The account quoted by Clarke from Bartram’s travels of more than one hundred years ago, while probably exaggerated, gives an idea of the abundance of the alligators at that time: “The rivers at this place from shore to shore, and perhaps near a half mile above and below me, appeared to be one solid bank of fish of various kinds, pushing through the narrow pass of San Juans into the little lake on their return down the river, and the alligators were in such incredible numbers, and so close together from shore to shore, that it would have been easy to have walked across their heads, had the animals been harmless.” At the present time it is usually necessary to travel far from the usual routes of the Northern tourists to find alligators in any abundance.
At Palm Beach, Florida, lived, a few years ago, and probably still lives, a well-known hunter and guide, “Alligator Joe.” Just what nationality he may be is difficult to determine, but that he knows that trackless waste, the Everglades, at least in the region of Palm Beach, is evident. He has an “alligator farm” near the great hotels of that famous winter resort, at which he keeps, or did a few years ago, a large number of alligators of all sizes, as well as a number of crocodiles. For a consideration (by no means a modest one) he would take out a party of tourists for a day into the Everglades, guaranteeing that he would find an alligator for them to shoot. It was rumored by the natives that an accomplice was always sent ahead to free the alligator at the psychological moment, after the hunters had been paddled by a devious course to the selected spot, but whether this were true or not the writer was not able to determine. It is true, however, that he and the writer paddled in a rather graceful canoe, dug out of a single cypress log, and waded through the Everglades for several days, searching for alligator eggs, and that we found only one nest and saw only one or two alligators ([Fig. 3]).
Doubtless in more remote parts of the Everglades the alligators are much more numerous.
During another summer the writer, with a guide, penetrated the very center of the State, to the region southeast of Lake Kissimmee, forty miles from the nearest railroad; here the alligators, and in consequence their nests, are fairly abundant, though the native hunters are, even in this remote region, rapidly thinning their ranks.
A still greater number of alligators was found, the following summer, in the Okefinokee Swamp in southern Georgia. In the center of this great waste, ten miles or more from dry land, nearly one hundred alligators, ranging from about four to eight feet in length, were killed within a week by a small party of native hunters with whom the writer was traveling ([Fig. 4]).
Whether this wholesale destruction by sportsman and native hunter will eventually exterminate our giant reptile, as has been the case with the buffalo and other game animals, it is impossible to say. Unless the Everglades and the Okefinokee are largely drained it seems probable that a few alligators will always remain in the most inaccessible regions.
Fig. 3. Alligator Joe in the Everglades.
(From a Photograph by the Author.)
