Lost Man's River(24)

If you will believe that, Professor, you will believe anything!

(signed) R. B. Collins





What can we conclude about his years on the frontier, apart from the widespread allegation that Watson was the “Man Who Killed Belle Starr”? At least three of Mrs. Starr’s biographers declare that after his departure from Oklahoma, the same Watson was convicted of horse theft in Arkansas and sentenced to fifteen years in the penitentiary, and that he was killed while resisting recapture after an escape. (Here as elsewhere they follow the lead of Hell on the Border, first published within a few years of the events, and considerably more accurate than many of the subsequent accounts, despite its report of Watson’s death.)

Watson’s destination after his escape from the penitentiary remains unknown, though he later related to his friend Ted Smallwood at Chokoloskee that he headed west to Oregon, where he was set upon by enemies in a night raid on his cabin. Obliged to take a life, possibly two, he fled back east. Another account asserts that Watson, on his way to Oklahoma, passed through Georgia, where he killed three men in a fracas. Like the many false rumors from south Florida—including the allegation that he murdered the Audubon warden Guy Bradley in 1905—these seem to be “tall tales” unsupported by known evidence or even anecdotes within the family.

Ed Watson reappears in Florida in the early nineties, in a shooting at Arcadia in which, by his own account (as reported by Ted Smallwood), he slew a “bad actor” named Quinn Bass. In the rough frontier justice of that period, our subject was permitted to pay his way out of his troubles, according to one of Belle Starr’s hagiographers, who asserts that “a mob stormed the [Arcadia] jail, determined to have Watson, but the sheriff beat them off.”

As Ted Smallwood recalls in his brief memoir:

Watson said Bass had a fellow down whittling on him with his knife and Watson told Bass to stop; he had worked on the man enough and Bass got loose and came towards him and he begin putting the .38 S+W bullets into Bass and shot him down.



In a different account:



Watson and Bass, another outlaw, became involved in a dispute over the spoils of a marauding expedition, and Bass was shot through the neck.



Though Watson is rarely identified as an “outlaw,” it should be noted that in those days, range wars and cattle rustling and general mayhem were rife in De Soto County, and gunmen and bushwhackers from the West found steady work. It is also true that Watson turned up at Chokoloskee Bay not long thereafter with enough money to buy a schooner, despite his alleged recompense to the Bass family. Considering that he was penniless when sent to the penitentiary and had no known employment after his escape, it is difficult to imagine where that money came from.

In his first years in southwest Florida, while establishing his plantation at Chatham Bend, Watson assaulted Adolphus Santini of Chokoloskee in an altercation in a Key West auction house, and this knife attack, which did not prove fatal, was also taken care of with a money settlement considered very substantial for that period. Again, our subject’s source of funds, after long years as a fugitive remains unexplained. One cannot dismiss the possibility that from the time of his prison escape in Arkansas until the time he took refuge in the Ten Thousand Islands, E. J. Watson made his living as an outlaw.





Withlacoochee


Until his final summer on the Bend, when he was twenty, Lucius Watson had never perceived his father as other than a bold choleric man, abounding in energy and generosity, good humor and intelligence, more instinctive with crops and farm animals, work boats and tools, than any other man in all the Islands. Even today he felt haunted and constrained by that powerful human being he called Papa, the doomed man he had seen for the last time in September of 1910, waving somberly from the riverbank at Chatham Bend. But as his biographer, he understood that his task must be to set aside love and admiration and reconstitute a more objective figure, much as a paleontologist might re-create some ancient creature from scattered shards of bone, pieced together on a rickety armature of theory. Mistrusting the warp of his own memory, he hoped to collect the more critical fragments of the “truth” from the common ground in the testimonies of his subject’s friends and enemies, retaining those which seemed consistent with the few known facts.

In the popular accounts (and there were very few others), the material was largely speculative as well as sparse. Most stories about Edgar Watson related to his last decade in southwest Florida, with which Lucius himself was already familiar. There was virtually no mention of South Carolina, where Papa had spent his boyhood and early youth, nor even of north Florida, where he would live well into early manhood, marry all three of his wives, and spend almost half of his entire life.