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three sandy beaches and rare tropical hardwood hammocks to call his own, he was living the fleabitten life of an outback type. He was poor, but not as poor as the Seminoles. Sometimes he would take a canoe on the lower Peace River, in perfect harmony with his environment. Although biographical information about McLeod’s daily activities remains sketchy (he didn’t keep a diary as Kroegel sometimes did), he patrolled the Charlotte Harbor rookeries around Gasparilla Sound, chasing away poachers with his boat, badge, and gun. McLeod wrote an emergency report for The Auk in 1907, on protecting roseate spoonbills. As a wildlife warden, he worried that enforcement of the Lacey Act was too lax, that the good old boys of Florida simply spat at federal laws. At times, their arrogance made him weep in frustration and dismay. “No Trespassing” signs, he understood, didn’t mean much in the matted thickets of southwest Florida. But McLeod had the tough soul of an outdoorsman and lit out after hunters in both boat and prose. “Five years ago there was a fine flock of roseate spoonbills or ‘Pink Curlews’ that used and did their feeding in the northeast end of Turtle Bay,” he said; “only 18 are left now of the flock, and they have for the past two seasons done their feeding on my home island in the fall, and winter months. Hunters and tourists killed them, and there are but few left on the Gulf Coast of Florida.”54

McLeod spoke in a short, curt, unflamboyant way. There was no philosophical complexity about him, and this simplicity added to his credibility. As an environmental activist, McLeod worked with the National Association of Audubon Societies and the Roosevelt administration to go after the illegal hunters in Charlotte Harbor. He was livid because the cold-blooded murderers of Warden Guy Bradley, using expensive lawyers, were never indicted. He complained about this often, calling it an abortion of justice. Herbert K. Job said the same. Regardless of the Lacey Act and the law of June 28, 1906, plumers, he said, were still killing birds for “wings, feathers, and mountings.”55

Eventually, McLeod himself, while protecting the rookeries in northern Charlotte Harbor and the lower Peace River, became a victim of the “Feather Wars.” Shortly after Roosevelt’s executive order 939 regarding the west coast of Florida, he was murdered by local fishermen and plumers who were furious over federal island grabs. McLeod’s patrol boat No. 5 was discovered on November 30, 1908, sunk with sandbags. Blood was splattered all around, as if a can of red paint had exploded. Detectives, believing that McLeod had been hacked to death with an ax, recovered his blood-soaked hat, which had two gashes in the crown. Clumps of hair were also found. A struggle had obviously occurred before McLeod had died. Speculation was that his body had been tossed into the Gulf of Mexico, where sharks and other flesh-eating fish had devoured it. Presumably, this was meant as a message to the Florida Audubon Society that individuals who tried to interfere with the milliners would face dire consequences. The person or persons who killed McLeod were never found.* Once again, as in the murder of Guy Bradley, Job seethed with rage. Notices seeking information about the murder were posted on bulletin boards in fishermen’s hotels around the Charlotte Harbor region. The De Soto County Sheriff, however, claimed they couldn’t find proof: there were no fingerprints, no witnesses, and no confessions.

McLeod’s death strengthened Roosevelt’s determination to further safeguard the rookeries and wildlife preserves in Florida. Roosevelt vowed to visit the federal bird reservations that McLeod had protected soon; he eventually did go to Pine Island Sound after his presidency, in 1914. And the National Association of Audubon Societies, undaunted, pleaded with citizens of Florida to “awake” and establish a game commission in order to see that the bird laws were enforced.56 In Bird-Lore, an illustrated bimonthly, the editor, Frank M. Chapman, credited McLeod with saving the white pelican colonies