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Book Review
| Death in the Everglades: The Murder of Guy Bradley, America's First Martyr to Environmentalism. By Stuart McIver. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2003. xvii + 187 pp. Notes, bibliography, index. $24.95.
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| Both the title and the preface state that this book is about the 1905 murder of Florida game warden Guy Bradley. In fact, the book covers three topics: (1) the impact of late-nineteenth-century human encroachment on the environment of South Florida, (2) the origins of the Teddy Roosevelt-era conservation movement, and (3) the murder of Bradley. |
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South Florida in the 1880s is presented as a region beautiful yet wild, untamed and frightening. Its saltwater marshes and mangrove swamps held man-eating alligators (one of which, we are told, even once devoured a postman), monstrous snakes, predatory sharks and, most notably, enormous rookeries of spectacular plume birds such as egrets, herons, flamingoes, spoonbills, and ibis, to mention only the more important species. |
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Due to women's fashion of the period, the millinery markets of New York and Paris were placing lethal pressure on Florida's tropical avian population. Ornamental bird plumes, by weight, were more valuable than gold. Soaring plume prices coupled with a poverty-stricken, rough-hewn populace contributed to a true "tragedy of the commons." Armed with silent-shooting rifles, "plumers" could decimate a rookery in just a few visits. The author's agonizing description of the slaughter of these beautiful birds at the rate of 5 million per year, solely for ladies' hats, is guaranteed to boil the blood. |
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The American Ornithologists' Union (AOU) and the Audubon Society were founded during this era for the purpose of ending "The Age of Extermination." Besides the involvement of T. R. himself, there were other notable bird protectionists such as Frank M. Chapman and William E. Dutcher. The book's author recounts how, in 1886, Chapman, a banker and amateur ornithologist, conducted a count of birds adorning the hats of women on the streets of Manhattan. Of 700 hats surveyed, 542 were decorated with birds or bird feathers representing 160 species! Dutcher, working with the AOU and Audubon, succeeded in pushing through a Florida law in 1901 that placed criminal penalties on plume hunting. Thus enters the unfortunate Mr. Bradley. |
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Guy Bradley, a South Florida local and former plume hunter himself, was hired to enforce the new law. His was the most dangerous job: facing-down the plumers literally at gunpoint. On 8 July 1905, during one such "face-down" at Oyster Bay, Bradley was shot at close range and killed by Walter Smith, whom Bradley had confronted while Smith shot cormorants. Whether Bradley's murder was due solely to his role as game warden is debatable. Smith, a grizzled Confederate veteran of the Civil War, had had a long-standing personal feud with the 30-ish Bradley. Nevertheless, the killing, for which Smith amazingly was acquitted, did publicize the brutality of the plumer's trade and helped to speed its demise. |
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Stuart B. McIver, with Death in the Everglades, has written an informative and well-researched book that will be of considerable interest to educators, students and conservationists, particularly those, like me, who enjoy history. The sentences and chapters are well-constructed. The freely flowing text makes one eager to read about this terribly regrettable yet important saga in America's transition from frontier to modern society. |
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Ed de Steiguer is professor of natural resources at the University of Arizona. He teaches courses related to economics and planning, and policy and law on public lands. He is the author of more than one hundred works related to natural resource economics and policy including The Age of Environmentalism (McGraw-Hill, 1996). He is a former fellow with the Udall Center for Studies of Public Policy. |
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