Totch

Loren G. "Totch" Brown looks back on the Everglades and the mangrove islands of the Ten Thousand Islands as they were before progress reshaped them. Born on Chokoloskee in 1920, he left school after the seventh grade, bought his first motorboat at thirteen, and made his living as an alligator hunter, commercial fisherman, crabber, fishing guide, and singer and songwriter. His story moves between a childhood of hard poverty and later years spent on the wrong side of the law, first as a poacher and then as a marijuana runner.

The memoir reaches back well before Brown's own lifetime. It describes the handful of settlers who first claimed the high ground on Chokoloskee, a rise built from oyster shells left by the Calusa people about a century earlier. They lived in tin or palmetto-frond shacks, ate wild game and swamp plants, and endured hurricanes and swarms of mosquitoes. Brown also recalls the outlaws of his grandfather's day, men who killed as readily as they would shoot a bird for its plumes. His grandparents were contemporaries of Ed J. Watson, the subject of Peter Matthiessen's Killing Mr. Watson.

Brown tells his story in his own voice, with the ease of a natural storyteller. Peter Matthiessen wrote the foreword. Brown also appears in a PBS film about the Everglades that Matthiessen made, and in the 1957 film Wind Across the Everglades, where he and Burl Ives sing some of his Florida cracker songs. The book will appeal to readers interested in frontier Florida and in a way of life that has largely disappeared.