by Marjory Stoneman Douglas, 1974 in Audubon Magazine

He was certainly the prophet, and unmistakenly the founder, but what more he was is hard to define. Ernest F. Coe, the six-foot-tall, spare, courtly gentleman without whose startling vision, slow-burning passion, steely endurance, and indomitable will there would be no Everglades National Park today. And probably no Ever-glades. No one word can contain his complexity or equal his simplicity. But "prophet" comes first.

It was in 1925 that Ernest Francis Coe and his small wife Anna first walked a narrow street in Miami, Florida--a boom-town crowded with bands and banners, noisy land speculators and frenzied natives--with the reserved, inquiring politeness of New Englanders far from home. The tropic town that had been the last stop on a frontier railroad was bursting its boundaries, running its streets far out among the scarred grapefruit groves and the pinelands, to the very edge of the strange interior country called "the Everglades."

It was still the country that had been mysterious to white men for four hundred years since the discovery of Florida. Few knew anything about it, and not one of the flooding newcomers could care less.

Ernest Coe moved almost unbelieving through the hurly-burly, more aware of palm trees rippled in sunlight by the sea winds and the sparkles rippling on the great blue bay. He saw here rich evidences of plant life that fascinated him as a trained horticulturalist. The toughness of his Connecticut ances-tors had been in his blood and his long bones since his birth in New Haven in 1869. His scholarly urbanity was perfected at Yale College, from which he was graduated in fine arts in 1887, and was polished by some years of study of landscape architecture in Europe and Japan. He had returned to years of valuable service as a landscape architect in New England. He was a distinguished member of the American Society of Landscape Architects and of the Committee for National and State Parks and Monuments.

He was fifty-eight years old when rumors of the Florida boom, with a great building of estates that would need landscaping, spoke to the unsatisfied adventurousness of his Yankee nature.

I remember him then, as clearly as I was to see and know him all the rest of his years in which he did not seem to change at all. His sparse straight six feet of height and broad shoulders were topped by a shapely head of thin gray hair--or perhaps it was already white--that seemed to always blow in wisps over his high forehead, because in town he never wore a hat. He always wore clean seersucker suits with an air of being smartly turned out. His skin was quickly tanned. His nose was long over a whitish, nondescript moustache that did not hide his mobile mouth, readily smiling his deprecating, agreeable, down-turning smile. His eyes were almost concealed under bristly eyebrows and prominent, drooping eyelids. At first, he wore gold pince-nez that seemed to droop also, before he changed to spectacles.

At first, he wore gold pince-nez that seemed to droop also, before he changed to spectacles. But when he turned his hidden gaze directly on you, gray, noncommittal, alert, there was steel in it. His voice, with its cultivated, sliding New England accent was always pleasant and urbane. He would stand politely to hear what you had to say, turning his head away in a curious sideways slant, before he straightened and looked at you and began to talk. Then you listened. At first his words did not flow with such easy, soft persistence--until the subject that was to be his passion, his life and his death, took hold of him.

There was a man by the name of Harold H. Bailey, an intensely active, able ornithologist who had lived in Miami since at least 1919, studying and writing about the trememdous birdlife of South Florida for national ornithological magazines. He wrote one of the first big books about Florida birds, and in the constant comings and goings of his observations he had learned his way about the trackless Everglades that had been a concern of all ornithologists since Audubon.

The wonderful plume birds, almost entirely destroyed for the powerful New York millinery trade, had been saved from complete destruction by the then National Association of Audubon Societies, which successfully fought to have the legislature of New York pass an act making the sale of wild bird plumage illegal.

Harold Bailey had gathered together a number of resi-dents interested in the Everglades, botanists like Charles Torrey Simpson and Dr. David Fairchild of the U.S. Department of Agriculture; Dr. John Gifford, a forester; and men interested in plants, like R.D. Maxwell and the young Gaines Wilson. They met often to read papers about Everglades plants and wildlife and discuss their future. It was Harold Bailey who first said that the whole southern area of the Everglades should become a national park. They agreed, but nothing was done about it.

These were men of like minds to whom Ernest Coe was drawn immediately on his arrival in 1925. It was Harold Bailey who first took him out to the Everlades.

Bailey repeated to Ernest Coe what he had said before, that all this southern area ought to be preserved forever as a national park.

His words were at last spoken to the right man. Perhaps at that moment they were standing at the edge of one of those arms of high pineland that penetrate into that enormous expanse of brown saw grass, with the flow of fresh water about the millions and millions of tough roots glinting and glittering in the sunblaze. They looked out straight and far to the sharp, soft edge where the earth and blue sky met at the perfect horizon. The slow-moving clouds, like high white ships, dragged their lavender shadows across the solitudes. They could see here and there some of those islands of green jungle called "hammocks," pointed like boats by the force of the sweet water, mounds of trees matted with vines, within which the last Indians, in the third Seminole War, found their refuge and their freedom. The winds blew in great fresh gusts, fragrant with greenness and blossomings in the vast watery quiet.

In Ernest Coe's mind as he stared, drawing his breath deep with delight, Harold Bailey's words must have exploded in a white fire of revelation. A man transformed and possessed, he went home to Anna Coe. The blaze that had been lighted in him, the purpose and the power of the idea, would dominate his every moment for the rest of his life.

When they came South they must have had enough money to live on, with care. They bought a pleasant house in Coconut Grove for themselves and a niece and nephew they were educating. I don't remember hearing if he ever worked at landscape architecture, even at first, although I know he lectured on the use of tropic plant material, especially his favorite crotons. Later, when the boy and girl were old enough to leave, the Coes bought a much smaller house on El Prado, where they lived for the rest of their lives.

He began to spend all his time studying the Everglades. The real estate frenzy of the boom that had begun in Miami and passed northward, surfacing again in New York as speculation in stocks, passed him by.

The great hurricane of 1926 that brought ruin and sanity to Miami did not affect [Coe] beyond debris and a stranded boat in his garden. He was making himself as familiar as any white man had ever been with the whole nature of the river of saw grass and water that moved in an enormous arc from its source in Lake Okeechobee, down the middle of that great paw-shape of South Florida, within the enclosing limestone coasts to the dark mangrove forests of the Ten Thousand Islands, its delta.

He managed to get to Okeechobee and saw how the water that overflowed into the vegetable lands, from which the retaining jungles of sugar apple had been cleared, was the secret that kept the Glades alive. He saw how it seeped into the porous rock and maintained the water tables for the growing coastal cities. He saw how the canals that had been cut across the limestone barriers, in the thoughtless early zeal for draining what were said to be stagnant swamps, allowed the surrounding salt water to creep up into the well fields and destroy the vegetation of the sawgrass prairies.

He saw that all the great region below the Tamiami Trail, across the state--land too rocky for cultivation but holding the water, the life-blood, for vast riches of plant life and birdlife and animal life, as well as the breeding grounds of an enormous quantity of fish and shellfish for the seas outside--could be preserved only by making it a national park.

He learned the bewildering varieties of tropic plants and trees that made this region a botanical treasury. He knew the animals that found refuge in it--deer and bear and otter, panther, raccoon, opossum, wildcat. He studied the alligators and the crocodiles, the lizards, the tree snails, the snakes. Above all, he fell under the spell of the million and a half wading birds, now guarded by law although plume hunting was still being carried on for Cuban and South American markets. He knew the snowy egrets and the great egrets glistening in their nuptial feathers, the ibis and the wood storks, the roseate spoonbills and the rest of those amazing free multitudes.

He tramped everwhere in that country, often alone, wearing khaki trousers and a cotton shirt, a canvas hat and sneakers, carrying only a heavy stick. He went out from what was then the end of the Tamiami Trail, at Forty-Mile Bend, crossing slowly through saw grass and rock and jungle and mangrove to Chevelier Bay and the remote and silent rivers that reach to the Gulf. He was friendly to people in the few houses on lonely beaches. He spent time gossiping with Old Man Smallwood at the store on the mounded island of Chokoloskee, where the Indians came down the Taylor River to trade, and everything was known that went on in the bewildering Ten Thousand Islands.

From Miami he ventured to drive south along new roads cut into the great pinelands, across open sloughs of saw grass and water beyond which the native royal palms of the rocky islet of Paradise Key glittered over jungles of live oak, strangler figs and gumbo-limbo. He drove south on an even rougher road to open country beyond, where ineffectual attempts had been made to raise beans among the surface limestone, and still beyond, through the strange sunny country of ancient dwarf cypress, the small white trees etched in spring with the pale green flames of their leaves and marked with the scarlet tongues of air plants. Bald eagles swept overhead. Sometimes, over a patch of jungle, a fork-tailed kite snatched at a tree snake, or out of the clouds floated, with their matchless flight, a pair of man-o-war birds.

At the very end of that first road, rough as a plowed field, a car could jolt down to the flatlands, colored coral and yellow with water weeds in the white marl soil, to the small gray houses on stilts at Flamingo, silhouetted against the shining green and milky running of the sea. He tramped and sailed to the sandy capes of Cape Sable, where the turtles lay their eggs in spring moonlights and Guy Bradley (the Audubon Society warden shot by plume hunters) was buried.

Inland, on the stark whiteness of hurricane-killed mangroves, he saw the rookeries of thousands of stick nests and the rose and red of roseate spoonbills reflected in the blue water of salt ponds. And still farther inland, along the flats, he saw enormous flocks of terns and sanderlings rising and blowing in feathery blizzards. He knew the island jungles of Shark River to the west, and to the east, across the polished Florida Bay, the Keys and the ocean and its hidden coral reefs with their wonderful sea gardens.

To Ernest Coe this lower Everglades was the most strange, unknown marvelous country under the sun. He spent nights and days learning and delighting in it. He could sleep comfortably anywhere he found himself, on the warm sand of a beach, on a grassy rise over a slow river with the bull alligators roaring, or on a pile of leaves among logs in a jungle hammock. Rolled up in a blanket he slept soundly. If there were mosquitoes, he woke to pull a pillowcase over his head, and fell asleep again.

The wild scream of a panther in a nearby thicket never bothered him.

One night some kind of big cat sat on his warm shoulder and, as he told a writer for The Saturday Evening Post, he "enjoyed the friendliness of the wild thing." He was as unconcerned about snakes as any Seminole, but he did carry his stick, in case a rattler or a moccasin "misunderstood him." He felt they were quite disposed to be docile if treated cordially.

All this time he was learning the Everglades, Ernest Coe was also talking about them. In Miami he talked before women's clubs, garden clubs, Rotary clubs, civic meetings, or groups of neighbors. He gave lectures everywhere, illustrated with slides. And the theme of everything he had to say was, "It must be a national park."

Most people thought it was impossible, impractical. The feeling grew here and there that the man, interesting as he was, must be a little cracked. But everyone listened. They had to. He would not let them go. He talked in the same genial, easy way to plume hunters and alligator poachers about their beach fires.

These Glades people listened to [Coe] politely enough, but as to a national park, they wouldn't stand for any interference by the Government. He received word that if he didn't drop the idea he would be shot. He smiled, that easy amiable smile, and went on talking. On city streets, when busy people saw him coming, they turned aside hurriedly. He would talk for an hour, in the full sun, in a shower of rain. He was so kindly, so well-mannered, it was hard to be rude to him.

But there were other people who listened and were warmed by his prophetic fire. In 1928 he had set up a "Tropical Everglades Park Association." It included many men who had been drawn together first by Harold Bailey, although Bailey, absorbed with ornithology, had moved North. Probably the man of most importance in the new group was Dr. David Fairchild, retired as head of the Bureau of Plant Exploration of the Department of Agriculture, who was now living in Coconut Grove and completely aware of the correctness of everything Ernest Coe said about the Everglades. He enlisted the interest of influential men in Washington, notably his brother-in-law, Dr. Gilbert Grosvenor of the National Geographic Society and his associate editor, John Oliver La Gorce. The editor of the Miami Herald, Judge Frank B. Stoneman, was already writing editorials in favor of Ernest Coe's idea.

Ernest Coe was named executive director of the new association, and money was raised to pay him a small, somewhat intermittent salary and the expenses of an office in the county courthouse. Often he had to use his own money for stamps for the flood of letters he poured out, pecking away at the second-hand office typewriter. Everyone received letters from him constantly, and his long envelopes were crammed with carbon copies of letters he had written to everyone else. Always there was a croton leaf enclosed.

He spent nearly all of three years in Washington, talking to people about an Everglades National Park. There, where out of 500 applications and plans for proposed national parks only 26 had ever been created, he was regarded to be one of the milder forms of nut, to be avoided if possible. But his perfect manners, his unobtrusive determination, his prophetic fire, were alike unaffected by indifference, frustration, and that kind of laughing contempt which is the hardest slight of all to bear.

What he insisted on was that the lower Everglades must become the largest national park in the United States, more than two million acres of land and water. It must include a considerable acreage north of the Tamiami Trail in the Big Cypress Swamp, which controlled at least one-third of the flow of fresh water necessary for the park's survival. He also insisted that it must contain a corridor eastward to Key Largo, to that amazing 21-mile-long coral reef abutting on the ocean, the greatest sea gardens on the eastern coast of North America. Nothing was more prophetic than his insistence on these boundaries. He had seen with blistering clarity, from the Miami boom, how unrestricted commercial development accompanying a population explosion violates and destroys everything in a new country in its blind and ruthless path.

The problem of establishing a national park was that the land had to be given outright by the state, or states, to the federal government, which was not empowered to buy any land for such a purpose. And before any such land could be accepted as a potential park, it had to be proved acceptable.

But interest in the park increased in Miami, through Ernest Coe's letters and talks and those of David Fairchild and Ruth Bryan Owen, representative in Congress from the Miami district, and because of attention aroused by articles in the newspapers.

And in 1928 Senator Duncan U. Fletcher sponsored a bill giving authority to the Secretary of the Interior to investigate the possibilities of an Everglades National Park. A national commission was appointed to inspect it.

In 1930 the Tropic Everglades Park Association, with Ernest Coe in charge of all the arrangements, with Mrs. Coe working just as hard and as devotedly as he, became the host organization for the commission. But the commission members had agreed among themselves that he talked so much, and at such length and so exhaustingly, that he must be kept in the background.

Ernest Coe therefore found himself relegated to silence and the hard work behind the scenes, a role he accepted without complaint. The members of the national commission were Horace M. Albright, director of the National Park Service, and his assistant director, Arno B. Cammerer, Ebert K. Burlew, assistant to the Secretary of the Interior and his representative; Roger W. Toll, superintendent of Yellowstone National Park; Dr. T. Gilbert Pearson, president of the National Association of Audubon Societies; Dr. Herman C. Bumpus of the American Association of Museums and president of Tufts College; Dr. Mathew W. Stirling, chief of the American Bureau of Ethnology; Caspar Hodsdon, a close friend of Secretary of the Interior Ray Lyman Wilbur; and Lyman B. Kelsey, member of the Committee to Select Eastern National Park. Ruth Bryan Owen and I represented the female influence on the local committee, of which the most influential figure was Dr. David Fairchild.

The first part of the expedition was, I remember vividly, a great success for everyone but Ernest Coe and me. We were to embark in a big Goodyear blimp to give the commission a total view of the area. It was a crisp, brilliant day in February. But the blimp was a little small for the whole party and some guests, so Ernest Coe and I were asked if we would mind sitting in a sort of glassy observer's coop swung below the regular cabin under the great shadow of the gas bag. There was not room for much more than the two of us, but at the last moment a bucket was insinuated at our feet. Ernest Coe explained most apologetically that he had asked for it because he was likely to be a little airsick. I remember how the thing swung airily as we progressed over that vast unrolling green area that looked to me, a little dismally, like an enormous motheaten carpet. This was while poor Ernest Coe was being sick, as inconspicuously as he could, in the bucket.

What saved the day was the sight, floating between us and the ground, of enormous drifting flocks of white birds. We were both only too happy to land, not a moment too soon for my own worsening condition and a lifelong hatred of blimps.

That was the last time, until the very end of the trip, that I saw Ernest Coe. Down on the Keys, for a view of the ocean that concealed the remarkable coral reef Ernest Coe wanted to save from destruction by coral thieves, we boarded a big roomy cruising houseboat for long sunny hours in brilliant waters, eventually moving around Cape Sable and up into the Shark River. The men who had worn their Western park clothes, heavy boots and jackets, and hard hats had by this time managed to discard them for the light trousers, cotton shirts, and sneakers of a proper Everglades expedition. They were fascinated with everything--the tropic vegetation, the low sand beaches, and the vast tangled arches of the mangroves.

It was late in the afternoon that we anchored for the night in Tarpon Bend and changed to a procession of rowboats for a trip up the river to the great egret rookeries. A vast vermilion and gilt sunset smoked up from the Gulf to the west as thousands and thousands of adult birds in full nuptial plumage began to go home over our heads.

The soft rustling of those white, white wings roofed the evening wind above us. The men were standing up in the boats, breathless. All they could say was, "Oh--more birds--more birds," as the wings went over in their hundreds, their thou-sands. The sunset died. An enormous white moon rose out of the east with the flying processions of birds dark against it, their wings still whispering.

Moon and all, it was just as Ernest Coe had planned it. The spell was not broken until Dr. Bumpus fell overboard.

But after a hilarious dinner on board the houseboat, some man rowed up quietly in the dark water alongside and told someone that on the next branch of the river a group of plume hunters was quietly waiting until we got away before shooting up the rookery. Prices for plumes were still high in Havana. Several men of the commission went over to talk to the hunters around their campfire. Any attempt to protest would have been useless. The hunters were very polite, but noncommittal. We had a delightful evening on the boat, listening to Gilbert Pearson's wonderful stories and laughing until we cried. But the night after we sailed back to the Keys we heard the hunters had shot and clubbed the adult birds to death, stripping the bloody plumes from their bodies and leaving tens of thousands of nestlings to die of starvation or heat in the blazing sun. I think it was the death of those birds that most convinced the commission this area must be protected as a national park.

The next day we went in small boats through the flatlands among storms of shorebirds up to more rookeries of egrets and roseate spoonbills at Gator Lake. The visitors were completely entranced with the strangeness and brilliance of the country. They were undaunted by clouds of mosquitoes at twilight on Northwest Cape beach. They were still avidly sightseeing the next day, back on the Keys. From there they went by car through the open Glades for luncheon at the lodge among the jungle trees at Paradise Key, recently given to the state as Royal Palm State Park by the Florida Federation of Women's Clubs.

Sunburned and mosquito-bitten, we all went gamely to a dinner and dance that night at a big hotel, although I noticed they slipped away early.

I saw Ernest Coe again for the first time since our blimp trip when he came to take me to the hotel that night. When I went downstairs he was sitting bolt upright in a straight chair, in his well-worn, beautifully cut evening clothes, glasses on his nose, exhaustedly sound asleep. Mrs. Coe, he regretted, was unable to attend. I knew she had been taken ill.

The commission approved overwhelmingly the idea of an Everglades National Park. Another bill was passed in Congress that indicated that the federal government would accept the region as a park as soon as the land was donated. Then began long years of even more unrelenting effort. The people who had laughed at the idea of a national park and resented it had already begun to fight against its establishment. Many were speculators who had bought large or small parcels of land to hold for higher prices than they could get if their acres were condemned. All sorts of people opposed it bitterly on the grounds that it would prevent progress.

This opposition was evident at the first hearings in Washington on the subject of the suitability of the land for such a park. Speakers against it insisted the Everglades was worthless as a park, could not be developed without drainage, was nothing but swamps and snakes. To prove it, a man dumped on the chairman's table a large sackful of snakes, chiefly harmless indigos, the biggest one of which Ruth Bryan Owen picked up, although she admitted later she had never touched a snake before, and hung around her neck. It was Ernest Coe who had to bear the brunt of the work to face the opposition and acquire the land. These were the days when interest died, when less or no money came in for his salary and office expenses. His clean collars and cuffs grew worn, his canvas shoes, under their fresh white paste, were run-down, his tie a little shabby. He was moved into a small make-shift office in the civic center, where he carried on as usual, letter-writing and talking.

The opposition was vociferous and unmoved. Time dragged on with little interest on the part of the state. Mrs. Coe was often ill and died in 1941. It was hard to see what they had been living on. Ernest Coe had fallen, seriously injuring his kneecap. People did not listen now when he talked about the park. During the war years it was all but forgotten. Yet Coe went on working.

But after the war interest in the park began to revive. Senator Spessard Holland, recently retired as governor of Florida, told John S. Knight, publisher of the Miami Herald, that with the Herald's help an Everglades National Park might now be achieved. There was actually money in the state treasury that had not been spent during the war, and this would be available. John Knight asked his editor, John D. Pennekamp, to reactivate the park effort. At Pennekamp's request Governor Millard Caldwell revived the Everglades National Park Commission.

Pennekamp found that the state owned 900,000 acres of Everglades land, some donated by public-spirited landowners like Barron Collier. Governor Caldwell recommended to the legislature to approve the use of $2 million. Thus, with the energetic leadership of John Pennekamp, and the enthusiastic support of Governor Caldwell and Senator Holland, 1,258,000 acres could be acquired to fulfill the requirements for a national park. But now Ernest Coe, who had fought so long almost singlehandedly, became a stumbling block to the immediate acquisition of the park. He insisted with all his force, tempered by years of hardship, that each of the more than two million acres of his original plan must be included within the park boundaries: the Keys and the great coral reef, because otherwise they would be destroyed, and the acreage north of the Tamiami Trail, part Everglades, part Big Cypress, because it controlled one-third of the water flow so important to the life of the park.

Coe was, therefore, not named a member of the new commission. Although the state cabinet had previously voted $400,000, which was never used, to buy land, the commission reported that the northern property was held by private interests so hostile to the park that it could not be purchased. The park must be established with the land now available, or not at all. That winter a strategy meeting of the park commission was held in New York, with state and national officials and representatives of the National Audubon Society. Ernest Coe, thinner, more worn, but straight as ever, at-tended by special invitation, wearing his usual seersucker suit and no overcoat, oblivious of cold or opposition. The proposed size of the park was discussed carefully and in detail. Ernest Coe made his unshaken argument for the original park boundaries. If they could not be adhered to, he said, there was no use in trying to set up any Everglades National Park at all. The vote was taken.

Ernest Coe's was the only "no." The park was assured. He rose and walked out into the stinging cold.

Five governors of Florida, three Presidents and their administrations, had come and gone since 1928, when Coe had begun to talk about the park. Now the state moved fast. The $2 million was voted to acquire the land, the largest sum ever given by any state to establish a national park. The bill to donate the land was signed by Governor Caldwell. Julius Krug, Secretary of the Interior, signed the document officially establishing Everglades National Park on June 20, 1947. It had taken 19 years. On December 6, 1947, when President Harry S. Truman dedicated the park in the town of Everglades, with John D. Pennekamp presiding, Ernest Coe sat on the platform because Pennekamp insisted he do so, over Coe's earlier refusal. He had hardly been seen in public in months. But people who valued what he had done tried to give him some appropriate recognition.

That year, 1947, Coe was voted Outstanding Citizen of the Year by the City of Miami. In 1948 he was awarded the George Robert White medal of honor, the highest horticultural honor in the United States, and the Thomas Barbour medal for conservation by the Fairchild Tropical Garden. He took them with quiet thanks and went home again. He declined as charity a purse of $2,400 from the Rotary Club, although he accepted with thanks the club's award of an honorary lifetime membership by which he could still enjoy the regular weekly luncheon meetings. He did, however, accept the invitation of the National Park Service to write a report, and presumably be paid for it, called "The Story of the Everglades National Park Project." Few people saw him. He did not talk anymore. Some felt his heart was broken. I do not think so. I think Coe was, as a prophet, biding his time. He died in 1951 at the age of 84.

Everglades National Park has been in one sense a great success, since it was saved and because millions of people have enjoyed it. Its life, however, has been in constant danger because its essential water supply was almost completely cut off by the complex system of canals and locks built by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers for draining the upper Everglades, and by the refusal of the Central and Southern Florida Flood Control District to allow available water to flow into it.

But the threat to the park raised such a public national outcry that at last an adequate flow of water southward has apparently been guaranteed. Additional farming lands, omitted from the park area, are now being acquired. Federal and state laws have been passed to stop the poaching of alligators for sale to leather-makers.

Whether he is remembered or not, this is Ernest Coe's monument. And some curious things have been happening.

The great coral reef off the Keys, which Coe fought to have included in the park, has been miraculously acquired as a great undersea state park, named for John Pennekamp. Then the area just north of the Trail that Ernest Coe insisted must be included for the park's protection, was quietly purchased from private landholders for an enormous international jetport. But the jetport has apparently been stopped by an unprecedented uproar. It seems that Everglades National Park has been saved again. But it is clear this threat would not have been possible if, as Ernest Coe saw it should be, the Big Cypress had been included in the park from the first. Now conservationists have mounted a major campaign to do what should have been done years ago--to protect the Big Cypress. It is also clear, at least to me, that Ernest Coe was a great prophet. Unknown as he was and forgotten as he is, I believe his unbroken spirit is not dead, but walks the Everglades still, guarding them.