The Wilderness Warrior - Douglas Brinkley [312]
By all accounts Bradley made impressive inroads patrolling the Everglades–Florida Bay–Cape Sable areas: a dizzying complex of freshwater sloughs, sapling thickets, cane fields, sawgrass ridges, and tree islands. 50 The tides, which lashed like a hurricane, made much of Cape Sable appear arid, and the saline soil stunted the growth of hardwood hammocks. The steady sunshine Bradley encountered was often blinding, even unearthly. There were no gentle slopes or saddle ridges in this flat, forbidding landscape. But birdlife abounded. “Citizen Bird” enthusiasts, for example, traveled from faraway Boston and New York to see the Cape Sable seaside sparrow, a rare creature that Bradley encountered nearly every day on his beat. Life was good for Bradley, a man who enjoyed being outdoors. Catching silver fish for dinner from the Audubon in the quiet evening air—particularly kingfish or mackerel—he lived well off Florida’s natural bounty. “Guy’s first year as warden had been a busy one,” his biographer Stuart B. McIver wrote. “That year the price offered to hunters for egret plumes rose to thirty-two dollars an ounce, more than twice the price for an ounce of gold. Four egrets had to die to yield an ounce of plumes. Bradley’s vigilance had helped create a scarcity that was driving the price up—and ultimately making the rookeries all the more tempting to plume hunters.”51
Excited that the one-two punch of wardens Kroegel and Bradley was producing constructive results in Florida, Dutcher wrote an AOU report in late 1903 claiming that the tide had turned in the good guys’ favor. The document could be summed up in two words: imminent victory. Clearly, Dutcher understood that slight disturbances still occurred around Cape Sable, but the systematic avian slaughter (he insisted) had ceased. President Roosevelt was elated. Nothing could please him more than the fact that the U.S. Biological Survey and AOU were starting to seize control of precious rookeries to save them for posterity. Dutcher’s enthusiasm, however, was very premature. Bradley—because of the sheer geographical magnitude of his beat—found himself stretched thin and doing the job of ten men.
Chapman—erroneously believing Bradley had taken South Florida from the plumers and eggers around the lower keys, as Dutcher had claimed—journeyed to Florida with his wife to witness the supposedly rejuvenated flocks at the Cuthbert Rookery. Unbeknownst to Bradley, however, either the Smith gang or the “Uncle Steve Boys” (vicious plumer organizations) had been eyeing Cuthbert for a broad-daylight strike. One misbegotten afternoon, when the Audubon was nowhere in sight, one of the bandit gangs pillaged the startled rookery, turning the avian nursery into a bloody slaughterhouse. Guns blazed nonstop. Before long the island was strewn with corpses of egrets and great white herons. Cuthbert Rookery has been “shot out,” a deeply embarrassed Bradley told the Chapmans upon their arrival to Florida. “You could-a-walked right around the ruke-ry on them birds’ bodies, between four and five hundred of ’em.”52
This news, and some investigative sleuthing of his own, made Chapman fear that the Biological Survey wardens, for no fault of their own, were in a precarious situation. The vast Florida Bay waterways Bradley was being asked to protect were impossible to patrol properly without a motorized fleet. President Roosevelt’s warden needed reinforcements and supplies (or at least something more intimidating than a .32-caliber pistol and a single outboard motor). “That man Bradley is going to be killed some time,” Chapman wrote in his journal. “He has been shot at more than once, and some day they are going to get him.”53
Chapman’s diary proved prophetic. On the morning of July 8, 1905, Bradley heard rolling