall, with copper skin and slate-black hair, and were decorated head-to-toe with jewelry and tattoos. Women’s hair flowed down their backs, and they wore rawhide bikini bottoms with Spanish moss sashes that draped from shoulder to hip.

The Timucuans built their main tribal village near the present-day Dungeness dock and lived peacefully on the island for centuries, gathering nuts and berries from the forest and shellfish from the marshes. Their hunting ceremonies often involved imbibing large quantities of the “black drink,” made from roasting the dark dried leaves of the island’s yaupon holly. Small doses of the highly caffeinated tea provided a stimulating pick-me-up, but big batches of the bitter drink induced sweating and vomiting (its scientific species name today is
vomitoria
), which purged any physical or spiritual pollutants from the drinkers.

Much more palatable was the root beer brewed from abundant sassafras trees on the island. The sweet brew was so enjoyed by the
Timucuans
that one of the island’s alternate names was
missoe
, meaning “sassafras.” The drink became both a blessing and a curse. When the Europeans arrived on the island in the sixteenth century, they began logging and shipping the sassafras back to Europe, where it commanded a high price as a healing tonic beverage called root beer.

In 1567, the first three Spanish missionaries to arrive were killed by the Timucuans. Eventually, the Spanish subdued the island. They also brought deadly diseases—smallpox, measles, syphilis, and influenza—that decimated the native people. Less than a decade after the Spanish arrived, the Timucuans were almost completely wiped out.

The few remaining Timucuan survivors converted to Christianity and became loyal subjects of the Spanish missions. When mainland Guale Indians revolted against the Spanish in 1597, the Timucuans sided with the Spanish and helped defeat the Guale. One of the Timucuan leaders in the battle was a female chieftain, Dona Maria Melendez. The first of many fearless women to rule the island, Dona Maria was named princess of the island for her strength and courage.

In the 1700s, the British and Spanish fought for control of the island. British general James Oglethorpe built two forts on either end of the island to defend against the mighty Spanish navy prowling the seas.

Oglethorpe befriended the Indians living along the coastal islands, among them a young boy named Toonahowi. Oglethorpe took him to England to show the royal court some of America’s dark-skinned natives. During that trip, Toonahowi made friends with a teenage duke who ruled Cumberland, a scenic coastal county in northwest England. The two adolescent boys—the dark-eyed, black-haired child of the wilderness and the fair-headed, blue-eyed child of wealth—became such close friends that Toonahowi later asked the general to name the largest island back home in honor of his noble teenage pal, the duke of Cumberland. Oglethorpe obliged.

Oglethorpe secured Cumberland Island and the Georgia coast in the decisive Battle of Bloody Marsh in 1742, which occurred just north of Cumberland. Oglethorpe’s outnumbered, ragtag British soldiers—most of them former prisoners and ex-convicts—prevailed over the more heavily armed Spanish. Cumberland and the Golden Isles belonged to England.

Cumberland Island’s forts were deserted soon after the war, and for the next few decades the island became a refuge for pirates, criminals, and castaways. Then in 1765, Oglethorpe returned to build a hunting lodge on a scenic bluff overlooking the island’s south end marshes. He named it Dungeness, after a castle in England. Oglethorpe’s rustic hunting cabin was hardly a castle, but over the next century two of the island’s leading ladies would build the country’s most magnificent mansions on that very spot.

The first of them was Catharine “Caty” Littlefield, a petite New England debutante with ink-black hair, porcelain skin, and chocolate-brown eyes, who wore fashions that accentuated her ample bosom. Men swooned over her, smitten by her beauty, swayed by her elegance, stunned by her boldness.

It was a soldier who won her hand in 1773. Nathanael Greene married eighteen-year-old Caty, just before the colonies began their fight for independence. Though Greene was raised as a pacifist Quaker, he joined the revolution, enlisting as a militia private, the lowest station in the Continental Army. Despite not having any military experience, he quickly climbed the ranks and became George Washington’s second-in-command. Washington appointed him to lead the Revolutionary War’s southern campaign.

Caty Greene, pregnant with their first son, accompanied her husband in bedraggled military camps close to the front lines. With the government unable to pay for basic troop supplies, Greene personally accrued tremendous debts in order to feed, clothe, and equip his ragged soldiers. Though Greene lost every single battle he fought, he masterfully weakened the more numerous British forces through long, elusive, and tiresome retreats. Greene’s ingenious tactics sapped the British of their strength and resolve even as they “won” every battle.

After the war ended, Caty was the belle of the military balls. Though she arrived on Nathanael’s arm, swashbuckling officers vied for her dance card. George Washington once danced for three hours with Caty without sitting down, while Martha Washington watched enviously. Provocative and promiscuous, Caty was intimate with the most influential men of her era. She broke the rules of proper colonial women by seeing herself as more than the wife of Nathanael Greene.

She and Nathanael moved to Georgia, and after several failed attempts at growing rice on his Savannah plantation, Nathanael decided to invest in timber property on Cumberland Island. He expected hefty profits from harvesting the island’s live oaks, which would help pay off his war debts. The dense, heavy live oaks from Cumberland Island were used to build the country’s first war ship,
Old Ironsides
, a wooden-hulled frigate so tough that British cannonballs literally bounced off it.

But things fell apart at home before Greene could fully pursue his Cumberland Island plans. His party-loving wife grew bored on the plantation. A New England debutante, Caty was accustomed to the swirling social balls and wanton eyes of handsome men at fancy festivities. She became entangled in an affair with another handsome war hero, General “Mad Anthony” Wayne, a longtime friend of Nathanael. Anthony and Caty rode horses together, and rumors swirled that Anthony made late-night visits to her manor. There were even whispers that Caty planned to murder her husband with a butcher knife and blame it on fugitive slaves.

When Nathanael caught wind of the affair, he prepared to go after his former army comrade. But Nathanael was already weakened, broken-hearted, and overworked, burdened by heavy debts while still trying to fund his wife’s lavish lifestyle.

“I tremble at my own situation, when I think of the enormous sums I owe,” Nathanael wrote in his journal. “One of the payments for Cumberland Island is due, and the parties press me for payment. I seem to be doomed to a life of slavery and anxiety.”

Before he could face off with Mad Anthony, Nathanael Greene collapsed of nervous strain, abetted by sunstroke, and died at age forty-four.

Almost immediately, men jockeyed to court Caty, and Mad Anthony was first in line. Caty flirted with several suitors, but she eventually settled on her children’s tutor, the Yale-educated, cultivated savant Phineas Miller. They wed in 1796, and soon after, they sold her Savannah estate and moved to Cumberland Island, where they planned to start a sea island cotton plantation.

Despite her inherited debts, Caty built her dream house on the south end of Cumberland in 1803. Slaves built the grandiose thirty-room mansion using tabby, a concrete made from oyster shells left behind by over 130 centuries of Indian meals. Caty’s Dungeness mansion was the largest tabby house ever constructed.

One of Phineas’s college buddies from Yale was Eli Whitney, who served as a tutor and handyman on the Dungeness estate for a few years. To help their struggling plantation, Caty asked Eli to come up with a machine that separated cotton seeds from lint.

Caty and Phineas were losing money growing cotton. The tedious, time-consuming task of removing the cotton seeds by hand made it far too costly. Eli went to work on a machine that duplicated the manual process. He watched the hand movements of the slaves cleaning cotton, and after a few months of tinkering in the Dungeness workshop, Eli presented a working model of his cotton engine (“gin”) to Caty, Phineas, and a few friends. He placed the machine on a mahogany table in the parlor of their mansion, dropped some fluffy cotton bolls in the hopper, and cranked the handle. Seeds came out on one side and clean white cotton fiber on the other. The audience was astonished.

But there was still a problem, Eli pointed out. After a few cranks, the machine’s teeth became clogged with cotton fibers.

“Why, Mr. Whitney, you want a comb,” Caty said, and handed him her hair brush.

“Madam, you have completed the cotton gin,” he said.

Word of Eli’s invention spread quickly. For the first time, cotton could be profitable for the South. In one hour, his machine could match the full day’s labor of fifty slaves cleaning cotton by hand. Plantation owners began planting vast fields of cotton, which, in a cruel irony, ultimately required even more slave labor.

Eli and Phineas quickly formed a company to mass produce the cotton gin. Until it was patented, he closely guarded his cotton gin from outsiders. However, shy Eli had a hard time saying no to the ladies. He allowed women to peek at his new invention. One afternoon, a clever young farmer named Edward Lyon dressed up as a woman and flirted with Eli in order to get a closer look. Soon after, Lyon came out with a rival machine, and others quickly followed.

Eli and Phineas filed sixty lawsuits to protect their cotton gin patent, but they were of little use. Several models of cotton gin beat Eli to market. Though he is synonymous with the cotton gin in history books, Eli Whitney made almost no money from his invention.

Phineas and Caty still had high hopes for their sea island cotton plantation on Cumberland. But Phineas would not live to see their plans come to fruition. In 1803, less than a year after Dungeness was built, Phineas pricked his finger on a thorn and died of lockjaw a week later at age thirty-nine.

For the next twenty years, Caty managed the island plantation. She established vast orchards and gardens that provided fresh fruits and vegetables. Slaves gathered shellfish from tidal creeks. Kitchen servants made gourmet soup from loggerhead sea turtles, which were flipped upside down on the beach and butchered. She continued hosting extravagant parties, even though she was drowning in debt.

When Caty died of bilious fever at age sixty, her daughter Louisa assumed the role of island mistress. Louisa singularly supervised the island estate for the next two decades. Like her mother, Louisa continued hosting grand galas. To celebrate the end of the War of 1812, Louisa threw a sumptuous soirée at Dungeness. During the festivities, British warships—unaware that a peace treaty had been signed a few weeks earlier—dropped anchor offshore of Cumberland and commandeered the mansion. They banished Louisa and her guests to the upper floors at gunpoint.

Yet even in war, romance triumphed. As the night wore on, the young ladies looked longingly down the banisters. Finally the British sent an invitation upstairs for the women to come down and join the officers. The men were held captive, while the island ladies danced all evening with English gentlemen in their gold-braided regimental garb. One dark-eyed belle, Ann Couper, caught the eye of British lieutenant John Fraser. The British eventually left the island and returned to England, but a year later Fraser came back and married his “pretty prisoner of Dungeness.”

Louisa received another unexpected visitor from a passing ship in 1818. While tending to her orange groves, Louisa got word that a feeble, frail Light Horse Harry Lee had arrived at the Dungeness dock. A Revolutionary War hero, Light Horse Harry had helped draft the Constitution. Years later, flat broke and dying of cancer, he was sailing north toward his home in Virginia when he asked to dock at Cumberland so he could “die in the arms of the daughter of my old friend and compatriot General Greene.”

Light Horse Harry was buried on Cumberland. Years later, his son, Confederate commander Robert E. Lee visited the island and solemnly placed a wreath on his father’s grave.

After Louisa died in 1831, most of her land was eventually sold to Robert Stafford, whose eight-thousand-acre sea island cotton plantation on Cumberland became one of the most productive in the world. More than 350 slaves tended the cotton fields, making Stafford one of the South’s largest slaveholders.