In 1938, a young wildlife technician named Daniel B. Beard wrote one of the first comprehensive studies of the proposed Everglades National Park. He warned the park service to expect "unprecedented" problems. His words were dark -- at times incredibly pessimistic -- but Beard was trying to tell us something: The park was dying nearly 60 years ago!

He writes: "[National Park Service] Director [Arno] Cammerer recently said, 'I would much rather have a national park created that might not measure up to all everybody thinks of it at the present time, but which, 50 or 100 years from now, with all the protection we could give it, would have attained a natural condition comparable to primitive conditions..." If the National Park Service is prepared to follow the strategy thus expressed, the Everglades National Park seems justified. If it is not ready to do this, the writer wishes to state emphatically, the Everglades is NOT justified."

My copy of Beard's enlightening report was given to me by an Everglades National Park ranger who retrieved it from a dumpster at the Everglades City ranger station. This was not a photocopy but a printed version, complete with the original heavy ink typeface, spelling errors and hemp stitches -- most likely produced in 1938. As I read, excitedly freeing each sticky page of the report, I realized I was holding the smoking gun. This discarded report was Exhibit A, if you will, of the crime of the century: Ignoring the words of Daniel Beard.

Last month at Everglades National Park, Maud and I walked across the lawn and onto a mowed path opposite the Royal Palm Visitor Center's Anhinga Trail. A man told us, "That's not the trail head." He didn't know that we were heading off on the Old Ingraham Highway to where orange trees peek through the dense woods. That is where the main lodge of Royal Palm State Park, which I like to call the "park before the Park," once stood.

Though the large wooden building was moved to nearby Homestead in the 1950s, only to be destroyed by Hurricane Andrew in 1992, we were looking for a stone deer-feeding station I once saw in an old photo. After squeezing through the jungle for hours, we finally found something, if not exactly what we had expected: a charming little rock structure with cypress beams and barrel roof tiles! We were in the presence of history, looking at the beginning of Everglades National Park. The limestone pumphouse is part the original state park that brought visitors to "Paradise Key," which graces the background of our cover. Veteran surveyor James Ingraham first marveled at the hammock's tall and majestic Royal palms in the 1890s when he surveyed a railroad route from Miami to Key West for magnate Henry Flagler. The idea was to go down through the Everglades to Flamingo and then across shallow Florida Bay; the Old Ingraham Highway still marks the first part of this route.

Ingraham convinced Flagler to donate 960 acres -- including Paradise Key -- to the Florida Federation of Woman's Clubs, which established Royal Palm State Park in 1916. You'll read all about how Federation President May Mann Jennings pioneered Florida's conservation movement in our section, "The Park Before the Park."

We are faced with a huge challenge in restoring the Everglades, but the task might have been impossible had the dream of 19th century botanist Dr. Henry Perrine come true. South Florida's development might have begun at the southern end of the park in 1840 instead of in Miami in 1896.

Born in New York in 1797, Perrine became a doctor in Illinois. He tried to cure himself of pneumonia with what he mistook for quinine. The substance was really arsenic and almost killed him, making him too weak for northern winters. He moved to New Orleans and became ambassador to Campeche, Mexico, where he learned of Mexico's monopoly on rope-making with the fibrous sisal plant. To Perrine, sisal was the perfect candidate for an obscure circular from Washington, D.C. requesting foreign plants and animals of potential benefit to the U.S. economy. Though Mexico carefully guarded the valuable seeds, the government released some to Perrine in thanks for saving many important Mexican politicos from a plague.

After he returned to the U.S., Perrine spent a year researching soils and climates near the tropics. Cape Sable, now the southern tip of Everglades National Park, had the perfect conditions for growing sisal. Perrine was granted 230,000 acres in the area, but before he could start his plantation, the Second Seminole War broke out. The government ordered everyone off the hazardous mainland.

Perrine did move to a small island called Indian Key, but he felt compelled to sneak back over to Cape Sable. Then his dream came to an abrupt end. On August 7, 1840, Perrine was one of 13 people massacred by the Seminoles during their raid on Indian Key. Instead of a huge agricultural development, the only remains of Perrine's vision are the scattered green monuments of wild sisal, yucca and prickly pear cactus on the Park's Coastal Prairie Trail.

Millions of people have visited Everglades National Park. Some have even explored the islands of Biscayne National Park, a bit more difficult to access. Yet very few have had the unique opportunity to visit the third, most isolated and historically richest of South Florida's national parks: Dry Tortugas National Park. Established in 1935 as Fort Jefferson National Monument, the park was enlarged and redesignated in 1992.

In 1513, Spanish explorer Ponce de Leon named the westernmost Florida Keys "Las Tortugas" for their abundance of sea turtles. Several years later, "Dry" was added to indicate the lack of fresh groundwater. The United States acquired Florida in 1821 and constructed a series of lighthouses stretching down the east coast. By 1825, the Loggerhead Key light marked the Tortugas and still stands there today. On nearby Garden Key in 1846, work began on the largest brick fortification in the western hemisphere: Fort Jefferson. Experts still differ on whether 16 or 40 million bricks were shipped for construction over the next 30 years, but all agree that this was quite a feat, considering the remote location.

Why build such a huge structure in the middle of nowhere? Because the channel through the Tortugas is the only way for large vessels to enter the Gulf of Mexico. The Union Army occupied Fort Jefferson during the Civil War, ensuring tight control over the entrance and exit of the Confederate port of New Orleans. One of Fort Jefferson's many prisoners was Dr. Samuel Mudd, convicted of conspiracy for setting the leg of Abraham Lincoln's assassin, John Wilkes Booth. Though the Army abandoned the fort in 1888 after new weaponry rendered the brick walls obsolete, the "Gibraltar of the Gulf" remained strategic. On January 24, 1898, the U.S.S. Maine left Garden Key for Havana Harbor, where it was sank less than three weeks later.

In a grand coincidence, 1997 marks not only the 50th anniversary of Everglades National Park, but also that of Marjory Stoneman Douglas's landmark book, The Everglades: River of Grass. Marjory was already 57 years old when she completed this book. On May 14th, the Everglades legend passed away shortly after her 108th birthday. Art Marshall, a leading environmentalist, once said that with the three simple words, "River of Grass," Marjory defined and educated everybody as to what the Everglades truly meant.

Less widely known is the story of how Marjory came to write the Bible of Everglades understanding. Born in 1890 in Minneapolis, Minnesota, the future Mother of the Everglades caught the Florida bug early, at age four, on a steamer trip with her parents to Tampa. This "marvelous, wonderful white tropic light" called to her years later when, after a failed marriage, she moved to Miami in 1915 to start a new life with her father, Frank Stoneman, founder and editor of the News Record. Stoneman's controversial editorials denouncing the drainage of the Everglades alienated his readers. Lack of scientific information and public opinion in favor of making real estate and farmlands out of the South Florida swamp made his newspaper unpopular. A lawyer named Frank Shutts rescued the paper from bankruptcy, and in 1910 it was renamed The Miami Herald.

Stoneman's courageous stance no doubt influenced Marjory, then a cub reporter for the Herald. After World War II, Hervey Allen, editor of Rinehart and Co.'s "Rivers of America" series, asked Marjory to write a book about the Miami River. Marjory decided that the Miami River was too insignificant to warrant a book, but was a part of the large, wide, slow-moving "river" that she would make famous. "All right," Allen said, "write about the Everglades!" -- setting her off on a lifelong journey.

In light of the National Audubon Society's photography contest honoring Everglades National Park's 50th anniversary, whose first prize winner was my own childhood fried David Dunn (I helped him exhibit his photographs all over the state of Florida in 1997), I'd like to take this opportunity to talk about how the original Audubon documented the natural wonders of the Florida Everglades in 1831 -- when there were no cameras, only pencils and paints.

The territory of Florida had just been transferred to the United States a decade previous to the six-month expedition by the internationally-renowned French explorer, artist, scientist, woodsman and naturalist, John James Audubon. What some people don't know is that he was also one of the first bird hunters in America. That's right -- bird hunter! Years before museum collections, good bino-culars, cameras and field guides, there was simply no other way to study birds than to shoot them first. Audubon succeeded in collecting 52 bird species, many of which would have landed him in jail today! Ironically, his namesake, the Audubon Society, was formed in 1886 to protect birds that were being overhunted for their decorative plumes. Nonetheless, Audubon was the first to widely publicize the spectacular birds of the southern Florida Everglades with his beautiful paintings.

Audubon began his journey at St. Augustine, then explored the St. Johns River, Cape Sable, the Florida Keys, Key West and the Dry Tortugas. Among the more popular species Audubon first showed the world were the Great white heron, Roseate spoonbill and Sooty tern. In our modern-day adventures we have the advantage of paved roadways, outboard engines and swamp buggies. However, Audubon had to explore Florida on foot, on horseback, by canoe, skiff, cutter and schooner, over muddy log roads, Indian trails, hammocks, mud flats and swamps. For those of you entering the contest, keep in mind how easy you have it today!

Known today for its extensive wilderness, Collier County might have been another Miami had the dreams of its namesake, Barron G. Collier, been fully realized. The largest owner of Everglades lands -- over 100 million acres -- and one of the fathers of modern advertising, Collier was born in Memphis, Tennessee in 1873. At age 26 he moved to New York City and created a powerful new advertising concept -- emblazoning trolley cars with color posters. Although Collier was one of America's wealthiest businessmen and had no reason to start over, he became obsessed with developing the muck and marl soils of the Everglades into the next Florida Riviera.

In 1911, Collier came to the "forgotten frontier" to visit his friend and business associate, John M. Roach, president of the Chicago Street Railway Company. Roach owned the Useppa Inn on an island near Fort Myers. Collier was instantly hooked on the subtropical beauty and amount of available land. He bought the inn, moving in permanently in 1926. He then began purchasing huge tracts of land from private owners, timber companies and the state and Federal government, finally carving Collier County out of Lee and Monroe counties.

Collier set his grandiose sights on a little community in southwest Florida's Ten Thousand Islands called "Everglade" (still a small town in the mangroves known as Everglades City). He dredged and filled the low-lying area, financed a lumber mill, hotel and bank, and laid out an impressive street system with elaborate lanterns and Greek Revival civic buildings which remain as monuments to the metropolis that never was. The reason: Collier ended up spending so much money dynamiting rock to build the Tamiami Trail that Everglades City didn't live up to his vision. But there was a happy ending. The Collier family, still important landowners in the area, donated thousands of its patriarch's original pristine acres to help create Everglades National Park.