“I know it is doing the legs good,” he wrote his mother, “the muscles are better than ever before.”. Convincing lawmakers that the so-called "wasteland" of the Everglades held anything worth preserving in its natural state took patient persuasion. Miami was then a remote outpost of some 15,000 people—“no more than a glorified railroad terminal,” Douglas said. Coe also was anxious to overcome the perception, as he put it, “that the Everglades National Park was just another Florida promotion scheme." So you had to have schemes to drain the swamp. But when Hamilton Disston—and those who would follow in his footsteps—tried to drain it, none of that was well understood. Narrator: Not only was the prized soil disappearing on the wind, but the water table had dropped precipitously, choking off the supply of fresh drinking water to Miami, now a city of more than 100,000. He was smart, he was savvy, he had ambitions. The endless acres of saw grass, brown as an enormous shadow where rain and lake water had once flowed, rustled dry. Water was a fact of life for anyone living in south Florida. Told through the lives of a handful of colorful and resolute characters, from hucksters to politicians to unlikely activists, The Swamp explores the repeated efforts to transform what was seen as a vast and useless wasteland into an agricultural and urban paradise, ultimately leading to a passionate campaign to preserve America’s greatest wetland. But the message put forward in Douglas’s. There is a feverish quality to the endless engineering assaults, the mad plans to rechannel the circulatory system of the Everglades, the blind determination to ignore the forces of nature. “I know it is doing the legs good,” he wrote his mother, “the muscles are better than ever before.”. Narrator: By draining the Everglades, Broward vowed, he would make Florida America's new heartland. The Everglades was once reviled as a liquid wasteland, and Americans dreamed of draining it. Thomas Van Lent, Civil Engineer: The City of Miami got its water from wells. When I first moved to Fort Lauderdale I could hear the sounds of the birds and bugs at dawn and dusk coming alive. The Everglades was once reviled as a liquid wasteland, and Americans dreamed of draining it. Jack Davis, Historian: The state of Florida is flaunting it as if this is the gospel word about Everglades drainage. In Simpson's view, perhaps no spot in the Everglades was more urgently in need of protection than Paradise Key. But the soil also subsided very rapidly. Not that anybody was ever going to be able to live there during the summer rainy season, but they could say in a northern ad in a newspaper, “Sidewalks, yes. Some people lived in tents. Andrew Price - Oboe The farmers in the upper Everglades, they mostly wanted the lake to be kept very low, except when it was a drought situation. They were school teachers and clerks, bricklayers and farmers, all of them eager to claim their very own parcel of drained Everglades muckland—in what advertisements had described as one of "the greatest land propositions ever offered to the investing public.". By building the dike and concentrating that water, and then once the lake blasted through the dike, it was way more powerful and way more water. Now it is revered as a national treasure, and Americans have launched the largest environmental project in history to try to save it. Billions of state and federal tax dollars are being spent. Jack Davis, Historian: So you have all these competing interests in the Everglades and each wants the Everglades to work for them. It was a very large storm. Her father was a State Legislator, her husband had been Governor of Florida, and if anybody knew everybody in the state of Florida, it was May Jennings. Paul Sutter, Historian: People like Simpson begin to interpret the landscape to south Floridians in ways that becomes particularly powerful. We had to chain this beast. And when you say “dike” you’re talking about basically a six-foot wall of muck. The last third of the book deals increasingly with intricate political and economic maneuvering over the Everglades. Where Disston saw potential, most others saw an insurmountable obstacle: a massive wetland known as the Everglades that covered much of Florida’s southern half, inhibiting settlement and development.