Florida Mounds and Springs
by THOMAS BARBOUR
1
GRANDMOTHER’S house at Eau Gallie is situated right on the shore of the Indian River — which is not a river at all but a large and rather brackish lagoon. It is a queer old structure, really a double house. The front part is said to be the oldest building in Eau Gallie. Grandmother’s bedroom and the sitting room are downstairs and there are two guest rooms upstairs. The front walk out to the lane passes under an arbor covered with Cherokee roses.
To the east, facing the river, there was a screened porch with an open porch directly above it. Beside the screened porch, where one might sit in peace during the mosquitoey seasons, there was more wide porch space connected with the separate dining room. Part of the open veranda downstairs extended around the trunk of a giant water oak which shaded the unroofed porch and a large part of the house. At the western door of the dining room was the cistern which provided drinking water, caught from the eaves. There are two artesian wells on the place, but the water from these is strongly sulphurous, though in time most of us grew to like it.
It was a picturesque dwelling place, beautifully cared for and planted out while Grandmother was alive — now, however, sadly in ruins. For years there was a long wharf at the foot of the little grassy lane that bordered her property on the north. Here the old stern-wheel steamers which ran south to Jupiter from St. Augustine stopped on their irregular journeys down river. To this wharf also was tied Grandmother’s fishing launch.
In Florida at that time, few people had such a boat. The engine was made of solid bronze, for Grandmother hated the idea of sitting near a rusty engine, and she knew it would be that with the care it would get locally. Moreover, the engine was made so that it could be run very slowly for trolling. The Indian River had not been netted outrageously by commercial fishermen in those days, as it has been now, and it was no trick at all to catch a mess of sailor’s-choice from the dock.
These were delicious little pan fish which might be sent to the kitchen or sometimes impaled as bait on a big hook and tossed far out from the end of the dock on a long line. There was always the good chance of catching an errant sergeant fish or snook, which might be cruising up or down the river well out from shore. These big fellows were whitemeated and delicious to eat. You couldn’t catch a big one now in the Indian River to save your soul — I mean one of fifteen or twenty pounds.
On trolling excursions with Grandmother, I usually went across the Indian River to the southern point of Merritt Island directly opposite across the river from “Walden,” as Grandmother called her place. Merritt Island, something over a hundred miles long, lies in the Indian River, and that area of water lying to the eastward of the island is called the Banana River. Where the two socalled rivers meet, there is an area of perhaps a hundred acres of really deep water for that part of the world, perhaps from fifteen to twenty-five feet. Here we trolled around and around, again and again. We used a hand line; Grandmother got more of a thrill without a rod.
I remember well the very first time I ever went there with her; I caught a sea trout, in reality an ally of our Northern weakfish and, of course, no trout at all, which weighed just short of fifteen pounds. It jumped nobly when it struck, and I can feel now the sense of triumph as I landed it, although, in my opinion, the meat of this fish is decidedly inferior in quality.
On these trolling excursions we passed back and forth across the front of a great shell mound — thirty feet from the river shore to the top — which is located on the eastern shore of the Banana River, directly at its junction. I never saw this Banana River mound without its firing my imagination. It seemed so stupendous to my childish eyes. We often talked about how smelly the top of the mound must have been as a dwelling place, for of course the whole great accumulation was formed by Indians sitting around their campfires and for years unnumbered throwing the shells of the mollusks they ate over their shoulders, so to speak. There are little lenticular spots throughout the whole mound, which was certainly several acres in area, and these lenses were the compacted remnants of age-old cooking fires. We know that primitive man is not very fussy about what he smells, but these mounds, during the process of their formation, must have been noisome in the extreme.
The Banana River mound was not very much higher or very much larger in area than the shell mound which belonged to Grandmother and which was but little over a mile south of “Walden,” where the Eau Gallie River enters the Indian River. On the rich surface of this mound, among enormous oaks and tall cabbage palms, which must have been very old, Grandmother’s wonderful grove of old orange and grapefruit trees stood. They were apparently old seedling trees: they show no signs of having been budded; and how so many seedlings came to produce such superb fruit is a first-class mystery.
Once, however, before I ever tried digging there, I rowed myself over to the great mound at the mouth of the Banana River and by chance landed for a memorable day of sport. I must have been about twelve. I left my boat at the beach in front of the mound and trudged across through the scrub to the ocean. Naturally, on the way I examined carefully the bear tracks and the deer tracks in the sand, and finally reached the ocean beach after a walk of about a mile and a half. Then I uncoiled the long, heavy fishline which I had carried with me. I baited it with a sailor’s-choice, taken from my pocket, and bent in a match stick to the line about six feet from the sinker and the bait. Catching this little stick with my second and third finger, I would whirl the whole contraption around my head and heave it far out into the surf.
The sun was warm and the water caressed my bare feet. Suddenly I caught what to my eyes was the father of all channel bass and dragged it up on the beach. I beat its head vigorously with a club till it quit flopping, hitched a line to its tail, and slung it over my shoulder.
Thoroughly tired, I plodded back to the boat. As I was getting ready to row home I saw a fine big possum on the shore. He was traipsing about in broad daylight, which is no ordinary custom for possums. I ran him down and turned him over with one of the oars. With another line, which I had in the boat, I made one of his hind feet fast and hitched him to one of the thwarts. I rowed proudly home.
Grandmother was delighted at sight of the big fish, which we sliced up for broiling, reserving a good chunk for chowder. She spurned the possum, however, which went home that night with Aunt Harriet, ensconced in her covered basket. She was our cook and lived in “Colored Town” about two miles away, and this particular evening she went home with plans for fattening her trove before killing it. I can see her now as she puffed her little black T D pipe, walking along with a distinct hitch, for one of her legs was considerably shorter than the other.
2
DURING the early years of our married life, Rosamond and I had several happy visits to Eau Gallie and there we began our first amateur archaeological digging. We found pottery sherds beyond number in the great Banana River mound. Directly behind it there was an even higher sand mound that must have been the burial place used by the makers of the shell mound for a very long time. The Peabody Museum still has many of the bones which we dug and one pretty fair skull. If, however, we had known as much then as we do now about caring for this sort of material, we should have had a much larger and much better collection. The bones were soft and punky, and many were ruined by the penetration of roots of the trees and shrubs growing on the mound. Nevertheless, our digs were memorable occasions and they offered thrilling adventures and worth-while experience.
It has always been a mystery to me why this mound should have so abounded in fragments of pottery, showing several different designs, and other human implements such as shell cups and ladles, many fashioned from the big whelk shells. On the other hand, the mound at our grove proved to be unproductive. Grandmother was always very much interested in our digging activities and keen to see what we found. She helped find laborers to dig for us and frequently ferried us over and back from the mound. But none of Grandmother’s old colored folk who worked around the place would ever go near the mound.
Mounds built of shells of marine species are characteristic of the coastal areas of most of Florida, whereas shell mounds composed of fresh-water forms are characteristic of the St. Johns River area particularly, and of lakes and streams of North and North-central Florida. The gigantic mounds, sometimes acres in extent and perhaps twenty or more feet deep, some even larger than our great mound near Eau Gallie, were to be found near salt water on both the east and west coasts of the state. Many have gone and others are fast disappearing. The shell was used in all road-building operations long before modern methods of road construction came to be practiced, and shell still is carted away to be used for country roads, private avenues, paths, and sidewalks.
These mounds have furnished enormous collections of pottery and other human artifacts to many museums since Dr. Jeffries Wyman first read the account of his visit to the shell mounds of Northern Florida before the Boston Society of Natural History on April 18, 1867. He said, “The age of these mounds was not determined but the occasional occurrence of live oaks, five feet in diameter, proved that the mounds had not been materially increased since the advent of the white man more than three centuries ago.” As a matter of fact we know little or nothing of the people who made them.
The Indians in Florida today are not the Indians who were there when the Spaniards discovered the country. The early published accounts and illustrations give some account of the way the natives of that day appeared, but there is every reason to believe that neither the Indians of the present day nor even the Indians of four hundred years ago had any traditions or recollections which would indicate that they knew anything about the prehistoric inhabitants.
On May 20, 1874, but a few months before his death, Professor Jeffries Wyman communicated to the Boston Society of Natural History the fact that he found indubitable evidence of cannibalism practiced by the early inhabitants living on the shores of the St. Johns River. He says, “In several instances considerable portions of the skeleton of a single individual were found but spread out over a large surface in a disorderly manner showing that the bones could not have been deposited as in the ordinary Burial. As there were no marks of teeth these bones could not have been supposed to have been broken up while lying on the surface by wild animals. . . . They were, besides, in the different instances broken up in a somewhat similar manner, the upper arm and thigh bones being fractured just below the heads and in the middle. Bones of the forearm and leg were generally broken through the middle and the ribs were broken into smaller pieces of nearly uniform length.” So much for Wyman’s observations, which, as always, were carefully made and accurately described.
I asked my friend Earnest Hooton whether our impression that the skulls of the mound builders were really characterized by being very thick, for so they certainly appeared to us, was correct. He replied, “The Florida Mound skeletal material in the Peabody Museum, collected from the days of Jeffries Wyman onward, is extraordinary for massiveness. The skulls are thicker and heavier and usually broader than those of Seminoles. Morphologically they are quite distinct. Several of our Mound crania show fusion of two or more molars—a rare phenomenon. They tend to be brachycephalic and usually are low of forehead and heavy of brow-ridge.”
A few years ago Professor E. D. Merrill, Mr. Harold Loomis, and I visited that enormous mound at the southern end of Marco Island in Southwestern Florida. This mound, which is one of the largest in existence, is composed almost entirely of great, heavy-shelled, hard clams — quahogs we should call them in New England.
We walked about examining the cacti and other interesting species of plants characteristic of this area and fell to disputing among ourselves as to the probable age of these deposits. After considering the matter carefully and concluding that there was no likelihood that any great population of aborigines lived on Marco Island at any one time, we came to the conclusion that something in the order of 20,000 years, at a minimum, would have been necessary to give rise to this enormous accumulation of shells. Our surmise regarding the population was based on the fact that we know of no place in the eastern part of the United States where native or aboriginal people were densely crowded together.
3
I HAVE always thought that we were owed some further explanation about Ponce de Leon and his search for the Fountain of Youth. Who planted in his head the idea that there was such a thing? He was supposed to have made his first search in Bimini. That was a mighty poor guess from any angle. But Florida is another story, and certainly a far better bet as a hunting ground, for North-central Florida has more spectacular, indeed more incredible, springs than any other region of which I have ever heard. It is impossible here to describe each of these springs in detail, but it can truthfully be said that, like the stars, one differeth from another in glory.
My first choice is Wakulla, not simply because at times it is probably the largest spring in the entire world, but because there is a sense of timelessness and mystery which is quite overwhelming as you row about its pellucid waters. It is a unique experience to look down and see the remains of a mastodon (its mate now stands in the State Museum at Tallahassee) lying in clear sight on the bottom of the spring (although pretty well encrusted with limestone) and a bee tree quite obviously chopped open by the stone axes of primitive people using the tools of untold generations ago. The spring, which is really a crystal lake in the woods, spews forth a river which winds through a lovely stand of cypress, and since it belongs to a family appreciative of beauty, the du Ponts, it has been kept unsullied.
Here, as one looks into this strange and mysterious world, one secs a bewildering variety of aquatic vegetation which sways and waves in the swift stream and through which the usual swarms of fish and turtles, snakes and alligators, wander about pushing aside the moving plants in a strange, fairylike land under water. The water itself is so perfectly limpid that no concept of depth can be gained by peering down into it; you may stick your arm down to touch a turtle and find you could not reach him with a ten-foot pole. On the shores there are birds beyond number. Here is the one great concentration of limpkins of which I know remaining in Florida — that is, one which is permanent, always to be found, and not a fortuitous congregation.
Limpkins appear to some as giant rails and to others as miniature cranes. Their voice is distinctly crane-like, likewise their flight, for they flap heavily with their necks stretched out straight ahead and not retracted the way herons fly. These birds have suffered in the past because they were noisy, not particularly shy, and delicious to eat. It is a wicked shame to find a writer in the Saturday Evening Post (January 30, 1943) proclaiming that Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings hunts and eats limpkins at Cross Creek. If Mrs. Rawlings really eats limpkins, she should be jolly well ashamed of herself. The bird is so near the verge of disappearance and is so carefully and specially protected by the Federal government and the State of Florida that this heedless advertising of its table qualities is deplorable.
Rosamond and I once visited the spring in summer after heavy rains. It is hotter than the hinges of Gehenna in summer in this part of Florida, and we had to keep our windows open to breathe. You will probably think that I am a monument of mendacity when I say that the chorus of frogs of perhaps twenty species completely prevented sleep. It would have been as easy to sleep in a boiler mill or a drop forge foundry. However, the early morning ride in the glass-bottomed boat over the great chasm, where crystal-clear water boils forth from an enormous depth, was rewarding. I believe that, were not the throat from which the water pours curved on its route underground, it would have been possible to see down more than 200 feet. Two hundred thousand gallons a minute issue from this magic well. In the morning of our visit the amphibian chorus died off with the rising of the sun and the only sounds were the plop, plop, plop of the jumping mullet and the calls of the awakening birds. Mullet run up from salt water in great numbers — whether for a change of scene or for medicinal reasons I have no way of telling.
The outlet of Silver Springs is the famous and lovely Oklawaha River. Years ago stern-wheel steamers from Jacksonville used to reach the spring along this stream and the St. Johns River. It has been known to pour forth 500 million gallons a day in the rainy season — enough water to supply the city of New York. It has now become a tourist resort visited by tens of thousands, and unfortunately shows the result of its commercialization. Here you may be photographed sitting astride “Ferdinand” — not even a bull, but a great fat ox — on the very shore of the springs, or eat a fried chicken near its bank, or watch some obviously unhappy Indians, far from home, do beadwork and make various sorts of objects for sale.
4
FOR years I have turned aside on journeys through the state to visit one spring or another, so that in time I think I have seen most of them. But there are three hidden beauties about which I am going to say a word in the hope that my reader may some day be inclined to see them for himself. One is a fairy gem called Juniper Springs in the midst of the Ocala National Forest. This is a tiny spring compared to the other two, but it boils gayly out of a picturesque rocky basin from a pure-white sandy bottom. The water, when the sun shines on it, becomes a vibrant and lovely aquamarine, while the spring itself is in a little clearing with well-kept lawns and a neat bathhouse for visitors.
Around this clearing the woods are undisturbed, and for some distance the trees have been identified by the government naturalists and accurately but inconspicuously labeled with their common and scientific names. There are paths which wander along the course of the bubbling stream which issues from the spring, and there is supervision which is sufficiently ominous so that no one feels inclined to dump lunch boxes, bottles, bits of paper and string as, unfortunately, the traveling public of these United States is so often inclined to do. The setting of this spring is entirely satisfying and I salute the Forest Service for its work at Juniper Springs.
Farther south near Dunellon is Rainbow Spring. Here the setting is not ideal; surroundings are somewhat artificial and the country about the spring and river which it forms is a little disappointing. But there is a mysterious quality to this water. Dr. Herman Gunther, head of the State Geological Survey in Tallahassee, told me I would never believe what he said about it until I had seen the spring with my own eyes. He told the truth, for every leaf of Sagittaria, Ludvigia, Vallisneria, or any of the other aquatic plants is limned out with prismatic colors. The effect is truly eerie. The outlines of the plants are not sharp and clear as they are in the other springs, but are blurred and softened by these lovely prismatic effects in a way which is quite impossible to describe.
Homosassa is a spring for the zoologist. It is another enormous basin only a short way from salt water on the west coast of the state. The surroundings are not particularly attractive, but it is a meeting place, a sort of piscine rendezvous, where fish of many sorts form a procession and swim around and around in the crystal water. They swim layer upon layer, dipping down out of sight in the depths and then reappearing, cohort after cohort, so that the effect is bewildering. Great tarpon, giant jack, snook, mullet, and a dozen other species in countless hundreds parade solemnly round and round as well as up and down.
No one fishes here and the animals appear perfectly fearless. This is an extraordinary sight indeed, and one which for some reason is not so famous as it should be. I should never have seen the spot if my friend Dr. Archie Carr of Gainesville had not insisted that I make an excursion there. Since then I have stopped to look at it with great enjoyment whenever I have been within motoring distance. I should everlastingly like to know what draws the fish. I suspect it may be that the exceptionally pure fresh water is distasteful to unpleasant ectoparasites from which the fish crave riddance.
From one point of view these giant springs have been a bitter disappointment. I have always expected that from time to time they would spew up samples of the life which we naturally suspect exists in some of their vast subterranean waterways. Consider these facts. In 1895 a curious pallid wraith of a salamander was shot up in the artesian well that supplied water to the Fish Commission Station at San Marcos, Texas. This curious little creature, about four inches long, blind, translucent, its limbs modified to serve as threadlike tactile organs, was well named by the late great naturalist Leonhard Stejneger, as Typhlomolge rathbuni.
From time to time additional specimens have appeared in this well and in others driven in the immediate neighborhood; most museums have a representation of this strange little animal, and a good many individuals have been used for experimental purposes. Now, however, a specimen seldom appears, and it may be presumed that the population was a small one. This is not the case with the European Proteus from the caves of the Alps of Carniola, in Austria, which is a much larger animal, also blind and somewhat similar in appearance. Two different races have been described.
A few years ago Dr. Archie Carr, Jr., of the University of Florida, described a still more remarkable find which had been shot forth from a deep artesian well near Albany, Dougherty County, in Southern Georgia. This is the most degenerate — or most highly modified, if you prefer — cavernicolous amphibian which has ever appeared. He brought it to Cambridge for study, and I suggested he call it Haideotriton. He described it under this name, with the specific name of wallacei, to commemorate a gentleman associated with the discovery. And then, bless his heart, he gave it to our museum. This is a first-class treasure and one of the most curious creatures to be found in the whole house. It never has been found again since the date of its discovery in 1939.
So it was not unreasonable to suppose that these great Florida springs would have produced samples of this fauna which has probably been lurking in the bowels of the earth since cretaceous times, perhaps a hundred million years ago. There is one possible explanation: that because these great springs simply swarm with fish, creatures of this sort may from time to time have been snapped up when they emerged. A counter suggestion, however, is the fact that generally fish will not eat newts and salamanders the way they will eat some species of little frogs.
These, of course, are only samples of the fabulous Florida springs. Many have been dug out for bathing purposes, and one I can think of is a comfortable old-time spa, its waters cool and refreshing. The oldfashioned hotel there has its dining room in plain sight of the spring. I have always thought that would be a pleasant place to muse away a few days doing nothing. It is called Deleon Springs.