For Sale —American Paradise by Willie Drye Read Free Book Online Page B

of the nation. The man who builds a factory or digs a mine serves his country.”
    It was a properly moral Victorian attitude of noblesse oblige. And he expressed another old-fashioned opinion about acquiring great wealth: It took an awful lot of hard work and self-sacrifice, and required a single-minded, almost fanatical devotion.
    â€œTo succeed may cost one’s health, or it may mean separation from one’s family and friends and banishment to the desert, the mine, or the forest,” he said. “But no matter the way and no matter the price, success always demands unremitting toil, self-denial, and enthusiasm.”
    Henry Flagler would live just long enough to see his railroad to Key West—called the Overseas Extension—completed in 1912. He died after taking a bad fall a year later at his magnificent home in Palm Beach.
    Flagler’s construction crews employed hundreds of men to clear the right-of-way and lay the tracks for the railroad down Florida’s east coast. Among the men who hired on was Joe Ashley, a backwoodsman who was a highly skilled trapper and marksman.

    Joe Ashley brought his family from the state’s Gulf Coast and joined Flagler’s construction crew in 1904, the year Flagler made the decision to extend his railroad to Key West. Among Joe Ashley’s sons was eleven-year-old John, who had inherited his father’s remarkable skill as a marksman with a rifle and a pistol. John preferred to spend his time in the wilds, trapping otters. The skills the youngster was developing would serve him well in another, more lucrative occupation in a few years.
    In 1905, Flagler’s work crews began clearing the right- of-way to lay rails to the tip of the Florida peninsula, where they would start building bridges and laying tracks across the Florida Keys. Florida’s mild winters and rail connections to populous northeastern cities were getting more attention across the country. The January 1906 edition of National Geographic magazine noted that southern Florida was “the only truly tropical land” that was connected by rail to the eastern United States. “It is indeed a wonder that when cold weather comes, this region is not completely overrun with people,” writer John Gifford said.
    As the first decade of the new century ended, Florida was not running over with people, but it was starting to get noticed. The 1910 US Census showed that the state’s population had increased from just over 528,000 in 1900 to about 753,000 in 1910.
    The population increase for Dade County—which included Miami—was especially impressive. In 1900, when Dade County extended one hundred miles up the coast from Miami, its population was about 4,600. Ten years later, Dade’s boundaries had been shrunk to create Palm Beach and St. Lucie Counties to its north. But even within the diminished boundaries, Dade’s 1910 population had more than doubled in a decade, to just under 12,000. And the combined population of the new counties that occupied Dade’s old boundaries was approaching an additional 9,700 newcomers.
    Americans were beginning to realize that an earthly version of Paradise lay at their doorstep. Florida was a long way from being tamed, but the tangled, unearthly wilderness that had terrified Jonathan Dickinson and alternately disgusted and enthralled Jacob Motte did not seem quite so wild and impenetrable anymore. As the first decade of the new century ended, more newcomers were coming to Florida, bringing their dreams, ideas, and money. As they worked to carve an idyllic paradise out of the wilderness, a homegrown gang of opportunistic thieves—daring, ruthless, clever, and intimately familiar with the wilds of southern Florida—were determined to grab as much of the new wealth as they could carry away to their hideout, deep in the Everglades.
    After all, they told themselves, they were entitled to it.

CHAPTER THREE
Dreamers and