The Most Outrageous Alligator Poachers

By Barbara Tyner Hall

This book is going to take you deep into the heart of the Everglades before it became a national park. This journey will give you a great insight into how the laws of the land changed and how it affected the people of the area.

This story is plunging deep into the swamplands whose people learned to live off the land as a way to survive in this harsh terrain.

Many are commercial fishermen and stone crabbers, and as the I was from the area, it took me a year or so before I learned that they were ex-moonshiners, and their fathers were plume hunters. The best guides in the area are, in fact, the best alligator poachers and hunters known to this area, and the best of all is known to be the men depicted in this story.

Behind all the complicated waterways, there is a root system like no other just like a brain of a computer, and behind that is a maze of rivers that are some of the most complicated known to man. People have lost their lives trying to maneuver through the shallow waterways.

The new park rangers that were now assigned to this area had to appeal to the local fisherman to show them how to get out if Chokoloskee Bay and a few other waterways so they could patrol the area and return safely that evening to their families. Most of the families and early settlers were related to each other and would clan up like the Indians and did not like outsiders.

When the information that was provided to the first park rangers were not at all accurate, the locals, as well as Peg Brown and his friends, enjoyed toying with the rangers as much as possible. They would lay out some routes for the park rangers to follow, and let’s just say there were always some significant points missing. With that the temperament of the poachers grew more mischievous than ever, which led the authorities on highly action-packed chases and exciting adventures and escapades throughout the dangerous maze of the Ten Thousand Islands.

Everglades natives believe that the animals in the national park belong to them, and they should be allowed to use animals as they saw fit, much of the same way a developing nation controls its oil.

The local people were not all that upset about the widespread killings of the alligators. Most alligators were a nuisances, but they believed in the hidden supply theory, which was said that an unlimited supply of alligators would always emerge from the swamps to replace the ones that were poached and made into shoes, belts, and purses for some of the wealthiest people who could afford to buy them.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Page Publishing, Inc.
• Release date: Feb 15, 2021
• ISBN: 9781662409240

Book preview

Chapter One

The Everglades

It was a hot and starry night. The stars glittered against the beautiful backdrop of the black satin sky with the occasional purple cloud dancing and sailing across it like it was an ocean sky, and the moon was full, which gave off enough light to see for miles. There as not a person in sight and the only thing you could hear was a constant drone of mosquitoes (swamp angels) buzzing around your head, and a humming like you have never heard before. Sometimes the insects were so thick a scarf would be required to keep them out of your mouth and ears. Moments later, a bellowing sound of a bull alligator sounding his primal challenge letting the ladies know where he is, and the deep base sound echoed like a roar of a lion through the glades claiming he is the king of the jungle.

The Everglades, the southern tip of Florida, was home to approximately 650 modest people who survive by living off the land and making a living any way they could to support their families with what they had available to them.

The area was a desolate area teeming with wildlife like the Florida Panther, West Indian Manatee, the Black Bear, and the American Alligator, to name a few. Along with the animals was one of the most significant fisheries, one could only hope to encounter. All of this and more inhabit this area, making it a very sought after place if you make a living off of guide fishing or hunting.

Florida had a long history of Plume hunting, moonshiners, and rum runners long after Prohibition in 1933.

Moonshiners continued to make illegal liquor in South Florida and the Everglades. In the 1950s and 1960s, the police and revenue authorities battle in all parts of South Florida. Seizing homebrew from cars, trucks, and homes, they raided with the still hidden deep in the swamplands of the Everglades.

The Everglades is approximately 580,000 square miles starting at Napes and continuing west to Miami, and then from Key West to Lake Okeechobee with most of the area being primitive. The echo system in Everglades National Park had suffered significantly from human activities.

People had lived in and around the area for thousands of years. Plans arose in the 1800s to drain the wetlands and use it for agricultural and residential use. As the region progressed, the water from Lake Okeechobee was increasingly controlled and diverted, which enabled the explosive growth of the South Florida metropolitan area. This area consisted of wet, smelly saw grass marshlands where waters move slowly and southward to the nearby mangrove swamps bordering the Gulf of Mexico and then flowing into Florida Bay.

Everglades does experience an extensive range of weather, from frequent flooding in the rainy season and drought in the dry season.

The Indian Seminole Tribe formed in 1957, Mostly creek people, that were forced from their land in North Florida and settled into the Everglades. After adapting to the region, they were able to resist the removal by the United States Army and stayed in the area. The word Seminole means wild people or Runaway and comes from the Spanish word Cimarron. The Seminole Indians gave the area we know today as Everglades, the name that means Ongoing of Grass or Sea of Grass to describe the saw grass marshes. The most significant part of the complicated echo system that includes cypress, swamps, and mangrove forests of the Ten Thousand Islands and the tropical hardwood hammocks that we know and love today.

Some of the people that move here are outsiders to the locals. They move here to fish, and most are retired people or refugees from significant Florida developments, looking for a place where nature has not been destroyed. They come to see the spoonbills and manatees and especially the alligators that exist under federal protection in the National Park. They’re not always aware that the people from whom they buy their trailer lots and their bird books are the people they hire to take them fishing or sightseeing. They are often the same ones that eat Chokoloskee Chicken at night and also are the ones who separate the alligator from their skins by the thousands from here to Cupid Bay.

Many of the alligator hunters or the local people never liked the National Park in their backyard. They do not always like a tourist either, even when the tourists bring in needed revenue to Chokoloskee Island and Everglades City. Tourists often mistrust locals if they feel they destroy wildlife, and that is funny given that the tourist is the ones that live in developments where bulldozers have destroyed wildlife and everything in its path.

There is even a big sign on Chokoloskee Island that reads, Yankees, do not proceed beyond this point, which sometimes defines the limits of a relationship between the Yankees and the locals.

The locals look around and notice how their little island is starting to change, more channel markers, bigger boats, motor homes, and approved campsites, and no one was happy about it.

Chapter Two

Peg Brown

Peg Brown was a 5’10", thinly built man with massive arms and an anchor tattoo and talked with a distinguished slow Southern drawl. Brown was a macho man with his own Everglades style. He was a quiet man who commanded attention when he entered a room with his presence, but he moved quietly and would blend into the background if you allowed him to. He was a straightforward man with strong knowledge of the Ten Thousand Islands, one of the few that was reputed to know how to navigate all the backwater countries, which are one of the most complicated areas in the park. He was a native to the area, and his name was one nobody would soon forget.

He was a seasoned and experienced guide, one of the best in these waters, and a commercial fisherman, and his favorite title of all was one of the most outrageous alligator poachers who ever lived. He knew the Everglades like the back of his hand. The Everglades was his playground, this natural trade being passed down from generation to generation, learned from his elders, born to do as his father did, but Peg took a particular interest in the trade that he enjoyed so much. He was fearless in doing this challenging work and took great pride in his accomplishments, like the money that he buried under a tree on his property from the profits of the hides.

He had a small modest home with minimum things to survive. His décor in the house was of a typical fisherman from the area with fishing rods and guns leaning against the bare walls and a few snapshots of beautiful Costa Rican women on the mantelpiece sharing space with a vast snook, one of the prize game fish in the area.

Peg required a little more entertainment than what the small village offered. So Brown decided that he would divide his time the same way he shares his pictures on the mantel in his home. Peg would meet his women in Costa Rica, and then he would come back, get someone to translate his letters that he wrote to the Costa Rican Embassy with which he would wage a continuing campaign and spend many hours asking for safe passage for the women to join him here in the United States. Most times, he had to give up and go down and visit the women there. Then he came back and plotted his new strategy again.

Alligator hunting was not an easy job, not by far. Peg saw the alligator as money in the bank. Prices were high, and profits are very lucrative. No two alligator expeditions were ever the same. Some exciting and challenging, and some just the same old thing. That was one reason Peg never got bored with the job and enjoyed doing it. The work was hard, and the mosquitoes and deerflies bothersome. It was long hours and dirty work, and it took him deep into the swamps for days but was still fun and challenging to Peg. In the long run, the payday was well worth it. The thought of being caught by the rangers only made the game more exciting to Peg. Peg figured he would take advantage of the little knowledge the rangers had of the area, and he would surely have fun with them while he could.

Brown’s poaching commanded eight dollars a linear foot. Peg claims his profits ran well over fifty thousand dollars, although he never kept an accurate account.

The ten thousand alligators that Brown admitted to killing would have made up a vast majority of the estimated population in the state of Florida around the 1970s. An average of six feet of alligator hide per animal worked out to sixty thousand linear feet of leather. That’s a lot of shoes in Bloomingdale or any other high-end store that sold alligator skin purses, shoes, wallets, and belts.

Chapter Three

Alligator Money