The Everglades: River of Grass

"The Everglades" is the story of the only river of its kind in the world...a river of water and grass. Halfway down the Florida peninsula is Lake Okeechobee and south and southwest from it runs for a hundred miles the strange river of fresh water and saw grass, fifty, sixty, seventy miles wide. Geographically in the temperate zone, the laws of the rain and of the seasons in the Everglades are tropic laws and the strange river teems with natural life, with birds, beasts, fish, trees and other plants. Mrs. Douglas writes with the feeling of one who has seen and loved the Everglades in every mood, and who is warmly conscious of its strange beauties. The Everglades have always been resistant to human interlopers. The Indians, forerunners of those known to whites as the Seminoles, came down the peninsula to the Glades and lived apart in the grassy hammocks, on the beaches at the mouth, or on the rocky rims of the stone trough that holds the river of grass. Although the early Spaniards conquered other Floridian Indians by the sword or the Cross, the natives of the Glades, independent, suspicious, self-sufficient, were unconquerable. Eventually, of course, more white men came and set up cities on the edges of the Everglades. But despite the civilization so near at hand, the interior of the saw-grass river region is still wild and natural, much of it as yet uncharted.