For The Bitter Southerner, Mike Kane brings us a gothic, savor-y true crime story about the life and death of America’s first game warden. Kane and photographer Teague Kennedy brave mosquitos and crocodiles to retrace the steps of Guy Bradley, who was paid $35 a month in the early 1900s to deter and arrest poachers bent on harvesting the beautiful plumage of wading birds in the Florida Everglades. Illegal hunters prized the feathers, which were sold to milliners making hats for wealthy women in the Gilded Age.
July 8, 1905. A blood-soaked, small wooden skiff bobbed in the waves, adrift off the eastern short of Cape Sable in Florida Bay. Inside, a man lay dead from a single gunshot wound, a revolver by his side.
There are a million ways to die here in the waters surrounding the Everglades and the Ten Thousand Islands. These include: venomous snakes, alligators, crocodiles, sharks, swarms of mosquitoes, punishing heat, and the near constant threat of tropical storms and hurricanes. The man had understood that, here, nature gives no quarter.
He was keenly aware that certain men wanted him dead, simply because his job was protecting local birds whose plumage had become more valuable than gold in the Gilded Age lust for exotic millinery. Still, he persisted, paddling and slogging across vast distances in an audacious bid to defend the defenseless, and knowing it would likely cost him his life.
His name was Guy Bradley, and we are chasing his ghost.
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“Florida Man,” Explained
“When I consider Florida Man and its position in the larger social construct of the world, I begin to wonder about my responsibilities to this place and to the narrative itself.”
She’s One of Florida’s Most Lethal Python Hunters
“Donna Kalil has plunged into canals in the dead of night, straddled two-hundred-pound serpents, and been bitten more times than she can count—all in the name of killing a thing she loves and playing a game she can’t win.”
The Worm Charmers
“They call it worm grunting.”
