Lost Man's River(22)

Lucius nodded, intent on the details. Besides providing clues for systematic research, this Herlong reminiscence was complementary to an account of Watson’s later life by his father’s friend Ted Smallwood, which had turned up in recent years in a history of Chokoloskee Bay. Both brief memoirs had been set down nearly a half century after Edgar Watson’s death, and yet—and this excited Lucius most—these separate narratives by two men who had never met were nowhere contradictory, and therefore more dependable than any material he had come across so far.

Returning the clipping to the old man, who was all but transcendent with self-satisfaction, the historian promised to acknowledge “the Arbie Collins Archive” in his bibliography and notes. Though Arbie would not admit it, the prospect of seeing his name in print delighted the old archivist, persuading him that he, too, was an historian of record, and that his lifelong pursuit of Watsoniana had been worthwhile research after all.

The two Watson authorities soon agreed that they must go to Columbia County to complete their research on their common subject. Given the makeshift life of frontier Florida, the chances of finding significant data by rummaging through old records seemed remote indeed. However, they might hope to locate some Collins kinsmen who might talk with them, and perhaps some old-timers who could claim a few dim reminiscences of the Watson era. But when Lucius invited Arbie to accompany him on a later visit to the house at Chatham Bend, which the Park Service was threatening to burn down, Arbie shook his head. “Not interested,” he said.

It was understood (though they had not spoken of it) that Caxambas had become Arbie Collins’s home. In the next days, the old man remained more or less sober, working happily to reorganize his rough data. “I been updating my archives, Professor,” he might say, picking up one of Lucius’s pipes and pointing the pipe stem at its bemused owner. Clearing his throat and frowning pompously, weighing his words in what he imagined was an academic manner, the old man sorted his scrofulous yellow scraps. “ ‘Bad Man of the Islands,’ ” he read out with satisfaction, “ ‘Red-bearded Knife Artist.’ How’s that for data?” Slyly he would frown and harrumph, pointing the pipe. “Speaking strictly as a scholar now, L. Watson, that man’s beard was not real red. It was more auburn, sir. More the color of dried blood.”

“Clearly a consequence of his inveterate habit of dipping his beard in the lifeblood of his victims,” Lucius observed, taking back his pipe. He was having great fun with this bad old man. At the same time, he took pains not to feed an anarchic streak which flickered like heat lightning in Arbie’s brain, and sometimes cracked the surface of his eye.

“That could be, L. Watson. That could be, sir.”





Murder in the Indian Country


Hell on the Border, that grim compendium of Indian Country malfeasance first published in 1895, identified “a man named Watson” as the killer of “the outlaw queen” Belle Starr. Was this man one of those shadowy assassins who intervene in greater destinies, then are gone again into the long echo of history? Or did he later reappear as the enigmatic “Mister Watson,” shot to pieces by his neighbors on the coast of southwest Florida in 1910?

Edgar Watson fled north Florida in late 1886 or early 1887. In a recent letter to The Miami Herald, which Mr. R. B. Collins has brought recently to my attention, Dr. D. M. Herlong, a neighbor of the family, describes how Watson departed their community “in the dead of night,” though he relates nothing of the circumstances:

One bright moonlight night, I heard a wagon passing our place. It was bright enough to recognize Watson and his family in the wagon. The report was that they had settled in Georgia, but it could not have been for long.



Although there is no clear record of his movements, it appears that in the spring and summer of 1887, Edgar Watson sharecropped in Franklin County, Arkansas, continuing westward after the crop was in and settling near Whitefield, in the Indian Territory, in early January of 1888.

The period in Mr. Watson’s life between January 1888 and March 1889 is relatively well documented, due to the part he may have played in the life and death of Mrs. Maybelle Reed, popularly known as Belle Starr, Queen of the Outlaws, whose multicolored myth has generated endless articles and books, poems, plays and films, to the present day. Because Belle Starr’s murder in the Indian Territory on February 3, 1889, was attributed only six years after the event to a man named Watson, this name appears in the closing pages of most (but not all) of her numerous biographies, despite many doubts as to the true identity of the real killer.