Shadow Country: A New Rendering of the Watson Legend Book

Shadow Country: Peter Matthiessen's New Rendering of the Watson Legend


Edgar Artemas Watson (1855-1910)

For seventeen days I was held enthralled by Shadow Country. Once I began it, I was unable to stop. Nothing could have pulled me away from it.

"A New Rendering of the Watson Legend" happens to be the subtitle of Peter Matthiessen's 2008 National Book Award winning novel. The operative word in that subtitle is Legend.

A legend is a story founded in truth, indigenous to the people residing in the region where the story originated. Rooted in truth, the question becomes where does the truth stop and the legend begin?

Peter Matthiessen devoted approximately thirty years of his life absorbed, or as he says in his introduction to "Shadow Country," he has learned a lot about obsession having spent so much time in the mind of E. J. Watson. For Matthiessen had previously written of Edgar Watson in a trilogy of novels: Killing Mister Watson (1990); Lost Man's River (1997); and, Bone by Bone (1999).

Watson was born in 1855 in Clouds Creek, South Carolina, as Edgar Artemas Watson. In later life he changed his name to Edward J. Watson. The J stood for Jack.

Matthiessen constructed his novel in daring fashion. In Book One, Edgar Watson is shot down by his neighbors on Chokoluskee Island, Florida, on October 24, 1910, suspected of a growing number of murders over a period of time. The question is obvious. How did those who knew him come to these conclusions, for, as we begin this increasingly complex web, there is no evidence, but only suspicion.


Chokoluskee Island

Matthiesen's writing is brilliant not only in its structure, but the dialogue of the natives of Chokoluskee, Florida. The language is reminiscent of a blend of the inhabitants of the novels of Erskine Caldwell and William Faulkner. It is as easy to believe you are listening to conversations heard along a walk down Tobacco Road or around Frenchman's Bend.

Not only is Matthiesen perfect in character, dialog, and plot, he is a master of setting. For when you enter "Shadow Country," Matthiessen has effectively taken you to a lost world, relatively unblemished by man. And he will develop the theme of man's callous domination over nature in revealing plans to develop the gulf coast of the Florida Peninsula as Flagler and others permanently changed the character of the State's Atlantic coast.

Here are vast rookeries of white plumed egrets, with nights shattered by the scream of Florida black panthers. Seemingly sodden logs transform into huge alligators and crocodiles. In the vast mangrove tangles, cotton mouths, coral snakes and Florida Diamondbacks wait for the unwary traveler. And it is man's nature to believe that he has the right to exterminate any species for profit.

Book One is filled with fifty one monologues of fourteen separate narrators. They relate their memories of Watson and what they "know" of him. It becomes readily apparent that knowledge is an illusive concept.

Among the many crimes laid at Watson's feet is the murder of Outlaw Queen Belle Starr, while he was a fugitive in the Indian Territories. Watson did not deny the story, enhancing his reputation as a man not to be trifled with.

Watson has appeared as a figure in more than one Florida history. In The Everglades: River of Grass by Marjory Stoneman Douglas, we find:

Halfway up the empty Chatham River a circumspect man named Watson had built a respectable two-story frame house high on an old sand-and-shell Indian mound that commands a great sweep of river east and west. There was nothing to be seen but the fish jumping and the birds flying. It had a porch and high bare rooms, a rainwater cistern, a plank dock for his boats. He set out a cane patch, horse bananas, and the usual vegetables. He planted palm trees along the river, and two royal poinciana trees flamed against the gray house and dazzling blue sky….


Edgar Watson's home on Chatham Bend

Nobody seems to know when Watson first came to Chatham River. Nobody over there even now seems to want to say much about him. But of all the men who lived silently along those coasts with the air of strange deeds behind them, Watson's is the figure about which multiplying legends seem most to cluster.

He was a Scotsman with red hair and fair skin and mild blue eyes. He was quiet spoken and pleasant to people. But people noticed one thing. When he stopped to talk on a Fort Myers street, he never turned his back on anybody.

It was said freely that he had killed people before he came to Florida, that he killed Belle Starr and two people in northwest Florida. That was nobody's business here, from Fort Myers to Shark River. From time to time he went up to Fort Myers or Marco in his boat and took down to work at that lonely place of his on Chatham River people variously described as a boy, a rawboned woman, two white men, a Negro, a Russian, a Negro woman, an old woman. No one seems to know how many. No one seemed to notice for a while that none of these people came back.

He was, of course, a plume hunter and alligator skinner, and he shared many feuds with the quick-shooting men of the wilderness….

In 1910 a man and his son sailing up the Chatham River saw something queer floating by the bank. It was the body of an old woman, gutted, but not gutted enough to sink. The man said, "Let's get along to Watson's and tell him about it."

The son said, "Let's get back to Chokoloskee and talk to Old Man McKinney." At Chokoloskee they found several men talking to a Negro in McKinney's store. The story the Negro told was that he'd worked for Watson a long time and seen him shoot a couple of men. The Negro said he'd buried a lot of people on his place, or knocked them overboard when they asked him for their money.

Watson was away, the Negro said. His overseer, named Cox, killed another man and the old woman and forced the Negro to help him cut them open and throw them in the river. He said he would kill him last, but when the Negro got down on his knees and begged to be spared Cox said he would if he'd promise to go down to Key West and get out of the country. The Negro came up to Chokoloskee instead and told everything.

A posse went down to Watson's place and found plenty of bones and skulls. The overseer got away and has never been seen there since.

The next day Watson came back in his boat from Marco and stopped at McKinney's store in Chokoloskee. He came walking along the plank, quiet and pleasant, carrying his gun. And here were all the men of Chokoloskee standing quietly around with their guns.

Mr. McKinney walked up to Watson slowly and said, "Watson, give me your gun."

Watson said, "I give my gun to no man," and fired point-blank at McKinney, wounding him slightly. As if it was the same shot, every man standing there in that posse fired. Watson fell dead. Every man claimed he killed him, and nobody ever knew because there were so many bullets in him.

However, Watson's end appears in a different manner in
The story of the Chokoloskee Bay country: With the reminiscences of pioneer C. S. "Ted" Smallwood (Copeland studies in Florida history) by Charlton W Tebeau. According to store owner Ted Smallwood, the group of men who shot Watson was led by D. D. House, and no one faced by Watson was wounded. Matthiessen chose the Smallwood account for Watson's death.


Smallwood Grocery, Chokoloskee, Florida

Book II provides a distinctly different perspective in the narration of Lucius Watson, the most loyal of Watson's children, legitimate or illegitimate. Lucius is also the most gentle of Watson's children. Following his father's death, Lucius sets out to vindicate his father's name and bring those to justice who murdered him, compiling a list of the assassins.

Lucius, having been made a Marine sniper in World War One, loses his taste for revenge. However, the news that Lucius has prepared a death list is rampant in his father's former community. Lucius risks his father's fate because of that list. However, he refuses to abandon his mission to find the truth behind the rumors that swirled around his father.

In the end Lucius learns a truth more horrible than that believed by the residents of Chokoluskee from his half brother Robert, whom his father referred to only as "Son Borne," failing to acknowledge him by name. Lucius' mission had been to write a biography of his father. On learning the truth, he burns it.

Book III confirms Matthiessen's unconventional structure. The narrator is Edgar Watson. The voice is surprisingly formal and articulate. Watson is a man politically astute, and educated in the classics. However, this is no self serving refutation of the many accusations made against him. Watson's long monologue is a confession of what he has done and what he hasn't. He is no saint, far from it.

Interestingly, Watson recalls the Iliad before his final trip to Chokoluskee:

"'All of us must die. Why make a fuss about it?' Achilles to Hector.
You die in your own arms, as the old people say."

Those old people, the ancient Greeks, would have said that wrapped around Watson's arms was the fabric of hubris.


Watson's Grave

My thanks to members of "On the Southern Literary Trail" who voted this as one of our group reads for January, 2013.

This is a MUST read.