FORT MYERS, OCTOBER 27, 1910. Thomas A. Edison, the famous electrician, telegraphed on Tuesday to know the depth of the water on the Caloosahatchee-
Mrs. Watson and children arrive from down coast today…
HOAD STORTER
Later years, Old Man Willie Brown would tell how he tried to stop them men that day, tried to see Justice Storter about what to do, get a warrant for Mister Watson's arrest. But Willie's boat was still at Smallwood's landing after the shooting, right there alongside of the Brave, so I don't know if he recollects things right or not.
My uncle George Washington Storter Junior was justice of the peace for the Chokoloskee Bay country, closest thing to law we had in them days. But Uncle George was in Fort Myers, summoned to jury duty, him and C.G. McKinney both. They was the two most solid citizens on Chokoloskee Bay, I guess, along with Smallwood. They was there in the courthouse when Sheriff Tippins brought them men from Chokoloskee for a hearing and ended up deputizing 'em instead. Appointed deputies to arrest a man that was already stone-cold dead by their own hand, stretched out in the bloody sand on Rabbit Key.
Before he deputized 'em, Sheriff Tippins took some depositions on the death, and the court clerk who wrote all of it down was Eddie Watson. After their mother died, back in 1901, Eddie and Lucius had lived awhile with their sister, Mrs. Langford, but pretty soon Young Ed went to live with his daddy in north Florida, never came back again until 1909. Walter Langford and Tippins was good friends-Tippins named his second son Walter Tippins-and Tippins seen to it that Eddie Watson got a job down at the court when he come back.
Well, Uncle George never got over seeing Eddie Watson on that day. Uncle George's own children done their schooling at Fort Myers, and he knew them older Watson children pretty good and liked 'em fine. That day in court, Uncle George told us, young Eddie Watson looked like he'd been bent by lightning. Never cracked during the hearing, but he never got unbended neither. Done his duty in life as a husband and provider, he was a ardent churchgoer, always up in a front pew where it was hard to miss him. He run a nice insurance business, slapped a back or two, and told some jokes. But there was something stiffened up in Eddie Watson, like a tree dead at the heart, like if he fell down he might split in two.
James Hamiltons and Henry Thompson and their families left Lost Man's River for good, and so did almost everybody else. Their houses were all swept away and their gardens spoiled by four foot of salt water. They had to make a fresh start somewheres else, cause that storm left nothing they could work with. So there was a lot of Islanders in Chokoloskee by the time Mister Watson come back from the Bend.
Folks hung on in the Islands after bad hurricanes in 1873 and '94 and 1909, but that hurricane of 1910 cleaned 'em right out. In my opinion, Watson and Cox was a big part of it. Them dark mangrove walls closing out the world, with the empty Everglades to eastward where the sun rose, and that empty Gulf out to the west where the sun set, the silence and miskeeters and the loneliness, the heavy gray of land and sea during the rains, the knowing that all you hoed and built, so much hard work and discouragement for years and years, could be washed away by storm in a single night-put that together with the fear that any stranger glimpsed around some point of river might be the man who called himself John Smith, come to take your life. All that dread had wore 'em out, never mind the blood in them black rivers.
FRANK B. TIPPINS
When those men told how E.J. Watson died, I kept my boots spread and my arms folded on my chest. I didn't show them sympathy or comment, only grunted, so pretty quick the talk diminished into mutters.
Something was missing in the story, and I said so. Sheriff Jaycox took the hint and whistled and sucked his teeth in official skepticism. Questioning their word made them draw together and fall still, like quail. Their faces closed. They had told their story, and the sheriffs could take it or the sheriffs could leave it, because no man there was going to change a word.
Well, boys, the law's the law, Jaycox informed them, and they had took that law in their own hands where it don't belong. Never mind if Mister Watson had it coming or he didn't, there was murder done here on the shores of Monroe County, Sheriff Jaycox said. Begging your pardon, Sheriff, I said, this here is Lee County, ever since 19 and 02, when they checked the survey. Mister Ed Watson was massacred in Lee County, Florida, and the Lee County sheriff could not just walk away, forget about it. Besides, the deceased had folks back in Fort Myers, and fine upstanding folks at that.
"Well, we ain't so particular which county," Charlie Boggess said. "What we been looking for is law. Ain't none showed up." Charlie T. Boggess was Ted Smallwood's sidekick and some way kin to my own clan up around Arcadia, and so felt entitled to speak his mind. But when I took a pad out of my pocket, Charlie T. thought better of his attitude, explaining that while he himself, having been crippled in the storm, had took no part, he could not find it in his heart to blame his neighbors for what they had to perpetrate in self-defense.
"That so?" I said.
"That's the way I look at it," Charlie T. concluded modestly, and everybody nodded, all but Smallwood, who harumphed and put his hands behind his back, as if encouraging us lawmen to get cracking and lay down some law.
All well and good, I told them, moving cautiously, but still and all I had to take those men responsible back to Fort Myers, procure some depositions in the case for a grand jury hearing. That put a scare in them, and certain men wanted the postmaster to come along to explain their situation, even though he disapproved of what they did.
Smallwood had an awful mess to clean up at his store, but after he had thought a minute he agreed to go. "All right, Bill?" he asked his brother-in-law.
"Up to you," said W.W. House, who was short-spoken that day with almost everybody.
At Chatham Bend we found no sign of Leslie Cox, nor the dead squaw-that's where all the trouble started, went the story. The men decided her own people "must of cut her down and took her home," but how did the Indians know that she was dead? Had the nigra lied about Cox and that squaw, and if so, why? And if he lied about the Indian, what else did he lie about?
We took aboard four thousand gallons of syrup for safekeeping. Mister Watson's old horse wore no halter and ran wild around the thirty-acre canefield, the men wasted half an afternoon trying to catch him. For all I know, that wild-eyed thing is running down there yet.
At Chokoloskee, on the way back north, we took the witnesses aboard. Mr. D.D. House was the only one who had a suitcase. He stood apart, hands on his hips, close to the boiling point. Bill House announced in no uncertain terms that it wasn't right to drag his dad off like a criminal when he had been known for honesty throughout his life. If his father could be left behind, and his young brothers, too, he would speak up "good enough for all of 'em." Young Dan and Lloyd were all slicked up, with shoes on, set to go, but D.D. House turned and marched them home, never said good-bye, never looked back, never said one word.
The widow and her children were all packed and ready. There hadn't been a drop of rain, and a dark place by the shore where the body laid upset her when she came down to the landing. Seeing the men on the Falcon's deck, she grabbed her children, started in to trembling, then fled back to the house. One man yelled after her, You can claim the body if you find the rope! Bill House told him to shut up. Rope? I said. Some men looked down. I went over to the store.