The Everglades: River of Grass

Marjory Stoneman Douglas “The Everglades: River of Grass”, Pineapple Press, 1947 original, 2007 60 anniversary edition with an afterword, 425 pp.

www.everglades.org  the official site of the Comprehensive Everglades Restoration Plan

Marjory Stoneman Douglas, the author, died in 1998 at the age of 108.  She spent the last 29 years of her life fighting for the preservation of the Everglades.

Before 1947, when Marjory Stoneman Douglas named the Everglades a "river of grass, "most people considered the area a vast and worthless swamp. Her book brought the world's attention to the need to preserve the Everglades.  Her book served to bring attention to the need to preserve the Everglades, much as Rachel Carson’s later book, Silent Spring, drew attention to dealing with the harmful effects of DDT. The Everglades is not only a unique environment that is home to countless animal and plant species but is essential to the availability of clean water to all Florida residents—full disclosure: this be me.

My Notes:

Pg. 6:  Lake Okeechobee (the Indian word for “Big Water) is the second largest body of fresh water within the confines of the U.S.; the lake covers seven hundred fifty square miles yet is often less than a foot deep in the shallows.  Below this lake lie the Everglades.  The present name “The Everglades”, came into general use only after the U.S. acquisition of Florida from Spain in 1819.  The Indians called this area “Pa-hay-okee,” (“Grassy Water.”)  For 400 years previous to this book the region now called “The Everglades” was described as a series of vast, miasmic swamps, poisonous lagoons, huge dismal marshes without outlet, a rotting, shallow, inland sea, or labyrinths of dark trees hung and looped about with snakes and dripping mosses, malignant with tropical fevers and malarias, evil to the white man. 

Pg. 14:  The water for the lake and the glades comes from the rains.  No melting snow water, no mountain freshets, no up-gushing from caverns in ancient rock: here the rain is everything.  Average rainfall in this portion of Florida is sixty-five inches.  The rains begin in the spring, in April or even late in May.  It rains over the Glades or the lake for an hour or two every day.  In late August or in September the rainy season sets in in earnest.  In the course of a single day as much as ten or twelve inches fall.  Sometimes more than half the year’s average will have fallen in less than two months.  Hurricanes often occur in September or October and July is not too early to expect a hurricane.  Officially in Florida the fifteenth of November closes the hurricane season. 

Pg. 26:  The rock beneath Okeechobee is only a few feet above sea level.   The surface of the lake is only twenty-one feet above the level of the salt water.  The surface rock below the Everglades dips south at an incline of half a foot to every six miles. 

Pg. 32:  Hammock:  name comes from the Arawak word for jungle or masses of vegetation floating in a tropical river. 

Pg. 184:  In 1763 Spain gave up Florida to get Cuba in return from the English.  By this time the Tekestas and the Mayaimis tribes had disappeared from the area.  Only the scattered Calusas were left and even their very name would be lost in a new name the white man gave all the Indians of Florida: “Seminole”.

Pg. 245:  The U.S. army was at war with the “Seminoles” from 1836 to 1842:  3,930 Indians and Negroes had been shipped to Arkansas.  Of the army and navy deployed against the Indians, 1,555 had died; the losses of the Indians and Negroes was greater than that.  It was war in which only the resistance and determination of the Indians, not four thousand people all told, fought against the whole might of the U.S.

Pg. 250:  In 1845 both Iowa and Florida became states: one free, the other slave.

Pg. 258:  In 1850 the Congress approved an act “to enable the state of Arkansas and other states to reclaim the ‘swamplands’ within their limits.  The great Swamp Lands Act of 1850 is the basis for much of Florida’s history.  Five hundred thousand acres of swamp and overflowed lands, in general known as the Everglades, thus came under the control of the state of Florida. 

Pg. 393:  In the afterword of this book Michael Grunwald writes:  “In May 2007 the haze is so bad in downtown Miami that I can barely see out my window, because 40 miles away, the Everglades is burning again.  Lake Okeechobee is running dry again.  South Florida is facing the worst drought in its history—again.”