Last Train to Paradise (9 page)

Stories circulated that some men did attempt to swim or slog their way through the swamps toward civilization, and that when caught they were forced to return to the labor gangs, this time as unpaid convict labor. Public outcry reached its peak in 1907, when a New York federal grand jury indicted the FEC and a prominent New York labor recruiter on the grounds that they had violated an 1866 law prohibiting the use of slave labor.

Because the allegations against the company and the recruiters had come in the main from witnesses whose reliability was open to challenge—many had criminal backgrounds, most were uneducated, others were alcoholic—the government abruptly dropped its case just as the matter was about to go to trial. But Flagler was far from pleased. To friends, he expressed his oft-repeated suspicions that the entire matter had been concocted by old foes of his in the government, still miffed that they hadn’t been able to prove their charges against Standard Oil.

In one letter to John Sleicher dated November 20, 1908, he expressed relief that the case against the FEC for “Conspiracy, Peonage, and Holding Men in Slavery” had been dropped, but said, “There is however an air of mystery about this thing that we do not understand.”

In another letter he wrote that same day to his old friend Dr. Andrew Anderson, Flagler was more pointed: “I have no idea that Teddy’s [Roosevelt’s] venom will permit him to stop as long as there is a chance to get a whack at me.”

Flagler, who had been adamant from the project’s outset about the need to treat his workforce well, also seemed upset that he had not gotten the chance to present a picture of actual conditions in the camps to the public at large. In a letter to Elihu Root, he reminded his longtime supporter that “when we started the work, I gave orders . . . that no pains or expense should be spared to house and feed the men in the best possible manner.” He reiterated that the company had gone so far as to build hospitals in Miami and Long Key and keep them staffed with registered nurses, physicians, and surgeons.

Flagler also noted that Major General J. R. Brooke, another associate from the early days in St. Augustine, had often accompanied him on progress inspection trips down the grade, and that Brooke had remarked to Flagler on a number of occasions that he had never seen any U.S. troop installations where the men were as well quartered and fed.

From a more distant perspective, there seems little doubt that many outlandish claims were made by zealous recruiters (and embroidered by men yearning to hear tales of fountains of youth and streets paved with gold). But it seems equally clear that there were never slave-labor practices in effect on the project.

A telegram that Joseph Parrott, Flagler’s operations manager, sent to Meredith in the midst of the furor sheds some light on the matter:

You will recall that more than a year ago I had occasion to advise you that some one had reported to me that some of our men on the extension work were using guns for making the men work and I told you at the time as a humane proposition it must not be done, and our men must be treated kindly, and if we had any foremen who could not work and supervise labor without the use of force or threats, or violent language they must be relieved. Apart from the humane idea, it is a business proposition that men work better and they are better men, if treated like men should be. While we may have some men among us who are not fit to be treated like men, I think it is best to discharge them even though it is an expense to us.

It takes no great leap, however, to imagine the dismay that must have been felt by significant numbers of men who were brought to a seeming paradise, there to encounter work of such a nature and difficulty as they could scarcely comprehend. It must have felt to some as though they had become slaves, captive to a project that would grind them to fishmeal unless they could somehow find escape.

11

A Surprise, the First of Many

A dependable source of labor was not the only problem Flagler faced, of course. In preparation for the project, he had amassed a formidable array of equipment, including three tugs, eight Mississippi River stern-wheelers, more than two dozen motor launches ranging from five to fifty horsepower, a dozen dredges, eight concrete-mixing machines to be installed on barges, two more concrete mixers for land, nine pile drivers for underwater supports and two more for land-based track pile driving, ten power shovels, a specialized catamaran for use in building forms for concrete piers, a pair of large steel barges and scores of smaller ones, several locomotive cranes, a floating machine shop, more than a dozen houseboats of varying sizes, and two oceangoing steamships.

Because much of the work would go on around the clock, all of the floating equipment was outfitted with its own generators to produce electric light. As word began to circulate about the scope of this assemblage, independent estimates of the costs of the project soared, with a reporter from the
Brooklyn Eagle
setting the ultimate price tag at more than $50 million.

It was far too late for any second-guessing on Flagler’s part, however. In a process regularly chronicled by the
Palm Beach Daily News,
the
St. Augustine Record,
and other Florida and New York newspapers, six of the dredges had gone to work immediately on the nearly twenty-two miles of palmetto scrubland and mangrove swamp separating the Homestead terminus from Jewfish Creek, where the FEC line would cross to Key Largo.

The big machines were working from either end toward a meeting place midway between Homestead and the creek, their progress often delayed when the channels had to be hacked to a depth that would permit the dredges to proceed. As company officials would remark, it was a “web footed proposition from start to finish.”

At the same time, crews were at work on a quarter-mile section of bridge and approach work, which would span Jewfish Creek itself. Laborers struggled with eleven-foot-long, lead-heavy crossties of ten-by-twelve-inch oak, chosen in this instance over pine because of its density and superior resistance to the elements. The rails, which were laid at the normal gauge, or width, of four feet eight and one-half inches, also had to be placed by hand, no easy task when each might weigh four hundred pounds.

Still, despite the rigors of the work and the chronic problem of desertion, work on the first leg of construction proceeded steadily. By 1906, the segments from Homestead to Jewfish Creek were nearing completion and work was being readied for Key Largo, when an advance survey party encountered the first of many surprises. As they hacked their way through the last of a thick stand of mangroves just south of the point where the new bridge joined Key Largo, the group stopped short, stunned at what they saw.

A lake stretched out before them, easily a mile across, and nearly as broad as the Key itself. There would be no skirting this previously uncharted body of water, then, and engineer Meredith soon realized that it would be no easy task to cross it, either, for core-drilling revealed that while the lake was scarcely six feet deep, its bottom consisted of a deep bed of peat, deposited undisturbed for eons and far too unstable to support conventional support pilings.

After considerable thought, however, the indefatigable Meredith hit upon a solution. As described by Franklin Wood, a writer for
Moody’s Magazine,
a contemporary periodical, Meredith explained to Flagler that they would dredge the claylike marl, countless tons of it, from the adjoining sea bottom and dump it into the lake to create an embankment across the newly christened Lake Surprise. Though it would be tedious and costly, there seemed little alternative. Finally, Flagler gave his approval to a process that would take almost fifteen months to complete.

The resulting mile-long stretch of track would give rail passengers their first real glimpse of open water, however, and the embankment and the name of the lake remain to this day, giving those who trace Flagler’s route by car a similar breathtaking vista and providing inspiration for artists and writers alike:

The car was up to eighty by the time they rounded the long curve and came up to Jewfish Creek Bridge. The car hurtled up the ramp of the bridge, left the ground briefly, and the undercarriage banged on the other side. The fat man grabbed for the door handle. Sober as hell now. Adrenaline sober. Night air, going eighty-five through the dark sober.

The young man’s foot drove deeper into the accelerator pedal, and he watched the flash of guardrails, saw Lake Surprise appear, the car slewing right, a tire slipping off the edge of the pavement, catching in the shoulder, twisting the wheel from his hands, and he didn’t try to recapture it, and the Buick rammed through the guardrail, sailing out into the water. . . .

There was the short flight, the pounding drop, the spray of glass, the sledgehammer to his chest. The warm water of Lake Surprise flooding in. And he lost consciousness.

—James W. Hall, Under Cover of Daylight (W.W. Norton, 1987)

12

Nature’s Fury

While the embankment inched its way across Lake Surprise, work down the line continued apace. Camps for workmen were laid out along the Upper Keys, from Key Largo to Long Key (proximate to today’s MM 68), a distance of about forty miles, but while supplies could be trundled by rail to the work site at Lake Surprise, everything necessary for the preponderance of the workforce quartered farther along—water, food, medicine, equipment, and building materials—had to be carried around the break in the line by barge or the shallow-draft paddle steamers.

“All there was ready for us was the air to breathe,” grumbled one workman, “and that was too thick with mosquitoes to be much good.” Added one of the paddleboat captains after his craft had run aground on one of the many shallow reefs abutting Long Key: “[There’s] not quite enough water for swimming and too damned much for farming.”

Overseeing it all was the quiet but indefatigable Meredith, the Midwesterner and “concrete expert” whom Flagler had snatched away from one years-long project in Mexico and dropped into the midst of an even greater undertaking in the Florida Keys.

“When I was down there,” wrote Edwin Lefevre in
Everybody’s,
“Meredith had his headquarters at Knight’s Key. In and out of the construction camps he flitted in his launch, his binoculars to his eyes, like a general observing the movements of his troops on the battlefield. You could see telephone poles sticking out of the water in the shallow places, for all the world like lines of skirmishers and scouts.”

Meredith’s devotion to his job and loyalty to Flagler were as steadfast as any military officer’s. For him, as for most of the engineers and supervisors, the successful completion of this singular project meant everything, their sense of duty inextricable from their sense of self. In the same way that NASA engineers half a century later would subsume their individuality into a group effort toward a goal of unquestioned magnitude and significance, the men who designed and oversaw the building of this railroad sensed that as a unit they could accomplish the impossible, and Meredith was the perfect field commander for this team.

He received his orders from the commander in St. Augustine, and conveyed them to his troops with dispatch, zeal, and, when required, creativity. For while the undertaking was guided by Flagler’s vision, the commander in chief was wise enough to give his field general free rein when it came to the devising of day-to-day tactics.
Here is the goal,
the wise commander says.
How you achieve it, precisely, is up to you.

“I was told to make my studies and my estimates,” Meredith said. “We had lots of problems to solve, and I was quite a long time at it, and I knew how much [Flagler] desired to see the work rushed, but I never heard . . . one request for haste. When the report was ready, Mr. Parrott and I took it to Mr. Flagler. He heard how we proposed to do it. We stopped before we came to the estimates of cost. And Mr. Flagler stood up and looked at us and said:
‘Well, let’s get to work!’ . . .
Perhaps he felt the occasion called for some comment, for he looked at me and said very quietly: ‘I want to see it done before I die.’ That is all he said.”

By all accounts, Meredith, in his hesitancy to express emotion, even a fit of temper, was much like Flagler himself. So when he closed his interview with
Everybody’s
as he did, the sentiments are especially revealing. “Mr. Lefevre, there isn’t one of us,” he said, “who wouldn’t give a year of his life to have Mr. Flagler see the work completed!”

It was a statement that in Meredith’s case would prove to be prophetic. For, deep inside, this taciturn man bore a secret that he had divulged to no one, and which would one day have profound consequences for this undertaking.

Meanwhile, because the pace of the work for the first half of 1906 had been agonizing, Parrott and Meredith made the decision to carry the project on through the hurricane season, which in the western hemisphere begins to peak in late summer and stretches well into November. It was not a decision to be made lightly in a region where life’s milestones were often marked in reference to major storms. Residents of South Florida who might never make reference to such cataclysmic events as world wars still regularly refer to the Storm of ’26, or Donna, or Andrew, to give historic context to a birth or death or a family’s arrival in these parts.

On the other hand, life in the American tropics has its lotus-eater’s aspect. Lulled to a near torpor by the hypnotic press of heat and sun, the repetitive rhythms of pile driver and spike-pounding sledge, and the steady if gentle ocean breezes, men seem to forget what might come churning up out of the summer-cooked waters between Florida and Africa—even today, when, despite the incessant reminders from a modern weather service to stock up and be prepared, long, last-minute lines overwhelm groceries and hardware stores whenever the annual hurricanes finally form and threaten.

And for men not born to the region, which included most of those on the labor gangs in 1906, such a lack of awareness might be understood. Though by nature, not forgiven.

Weather forecasting in those days was nearly nonexistent. Storms on land could be tracked, and advance warning given, reported by telephone and telegraph. But storms approaching the continent by sea were another matter. Communications between the United States and the Caribbean islands are chancy enough in the early twenty-first century. One hundred years ago, they barely existed.

In the Keys, in the late summer, Conchs kept a close eye on the skies to the east and trusted their aches and pains and the odd behavior of livestock and wildlife for tips. (According to novelist and Keys observer Joy Williams, locals know that a hurricane is coming when the colorful red blossoms of the royal poinciana refuse to appear, or when land crabs are seen marching toward higher ground, or when ants climb straight up the walls.) Though the barometer was invented as early as 1643—by an Italian named Torricelli—and though it had been refined considerably by the time Flagler began his march, few modern versions of the instrument had found their way to the labor camps of the Florida Keys in 1906.

Certain enterprising foremen understood the basic principles behind Torricelli’s work, however, and while none had gone so far as to erect anything like the thirty-four-foot-tall column of glass he’d originally used to prove his notions, these FEC employees did regularly check their own small tubes full of water in which small wisps of weed rested on the bottom. The principle was simple: if the weed nudged up off the bottom of the tube, it meant that the air pressure was dropping, that bad weather was on the way.

On the evening of October 16, 1906, as it turned out, the weeds in those makeshift barometers all across the work camps on the Keys had begun to rise at an alarming rate. It was an indication, of sorts, for the men stranded on those lonely bits of land, but there was no way they could have reckoned the magnitude of the storm they were in for. It’s one of the ironic things about hurricanes: they tend to be fast-moving, tightly packed systems, having nothing much in common with the sprawling fronts of advancing low pressure that usher in periods of miserable weather for most parts of the world, vast systems hundreds of miles broad and deep, lumbering along at five to ten miles per hour, taking their own sweet time in arriving and departing.

If normal storm systems advance like old-fashioned armies, hurricanes are the guerrilla element of weather, zigzagging here and there, now strengthening and speeding in their movement, now appearing to loll, doing everything they can, or so it would seem, to frustrate all those modern instruments arrayed to track them. A densely packed storm such as Andrew, for instance, which blew across the southern tip of the Florida peninsula in 1992, arrived under cover of night as well; a glance at the cerulean eastern skies at sunset would have revealed absolutely nothing out of the ordinary. And when the storm did arrive, early the following morning, it cut a swath that was barely more than twenty miles in width. But what a swath it was.

Residents of Coral Gables, perhaps five miles north of the passing of the storm’s eye wall, experienced heavy rain and wind gusts that felled tree limbs, the sort of weather most people might associate with a strong summer thunderstorm. It was the sort of evening to stow the lawn chairs in the garage and have a drink or two inside, feeling cozy while the rain splattered the windows.

But just southward, where the wall of the storm itself passed, matters were inconceivably different. It was almost as if a series of tornadoes had slammed against the shore and marched inland abreast, hundreds of them advancing side by side from just north of Jewfish Creek to just south of Miami proper, the storm roaring like 747 engines doubled, then redoubled again, shearing off roofs and leveling homes, flattening groves and pinelands and utility pylons, flipping vehicles and tossing massive rooftop cooling systems like toys. It is impossible to stand upright in such winds, and even if it were, remaining outside for long would be suicidal.

Kevin Brown or Roger Clemens might manage to throw a fastball in the high nineties, and some major leaguers have suffered fractured skulls when they’ve been too slow to duck such a pitch. Andrew’s winds were running somewhere between 150 and 175 miles an hour. A baseball weighs five ounces. Now try to imagine taking a hurricane-tossed, five-pound clay roof tile in the face. Or think of a jagged hunk of ripped-in-half tin sheeting, ten pounds of it, let’s say, Frisbeeing along at 150 miles per hour—try to conceive of what that might do, meeting the human body.

Most of us are spared such prospects, thankfully. Many of us have a hard time even conceiving of them, so far outside the range of normal experience are they. But that is another thing about hurricanes. For those who have never lain prone beneath the passage of such a monster, there is no way of knowing beforehand. And so it was for the men encamped on the northern Keys on October 17, 1906.

Six days before, the hurricane had been just a bothersome tropical storm, lolling off the Windward Islands. By October 15 it had escalated into a hurricane that was blasting Havana. By the next day the storm had taken a sudden turn northward, and by that evening, word had reached men working on the Extension that dire things were in store.

When the men went to bed, the skies were clear, the winds calm, almost unnaturally so, making it seem more humid than usual. And the seabirds seemed fewer in number, too. Because the foremen had their eyes on those rising strips of grass and weed, the boat decks were cleared of loose material, extra lines were lashed to the moored houseboats, stakes and guys on the tents were checked. When everything had been done that it seemed could be done, the men who were scheduled to work rejoined their shifts, driving piles, digging, toting, pounding, and pouring—and those who were spared their labor until morning went to sleep, for a while at least.

William H. Sanders, chief engineer for one of the tugboats in Flagler’s fleet, was one of the latter, housed with more than 150 other men on Quartersboat No. 4, one of the floating shanty-style dormitories that was tethered in Hawk’s Channel, just offshore from Long Key at MM 67, where work on the line was progressing from south to north. In a
Miami Herald
story, Sanders wrote that by midnight, winds had become so strong on Long Key that all work had to be shut down and the men sent to shelter on Number 4.

Sanders awoke at 6:00
A.M.
to find the winds screaming outside the flimsy walls, and the clumsy houseboat wallowing in huge waves, already taking on water. When he struggled out to the launches the men used to ferry themselves to and from their floating camp, he found every one of the boats useless, their motors soaked by the storm-driven rain. With rowing through the maelstrom out of the question, Sanders retreated inside with the others, hoping that the storm would blow over. As bad as this blow was, it surely couldn’t last that long, or so he thought.

At 7:30
A.M.,
with the winds having risen beyond what any of them had ever experienced, there was a sudden lurch, followed by a sensation of movement that sent a wave of dread through Sanders. The cables that anchored the houseboat had snapped, finally, and the houseboat, designed to be towed along protected waters at near-idle speed, was now being driven southward into the raging Gulf Stream by winds of more than one hundred miles an hour.

As waves smashed over the decking, planks began to give way, one by one. The boat was wallowing now, twisting with every wave crash. Men fought to lash mattresses over the gaping holes in the sides of the houseboat’s superstructure, but the winds were too strong.

Just before 9:00
A.M.,
a mighty gust swept over the craft, peeling the roof away in an instant. The men had a brief, surreal glimpse of nothing but leaden sky where boards once had been, and then, in the next instant, the walls of their shelter were toppled, leaving them exposed to the storm on what amounted to a barren barge-top.

Those who hadn’t been swept over the side with the crashing walls fought wildly to find some purchase on the disintegrating decks, but it was hopeless. Sanders saw some of his comrades, some of whom could not swim, others of whom feared the sharks that cruised the deep waters offshore, gulping overdoses of laudanum from the first-aid kits, then lying down to die.

Finally the boat was driven onto a reef, its bottom torn open, its decks pounded to smithereens by the relentless waves. Supervisor Bert Parlin rushed below to warn the men who had taken refuge in the shallow hold. Before he could get a word out, a huge support fell and crushed him. The others in the hold were tangled in the wreckage and drowned.

Some of the men who were still on deck when the boat ran aground were thrown into the sea. The lucky ones, like Sanders, were able to lash themselves to floating planks or timbers.

“One piece of the side wall held together, and about ten of us hung on to it for dear life,” Sanders said.

A few feet away, he saw one man clamber onto a huge piece of decking, a two-by-twelve timber nearly forty feet long. As Sanders watched, another plank came screaming through the air toward the man, who looked up in time to take its blow full force. The man’s chest split as though it had been cut with a giant pair of shears, Sanders said. In the next moment, a wave swamped his own makeshift raft. When he came up spitting seawater, the man and the planks were gone.