Guest post by Barry Ramey
Every great hero story starts with a world that seems impossible to conquer. America had one, at the bottom of Florida, and the people who conquered it are still there.
Some of the greatest American stories were never written in textbooks. They were lived by ordinary people in hard places and passed down at kitchen tables, on boat docks and behind store counters.
At a time when our history is too often forgotten, or taught as something to be ashamed of, Chokoloskee is a reminder of who we are: a true story of grit, faith, family and freedom, and American history worth being proud of.
Read the story below, then watch the full documentary at the end of this article.
Prologue: the land that said no
Heat that presses down like a hand, clouds of mosquitoes, alligators and crocodiles in the same black water, mangroves so dense a man could get lost a stone’s throw from his boat, and hurricanes that can wipe out a year’s work in a night.
That is the Ten Thousand Islands, where the Everglades meet the Gulf of Mexico. In the 1800s no road reached it and no sheriff patrolled it.
A handful of American families went anyway. This is their origin story, the story of Ted Smallwood, one of the men who led the way, told by the descendants who still live there.
A mangrove creek in the Ten Thousand Islands, the wilderness the pioneers set out to tame.
The ancient ground
Thousands of years before any settler arrived, the Calusa ruled this coast. They lived on oysters, clams and fish, and over more than 2,000 years they piled the shells into islands.
Dozens of these mounds still rise from the Ten Thousand Islands, and the biggest is Chokoloskee itself. We waded through chest-high grass to the top of one and found solid, dry ground in a world of water, with a gopher tortoise watching from the leaf litter.
Pushing through the hardwood hammock on top of a Calusa shell mound.
The call
The first family settled Chokoloskee in 1874. Some came chasing a living nobody else wanted; more than a few were running from trouble in other states. There was no law but what the settlers made themselves: the Wild West, in saltwater and mangrove.
Into that world came Ted Smallwood. As a boy, the family story goes, he ran away from a stepmother he couldn’t get along with and found work on the boats, including carrying the mail by sailboat along this coast for a dollar a day.
His descendant Corey McMillan says Ted called it the worst job he ever had. Passing through Chokoloskee, Ted met the woman he would marry and settled on the island in 1897.
Unlike the squatters before him, Ted bought the island outright around 1900, first in partnership with an earlier settler named Santini, and had it surveyed and legally deeded.
He grew tomatoes on the shell soil and shipped them by schooner to Key West and on to New York. “Where there was a will, there was a way,” says his granddaughter, Lyn Smallwood McMillan. That deed mattered: decades later, when the government took the land around the islands for the national park, it couldn’t take Chokoloskee.
The trials
The swamp tested the pioneers every day with hurricanes, heat, insects, snakes and gators, and every sack of flour came by boat. They painted their screens with turpentine against the sand flies and burned sulfur to drive off the mosquitoes. “The people had to grow, catch or kill everything they ate,” says Kent Daniels, whose family has been here about ten generations. With no telephones, the women talked across the island in whistles and hollers, each family with its own call.
The stronghold
In 1906 Ted became the island’s postmaster and began trading out of his farmhouse, and in 1917 he built his store on the water. It was the general store, post office, pharmacy and gathering place, “your original one-stop shopping,” Lyn says, and the island’s only link to the outside world. Seminole and Miccosukee families poled their dugouts in from the Everglades to trade hides and furs.
Lyn Smallwood McMillan, Ted Smallwood’s granddaughter, tells the family’s story among the store’s original shelves.
Here Ted showed what kind of hero he was. He spoke the tribes’ language and paid a fair price, and they came from as far as the east coast because they trusted him. When moonshine sellers came to prey on the Seminoles’ silver dollars, Lyn says, Ted made a rule: anyone drinking on his property had to lock their money in his “Indian bank” and leave their weapons behind the counter. “The next morning,” she says, “nobody was shot and nobody was bleeding.”
The store was later raised onto pilings, after the 1926 hurricane by local accounts, and its Dade County pine frame has outlasted every storm since. It stayed open until 1982, and Lyn reopened it as a museum in 1989, more than 90 percent original. “It is an exhibit in itself,” she says.
The nemesis
Every hero story has a villain, and Chokoloskee’s was real. Ed Watson arrived already rumored to have killed the outlaw Belle Starr out West. He became one of the most successful farmers on the coast, growing sugar cane on Chatham Bend, and built the biggest house south of Fort Myers with the mangroves at his back. He came to the store always armed, always with his back to the wall. He cut Santini’s throat in a fight in Key West; Santini survived, sold his half of the island to Ted, and left. Over the years, men who worked Watson’s fields had a way of disappearing.
In October 1910 the community had had enough. When Watson came ashore at the landing beside Smallwood’s store, island men were waiting. He raised his shotgun first, but the shells were wet and it misfired. The men returned fire, and the most feared man in the islands died beside the store’s door. With no courthouse for a hundred miles, the frontier made its own stand for law and order. The novelist Peter Matthiessen later retold the story in Killing Mister Watson.
A placard in the Smallwood Store: “Mamie Smallwood sold Mr. Watson damp paper shotgun shells.”
The world changes
In the 1920s Barron Collier turned the settlement across the bay into Everglades City, the seat of the new Collier County, and its Rod and Gun Club drew wealthy sportsmen from around the world. The club still keeps its old character, down to the cash-only policy. But Everglades City came later. Chokoloskee’s pioneers made it possible.
The darkest hour, and the comeback
Every hero’s journey has a moment when all seems lost. For the island families, it came from Washington. They had lived by commercial fishing for generations, and when Everglades National Park was created in 1947, they understood they’d been promised in writing that they could keep working the water.
Then the rules closed in, until the Park Service banned commercial fishing in the park in the mid-1980s. Corey’s father helped found Organized Fishermen of Florida and fought it in federal court. “It was like a treaty that was with the Indians,” Corey says. “It was good when it was written.”
“It killed the city,” Kent says. Families could leave the land their great-grandparents had fought for, or find another way to survive on it. They knew every channel in the Ten Thousand Islands by heart, a maze no outsider could run, and they had used it before, running rum during Prohibition.
Through the 1970s and ’80s, men who had run mullet nets were running bales of Colombian marijuana, and the area became one of the country’s biggest smuggling hubs.
One trip paid a year’s wages, “handed to you in a brown paper sack,” Corey says. Most families, Kent’s included, were forced into it to feed their kids, and some got greedy.
We rode the old smuggling route ourselves, a narrow, tea-colored creek under the mangroves where locals slipped past rangers watching the main passes.
It was illegal, and the islanders don’t pretend otherwise. But it had a code. “We didn’t get into a bunch of hard stuff,” says Captain Steve Markley. Anything harder found in a bale, like quaaludes, went overboard. “We never carried firearms.” And the money kept the community alive.
Kent says it paid for the town park, the fire department, a community center and a skating rink, and churches quietly made sure every child had school clothes and a Christmas. “Did we get greedy? Yeah,” Kent says. “But did it help the community? Yes sir, it did.”
The reckoning came before dawn on July 7, 1983, when federal agents swept into Everglades City. Operation Everglades eventually brought about 250 arrests and indictments, nearly 80 percent of the town’s adult men. Captain Steve was arrested four times, and families broke apart. “If I could do it over again,” he says, “I wouldn’t.”
But heroes get back up. The men served their time, came home to the same water, and built legitimate lives in stone crabbing, fishing, guiding and boat tours. “They all have legit businesses,” Corey says. “They’re all still here.” The fight to stay was never about fish or money. It was about home, and they won it.
Stone crab traps stacked high in Everglades City, where the island families went back to the water.
The heirs
Heroism ran in the family. Lyn says her father had three ships shot out from under him in World War II, the last at Normandy, where he carried as many wounded men ashore as he could, then gave his new shoes to the next man.
Ted’s store survives because his family wouldn’t let it go. His daughter ran the post office there until 1973, and Lyn now tells his story among the same shelves he stocked.
Out on the water, Corey, a seventh-generation local, runs the store’s boat tours. “It’s kind of a dream job,” he jokes, “just to ride around a boat all day, tell lies, and at least you’re not getting tracked by the Coast Guard.”
He took us through the mangroves to the graves of the Daniels family, original settlers whose descendants still live on Chokoloskee.
Along the way a crocodile watched from the mangrove edge and dolphins rode our wake. The old families are woven together: Captain Steve’s grandmother and Kent’s were sisters. “We’re a dying breed,” Steve says.
The legacy
Across America, pioneer history lives behind glass. On Chokoloskee it’s still open for business, and the families who refused to be beaten by the hardest country in America are still here.
That’s the pioneer’s real superpower: the will to stay, to build and to pass something on. “You adapt or you don’t survive,” Lyn says. And Kent, who left school in sixth grade and learned his history from the old-timers, has a message for any kid taught to be ashamed of this country: “Learn your history, but never be ashamed of it.”
As the sun goes down over the Ten Thousand Islands, the water turns to glass and the mangroves go black against a burning sky. It probably looked just like this to Ted Smallwood the first evening he stood on an island of shells and decided this was home.
Now watch the full documentary and see this story told by the people who lived it.
About the film: a Gateway Pundit exclusive documentary, hosted by Barry Ramey. It was made possible by three Virginia organizations that wanted this piece of American heritage told: AwesomeOysters.com, the Northern Neck Patriot Group, and the Northern Neck Sentinel, an independently owned local newspaper based in Virginia.
Plan your visit: For a true Florida experience, go with the locals:
Historic Smallwood Store & Museum, Chokoloskee, 239-695-2989
Captain Steve’s Swamp Buggy Adventures, Big Cypress, 239-695-2186
Everglades Rod & Gun Club, Everglades City, 239-695-2101
River Wilderness Waterfront Cabins, Everglades City, 239-695-4499
The post The Last Frontier: The American Pioneers Who Tamed Florida’s Wildest Corner and Never Gave It Back (VIDEO DOCUMENTARY) appeared first on The Gateway Pundit.
