American Handgunner Jul/Aug 2011 - Jeffersonian

Watson found his way to the Everglades
in the early 1880s. Timothy England
points out, “South Florida was still
a primitive frontier when the Old West
was being paved and electrified. Frontier
law meant you looked after yourself.”
Edgar Watson fit right in. An ambitious
man, he began farming in the mosquito-ridden
’glades, and had luck with
every crop he planted. He turned out
to be particularly successful in raising
hogs, and in growing sugar cane. He
earned enough to invest in state of the
art equipment to process the latter crop
into cane syrup, bottling it on-site and
taking it by boat to the Keys to sell
each year’s bounty. Others in that part
of Florida, the Ten Thousand Islands
and the village of Chokoloskee that was
the nearest community to his plantation,
came to respect him for his success
and, some say, to envy him for it.
After all, some were already calling him
“Emperor Watson” behind his back.
The day came when he got into a
drunken argument with a pillar of
society in tiny Chokoloskee, a landowner
named Adolphus Santini.
Angered at some perceived slight,
Watson drew a knife and slashed Santini’s
throat. To everyone’s surprise,
Santini survived. Facing charges of
attempted murder, it is a documented
fact Watson paid Santini $800 (some
say $900) to drop the complaint.
For that time, it was a fortune —
“enough to buy the Everglades,” some
said — and it seemed to double-stamp
Watkins’ guilt for the deed in the eyes
of the community. Was it a bribe to keep
Santini from testifying, or “street justice”
worked out by the authorities of
the time? The answer is unclear. We
do know he never stood trial for the
attempted murder.
Bodies Stack Up
In the sparsely populated Everglades,
seasonal farm and plantation help was
hard to come by. Visitors noted there
seemed to be ample labor present during
harvest season at the Watson plantation,
but the workers mysteriously disappeared
thereafter. Skeletal human
remains were discovered on Watson’s
property, though there were no scientists
in the Ten Thousand Islands to analyze
the bones to determine age. The rumor
spread Watkins murdered his workers
and disposed of their bodies rather than
pay them at the end of harvest season,
a practice known forever after in the
’glades as “a Watson payday.”
There is reason to believe this may
have been exaggerated or wholly falsified.
Watson might simply have brought
his migrant helpers to the Florida Keys
along with his delivery of cane syrup at
season’s end, to spend their pay there.
Timothy England has documentation
Watson told an Atlanta journalist at the
time about bones of Indians that were
abundant on his property, and history
shows Native Americans had indeed
inhabited the region long before whites.
England notes Watson paid well, taking
scarce labor from competing farmers,
and this could have engendered jealousy
leading to them spreading rumors to
scare workers away from their arch-rival.
England also points out Watson
reported at least one work-related death
on the property, a laborer whose arm
was caught in a cane grinding machine
and torn off, causing death by hemorrhage
before he could be aided. A second
employee may have died in the same
fashion, according to passed-down
recollections. It was dangerous work:
a slip of the cane-cutting blade could
pierce a femoral artery and bleed out a
worker in a very short time. The nearest
quality medical care, like the nearest law
enforcement, was 90 miles away in Key
West, or a day away in Fort Myers. It
was common to wait until the crops were
brought to market to bring in the bodies
of workers accidentally killed on the job.
The Situation Escalates
The term “serial murderer” was not
in use at the time, but suspicion built in
that direction when a couple who had
“squatted” on some of Watson’s property
and raised crops there refused to leave.
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