Key West, February, 1891.
Key West, in Spanish Cayo Hueso (Bone Island), derived its name, so says history, from the fact that the island was strewn with human bones. The conquerors didn’t take time to bury the bones of the conquered. The change, corruption Spaniards call it, from Cayo Hueso to Key West was easy.
The United States bought the island from Spain in 1816. The formation is coral and it contains about two thousand acres. The Hon. C. B. Pendleton, editor and proprietor of the Equator-Democrat, and a man of culture who has served in the State Senate, showed me an island, or key, as they call it in these parts, distant from Key West five miles, and which he believed to be the most southerly point in the United States. Another authority informed me that Cape Sable, distant from Key West about sixty miles, is the most southerly point.
To quote Editor Pendleton, Key West is distant from the tropical line only thirteen miles. Doctors will differ; another authority gives it as sixty miles. I am inclined to think that on the tropical question my editorial brother is correct in his estimate, because Key West is only distant from Cuba eighty or ninety miles.
The climate is about the same as that of Havana. In the Cuban capital the mercury never goes below sixty degrees; in Key West the lowest point recorded is fifty-one.
Key West is the ninth port of entry in the United States, collecting more import duty than all the other ports in the States of Florida and Georgia and one-half of Alabama combined.
In 1860 the population was about two thousand, one-quarter of whom were colored; but in 1869, after the rebellion in Cuba, the population of the island began to increase and now it numbers twenty-two thousand, and they claim that it is the largest city in Florida.
The inhabitants are mixed, very much mixed—Cubans, negroes, Americans, Chinese, etc. The negroes come from Nassau, Cuba and other places.
Key West was bought of Spain, as before remarked; the island is nearer Cuba than any other land, it is not in any sense American except that it flies the American flag, and it seems to be now, to all intents and purposes, a foreign place—a Spanish colony, as it once was. Spanish is the prevailing language, and Cubans predominate. All the public notices and handbills are printed in two languages, several newspapers are printed in Spanish, and only one, the Equator-Democrat, in English. It is difficult to make a purchase or to transact any business unless you speak Spanish, and there are few drivers or conductors of street cars who can understand you if addressed in English. The car drivers swear at their patient, sadly abused mules in hard Spanish. All the American residents and business men speak the prevailing tongue, or are learning it as fast as they can, for without it they cannot so readily conduct business.