the swamp the everglades florida and the politics of paradise

Over the next seventy five years, developers and government agencies spent many millions of dollars failing to drain the swamp and unable to tame the Everglades. After the Civil War the government didn’t feel it politically expedient to lose soldiers and militia in the swamp and left the Seminoles alone. Eventually the Seminoles were reduced to a few hundred individuals. Over the course of decades, the Everglades and its quagmire would provide vital protection for the Seminoles against the genocidal actions of Andrew Jackson, Winfield Scott and the U.S. Since the Seminoles were former Creek Indians and often had slaves of their own, it was a strange dynamic. Initially the purchase for five million dollars was to counter efforts by slaves to escape to sanctuary south of the border and to prevent Seminoles from raiding towns and plantations along the border. We learn about the three Seminole wars that occurred after the United States purchased Florida in 1819. When Florida was sold to the British in 1763, the Calusa had by that time nearly died out due to European diseases. For the next two hundred and fifty years, the Calusa with their base in the Everglades held off incursions by the Spaniards who had effectively given up on the conquest. The first south Florida invader, Ponce de Leon, in 1521, was killed by the Calusa. We learn about the Calusa Indians and their ancestors who thrived in the Everglades for thousands of years. We also learn that the Everglades terrain is sloped so gradually that it can take weeks for water to flow the length of the Everglades. We learn that the Everglades is very young geologically, rising out of the sea a few feet when the interglacial melt occurred 100,000 years ago.

In 2006, Michael Grunwald wrote this four hundred page history called The Swamp: Everglades, Florida, and the Politics of Paradise. It is a river of grass.' Marjory Stoneman Douglas, The Everglades: River of Grass, 1947 The miracle of the light pours over the green and brown expanse of saw grass and of water, shining and slow-moving below, the grass and water that is the meaning and the central fact of the Everglades of Florida. They are unique also in the simplicity, the diversity, the related harmony of the forms of life they enclose. Nothing anywhere else is like them their vast glittering openness, wider than the enormous visible round of the horizon, the racing free saltness and sweetness of the their massive winds, under the dazzling blue heights of space. They are, they have always been, one of the unique regions of the earth, remote, never wholly known.

'There are no other Everglades in the world.

The swamp the everglades florida and the politics of paradise