Profiles of Prominent Charlton County Citizens

RALPH DAVIS
The Old Man and the Swamp

By

Jim Dodson

The Okefenokee isn’t as isolated and wild as it once was, but there is still room for gators and one old swamper.

“Let me tell you ‘bout old man Brown’s bones,” Ralph Davis said one day deep in the swamp. “It happened back around ‘twenty-one or ‘twenty-two, when they was cuttin’ the timber out on Blackjack Island. They came across this dead man. He’d been dead for a year or more, they figured, ‘cause he was near about gone to a skeleton. They also found his dog and his double-barrel shotgun layin’ by the campfire. It’s my thinking that somebody killed that man. The swamp didn’t kill him. The swamp never killed any man that had any business in there. Anyway, they had no idea who the feller was, so they scooped up his bones and toted ‘em back to Billy’s Island. Then they buried ‘em there in the graveyard for a man named Brown, who had just up and wandered off with his dog and gun ‘bout a year or so before.” Ralph’s narrative stopped for a moment and he leaned over the boat and plunged his paper cup into the swamp’s amber water. After savoring a long cool drink, he said with a gravelly laugh, “Everything went along fine for a while, you know, until one day about six months later. Damned if old Brown didn’t come trampin’ out of the swamp one mornin’ as healthy as you and me!” Ralph’s gaze suddenly drifted across the swamp’s broad prairie. A pair of sleek sandhill cranes beat furiously away from a solitary dead cypress tree. Their staccato calls were faint in the wind. October had come to the Okefenokee. The swamp’s foliage was beginning to show tips of crimson and fallow gold. The dark water was as still as a mirror, the air crisp in the long afternoon light. “They never found out who that feller was,” Ralph said in an unexpectedly quiet voice. “Whoever he was, he was the only man I ever heard of getting’ lost in here. This swamp’s a paradise for a man who knows what he’s doin’. You can believe this, there ain’t no place like it left on this earth anymore.”

Strangely enough, it was a ten-year-old city girl who got Uncle Ralph Davis to come clean about how he lost his fingers. For years, when remarked on by visitors from outside the swamp, Ralph would hold up the index and middle fingers of his right hand – two sausage-thick appendages, rounded flesh stumps ending just below the first knuckles on both fingers – and say, while gazing at them in wonder, “You know what’s the truth about them fingers? An old bear took ‘em clean off one day back in the swamp just as I was fixin’ to cut his throat. Yes sir. He shore did.” Then Ralph would fix his astonished visitor with a solemn look, even though a good observer could catch a glint of mischief in his old eyes, and say, “Bet you thought a gator done it, didn’t you?”

Sometimes they would say yes, a gator. Or maybe some other dangerous swamp varmint. If visitors happened to find the way to Ralph’s tarpaper house on the eastern fringes of the Okefenokee Swamp, Ralph would invite them onto his sleeping porch to sit and talk about the swamp or their own neck of the woods. Occasionally, when Ralph saw an opening, he artfully spun out a yarn that, like the filaments of a spider’s web, captured his listener in the thrall of the swamp itself. Most listened mutely, except for the ten-year-old girl who set Ralph back on the heels of his engineer boots. “Uncle Ralph,” she said, “How big was that bear that took off your fingers?” ”Oh,” Ralph said, “he was a great big bear. Great big bear.”

“Then how come he didn’t take off more than two fingers?” she demanded. “How come he didn’t take a whole mouthful?”

Uncle Ralph looked at the child with admiration. Then he shook his head. “Honey.” He said grinning, “how’d you get to be so smart? I reckon I’ll just have to tell you ‘bout them fingers after all.”

Ralph Davis at sixty-eight is like a whiskey barrel set on two oak legs. He is a thickset man of medium height, with a round balding head and a broad bull neck that come together in such a way it is impossible to tell where one leaves off and the other begins. His arms are as firm as smoke-cured hams; his hands are wide, coarse and creased with long years, their strength can only be guessed at. Ralph could still lift a fifty-gallon whiskey barrel full of moonshine to his lips and take a long drink if he were inclined to do it. Ralph does not drink liquor. Though he was known for making some of the best contraband corn liquor in the Okefenokee back in the late twenties and early thirties, he never drank his own or anyone else’s bootleg. “Just never cared for the stuff personally,” he said. “Didn’t like its effects, if you know what I mean.” Unlike most people in the swamp, he never had much to do with tobacco, either. The only thing Ralph ever smoked in any measurable quantity was whole hog sausage, and that was usually in the late fall. When its spicy aroma drifted through the slash pine along the Okefenokee’s edge, most folks there knew it wouldn’t be long before Ralph showed up at their place with a couple of pounds of sausage.

Except for occasionally limping from an injury to his right knee that occurred when an ornery horse butted him into a pine tree a few years ago, Ralph looks as healthy as a green swamp cypress. And he is probably as tough. There were always three plinths upon which Ralph erected his philosophy for a healthy life. The first was good food. The second was a solid day’s work. The third was swamp water. “That’s one of the great mysteries of this world, the water in this swamp. Lot of folks say they’re afraid to drink it ‘cause it’s got all kinds of roots and peat and stumps in it. That’s a bunch of crap. I tell people that’s the purest water on earth and it is, too. That water’s ninety-eight percent pure. I defy you to find me some city water that clean. The other two percent is just Gatorade.”

When Ralph talks about swamp water, he sometimes takes a paper cup and scoops himself a cup of it, drinks it, then smacks his lips. As he is doing this, his face radiates a clean-shaven fleshy pink, the complexion of a woodsman. Suddenly a thought occurs to him and his eyes become quick and animated, flitting alternately off to distances and then squinting through his heavy black-framed glasses as he hones in on another swamp story, almost as though he were dredging the yarn up from its resting spot in some deep inner pool of fanciful memory, like a poacher working a gator out of a hole with a cypress pole.
The day before I met Ralph Davis for the first time, a man named Harry Johnson, who works for the government in the swamp but who, unlike Ralph, was not reared there, remarked that Ralph Davis was one of the world’s real old-time swamper, a diminishing breed of men and women who were born and reared in the swamp and understood its natural laws better than the manmade laws of the outside world. “Just be sure to believe about half of what he tells you,” Harry said. “Old Ralph, he’s up to here with swamp water.” Harry tapped the bridge of his wide nose with his index finger, then smiled. Later, thinking about it some more, Harry allowed, “Of course, everybody’s full of swamp water down here, you know. Old Ralph, I reckon he’s seen a better part of that swamp than anybody still around. Part of it was his for a long time.”

At one time Ralph Davis and his family owned as much as seven hundred and fifty acres. Almost half of their holdings was in the Okefenokee. For years, they lived in absolute harmony with the swamp. Ralph himself owned nearly three hundred and forty-five acres of the Okefenokee and built a comfortable hunting and fishing cabin on a lake deep in the swamp, a place where he could disappear. He would pack up his shotgun and a .22 rifle, some lard, corn meal, coffee and sugar; and of course, his fishing pole and head off in his pole boat like a possessed man. The only clock that Ralph ever listened to was the clock in his head, and perhaps that in the changes of the seasons.

In 1974 Ralph lost all of his swampland to the U.S. government. He remembers it well because it was the same year his wife Betty lost part of her leg after suffering a bad fall and fracturing her knee. The doctor put a cast on Betty’s knee, but the cast was too tight and constricted the flow of blood in the leg. Gangrene developed and the lower leg had to come off. “She learned to live without it pretty well,” said Ralph. “Not many women, or men for that matter, would have come back so strong after somethin’ like that. But Betty did. She was a mighty wonderful woman.” Ralph first met Betty, a King from nearby Folkston, in either 1952 or 1953 at a birthday party for a mutual friend over in Traders Hill. Betty was working as a cigar roller in a King Edward cigar factory in Jacksonville. Ralph was forty. Betty was at least ten years younger. Their love grew as slowly, but surely, as soft sphagnum moss about the knees of old cypress trees.

When asked why their courtship lasted so long, Ralph quickly declared, “Because there was a lot of good-lookin’ women runnin’ around in the woods.” The real reason was that Ralph wanted to tread carefully in a matter of such magnitude as marriage. He had been disappointed once when a girl he was engaged to marry ran off with another man. It was not a mortal wound. Ralph eventually calmed down and thankfully, never saw either one of them again. At the time he met Betty King, Ralph was a Charlton County Commissioner, a post he had been elected to in 1940 at age twenty-eight, which made him the youngest county commissioner in the state of Georgia and something of a local celebrity. The man he defeated for the job was named Gibson a wealthy farmer and a powerful south Georgia politician. The way Ralph beat Gibson was to avoid making promises he couldn’t keep. Ralph did not promise overnight prosperity or shopping centers. He promised roads and bridges and it is to his credit that during his sixteen years as a politician, a joy he didn’t particularly relish to begin with, roads and bridges were built. Ralph was known to be a man of his word. Before he gave his word again in regard to marriage Ralph wanted to make sure that it was the real McCoy.

Ralph eventually discovered that he and Betty did have the real thing. So on October 1, 1958, a man named J.E. Harvey, Sr. married Ralph Davis and Betty King. Ralph built his bride a five-room house just across the old turpentine road from the house where he grew up. The land surrounding their house became, for the most part, slash pine tree plantations, for giant timber companies were buying up much of the private lands to the north, east and west of them at a rapid rate. The Okefenokee Swamp, fanning out for roughly twenty-five miles to the west from the Davis’ back door, completed what amounted to an encirclement. The isolation was virtually complete. And that was just how Ralph liked it.

Neither of them ever left the swamp again for more than a few days at one time. Ralph would joke that Betty, a “city girl”, had grown up to become a fine swamp woman. Ralph fancied having maybe four or five children, but they only had one child, Steve, born in 1959. When Steve was old enough, the three of them ventured into the swamp together on long family outings. When Steve has twelve, he shot a charging bear in the mouth with a twenty-gauge shotgun from five feet while Ralph calmly watched from a thicket. The bear head hangs on Ralph’s sleeping porch along with a half-dozen deer heads Ralph bagged over the years. Both Ralph and Betty were proud that Steve grew up tramping and hunting the Okefenokee. Betty was especially proud when Steve was hired as a swamp guide by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. He was the youngest guide in its history. “Betty learned to love the swamp,” Ralph told me one afternoon with a scratchy edge in his voice, as we sat in a wide swing whose wood had turned green with age. “She’d hunt and fish and trap right along with us. She come to love it near about as much as me.” Betty died unexpectedly one night three years ago. “She told me she had a headache and she was goin’ to take some Anacin and lay down to get rid of it,” Ralph said. His voice was a sad whisper. “The doctor later told us she had a severe brain hemorrhage. She went into a coma and never woke up again. She was gone in a wink.”

In the early part of 1974, a federal man showed up at Ralph’s place with a notice informing him that the government wanted to take over his portion of the Okefenokee Swamp in order to preserve it from timber companies and people like Ralph, who had hunted and fished in there all their lives. All around him, it seemed, his friends and neighbors had sold off their lands for as little as ten dollars an acre to the timber companies or the federal government. “You know, a lot of these timber people took advantage of the people around here. They came in offering what looked like a lot of money and most of ‘em couldn’t resist it. They took the money and moved out. I guess that’s what happens when folks get an idea that there’s somethin’ better somewhere else. I don’t know why that is exactly, but I figure it’s got something to do with a nervous condition. Lots of folks get bored with what they got and go off and try someplace else. I couldn’t go nowhere else but here. This place was mine. I couldn’t go nowhere but here.”

Ralph watched with dismay as many of his lifelong neighbors “got citified and moved to towns.” He was fiercely determined to stay on the land where he was born. Finally the federal man returned one day with a piece of paper condemning Ralph’s three hundred and forty-five acres of swamp. Ralph took his issue to court, but a jury ruled against him and he was forced to sell. “They give me thirty dollars an acre for it,” Ralph said in a regretful voice. “They even took away my cabin. Nobody uses that place out there now. It’s just settin’. I told ‘em that I’d rather have my cabin than any of their money, but they just didn’t see it like I did.”

Ralph Davis’ house faces northeast, so that the sun sets during most of the year right out his back door, just over the hood of a ’56 bottle-green Plymouth coupe that sits in the knee-high weeds next to the main road. Ralph now owns thirty-three acres of land around him. He once had six hundred head of cattle; he now has six cows.

Ralph lives off Social Security and works part-time for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service as a consultant on the swamp. In 1934, he was a member of one of the crews that set boundaries defining the Okefenokee as a national wildlife refuge. Even at that time, Ralph viewed the government’s takeover of the swamp with alternate amounts of understanding and alarm. He recognized that before the Okefenokee was declared a national refuge by presidential act in March 1937, much of the swamp was rapidly falling to the timber companies. For more than a century, the swamp had been in a constant state of turmoil, a sort of prized geographical pelt fought over by Indians, pioneers, timber barons and the federal government. There had been harebrained attempts to drain the swamp and make it into fertile farming land. Its wildlife balance was precarious due to indiscriminate fishing and hunting by thousands of sportsmen, many of them outsiders who considered the swamp a place so wild and forbidding that they could comfortably ignore game quotas and laws. There were even blueprints on the table of some highway engineers to carve a major highway straight through the heart of the Okefenokee, a flawless asphalt corridor that would whisk Yankee tourists painlessly into Florida without having to detour around the swamp.

In earlier times, a scheme was hatched to dig a series of connecting canals throughout the swamp. By creating a navigable joint between the swamp’s two major rivers – the St. Marys, which begins in the Okefenokee and snakes eastward along the Georgia-Florida border, and the Suwannee, which begins in the swamp’s western interior and courses its way south to the Gulf of Mexico – swamp visionaries could foresee an important commerce lane being opened between the Atlantic and the Gulf. That project never got off the board. But in 1891, a man named Harry Jackson, a prominent Atlanta capitalist, embarked on a venture to dig a series of canals from the Folkston side of the swamp to the headwaters of the St. Marys River. Jackson and his business associates, who incorporated as the Suwannee Canal Company, purchased 257,889 acres of the swamp from the state of Georgia for twenty-six and one-half cents an acre. Their plan was to drain off most of the swamp’s water, leaving billions of dollars worth of timber and fertile land. Eventually almost twelve miles of main canal and eight miles of branch canals were completed. But when Jackson suddenly died in 1895, funding for the enterprise began to dry up, and the project was abandoned. The canal, a monument to man’s arrogance toward nature, was known thereafter as “Jackson’s Folly.”

Around the turn of the century, the Charles Hebard and Sons Lumber Company of Philadelphia purchased all of the swamp acreage owned by the Suwannee Canal Company. After surveying the swamp for eight years to locate the finest stands of virgin cypress, the Hebard Cypress Company began operations in the Okefenokee. A large steam-operated lumber mill was built near the town of Waycross and a small community of about one thousand people called Hebardsville sprang up around the mill. The company also constructed a railroad from Waycross to the edge of the swamp, then laid thirty-five miles of track into the swamp’s interior. Small-gauge steam engines were used to trundle logs out of the swamp to the lumber mill at Hebardsville. During the height of its production, the mill was cutting 150,000 board feet per day. About fifteen miles into the swamp on its west side, a thriving logging town grew up on a large island that had once been the homestead of a pioneer family named Lee. Before 1853, when Dan Lee filed a settler’s claim with the state for the four-and-a-half-mile-long island (one of the largest in the Okefenokee), the island had been the exclusive domain of a half-breed Seminole Indian named Billy Bowlegs. Billy Bowlegs and his small band of Seminoles were credited with killing scores of settlers and swamp venturers during their stay on the island, mostly during hit-and-run raids on fringe homesteads. In November 1838, General Charles Floyd led two hundred and fifty soldiers into the southwestern edge of the Okefenokee to chase the marauding Indians from their stronghold. Folklore has it that Billy Bowlegs fled without much of a fight and eventually resettled his renegade band deep in the Florida Everglades. The island he left behind became known as Billy’s Island.

The Hebard Cypress Company made Billys Island the site of its main logging camp, and a small town grew up with a hotel and a general store, a doctor, a school and a respectable amount of law and order. In 1911, the year Ralph Davis was born, the loggers were being paid about $1.50 per day for working from sunrise to sunset. By the time Ralph was ten and poling his own johnboat across the swamp’s prairies to visit his aunt and uncle on Billys Island, the town was laid out in regular streets. There were neat box-framed houses where workers lived, an ice house, electricity, telephones, and of particular interest to Ralph, Charlton County’s first moving picture house. Ralph’s daddy, Walter Davis, worked on the island and sometimes took Ralph along to spend the day knocking around town. There were, Ralph remembered, around six hundred people living on Billys Island – the greatest concentration of people ever to inhabit the swamp. During its occupation of Billys Island from 1908 until 1927, the Hebard Cypress Company harvested 420 million board feet of cypress from the swamp. Seven hundred thousand railroad ties were also cut during the period. The Hebard Cypress Company shipped most of the wood north where it was used in the construction of fine houses and boats.

Cypress, one of nature’s most enduring and resilient woods, grows at an almost imperceptibly slow rate and is amazingly durable. “You take that cypress tree yonder and look at it good,” Ralph Davis instructed one day in the swamp. “Then you come back here in ten years and look at it again. You won’t see a bit of difference. You won’t be able to tell that it’s grown at all.” A ten-foot cypress pole, according to Ralph, can be cut and tossed into the brambles, recovered ten years later and used as a pole for a johnboat without the wood having surrendered any of its strength or resiliency to time and weather. “Most of them railroad ties in the old days was made of cypress, because it would give like the devil under pressure and not break. They used cypress for railroad ties all over the country in them days.” Some of the swamp’s cypress, Ralph remembered, was also barged down the St. Marys River to St. Augustine, where huge foreign freighters waited to carry it abroad.

The Davis family first came to the swamp sometime around 1896, when the Suwannee Canal Co. abandoned its attempt to drain the Okefenokee. Walter Davis, a blacksmith and surveyor at the company, decided it was time to do something significant about forging his own fortunes in the swamp. He moved his wife Eliza and their two children from the town of Moniac, a village on the southeastern edge of the swamp, deep into the unblemished forests and swampland west of Folkston. Davis purchased a small tract of land and built a modest five-room house of hand-dressed cypress wood. Walter and Eliza Davis established one of the swamp’s enduring pioneer families.

The gentle bosom of land Walter and Eliza Davis elected to build their homestead on was an unusual geologic formation known as Trail Ridge, an elevated strip of land that spans the entire length of Charlton County and defines the eastern margin of the Okefenokee. Some scientists theorize that the predominantly sandy ridge was formed during the Pleistocene era, anywhere from five hundred thousand to two million years ago, when a great portion of southeastern Georgia was covered by the Atlantic Ocean. This theory, which is widely accepted among archaeological scholars, would account for some of the peculiarities of the Okefenokee Swamp. In the strictest sense of the word, the Okefenokee is not a swamp. Its waters are constantly flowing and circulating in channels, unlike the predominantly still and stagnant waters of a genuine swamp. The Okefenokee is 103 to 128 feet above sea level, which is higher than most of the land surrounding it. It is a watershed and the source of two rivers. Some biologists have described the Okefenokee as an elevated saucer that generates its own water from deep springs in its interior, However, more recent studies of the swamp’s hydrology conducted over a span of three years by the Ecology Institute of the University of Georgia have convinced most swamp experts that the swamp is fed by a series of small freshwater streams on its northern and eastern peripheries. Stream water accounts for the relatively strong currents in the swamp, for the water’s cleanness, and for the low concentration of nutrients in the water. The amber water, as Ralph Davis said, is both potable and despite its strong tea color, amazingly sediment-free. It is low in magnesium and potassium, since it does not, as once thought, well from the ground beneath the swamp. Though it is a relatively poor nutrient supplier for the swamp’s plant life, the Okefenokee’s richly varied flora have adapted to the deficiency by taking their nutritional supplies from the swamp’s rich peat beds. For man, however, the swamp’s water is a natural elixir, slightly acidic in taste but refreshing. A common but probably apocryphal story holds that Spanish explorer Hernando DeSoto transported great amounts of Okefenokee water from the swamp when he passed through its edges in the late 1600s. Eighteenth century and nineteenth-century sea captains stocked their ships with water from the St. Marys River before putting out to sea on long voyages. It is a constant source of amusement to Ralph Davis and others like him that the canoeists who traverse the Okefenokee lug along their own supplies of “city water” during overnight trips into the swamp. “This is God’s water,” Ralph said. “There ain’t no better water anywhere in the world.”

Ralph Davis was the youngest of Walter and Eliza Davis’ four children. Like most of the pioneer families of the Okefenokee, the Davises were nearly self-sufficient. They hunted alligators for meat and for the pliable skins of their bellies. As late as the 1950s traveling skin buyers paid as much as ten dollars per skin. For most of his life, Walter Davis worked as a “girdling” foreman for timber companies. He oversaw advance operations in the interior where crews gashed open cypress trees at their bases in order to drain their sap and dry them out. By the time the trees were ready to be harvested months later, they could be floated out of the swamp. Davis also farmed and raised hogs and cattle on his homestead. He built a one-room schoolhouse for his children less than a mile from the house and hired a teacher. The family gathered pine gum from the pine barrens around them and distilled it into turpentine, which they sold to itinerant buyers. They seldom ventured into the towns on the edge of the swamp for anything other than their own amusement. The swamp provided necessities of life; towns were there for visiting “citified” kin, no more.

Acute isolation attracted some men to the swamp and drove others from it. In earlier times, visitors from the outside observed the self-sufficient swamp families and often interpreted their self-sufficiency to mean that the people there were inward and shy. An unfair and lurid folklore emerged from reports that portrayed swamp people as dangerous, inbred and mean-spirited. One of the more damaging reports was credited to Dr. W.D. Funkhouser, who visited the swamp with a party of Cornell University scientists in 1912 to search for new flora and fauna and to determine the expediency of having the swamp made into a national park. Funkhouser accompanied a Cornell naturalist named Francis Harper, whose lifelong passion became a study of the culture and ecology of the Okefenokee. As the story goes, Dr. Funkhouser stopped off at the University of Kentucky on his way back to Cornell to give a talk on the findings of the expedition. According to newspaper accounts of the talk, Dr. Funkhouser reported having discovered a “half-savage family, speaking Chaucerian English, on an island in the midst of the forty-mile wide swamp, never explored within the memory of man.” The island was Billys Island, the family that of Dan Lee. The account continued: “Here we found a family of persons who in many ways can only be compared to animals. It consisted of an old, old woman, her three sons and two daughters who had intermarried, and their eleven children. All of them were degenerate weaklings, undernourished and had hookworm and bad blood, as the tests we made showed. They had a large graveyard, which was about full…. The family had no shelter except a rude lean-to against a tree and wore no covering to speak of, the children being entirely naked. While they spoke English we had much difficulty in understanding them as their vocabulary was Chaucerian, Spenserian, or Shakespearian… They had never heard of reading, writing, or any of the things we take for granted, and on learning that we were from New York inquired if it were another island or a turpentine still. Only one of them had ever been off the island.”

Stories and fanciful yarns abounded in the swamp. Hundreds of stories perpetuated the alledged horrors of the swamp: moccasins hanging from the cypress trees, alligators swallowing up johnboats and their occupants whole, black bears ravaging entire settlements. In the early twentieth century tales of a supernatural, if profoundly illiterate, race engendered by Civil War deserters, runaway slaves and mad moonshiners found their way into newspapers and periodicals across America. In the case of the Lees, records show that they could not only read and write, but they also settled comfortably into communities surrounding the swamp after the state paid them one thousand dollars to relocate. Francis Harper struggled for many years to debunk some of the bogus lore by insisting that Dr. Funkhouser’s speech was taken completely out of context by a highly excitable newspaper reporter. Harper devoted the remainder of his life to compiling oral histories of the people of the Okefenokee. He became friends with swampers and throughout the forties wrote down their stories in thirty-eight notebooks. He hoped to publish a definitive cultural history of the Okefenokee. In it, he planned to reveal that the swamper was in the truest sense of the word a Georgia “Cracker”, a proud cultural distinction signifying that swampers came from the same Scotch-Irish stock that moved into Georgia and settled much of the state in the early 1840s. When Harper died in 1973, however, his project came to a grinding halt. In 1975 Harper’s family granted permission to a Georgia Southern College English professor named Delma Presley to resume Harper’s project. Presley conducted his own extensive interviews with remaining swampers and their families and combined his findings with Harper’s notebooks and a wealth of anecdotal and photographic evidence into a forthcoming book titled The Okefinokee Sampler. (The use of the “i” in the spelling of Okefenokee was Harper’s preferred usage, stemming from the word’s Indian origin, meaning literally “the trembling earth.”)

Harper and Presley agreed that the Georgia Crackers who found their way into the Okefenokee Swamp were directly related to those who settled vast portions of Appalachia. “They found it was possible to live in the swamp with a great degree of privacy, the same way others of their kind moved into the mountains of Appalachia,” Presley said. “In both cases, the acute isolation helped preserve their original speech and their material cultures.” The remnants of Elizabethan English that Funkhouser and Harper heard in the Lee’s speech in 1912 hold remarkable similarities to usages already beginning to die off in Appalachia. The words “cromb” and “muzog”, words still in frequent use in the swamp vernacular during the 1930s, were direct descendants of Elizabethan English. A swamper such as Obediah Barber, who was alleged to have strangled a bear with his bare hands and killed another one with a stick, probably described the latter episode to friends by saying he had take up a club and “crombed the critter to death.” The word “muzog” was invoked by a swamper when he wished to note a good exploration of the swamp. When he felt tired and dirty, a swamper referred to his condition as “blowsey”; instead of asking “What?” he customarily said, “Do how?” His speech was peppered with wonderful proverbs and homilies. A swamper named Steve Gibson once described another man to Delma Presley as “crooked enough to steal a suckin’ bottle from a blind orphan baby.”

An acute sense of personal values tempered with a frontier sense of humor pervaded both the law and the lives of most swampers. Lydia Stone, the “Queen of Cowhouse Island”, a hard-scrabble woman who got rich off the timber in the swamp in the early twenties, was reputed to have paid a state judge one thousand dollars to let her husband “Baby” out of a long prison sentence for murdering a man. The moment Baby arrived home she allegedly canceled the check.

It is something of a tender irony that Francis Harper’s wife, Jean Sherwood, a tutor of Franklin Roosevelt’s children, lobbied intensely for Roosevelt to declare the swamp a national refuge, which he finally did in 1937. Creation of the refuge while protecting more than 412,000 acres of the swamp from poachers and timber barons, chased many of the remaining swampers like Ralph Davis off the land forever. Public education all but finished off the archaic language of the swamp.

The truth about swampers, typified by Ralph Davis, is that they are, despite their turtle-hard hides, a soft-hearted and sentimental breed. When Ralph Davis learned that the government was planning to take over the land and declare it a National Wilderness Area in 1974, he made dozens of boat trips into the swamp to retrieve a special kind of dead pine stump. Ralph called it “lightard wood.” It is deadwood that is high in pitch content. Its heartwood is a natural flame-quick kindling. Ralph found eight pine stumps, averaging ten feet in length and hauled them back to his house. He planted them, with the meticulous care of any city gardener, in the sand, ten feet apart, along the hand-split picket fence that surrounds his house. He did it primarily for his own peace of mind, but also for the chance visitor to his domain. “They ain’t a whole lot of them stumps left in the swamp no more,” Ralph declared, jabbing the point of his age-stained jackknife into one of the stumps. “So I went in and got me some to put here so people could see ’em in case they come back here to look around. ‘Fore the government took over the swamp, the Hercules Powder Company ‘bout cleaned out all the pine stumps. They make gunpowder out of pine stumps, you know. Cellophane was developed from pine stumps too. A man was just messin’ around with a pine stump and invented it, They make near everything out of pine stumps these days.”

Pine stumps were the showpieces of Ralph’s white sand yard, but they were by no means the entire show. In no particular order of importance, I saw dozens of rusting turpentine barrels, a skinning tripod, a steel-wheeled wagon, a mottled orange carpet draped over a portion of the fence, abandoned gas tanks, various metal buckets, a bent basketball rim on a leaning pine pole, a feeder crib, four or five piles of carefully chopped wood, two curling strips of tin siding, four fat gourds (birdhouses) hanging from a pole, a rotted-out johnboat, a rusting 1941 tractor (“It still runs just fine,” boasted Ralph), three car batteries, a handsaw, two Ford pickup trucks (’65 and ’77), two brown dogs, a black dog, and a spunky white kitten. Ralph’s yard would inspire the wrath of an army of Welcome Wagon representatives and anti-litter block captains in an American suburb. But Ralph does not deal with cities, except when he impulsively slides behind the wheel of one of his pickups and drives over to Jacksonville which he does two or three times a month. A couple of years after the government took away his swamp, Ralph went out and borrowed a bulldozer and plowed up a horseshoe dam around the northwestern edge of an old cypress pond that had burned out in the thirties. Spring and summer rains eventually turned the twelve acre declivity into Ralph’s very own private swamp. To complete the project he built a tin-roofed fishing shack on stilts in ten feet of water in the pond. He equipped it with a couch, a gas stove, and a bed. When the inclination stirs him he hops up from whatever it is he’s doing and ambles the quarter of a mile down to his shack for a quiet evening of fishing and a good snooze.

Before he built up the dam, alligators from the Okefenokee used to show up in the old cypress pond. Ralph, who estimates he has shot and skinned probably ten thousand alligators over the years, suddenly enjoyed having the mysterious critters around for pets. He got into the habit of carrying a burlap sack with him any time he went into the swamp, so he could bring back two- and three-foot gators when he found them in the marshes. At one point, Ralph calculated that he had twenty-seven pet gators swimming around in his pond. Friends, former neighbors, relatives, even total strangers began showing up at Ralph’s house to get a good safe look at an alligator. Then one night Ralph took his flashlight and led a couple of city people down the road to the pond only to discover every one of his gators missing. “Somebody come in here and cleaned every one of ‘em out,” he said bitterly. “It’s possible they went off on their own, ‘cause a gator can do some travelin’. But all of ‘em wouldn’t have left that quick. Somebody come down here and killed every one of ‘em is what happened.” It was something of a surprise to Ralph, and perhaps a bit of justice meted out by nature, that when Ralph built up his cypress pond, other alligators began returning on their own. Ralph began to sit out on his dock at night and try to count them. He fed them white bread. Eventually they began to respond to Ralph’s raspy “C’mon and git it!” call each dusk. Like coon dogs coming in from the darkening fields, their craggy snouts would appear in the still water, heading toward Ralph’s dock. “They knew they was gonna get groceries,” Ralph explained with a proud smile.

There are those, Ralph Davis among them, who believe that much of the swamp may dry up in the next half century unless some natural process acts to impede an ecological trend of the past twenty-five years. Slowly, the swamp is growing into a forest. The problem is the trembling earth itself. Floating chunks of rotted vegetation from the swamp’s base periodically explode to the surface when methane gas is released. On the surface, maidencane and sawgrass and other prairie grasses take root in the batteries and eventually fill in the water below with vegetation. Small trees take root, vegetation becomes denser and eventually a patch of solid land, a hammock, is formed. Unless something happens to remove this vegetation, whole prairie lakes and smaller ponds are eventually swallowed up. The most common solution to the problem is wildfire. For centuries, the swamp has periodically burned itself clean of whole swatches of peat and vegetation. Most of the fires began during periods of severe drought. The cause, in most cases, was lightning. During the late 1950s, Congress authorized construction of a dam, or sill, across the Suwannee River near its headwaters in the west side of the swamp to prevent the danger of wildfire. The action resulted in part from an extensive fire that raced up the eastern periphery of the Okefenokee in late 1954. The fire burned thousands of acres of private and public land including much of the swamp around Ralph Davis’ house. It claimed forty of Ralph’s cows and dozens of his hogs. If neighbors from Folkston hadn’t showed up at his place to help keep his five buildings wet, he might have lost all his farm buildings. “That fire come out of the south and it run as fast as anything you ever seen,” Ralph recalled. “They called it ‘Mule’s Tail’ fire cause it started when this boy was dippin’ turpentine in a Hoover cart and caught the damn thing on fire. The mule run away and the fire burned his tail off. A big east wind drove that fire six miles into the Okefenokee. It was December fifth, a clear, dry day, and in no time at all that fire had a six-mile breast. The followin’ day, a Sunday, a tornado come up out of the southwest and carried the fire more than forty miles in less than six hours. There wasn’t a leaf or a twig left ‘round my place after it come through. Four miles north of me in the swamp, the fire went out. It started to rain. If it hadn’t rained, I reckon that fire would have gone to Savannah.” Two days later, however, the fire started to smolder again and burned back into the swamp’s dense beds of peat. It took nearly four months for the fire to burn itself out completely.

The sill was constructed to prevent the swamp from burning in such a manner ever again. The water table of the swamp was raised, The higher level has indisputably changed the face of the Okefenokee. How the sill has altered the swamp is fodder for debate between different environmental factions. Some scientists are convinced that unless the swamp burns, it will inevitably dry up. Others argue that a major swamp fire would incalculably damage the ecological balance of the swamp, and would devastate the surrounding farm and timberlands. Ralph Davis believes the sill has speeded up the forest’s reclamation process. Someday he expects to see much of the swamp bone day. Like many old-time swampers who had their favorite fishing holes in the swamp’s prairies, he believes the additional vegetation has choked off the Okefenokee’s once abundant populations of jackfish, bluegill and warmouth bass. In places where he once poled a johnboat in search of alligators, he now watches guide boats ferrying groups of camera-clutching tourists deep into the swamp. Ralph learned to put up with the aggravation of tourists years ago when he realized that the swamp could never return to its former unmarred glory. Like the alligators, Ralph’s was an altered form of survival – either learn to adapt to the interminable whine of tourist boats or go someplace else. But like the alligator, Ralph wouldn’t know where to go outside the swamp.

“A man couldn’t get lost in the swamp today if he tried to,” Ralph said one day near a prairie pond called Buzzard’s Roost. He sat like an old turtle at the rear of a government-owned aluminum johnboat, fingering the eight horse power engine to half-speed as the boat droned noisily along a wide canoe trail. “You got all these trails and signs in here now, tellin’ you how to get from here to there. Hell,” he cussed softly, “in the old days you could just turn around and git lost. I never feared nuthin’ in the swamp except maybe two things. One was fog. It could come on you in here and you’d be stuck. I spent many a night in my boat out here. The other was snakes. Never had much use for a snake. I killed ‘em quick. Never got bit by one and I reckon that’s why. Now, here on the refuge, folks jump all over me – ‘Don’t you kill that snake, Uncle Ralph!’ – well, I’ll tell you about that. They’s some big rattlers and cottonmouths in this country. With all these families and young’uns comin’ here now, one of the big refuge bosses said to me one day, ‘Ralph, I heard there was a rattler here the other day with seventeen rattles. That right?’ I said, ‘Yes indeed.’ He said, ‘Now Ralph, I can’t tell you to go around killin’ rattlesnakes, but if you happen to git one down in the woods, well…’” Ralph grinned slyly. “I leave ‘em alone just once. If they come back again, me and the snake take a walk down into the woods.”

Ralph saw the swamp really begin to change just after World War II. “That’s when they come in here and cut all these canoe trails out and built all these facilities and such. Weren’t too bad at first. Not too many people was interested in the swamp ‘cept those that knew about it. When they first opened up you didn’t get the kind of folks you get in here now. There weren’t no scientists or any of these campers who come in to study the swamp. Those people at least care about the swamp. No sir. The biggest thing you got in here when they first opened up was hippies.” Ralph made a disgusted face.

Switching off the motor, Ralph guided the boat headlong into a battery, where it stopped with a soft bump. For a moment he watched the startled flight of a great blue heron as it rose into the overcast sky. A snake dangled from its talons. Ralph watched the bird disappear around a stand of cypress and then with surprising testiness said, “I never figured out why it was that the hippies liked to come back in here. Maybe they thought they were getting’ back to nature. Most of the time they went around in here naked as jaybirds anyway, just a-whoopin’ and a-hollerin’ to beat the devil. They couldn’t have give a hoopin’ damn about the swamp. I remember I was sittin’ up yonder in Gannet Lake one evenin’ when there come a bunch of ‘em in canoes. You could smell ‘em forty feet away against the wind cause hippies don’t like to take a bath, you know. So here they come, right up to my boat, as dirty as all the world. And this real purty little gal, ‘bout half naked, says ‘Hi, Pop!” or some such nonsense. Well, I said, “What do you young folks get out of goin’ around like you do? You come in here just a-rippin’ and cussin’ and you build fires and litter up the swamp, and I’d just like to know why?’”

Bewildered, the hippies stared at Ralph, then turned their canoe around and paddled quickly off. Days later, while patrolling remote Mizell Prairie, named for Ralph’s uncle Hamp Mizell, who co-authored a history of the swamp in the early twenties, Ralph spotted an empty metal canoe adrift in the current. He guided his government airboat within twenty feet of the canoe and shut off the motor. “I’ll be doggoned if there wasn’t a woman a-layin’ stretched out in the bottom of that boat, just as naked as a jaybird! She said she was getting’ herself a suntan. It was July, ‘bout a hundred and twenty out on them prairies and her layin’ naked in an aluminum canoe. Lord!”

“Are you crazy, lady?” Ralph asked the woman.

“No,” said the woman. “Why don’t you just go away?”

“I’ll tell you what you do, young woman,” Ralph said, feeling his face reddening, from anger as much as modesty. “You better git yourself up right now and put your clothes back on and head this boat back into the landing. You understand that?” The woman begrudgingly obliged. Ralph spotted the woman the next afternoon, swabbed in sunburn medication and bandages. “I know she went to the hospital that night with that sunburn,” Ralph said. “Those hippies were truly crazy.”

The Okefenokee survived hippies and so did Ralph. The scientists and Scout troops who followed the hippies were something of welcome relief to both of them. When experienced canoeists and wilderness campers began coming to the swamp in the late sixties, Ralph realized that the succeeding waves of invaders were at least sympathetic to the swamp’s delicate integrity. Even the casual two-hour tourists weren’t nearly as bad as Ralph thought they would be. They seldom littered and sometimes they asked Ralph thoughtful questions about the swamp and the way it used to be. But signs of man’s claim on the land were everywhere. The incongruity of a portable chemical toilet situated on a dock in the middle of a vast swamp prairie was unsettling for Ralph’s sensibilities. It was rare for him to see one, sitting stolidly on its manmade perch like a wooden telephone booth, a testimonial to modern man’s ordered vision of nature and his weak bladder, without stopping just to flush it vigorously a few times. “Ain’t this thing something?” he declared, rapping the side of a swamp Johnny. Then he walked around the other side, leaned in, and flushed it. “This here’s solid heart pine, two inches thick,” he said admiringly, running his hand over the coarse door. “Fine work, fine work. How much you reckon it cost the government to make this thing?” Ralph sniffed at the wooden monument. “It don’t smell bad. It’s clean. Nice wood.” Ralph stepped back and sized it up and declared, scratching his ear, “You know, it’s amazin’ how far we’ve come with modern science today. This handsome Johnny here probably cost the government two hundred dollars to build.” Ralph shook his head with wonder. “Too bad it cost ‘em two thousand to put it way out here.”

The sun had gone down over Ralph’s cypress pond when, seated in a peeling lawn chair on the deck of his fishing shack, Ralph unexpectedly held out his two stumpy fingers and said softly, “You know what’s the truth about them fingers? Well, I tell some city folks that an old bear got hold of ‘em one day back in the swamp. That sounds good to ‘em, cause that’s what a lot of folks expect to hear about the swamp. Simple truth is, a power saw took them fingers off back in ‘thirty-eight.” Ralph’s voice was a scratchy growl in a soft chorus of moping peeper frogs in the maidencane. “That old bear story makes a good line, I reckon,” Ralph said. “But I don’t let somebody believe it for long. I always tell ‘em in the end.” He took a square of white bread from a plastic sack and tossed it into the water five feet away where a young five-foot alligator waited motionlessly. The alligator ate the bread with a faint slapping noise.

“Now you take that gator there,” Ralph said. “He don’t know but one thing in this world. That’s how to survive. He knows that when he hears me call, they’s groceries to be had. That’s all. You can’t trust him. He’s not real smart. Nice lookin’, though, ain’t he? You know, they’s people that try to raise gators and sell ‘em as pets. Down in Florida they make ‘em slide down slidin’ boards and do all kinds of foolish things. That ain’t natural to an old gator. The swamp’s his place.” Ralph pivoted stiffly around in his chair to see where his dogs and cat were. All four were sitting together patiently, a tiny congregation on the bank fifteen feet away, staring back at Ralph. “I worry a lot about one of them old gators getting’ ahold of ‘em.” Ralph said. “To a gator, anything in that water’s groceries, you know.”

When total darkness descended over the pond, Ralph stood up and stretched. He told me he was going to go back up the road to the house and make some notes on the swamp for a book he plans to write someday. If he does it before next year, he will call it My Sixty-Nine Years in the Okefenokee Swamp. His friends told him he should wait until he is seventy, but Ralph told them he wanted to get a solid jump on it. He wants to get it all down on paper as soon as possible. “I had my time in that swamp,” Ralph said, snapping on his flashlight to go. He played the light out into the dark pond. The alligator was still there, a snout and two ruby red eyes shimmering on an onyx jewel. “You know what’s the truth?” Ralph said chuckling. “I may have to eat that gator someday.”

The Atlanta Journal and Constitution Magazine
November 18, 1979

 

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