For Sale —American Paradise (11 page)

In 1909, L. D. Reagin, publisher of the
Sarasota Times
, set out on an automobile trip from Tampa to Jacksonville. At the time, those cities were two of Florida's leading seaports.

There's no record of what kind of car Reagin was driving, but at the time a Ford Model T was capable of forty to forty-five miles per hour on a good road. And the roads between Tampa and Jacksonville were not the best.

It was a trip of around three hundred miles. Had Reagin been traveling in a Model T on roads that would have allowed him to push the car to its top speed for the entire distance, he could have made the trip in roughly six and a half to seven and a half hours.

Reagin made the journey in nineteen hours, for an average speed of about sixteen miles per hour. Still, in 1909, it was the fastest anyone had ever made the trip between Tampa and Jacksonville in an automobile.

By 1915, it was becoming abundantly clear to Florida's business leaders that there had to be a better way to link the state's Gulf and Atlantic coasts. And businessmen on the Florida Gulf Coast especially wanted an overland route from southwest Florida to Miami, which even then was on its way to becoming an important seaport on the state's east coast.

But between Tampa and Miami lay hundreds of miles of dense jungle and saw-grass prairies. Most engineers took one look at terrain that was as mysterious as the surface of the moon and concluded that a road simply could not be built through that impenetrable swamp.

Still, a few dreamers were willing to try. In April 1915, Francis W. Perry, president of the Fort Myers Chamber of Commerce, and James F. Jaudon, the tax assessor for Dade County, sat down in Tallahassee to talk about a road connecting Tampa and Miami. They got a map of the state from Florida commissioner of agriculture William McRae and studied it closely.

Lake Okeechobee, the giant, shallow lake that serves as a holding pond for water before it flows slowly southward through the Everglades, was the northern boundary of the Glades. From the southern shore of the lake to the tip of the peninsula was almost entirely covered by jungle, saw-
grass prairie, and a shallow sheet of water sliding through the Glades to Florida Bay.

You could travel by automobile on roads of varying quality from Tampa southward to Fort Myers, a distance of around 145 miles. But the only way to get from Fort Myers to Miami was to either go by boat southward around the tip of the peninsula or embark on an automobile trip of perhaps 750 miles that would have required going north to somewhere around Gainesville, then turning east to St. Augustine, and finally, a trip of more than 300 miles south down the east coast to Miami.

As Jaudon and Perry studied the map, they knew that carving a road through the Everglades would be a fiendishly difficult task. But even their unbridled imaginations couldn't conceive just how difficult it would be.

“The unknown character of the immense terra incognita through which the highway was projected could not be determined by engineers trudging through miles of aquatic prairie,” an anonymous author wrote in a booklet about the construction project in 1928. “Not until actual construction was attempted did the discouraging features of the undertaking become adequately known.”

Had Jaudon, Perry, and others who took up the cry to pierce the Everglades known what they actually were up against, they might not have taken on the project. No one would have blamed them for throwing up their hands and declaring that it couldn't be done.

Still, it was an age when anything seemed possible. The Panama Canal had been built to link the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, and Henry Flagler had laid down a railroad across the Florida Keys to Key West. Why couldn't a road be built through the Everglades?

Jaudon and Perry started talking to other movers and shakers in Florida. The idea started gaining momentum.

Judge Pierre Branning issued some special instructions to guide the selection of the dozen Dade County men who would sit in judgment of John Ashley in his third trial for the murder of Desoto Tiger: They must have no prejudice against Indians, they must be willing to consider an Indian's testimony the same as they would a white man's, they must have no prejudice against hearing testimony through an interpreter translating the Seminole language, no reluctance to impose the death sentence should evidence convince them beyond a reasonable doubt that the defendant was guilty, and no predetermined opinion about John Ashley's guilt or innocence.

It took a couple of days to get through the selection process, but on April 2, 1915, a jury in Miami started hearing the evidence. Newspaper reporters covering the first day of testimony wrote that the accused was in good spirits.

But his mood changed as the trial progressed.

The jury heard the story of Desoto Tiger's death—valuable otter pelts belonging to the Seminoles, Tiger found dead from two gunshot wounds, pelts sold by Ashley in Miami.

Ashley still wore bandages around his head from the gunshot wound he'd suffered after the robbery of the Bank of Stuart two months earlier. Bandages completely covered where his right eye had been.

“For the most part he sits grim and silent,” the
Miami Daily Metropolis
reported, “thin lips pressed tightly together—always watching the witness.”

His mother, Lugenia, equally grim, sat beside him with his lawyers at the defendant's table. “Never a change comes across her countenance, except when she turns to speak a word to her son in answer to some question,” the
Metropolis
reported. “Statement after statement comes from the witnesses, never causing her to wince or smile.”

A few days into the trial, the prosecution brought in a surprise witness who sent defense attorneys into paroxysms of protest. His name was Homer Tindall, and he'd talked with John Ashley when Ashley dropped by his campsite a few days before Desoto Tiger was killed.

Tindall had not testified during Ashley's first trial that had ended in a hung jury in West Palm Beach. After hours of heated arguments that stretched over two days, Judge Branning ruled that Tindall's testimony could be heard by the Miami jury.

Homer Tindall and his father had been camped about a mile and a half from the
Caloosahatchee
, the dredge that had been working on the drainage canal. Ashley spent the night of December 19 at the Tindalls' camp.

Around noon the following day, Ashley and the younger Tindall watched two Seminoles glide past their camp in a canoe in the canal.

“The Indians were coming up to the camp and they were some little distance away, and he, Ashley, asked me if I knew them and I told him I did not,” Tindall testified, “and he asked me if I reckoned they had any hides, and I told him I didn't know, and he said, ‘If they have let us kill them and get the hides.' He said, ‘We can do it and no one will ever know it,' and I told him ‘No,' and he said, ‘If I could find one with a large quantity of hides I wouldn't any more mind killing him than I would of shooting a buzzard,' and at that time the Indians were at the camp and there wasn't any more said.”

Tindall said Ashley had stayed in their camp until December 21 and then left; he'd had no further contact with him.

The jury also heard James Girtman testify that he had bought eighty-
four
otter pelts from Ashley for $584.

When Ashley took the stand, he said he and Desoto Tiger had discussed the hides privately in Ashley's tent, and that Ashley had wanted to buy the pelts but first wanted to get an opinion about what they were worth. Ashley said he told Tiger that he'd go to Fort Lauderdale to get an estimate, and that Tiger had insisted that he bring back whiskey.

Ashley said when he returned, he paid Tiger $400 for the hides on December 28, and this transaction also was in the privacy of his tent. He denied saying to Tindall that he would as soon shoot a buzzard as an Indian, and accused Tindall of accepting a bribe in exchange for his testimony.

Ashley told the jury that he'd shot Desoto Tiger in self-defense while they were in Tiger's boat. The Seminole had pointed a pistol at him and threatened to kill him unless he gave him whiskey.

“He had his pistol pointing at me, and I, hearing the click of the pistol, grabbed my gun and started shooting as fast as I could,” Ashley told the jury.

Desoto Tiger tumbled out of the canoe and into the canal, Ashley said.

But the jury didn't buy John Ashley's story. On April 8, 1915, they pronounced Ashley guilty of murder. The following day, Judge Branning sentenced Ashley to hang. When he heard the sentence, Ashley looked toward the attorney who had led the prosecution's case against him. A cool, chilling smile slowly came to his lips.

Ashley's court-
appointed defense attorney, Crate D. Bowen, said he would appeal the conviction. In the meantime, Ashley would be held in the Dade County Jail in Miami awaiting trial on charges of robbing the Bank of Stuart a few months earlier.

Some people who were acquainted with Joe Ashley attributed his contempt for the rule of law to the fact that he grew up in the post–Civil War South during Reconstruction, when US troops occupied the former Confederate States for more than a decade. Whatever the reason, he certainly did not respect traditional boundaries of behavior and property ownership.

He saw no harm in robbing banks. In fact, he considered it a public service. The money they took was insured and would be replaced by “some damned Yankee insurance company.” So the bank did not lose anything, the depositors didn't lose anything, and since the Ashleys would spend the money locally, it was actually a form of economic stimulus. So instead of forming posses to chase them down, “Everybody ought to help us,” was the way Joe Ashley saw it.

So it stood to reason that Joe Ashley and his family were not going to allow the state of Florida to hang his son for the murder of a Seminole.

Dade County Sheriff Dan Hardie knew he had a slippery prisoner on his hands, and that John Ashley's family was likely to try to free him. He added locks and chains to increase security.

The Ashleys' jailbreak attempt came in a sudden, brutal, and deadly fashion on June 2, 1915.

Workers at a multistory parking garage across the street from the Dade County Jail talked to three men—one older, the other two younger—who were hanging around the garage that morning as though they were waiting for something to happen.

The men wanted to make sure a Ford automobile parked in the garage would start with no problems. They bought new batteries for the car and installed them.

“I tried to talk to them but none of them seemed very talkative and our conversation was not long,” E. T. Wells, who worked at the garage, told the
Daily Tropical Sun
later. “The men all seemed to be nervous, and I remember now that one or the other frequently went to the doors or windows and looked out.”

One of the younger men was Bob Ashley, John Ashley's kid brother. Ashley had bought a bottle of whiskey earlier that day, and he was carrying a curious package, something long and slender and wrapped in blue paper. A garage employee later said Ashley occasionally went to a window or door of the garage to communicate in sign language with someone in the jail across the street.

Around 12:30 p.m. Bob Ashley made a daring move. He crossed the street from the parking garage to the jail and knocked on the door of the adjoining house, where Deputy Sheriff Robert Hendrickson, the jailer, lived with his wife. When Hendrickson came to the door, Bob Ashley shot him dead with a rifle that had been wrapped in the blue paper. He grabbed the keys to the jail, and ran.