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Fading Footprints: Frontier Communities in the Big Cypress Swamp by Rudi Heinrich SIGNED COPY
Fading Footprints: Frontier Communities in the Big Cypress Swamp by Rudi Heinrich SIGNED COPY
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If this narrative has a thesis or aim, I suppose it is to demonstrate that frontier conditions maintained in the Big Cypress region well into the latter half of the twentieth century. Even into the late 1970’s those living in parts of the Big Cypress remained largely unburdened by regulations and without the benefit of law enforcement. A few lived entirely within the wetland environment and coaxed a living from it. Some came to escape the cities and others simply hadn’t the means to leave. Others came as harvesters of lumber or crops, and some invested and speculated, succeeding or failing. Communities and settlements and ventures rose, fell or simply dried up. Yet the frontier created by the building of the Tamiami Trail remained largely free from the trajectory of sprawl in South Florida and frontier conditions maintained until the advent of the federal purchase in the late 1960s and the final establishment of the Big Cypress National Preserve in October, 1974. Frontier conditions remained only a few years after the federal boundaries and gradual regulation of the Big Cypress Swamp eventually crystalised the region’s dwindling communities into a snapshot, a place where perhaps history is frozen, and in some cases, even forgotten while nature reclaims the material culture. This narrative is a reminder that the Big Cypress Swamp was a populated landscape throughout much of the 20th century, moreover, a part of Florida’s history that should not be overlooked or the people who experienced it underserved.
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