BONE BY BONE. Peter Matthiessen. Random House. $26.95. 410 pp.
At the dawn of the 20th century, the wild frontier lands of Florida’s Ten Thousand Islands were ruled by an enigmatic legend sometimes called “Emperor Watson,” more often “Bloody Watson.”
His real name was Edgar Artemas Watson, and we can count ourselves lucky indeed that as talented a novelist as Peter Matthiessen became obsessed with this fearsome legend more than two decades ago. The result has been his Watson trilogy, now complete with the publication of Bone by Bone.
Legend had it that Watson killed as many as 50 people. One of them was said to have been the famed western outlaw queen, Belle Starr, ambushed in the Indian Nations where Watson had gone after he was implicated in a killing in North Florida. That same legend told us his successful career as a plantation owner and producer of sugar cane syrup owed much of its high profit to an unusual kind of downsizing. It was widely whispered that he drove his workers hard in his cane fields, then killed them at payday.
So much for the legend. Matthiessen’s concern lies with the man. Bone by Bone is basically a character study of a man whose intelligence and drive could have made him a major player in the development of southwest Florida.
Matthiessen’s trilogy began with the publication in 1990 of Killing Mr. Watson, followed seven years later by Lost Man’s River. In the first two novels, the tale of the Florida titan was told through the eyes of friends, enemies and family.
With the third book Wa
tson finally tells his own story and an engrossing one it is, encompassing the tragic, race-haunted Reconstruction era in the post-Civil War South, the lawless society in the Indian Nations in the Arkansas and Oklahoma territories and, finally, the raw, dangerous frontierlands of Florida before the 1920s real estate boom.
Watson emerges as a desperado, an outlaw, a devoted husband, a good father some of the time, an energetic entrepreneur, a visionary and always a creature of violence. And — surprisingly — a man of honor.
Wherever he went, trouble followed. Mamie Smallwood, of Chokoloskee Island, asked him “why such an amiable man found himself in so much trouble.”
His reply: “Ma’am, I don’t go looking for trouble but when trouble come hunting for me, why, I take care of it.
The violence with which he took care of it traces back to a childhood in Edgefield County, S.C., birthplace of 10 governors, as well as one of U.S. Sen. Strom Thurmond. It was not, however, a happy land in the sullen, resentful and race-obsessed days just after the end of the Civil War. Those were mean times and life with a drunken, abusive failure of a father shaped the boy as a tough realist who seldom shrank from the violence that eventually destroyed him.
Matthiessen’s South Carolina touch lacks the mastery he displays when writing about Florida. The long first chapter, confused and confusing as it meanders through too much genealogy, might be discouraging to some readers. Don’t let that stop you. On Page 63, Watson flees from the South Carolina law and crosses into Florida. The rest of the way you will be privileged to read a memorable novel.
Watson settled first near the Suwannee River, ventured into Arcadia (where he bushwhacked a man), then established his plantation on Chatham Bend, a large island south of Chokoloskee. Along the way, too many people turned up dead. Again and again Watson had to beat back the charges, sometimes in a court of law, sometimes in flight from the county sheriff.
Often he was accused of murders when he was many miles away from the scene, thus the swollen estimates of half a hundred killings by Watson. He did, however, kill many people, too many; the last scene of his eventful life — played out in the shootout at the landing at Smallwood’s Trading Post on Chokoloskee Island — brought him the bloody retribution he had earned.
In his 64 years, his path crossed those of many significant Floridians, among them a gunrunner named Napoleon Bonaparte Broward, who would serve as the state’s governor during Watson’s final years. Watson knew Jean Chevelier, the Old Frenchman, a colorful eccentric who was both a famous naturalist and a plume hunter; Guy Bradley, the first Audubon warden to be killed in line of duty; and Capt. Walter Smith, who killed him, then later settled in Pompano. Watson was blamed, unfairly, for the deaths of both Chevelier and Bradley.
Matthiessen, a student of primitive societies around the globe, does an excellent job of depicting the characters who lived out their lives on a Florida frontier plagued with too many dangerous men on the run, too many lingering racial problems.
The author, a New Yorker, knows firsthand how unforgiving a land the Everglades can be: “the razor-edged sawgrass and jagged limestone sinks, the heat and rain and greasy dragging muck, the no-seeums and mosquitos, the deep sloughs where the silent gators sank away beneath the surface, the thorny hammocks ringed with moats crawling with deadly moccasins.”
Matthiessen, who writes both fiction and nonfiction, has earned three nominations for the National Book Award, which he won with The Snow Leopard. Of his eight works of fiction, the three he wrote in the 1990s all concern Watson. The Watson trilogy constitutes an impressive addition to the literature of Florida.
Stuart McIver, a South Florida author, has written three magazine stories on Edgar Watson.
