Draining the Everglades
Near Miami, Florida
The Miami you drive through today sits on ground that was once part of the great wet wilderness of the Everglades. For generations, boosters looked at that slow moving sheet of water flowing south from Lake Okeechobee and saw not a living wonder but wasted swamp waiting to be conquered. The champion of that idea was Napoleon Bonaparte Broward, elected governor of Florida in nineteen zero four on a promise to drain the Everglades and build an empire of farmland.
Dredges began cutting canals from Lake Okeechobee toward the coast, the first breaking ground in nineteen zero six. The reclaimed land was sold across the country, sometimes honestly and sometimes through fraud, feeding the fever that would later explode into the great land boom. Yet the draining came at a terrible cost that took decades to understand.
The wetlands that filtered the water and sheltered countless birds and fish shrank year after year. In nineteen forty seven, a writer named Marjory Stoneman Douglas published a book that changed how Americans saw this place. She called it The Everglades, River of Grass, and she opened it with a single unforgettable line, there are no other Everglades in the world.
