THE WOODS WERE TOSSING WITH JEWELS(原文).docVIP

THE WOODS WERE TOSSING WITH JEWELS by Marie St. John In 1899 when I was five years old and living in Palmetto, Florida, my father decided to take his family through the wilds of the Everglades and stake a claim on an offshore island. His purpose was to farm this island but behind this was his wish to give us a taste of the way he grew up. He had been a cowboy in the Myakka area when he was fifteen years old. These ranchlands overlapped the north end of the Everglades at a time when it was unexplored. As long as he lived, papa liked his corn bread made campfire style with boiling water and salt only, and flattened out into a brittle, tasty cracker. His life was a series of adventures. He had lost a father and a brother in the Civil War. His father’s carriage house in Charleston, South Carolina, and his nearby plantation were in the line of Sherman’s march. His widow took her eightyear-old son, my father, and fled to Quincy, Florida. When Papa finished school at the academy there, he went to work as a cowboy on a ranch in Myakka for a friend of his dead father’s. By age thirty, he was a county sheriff, no mean job in those days, and his territory was wide ranging. The county he served was later split up into six or eight counties. South Florida was uninviting to many because of the mosquitoes, panthers, crocodiles, swamps, and wetlands. But these marks of wild country called to my father like the legendary siren song. He started building a covered wagon around the fourth of July and we went into the wilderness with him in the fall. We had made our home in Palmetto for a year or so where my mother’s gentle folks, the Harrisons, had settled following the Civil War. Our comfortable two-story frame house on the Manatee River was set about with live oaks, guavas, and long-leafed pine that branched out from the foot of the tree to shelter our cow and provide a roost for the chickens. My grandfather was the town doctor. He doctored the entire county and was paid in eggs and