A Trip to the Big Cypress

John Kunkel Small on the magic place that now houses a concentration camp

In May 1917, renowned New York botanist John Kunkel Small visited the Big Cypress, in the Florida Everglades, with guide W. Stanley Hanson. Except for the Seminole tribe members and explorers like Hanson, few people had ever seen this awesome geography.

Small documented how the rainy summers created impromptu lakes (like the kind that flooded the concentration camp where humans denied due process were moved into last night). He wrote about the alligators in Rocky Lake and the burrowing owls so tame you could pick them up. He was the first naturalist to raise the alarm about draining the Everglades (a cry picked up by Marjory Stoneman Douglas decades later).

"...some day, before drainage and other depredations of civilization, not to mention vandalism, have removed the bloom from that still unspoiled garden, we hope to make another and longer visit to the land of the Big Cypress." (John Kunkel Small, "A Trip to the Big Cypress")

(Photo courtesy of Hanson Family Archives)

Find Small’s monograph here