Edgar Watson SW Florida's Historic Killer

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Edgar Watson, known as Ed to the people who new him, was a business man and an historical killer who maintained a home in Ft Myers and has a sugarcane plantation on a 40 acre island in what is called The Ten Thousand islands, and now part of The Everglades National Park. While he is confirmed to have killed only one man officially, he was suspected of being a serial killer. He was born in Florida, but left as a young man and went to Oklahoma. While he was out there, he is widely said to have been the man who killed Belle Star, the Queen of the Outlaws. He was never arrested or tried for that and came back to Florida, where he first ended up in the cattle town of Arcadia. A lot of people dont realize it but Florida had range wars just like Arizona did. It is believed he was hired as a gunman and he killed another gunman named Quinn Bass. He was arrested and tried for that but acquitted for it being self defense.

He moved on to Fort Myers, bought a house and moved a wife and young children in. He then went down to the islands south of the Everglades and filed a claim on a 40 acre island called Chatham Bend. There he built a house and planted sugar cane. He was known as a successful farmer and even rendered and canned his own brand of alga syrup called Island Pride and sold it all over the country. Chatham Bend was very isolated down in the islands. To get there now, from the Ft Myers area, you would drive about 90 miles to Everglades City and it's sister town of Chokoloskee Island. Then you get in a boat and go about 20 miles east through Florida Bay. In Watsons day, they would go by schooner.

He was known for going by schooner to Key West and to Tampa to hire men, often drifters, to work his sugarcane. Often those men were never heard from again. He was suspected of killing a young couple who had taken up residence on another island he had filed claim on. He was known to carry a revolver in a shoulder holster, under his overalls and was known as a fast draw. The people in Chokoloskee and Everglades City became more and more frightened of him over time, even though, there was never any direct evidence he was killing people. Finally in 1910 a woman and two men were found by fisherman, and they had been killed and mutilated. They were tied up and weighted down with rocks tied to ropes in the river near Chatham Bend. Before anything could be done, the Hurricane of 1910 hit the area. After the storm, Watson showed up at Chocoloskee and was confronted. He claimed his foreman was responsible and left again on his schooner, saying he was going to bring him in. He came back with just a hat with a bullet hole through it, and claimed he had shot the man while he was trying to get away and the body fell in the river and he could not find it. There was a group of over 20 armed men at the landing at Smallwoods Store, (A place that still stands and is now a museum). The men called BS on his story and Watson raised his shotgun and pulled the trigger. The gun misfired, it thought he had wet shells. The crowd opened up on him. Later the coroner would say he found over 40 bullets in the body and did not bother to count the buckshot. They drug the body out to another nearby Island called Rabbit Key where they buried him face down, because they said, "he was going to hell anyway".

The Sheriff of Collier county came to investigate, and ended up deputizing the men after the fact. No one stood trial. His family had his body recovered and examined by the coroner and reburied in the Fort Myers City Cemetery. The writer Peter Maithiessen wrote three novels about him, the first one called Killing Mister Watson. No on really knows if he killed all the people he was thought to have killed except for the man in Arcadia which was ruled self defense. In Fort Myers he was thought of as a respectable business man and his children became prosperous and were well thought of in their time.


I visited the Cemetery this afternoon because I was over on that side of the river to pick up my son, where he had sold a car. I took this picture .

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While I was there, I found my next mystery to look into, but I cant find any specifics on line how the person came to be buried there. Our local historical museum is closed for renovations right now and when they open, I want to find if there is any info on how this was marked and what is known.

[Ellegua3]

Very interesting. I have not heard of EW, I live on the opposite coast.

[Deleted]

I can highly recommend the books by Matthiessen. He was best known for his non fiction book, *The Snow Leopard*. The writer was a pretty interesting guy himself. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Matthiessen

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Most people who think of Florida and quite a few who live here do not know much about the history and what a colorful and violent place it has always been. There have been people living near where I live continuously for 2000 years. The Calusa which was the dominant tribe here , built mounds on a lot of the islands. They dug a canal with hand tools made out of conch shells that stretched across one island and then continued across what is now Cape Coral out to somewhere around the I75 corridor. Chokoloskee Island where Watson was killed, was a Calusa garbage mound, called a "Midden" mound. Its where Native Americans shucked oysters for 2000 years and piled up the shells. Ponce De Leon was killed somewhere along this coast after he and his men confronted the Calusa. Hernando Desoto made contact with the Calusa here. We have North America's oldest continuously inhabited city St. Augustine, but on Pine Island just west of me, there was a Spanish Mission that may have been established before that. There were times though when it was not inhabited. It's called St James City.

There were Pirates here. They made bases in the 18th century on the outer Islands to target ships coming through the gulf. Tampa has it's Gasparilla festival every year and Gasparilla Island is Boca Grande which is part of the county I live in, but is on the north side of Charlotte Harbor. That pirate was fictional but based on a mishmash of real Pirates that did operate out of here. Treasure has been found here, both confirmed and some serious rumors about a Greek sponge diver who found something in Boca Grande Pass in the 40s or 50s. I know people that have found spanish cannon balls in and around Pine Island sound.

Sometime before Florida became a US possession remnants of the Native Americans displaced from land grabs in Georgia and the Carolina's along with escaped slaves ended up here. They are known as The Seminoles. Starting in 1816, actually before the US had Florida and lasting until 1858, the US fought three campaigns called the Seminole Wars and taken all together amount to the most costly, (in terms of money and casualties, of all the wars the US fought with Native Americans. In the second war, there was a massacre of US troops led by Osceola that until the Custer battle was the worst loss suffered by US military at the hands of Native Americans. It's called the Major Dade massacre. (Dade Co FL and Dade City Fl are named after him.) Over the course of the three wars many Natives agreed in times of peace to be relocated to the Oklahoma territories. At the end of the last war, which was caused by Army surveyors destroying a banana plantation of one the last great chiefs, Billy Bowlegs, which happened right here, near Ft Myers, about 100 Seminole refused to be relocated and went deep into the Everglades and never signed the last treaty, which means technically we are still at war with the Seminoles left in Florida. Though they seem to have had the last laugh because they now own Hard Rock Casino's world wide. Though most of them to this day have little contact with the outside world.


An aside to that, I have spent time in different reservation all over the US and had a lot of contact with different Native Americans. I have known zero Seminoles other than a few encounters and I stpped near an active village in the Big Cypress several years ago, and they would not even talk to me. I have met Navajo's in AZ who have invited me to their homes.

The southern most battle of the Civil War was fought here in Ft Myers as well.

After the civil war, a lot of men with bad pasts drifted into Florida. Watson was one of them. Cattle was one of the biggest industries along with other agriculture and trade was direct with the cattle docks here in Ft Myers at Punta Rassa, which today is where all the resort hotels are right at the mainland end of the causeway to Sanibel and Captiva islands and some of our best beaches. Cattle would be driven though the county and loaded on ships bound for Cuba. There was a direct telegraph cable laid between Punta Rassa and Havana and when the USS Maine exploded in the Havana Harbor the first word in the US came through the telegraph office at Punta Rassa. Florida is still one of the 4th or 5th largest cattle producing states in the US and claims the largest single ranch for producing breeding cattle, that is oddly, owned by the LDS

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I didn't even touch on all the obscure oral histories I am aware of including things like the stories I heard growing up and working around central Florida concerning one of our major land owning families, who also owned one of the largest Merchant marine lines and largely supplied a lot of troop supplies in Vietnam. They killed people up until the early 60s who would not sell out to them. They also have their name attached to sausage.


Or how State Road 29 which runs from Labelle FL to Chokoloskee was built with convict labor and supposedly there are over 200 men buried in the roadway.

The blatant corruption that was evident through the 1970s and 80s in local governments bought and paid for by drug rings. The Mafia connections through Miami that were everywhere from the 1920s on. Blatant modern lynchings not to mention some terrible things over the course of race relations into and beyond the civil rights era.


The serial killers and the drugs. Face eating Zombies and people throwing live alligators through the Burger King Drive Through window. That's Florida.

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Sept 6, 2016 12:07:01 GMT Ellegua3 said:

Very interesting. I have not heard of EW, I live on the opposite coast.

Miami? I know it well. My wife was born in Coral Gables. I am from a little central FL town called Sebring. I am a native. My parents came to Florida in the 50s. They were publci school teachers and Florida was paying well for teachers to relocate at the time.

[Ellegua3]

Sept 6, 2016 16:13:25 GMT @troubador222 said:

Sept 6, 2016 12:07:01 GMT Ellegua3 said:

Very interesting. I have not heard of EW, I live on the opposite coast.

Miami? I know it well. My wife was born in Coral Gables. I am from a little central FL town called Sebring. I am a native. My parents came to Florida in the 50s. They were publci school teachers and Florida was paying well for teachers to relocate at the time.

Very kool.

West Palm, I grew up in NYC, lived mostly in FL the last 15 years or so, left a few times but ended up back. Central (deltona), now down south. Took about 5 years to acclimate, still not used to the humidity 😃.

[Mitchell]

Fascinating, Troubador. My people's made that long walk from Florida.

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Sept 7, 2016 15:33:01 GMT Mitchell said:

Fascinating, Troubador. My people's made that long walk from Florida.

And you are here so some of them survived it. I am glad they did. I cannot imagine the horror of that. Or the heartbreak. May I ask what tribe? And did they end up in Oklahoma?


History is something I am fascinated with. I am no scholar, just interested. I also love reading about different cultures and peoples other than my own boring Eurocentric Protestant upbringing. I was raised in the typical southern small town and I am lucky my parents gave me a love of reading. I stumbled upon the book, Bury my Heart at Wounded Knee when I was in high school. That was an eye opener. Since then I have learned a lot more and so much about the diversity of the different peoples who did live here, and also about the ignorance of the average American about that subject. Most people still believe in the Hollywood depiction from films of Native American's all living in teepees and wearing war bonnets. They don't know that when the Cherokee were forcibly removed from Georgia and the Carolina's that most of them lived in the same type of farmhouse that everyone else did, or that in the SW there were huge cities of adobe which were so well built, they still exist. And they had people living there for hundreds and even thousands of years.

The man known as Squanto, also known as Tisquantum who helped the Pilgrims their first year had been captured by slavers and taken to Europe. Twice! He spent several years working in England as a shipbuilder before returning home, only to find most of his tribe had died from disease. The Pilgrims possibly would not have survived without his aid and him acting as an interpreter their first year.

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This is one of the more common Native American relic found here. The Calusa made digging tools and axes out of these. Fossilized conch shells with holes drilled through them. They would run a wooden shaft through the hole and attach it with ties to make a tool. With these they planted crops, built mounds, hewed wood, and even dug a canal across a large island.

[Mitchell]

Sept 9, 2016 12:55:12 GMT @troubador222 said:

Sept 7, 2016 15:33:01 GMT Mitchell said:

Fascinating, Troubador. My people's made that long walk from Florida.

And you are here so some of them survived it. I am glad they did. I cannot imagine the horror of that. Or the heartbreak. May I ask what tribe? And did they end up in Oklahoma?


History is something I am fascinated with. I am no scholar, just interested. I also love reading about different cultures and peoples other than my own boring Eurocentric Protestant upbringing. I was raised in the typical southern small town and I am lucky my parents gave me a love of reading. I stumbled upon the book, Bury my Heart at Wounded Knee when I was in high school. That was an eye opener. Since then I have learned a lot more and so much about the diversity of the different peoples who did live here, and also about the ignorance of the average American about that subject. Most people still believe in the Hollywood depiction from films of Native American's all living in teepees and wearing war bonnets. They don't know that when the Cherokee were forcibly removed from Georgia and the Carolina's that most of them lived in the same type of farmhouse that everyone else did, or that in the SW there were huge cities of adobe which were so well built, they still exist. And they had people living there for hundreds and even thousands of years.

The man known as Squanto, also known as Tisquantum who helped the Pilgrims their first year had been captured by slavers and taken to Europe. Twice! He spent several years working in England as a shipbuilder before returning home, only to find most of his tribe had died from disease. The Pilgrims possibly would not have survived without his aid and him acting as an interpreter their first year.

I am Choctaw. I don't know as much as I should about my heritage. At the time, it was a shameful blood to have in one's veins. Assimilation became the only hope for survival. The culture was passed on through re-tellings; the richness of a now abandoned aural tradition. What is left has been relegated to a few artifacts.

It is to be celebrated, though a culture is not always easily defined in purely black or white terms. As with all religions, there are a few barbaric traditions that should be left to the past. We have a tendency to view history as all good or all bad. The Natives become caricatures. Peace living hippie grandfather's or uncivilized beasts hell-bent on destruction. The reality is more complex. Yet, it is to be celebrated, and I assure you I do.

A people that was cleaner, more honest and open, and good natured than their European counterparts. If the Natives had so-desired, they could have easily killed every European who set foot on the shore. That they didn't, that they instead offered help and guidance, illustrates the defining characteristic of these two opposing groups of humans. A persecuted people left their home and traveled 3 months by boat seeking freedom. Once established in their new digs, they sought to persecute those whose charity allowed their survival.

There is a lesson that is very relevant today. Love your neighbors. Be good neighbors, but let them remain your neighbors. Don't let them move in. It never works out like you would want it too. 60 million dead Indians would agree.

[Deleted]

Sept 10, 2016 11:05:44 GMT Mitchell said:

Sept 9, 2016 12:55:12 GMT @troubador222 said:

And you are here so some of them survived it. I am glad they did. I cannot imagine the horror of that. Or the heartbreak. May I ask what tribe? And did they end up in Oklahoma?


History is something I am fascinated with. I am no scholar, just interested. I also love reading about different cultures and peoples other than my own boring Eurocentric Protestant upbringing. I was raised in the typical southern small town and I am lucky my parents gave me a love of reading. I stumbled upon the book, Bury my Heart at Wounded Knee when I was in high school. That was an eye opener. Since then I have learned a lot more and so much about the diversity of the different peoples who did live here, and also about the ignorance of the average American about that subject. Most people still believe in the Hollywood depiction from films of Native American's all living in teepees and wearing war bonnets. They don't know that when the Cherokee were forcibly removed from Georgia and the Carolina's that most of them lived in the same type of farmhouse that everyone else did, or that in the SW there were huge cities of adobe which were so well built, they still exist. And they had people living there for hundreds and even thousands of years.

The man known as Squanto, also known as Tisquantum who helped the Pilgrims their first year had been captured by slavers and taken to Europe. Twice! He spent several years working in England as a shipbuilder before returning home, only to find most of his tribe had died from disease. The Pilgrims possibly would not have survived without his aid and him acting as an interpreter their first year.

I am Choctaw. I don't know as much as I should about my heritage. At the time, it was a shameful blood to have in one's veins. Assimilation became the only hope for survival. The culture was passed on through re-tellings; the richness of a now abandoned aural tradition. What is left has been relegated to a few artifacts.

It is to be celebrated, though a culture is not always easily defined in purely black or white terms. As with all religions, there are a few barbaric traditions that should be left to the past. We have a tendency to view history as all good or all bad. The Natives become caricatures. Peace living hippie grandfather's or uncivilized beasts hell-bent on destruction. The reality is more complex. Yet, it is to be celebrated, and I assure you I do.

A people that was cleaner, more honest and open, and good natured than their European counterparts. If the Natives had so-desired, they could have easily killed every European who set foot on the shore. That they didn't, that they instead offered help and guidance, illustrates the defining characteristic of these two opposing groups of humans. A persecuted people left their home and traveled 3 months by boat seeking freedom. Once established in their new digs, they sought to persecute those whose charity allowed their survival.

There is a lesson that is very relevant today. Love your neighbors. Be good neighbors, but let them remain your neighbors. Don't let them move in. It never works out like you would want it too. 60 million dead Indians would agree.

Yes you are right about the complexity of the peoples and the cultures. Some of the other ignorance I have run into falls with some people I played a lot of music with over the years. These are some of the most Caucasian people you will ever meet and quite a few of them believe they are somehow transformed into First Nation people by their neo hippy beliefs. I never subscribed to the brutal savage or the noble savage. I suspect most people in the tribes were just like people today, some with great honesty and nobility and some with great failings and dark hearts and quite a few in various stages in between. Again, like I said, part of the problem is popular culture and the way the depictions of Native American were of mostly the tribes of the plains. That is how my neo hippy friends see themselves.

I dont know as much about the Choctaw as I do some tribes. I know they were in the Panhandle of Florida and into Alabama and Misissippi I believe.


There are things that have gone on into modern times people are not aware of and that is the forced removal of children. There were Federal level laws put in place to stop it, but NPR did a story just a year or so back, where it was still being done in the Dakotas. I met a man in NM about a year ago, who came out to do some emergency repairs on the airlines on my rig. He was my age, in his 50s, a Navajo. When he was an elementary school child he was taken from his home and put into a boarding school in CA. He ended up living away from his family for decades.