For Sale —American Paradise Read Online Free Page A

they were alternately helped and harassed by Indians. They were terrified when they saw the tracks of large animals in the sand. Aggressive, stinging insects constantly buzzed around them.
    â€œWe had little comfort,” Dickinson wryly noted later.
    Despite the fears and discomforts and the deaths of two members of their party along the way, Dickinson and his group maintained a resolute faith that God would see them safely through their perilous journey. Six weeks later they tramped wearily into St. Augustine. In April 1697, they finally reached Philadelphia.
    In the early nineteenth century, Dr. Jacob Motte, a US Army surgeon, was another reluctant visitor to Florida. The United States had acquired La Florida from Spain in 1821, and it became the US Territory of Florida.
    The Seminole Indians caused problems with American efforts to settle Florida, and the US government wanted to kick them out of their home. In 1832, Seminole chiefs signed an agreement to leave Florida and move west, but a few Seminole leaders refused to comply with the treaty and disappeared into the trackless Everglades.
    Motte, who was Harvard- educated and accustomed to the comforts and refinements of civilization, accompanied US Army troops sent to Florida in 1837 to drive out the stubborn Seminoles. He later wrote about his experience in Journey into Wilderness , in which he articulately explained his fascination and disgust with the strange land of Florida.
    Florida, Motte wrote, “is certainly the poorest country that ever two people quarreled for.” The climate was impossibly uncomfortable, too warm even in winter and impossibly hot in the summer.
    It was “a most hideous region,” and the only creatures who could live in such a setting were Indians, alligators, snakes, and “every other kind of loathsome reptile.”
    Common sense seemed to dictate that the Seminoles should keep Florida, Motte said.
    But at times, Motte, the weary, miserable soldier far removed from his customary comforts, was dazzled by Florida’s wild tropical beauty.
    In late January 1838, Motte’s unit moved from Fort Pierce a few miles down the coast to the headwaters of the St. Lucie River in present- day Martin County. The landscape enchanted him, and he wrote about it in gushing prose. Instead of a nasty swamp fit only for Seminoles and snakes, Motte saw “picturesque clumps of cypress trees and willows, ornamentally clothed with long hanging moss, gracefully and fantastically disposed in festoons, forming fairy- looking islets reposing in verdant loveliness on the bosom of the water.”
    Instead of a lair for loathsome reptiles, it was the habitat “for the genii of those unearthly regions, which come nearest the description of that fabulous place, that we read of, which was neither land, water, nor air,” Motte wrote.
    The deeper the soldiers went into the wilderness, the more rhapsodic Motte’s descriptions became. “Nothing, however, can be imagined more lovely and picturesque than the thousand little isolated spots, scattered in all directions over the surface of this immense sheet of water, which seemed like a placid inland sea shining under a bright sun,” he wrote. “Every possible variety of shape, colour, contour, and size were exhibited in the arrangement of the trees and moss upon these islets, which, reflected from the limpid and sunny depths of the transparent water overshadowed by them, brought home to the imagination all the enchanting visions of Oriental description.”
    Motte “felt the most intense admiration, and gazed with a mingled emotion of delight and awe” at the ethereal landscape.
    Florida became the twenty-seventh state in March 1845. It is a quirky state geographically, simultaneously the southernmost continental state and yet, in some ways, it was only marginally a part of the antebellum Old South that bordered it to the north. It is the only state that both touches