The American Siberia; or, Fourteen years' experience in a southern convict camp

Chapter I

In the fall of 1876 a singular spectacle might have been observed at the little town of Live Oak, in Northern Florida. A train had just arrived, and from one of the cars some thirty odd men disembarked and formed in irregular procession by the road-side. The sun never shone upon a more abject picture of misery and dilapidation. They were gaunt, haggard, famished, wasted with disease, smeared with grime, and clad in filthy tatters. Chains clattered about their trembling limbs, and so inhuman was their aspect that the crowd of curiosity seekers who had assembled around the depot shrank back appalled.

These thirty starved and half -dying wretches were about half of the convicts of the State of Florida. They were those who had emerged alive from as awful an experience as men were ever fated to undergo. Florida had shortly before passed from radical rule. Governor Sterns had been superseded by George F. Drew, now a merchant in Jacksonville, and with the change of administration came a general overhauling of state institutions, including the penal system. Prior to that time a penitentiary had been maintained in a very old building at Chattahoochee, since remodeled and used as an insane asylum. The state was poor, largely unsettled, torn with political strife, and as might have been expected, the prison was run in a rather happy-golucky fashion, and the history of its early years is a story of experiments, expedients and make-shifts of which little or no record was kept.

I do not pretend to say whose fault it was. A man named Martin was warden, and the place was horror's den. He had been placed in charge of the building during the war, at a time when it was used as an arsenal. The state got rid of its criminals by turning them over bodily to him, and paid him bonuses amounting to over $30,000 for accepting the charge. He had vast vineyards and worked the convicts in them, manufacturing all kinds of wine, at which he made a fortune. There were no restrictions whatever placed upon him by the state. The punishments consisted of stringing up by the thumbs, "sweating" and "watering." The first explains itself; sweating was shutting up in a close box-cell without ventilation or light; and the last named was no less than the celebrated torture practiced during the Spanish Inquisition under the name of the "ordeal by water." Accounts of it given by historians are almost identical with the method then in vogue at Chattahoochee. The prisoner was strapped down, a funnel forced into his mouth and water poured in. The effect was to enormously distend the stomach, producing not only great agony but a sense of impending death, due to pressure on the heart, that unnerved the stoutest. When deaths occurred, as they did quite frequently, the remains were wrapped in a blanket and buried in a shallow trench that barely covered the remains from the air. Some horrible stories, too revolting to repeat in detail, are told of graves desecrated by domestic animals, and there was no record kept of the dead or those who escaped. In brief, the state turned over its charges body and soul, and thenceforth washed its hands of them. And this was not in the middle ages or Siberia, but in these United States, about a decade and a half ago.

During this administration escapes were frequent, and there are some tragic stories connected with them. The guards were often negro convicts, and the old maxim of slavery days, that a black overseer was the crudest to his race, was proven time and again. One day a prisoner, a white man, made his escape and succeeded in penetrating tr>3 wilds of La Fayette County, some seventy miles to the south. In that section of Florida there are not only dense and trackless forests, but they are intersected by wide lagoons and palmetto flats, in which the tropical monotony of the scene is such that a man may wander for days and not be positive that he has made any actual progress. None dare vent-

IO THE AMERICAN SIBERIA

ure into these wastes save trained backwoodsmen, and even they are often lost in the forest labyrinths.

In this natural man-trap the convict found himself. It was impossible to track him through such a jungle, infested as it was by wild beasts, alligators and horrible reptile life from the swamps, and there he was left to his fate. Months afterward a party of adventurous hunters discovered a sodden bundle of rags in a very lonely spot in the woods. They disturbed the unsightly rubbish and lay bare the bones of a man. The tatters of clothing bore the tell-tale prison stripes, and by a peculiarity of the shoes, one of them being a convict's brogan and the other a gaiter, the remains were identified as those of the fugitive who had disappeared in the forest. It was a dreadful death, alone in that awful solitude, and could the story of what he suffered be told in its entirety it would doubtless put romance to shame.

The story of this regime is one of almost unrelieved barbarity, and the absence of records make it almost impossible to give an idea of the state of affairs, except by isolated instances. For example: the guards were armed with muskets and bayonets. The latter were carried fixed, and when the squadi returned at night they were called into frequent requisition to keep laggards in line. Often a man would drop of fatigue, and he would be instantly and mercilessly prodded with the cruel steel.

THE AMERICAN SIBERIA II

The legs and backs of nearly all of the convicts were covered with the scars of bayonet-wounds. The squads were run in, in this manner, to make it possible to work them up to the latest moment.

On one occasion there was a prisoner who gave considerable trouble by reason of his frequent attempts to escape. His name has been lost, but his number was forty-seven. At last he formed a plot to levant through one of the windows, and a fellow-prisoner who was in his confidence betrayed him to the officers. This furnished a good opportunity to get rid of him, and guards were stationed before the windows all night, to kill him as he came out. However, he suspected something wrong, and did not come. Next morning he was placed in the blacksmith shop and purposely left alorle near an open window. The temptation was too great and he made his way through, to be shot dead by a guard who lay ambushed for him outside. I have these statements from the then deputy warden of the prison, who is now a resident of Jacksonville, and there is no doubt of their accuracy.

At last, shortly before the close of Governor Stern's administration, a great scandal, growing out of these atrocities, became so imminent, that a sort of compromise between the prison and the lease systems was effected. The convicts were divided;

about half were sent to build a railroad between St. John and Lake Eustace, and the balance were left

under Martin. It was hardly an improvement.

The line of the proposed railroad was through st virgin wilderness; there seems to have been no attention whatever paid to proper equipments, and the story of that terrible journey stands unparalleled in criminal annals. Dozens of those who went into the tropical marshes and palmetto jungles of Lake Eustace went to certain death. There was no provision made for either shelter or supplies. Rude huts were built of whatever material came tp hand, and in the periods of heavy rain it was no unusual thing for the convicts to awake in the morning half submerged in mud and slime, The commissary department dwindled into nothing I do not mean that there was some food or a little food, but that there was no food at all. In this extremity, the convicts were driven to live as the wild beasts, except that they were only allowed the briefest intervals from labor to scour the woods ior food. They dug up roots and cut the tops from "cabbage" palmetto trees. Noble Hawkins, a tewyear Nassau convict, lived for fourteen days on nothing but palmetto tops and a little salt, and his case was but one of many.

Of course there is a limit to human endurance. It was not long before the camp was ravaged by every disease induced by starvation and exposure. The pestilential swamps were full of fever, and skin maladies; scurvy and pneumonia ran riot. Dysentery was most common, and reduced the men to a point of emaciation difficult to describe or to credit. Every stopping-place was a shambles, and the line of survey is punctuated by grave-yards.

The camp was at different times in charge of various captains, and under some of them the punishments were excessive. Hanging up by the thumbs was usually resorted to, and this led, one night, to a grisly tragedy. A negro convict was strung up for some infraction of the rules. Whipcords were fastened around his thumbs, the loose ends flung over a convenient limb and made taut until his toes swung clear of the ground. The scared convicts huddled about the camp-fire and watched their comrade as he writhed, and yelled expecting every moment that the cords would be unfastened and his agony ended. But the captain had determined to make a salutary example, and he let the negro hang. Meantime the poor wretch's anguish was a hideous thing to see. They say his muscles knotted into cramps under the strain, his eyes started from his head, and sweat ran from his body in streams. An hour passed — then two. His shrieks had ceased and his strugglss grown feeble, so they let him down and he fell to the ground like a log — dead.

It was then that the captain realized what a monstrous thing he had done, and he deserted his post, slunk away in the night, and was never heard of again. Here was a study for an artist. Night in the palmetto woods, the flaming camp-fire outlining the circle of frightened convicts and the miserable barracks where they slept, the distorted corpse upon the ground, and the panic-stricken officer creeping away among the trees.

Soon after the Drew administration assumed the state government, the horrible condition of affairs which I have outlined forced a change of some character. The building at Chattahoochee was entirely unsuited for prison purposes, and the lease system was turned to, as a last resort, very much as was the case when Georgia was saddled with that institution. Advertisement was made for bids and the Lake Eustace gang hired to Major H. A. Wise, a general merchant of Live Oak. The balance were sub-leased to Green Cheers, a farmer who lived in Leon County. My brother, W. F. Powell, and myself were employed by Major Wise to take charge of his camp, and thus began the system which has been more or less under my eye ever since.

The ragged battalion who disembarked at Live Oak were the survivors of those who had penetrated the wild morasses of Lake Eustace. The major part of them were negroes, but it was impossible to tell, as they stood, who were white and who weie black, so incrusted were they all with the accumulated filth of months. The sight staggered me, but I saw at once that the first business on hand was to get them clean, and I ordered them to strip. It was not a difficult task, as scarcely a man of them possessed a whole garment, and I burned the vermin*

THE AMERICAN SIBERIA IJ

swarming rags as fast as they were removed. Tubs of water were placed along the line; they bathed, and clean clothes were given them.

While this operation was in progress, my attention was attracted in particular to two white men, by reason of the singular appearance of their hands. They resembled the paws of certain apes, for their thumbs, which were enormously enlarged at the ends, were also quite as long as their index-fingers, and the tips of all were on aline. This deformity was occasioned by stringing up, and when one stops to consider the amount of pressure necessary to stretch out a man's thumb fully three inches, some idea can be formed of the severity of the punishment. The names of these two men were Robert and Eugene Weaver. They were natives of one of the northern states, and subsequently served out their sentence and were discharged by me.

Another member of the squad was a negro named Cy Williams, and as he had had a rather extraordinary history, I may as well tell it at this point. He was the first prisoner received by the State of Florida, and was entered in the books as* No. i. He did not know his age, but when he was a mere pickaninny, running about in the one garment that forms the costume of all negro youngsters in the South, he was arrested for stealing a horse. He was not large. enough to mount the animal, and was caught in the act of leading it off by the halter, for wfcich he was duly sentenced to twenty years imprisl6 THE AMERICAN SIBERIA

onment. Warden Martin was somewhat puzzled to know what to do with so small a convict, but he finally invented a task that certainly reflects credit upon his ingenuity. He placed two bricks at each end of the prison yard, and giving the black baby two more, ordered him to carry them to one of the piles, lay them down, pick up the other two, which in turn he carried to the further end, exchanged again, and soon back and forth all daylong, always carrying two bricks. He was warned that he would be whipped if he failed to pile the bricks neatly or broke any of them. He grew up at the task, and the constant abrasion of merely picking up and laying down wore out four sets of bricks before he was put to other labor. Owing to the absence of all system, he received no commutation upon the first ten years he served, but on the balance of the sentence he received what is called in Florida "gain time," making the entire sentence seventeen years and some months.

Major Wise leased the prisoners with rather vague speculative views, and the squad was sent originally to the Santa Fe River, where they were employed for some months in "ranging" timber. Meantime he closed a contract with Dutton, Ruff & Jones, dealers in turpentine, rosin and naval stores, by which he engaged to deliver "gum" from the vast tracts of pine woods owned by the firm in the vicinity of Live Oak. The leading spirit of the firm was Major Charles K. Dutton, of New York

City, who subsequently occupied about the same relation to the lease system in Florida as that of Senator Joseph Brown in Georgia.

It was evident that very few of these men were able to stand the exhausting labor of turpentine culture, and that it would be necessary to first get them into condition. However, we went into camp in the woods near a little station called Padlock. There we built a rude log-house, twenty by forty feet, for sleeping quarters. Like Solomon's temple, it was erected without the sound of hammer, and the roof vvas secured by a curious system of pegs and weights. There was not a nail in the structure, and it was altogether a fine specimen of wild woodcraft. On each side two sloping platforms ran from end to end, one built over the other, like berths in a steamboat. The prisoners slept on them, and midway between the two a long chain was stretched at night-time, on which they were strung by means of smaller chains fastened to their leg-irons. These latter were technically known as "waist-chains, " and were attached in turn to the "stride-chain," which passed from shackle to shackle, with play enough to enable a man to walk by taking fairly short steps. As both stride and waist chains were riveted on, it would appear at first glance impossible for a man to remove his pants with his ankles thus fastened together, and in fact, when we first received the convicts, they wore them buttoned down the outside of the leg, like Mexican vanqueros.

But in time they learned to draw the garment down between the ankle and the iron, and then up and out; a simple but ingenious process, and slashed trousers were abandoned.

The front of this "cell-house," as it was termed, was not sealed solidly, but slatted, so as to permit a view of the interior at any time. At night it was lighted by pine knots burned on a sort of pyre in the middle of the floor, and a watchman sat with loaded rifle in front. The routine of locking up the men was about as follows: As they returned trom work they filed in and took their places on the sleeping-platform. The building chain was then passed through a ring at the end of each man's waist-chain and made fast outside. A squad of guards were ready, torches in hand, and proceeded to rapidly scrutinize each link of the irons, a process familiarly known in camp as "chain search." This over, supper was served and eaten, and after a short interval a bell rang for every man to lie down. That was the last thing in order for the night, and if any convict desired to move or change his position thereafter it was required tfeat he first call to the night guard and obtain his permission. I may say that the same system, with some immaterial modifications, is the one in vogue at the present day.

We named our camp "Padlock," after the station. Besides the cell-house, there were buildings of the same primitive character for the guards, but there was no stockade, and the cooking was done hunterfashion, on a bank of dirt under a lean-to shelter. The kettles and pots were suspended over it by bits of wire, and, in brief, all the other appointments were on the same scale. The food consisted of fat "white bacon," corn-bread and cow-peas — the latter a small red variety indigenous to the South. They were wretchedly prepared, of course, and in summertime I have often taken my penknife and scraped off a literal stratum of gnats from the top of the pea pan before sending it to the men.

We discarded the old methods of punishment from the start, and adopted the strap, which has been used ever since to enforce discipline, and has of late years been adopted by state law. It consists of a sect ion of tough leather about afoot and a half long by three inches broad, and attached to a wooden handle. The castigation is applied below the loins, and the convict placed upon his knees with his palms on the ground. The clothing is then drawn back and the leather applied until, in the judgment of the captain, a sufficient punishment has been administered. There is no legal restriction, and never was, as to the number of blows, the frequency of punishment or by whom it shall be applied; but the rul« has been that the warden, his assistant or the captain in direct charge of the camp, shall do the whipping. During the time that I was at the head of the lease system, I allowed no one else to administer punishment, as the matter was always unavoidably the source of more or less outside criticism, and I did not wish responsibility to be divided.

To return to the camp, the prisoners were worked in the woods in a radius of a few miles, and conveyed to and from the spot on what was known as a "squad-chain." In principle it was similar to a building-chain, but it was shorter and lighter, and the men were strung upon it by the rings of their waist-chains like ribs from a central vertebrae. Every man went on a trot. They kept this gait up all day long, from tree to tree, and as the labor is exhausting in the extreme, I have frequently seen men on their way back to camp drop of fatigue, and their comrades on the squad-chain drag them a dozen yards through the dirt before the pace could be checked so as to enable them to regain their feet. There would be a prodigious clatter of iron, a cloud of dust, a volley of imprecation, and the fallen man would stagger up, dash the dirt out of his eyes, and go reeling and running on.

But these scenes came latter on, for the camp was for a long time virtually a hospital. I found the dysentery, with which most of the men were affected, almost impossible to check, and the mortality was terrible. The disease was of the same character as that which was so prevalent on both sides during the war, and many a corpse interred at Sing Sing was almost literally nothing but skin and bones. No records were kept of the number of deaths, and I am unable at this lapse of time to estimate them with accuracy, but it was a large proportion of our prisoners, and it was nearly a year before the balance were in what might be termed fairly good condition.

I shall frequently have occasion in this narrative to speak of trailing convict runaways with hounds, and I know that there is a prevalent impression that bloodhounds are employed for the purpose. This is an error, and I believe that the first and only experiment of that sort was made at the beginning of the Wise lease. Major Wise sent to New York and procured two imported blood-hounds of pure strain — one a male and the other a female. They were sent originally to the Santa Fe River, to the logging-camp, but afterward transferred to us at Padlock. The male died from the effects of the ^urney, but the other arrived in tolerably fair condition, and was certainly a formidable brute. She was as large as a calf, pied like a leopard, and looked less like a dog than some unknown wild beast. She spread consternation among the natives, and when they happened to encounter me with her they would abandon the road and take to the tall timber. I called the dog Flora.

The experiment was not a success. Beyond the intimidation of her appearance Flora had no especial value, and was vastly inferior to a deer-hound as a trailer. The hot climate proved too much for her, and she eventually succumbed to it and took the hydrophobia. I shut her up in a shed upon 2 the first appearance of the symptoms, and the great brute, howling, foaming and dashing herself against the walls in her paroxysms, was a spectacle of such terror that none dare approach her. She crunched some heavy boxes that happened to lie inside absolutely into splinters, and in one of the fits she died.

The fact is that fox-hounds are used for manhunting in nearly all the southern convict camps. They are probably a trifle less keen of scent than a deer-hound, but they have also a slower gait, which is an advantage, inasmuch as it enables the horsemen to keep up with them. But at any rate, their marvelous powers of following a trail hours after it has been made, holding it through turns and back-tracks and over traveled roads, almost surpasses belief. The fox-hound used for the purpose is slightly larger than a full-blooded pointer, and built a little heavier about the shoulders, but resembles it in general contour of the body. The head, however, is that of the typical hound — long-eared, sad-faced and deep-jowled. I can affirm that some of them are natural man-hunters, just as a colt is occasionally born with a natural trotting-gait. In training puppies at the camp it was my custom to order one of the "trusties" to run a few miles through the woods, and then put the dogs on his track. I have known them to trail the man over the most intricate routes, and eventually follow up his track into the cell-house and pick out the identical trusty where he lay, among a hundred other men, upon the sleeping-platform.

Another popular error in regard to chasing with hounds is that they attack the prisoner when they run up upon him. Such is by no means the case. The hounds are always closely followed by horsemen, and if they once get out of sight and sound the pursuit might as well be abandoned. In brief, they are simply guides, and when once the game is brought to bay, they are too wary to venture close enough to run the risk of a blow. I have known cases where dogs have been killed, but the convict invariably employed some strategy to entice them in range. On one or two occasions men have hidden behind trees, and the hounds, intent upon the trail, have been brained as they rushed past.

By what faculty they follow a track is a disputed question. They seem to have no difficulty in distinguishing the trail of one man from another, and it is certainly not in all cases by reason of an odor left upon the earth. I have one dog at the present writing that trails entirely by air; that is to say, he never touches his nose to the ground bqt invariably holds his head high, and in this attitude runs at full speed, immediately distinguishes cross-trails, and rarely makes a mistake.

There have at different times been some few men under me who, by a freak of nature or some inexplicable condition, left no trail and could not be followed by any hound. I do not attempt to explain it, but simply state it as a fact — one, by the bye, that has a bearing upon several cases I will detail further on. Whatever emanation lingers in the wake of the average human being and furnishes the mysterious clue to the dog was certainly lacking in their make-up.

Chapter II

In addition to the reasons that appeared upon the surface, there was another, and a potent one, for the employment of convict labor in the turpentine woods. The work is severe to a degree almost impossible to exaggerate, and it is very difficult to control a sufficient quantity of free labor to properly cultivate any great number of trees. The natives follow it more as a make-shift than a vocation, and are only too glad to abandon its hardships for any other character of work that comes to hand. The variety of pine from which the gum is obtained covers immense areas of Georgia and Northern Florida, and the process, which is curious and not generally understood, is as follows:

Early in the spring large oval cups, technically termed "boxes," are set into the trunks of the trees, close to the ground. They are several inches deep and hollowed out at the bottom to receive the sap. All this is done with a peculiarly shaped axe, having an extremely long blade, and it is needless to say the operation requires both strength and dexterity. When properly cut, the box has the appearance of having been made by a chisel, yet it is possible to hew one out with as few as nine blows of the axe. This of course requires a great expert, and few acquire that degree of skill. The average daily task of a convict is from sixty to ninety boxes.

Directly after the box is cut a triangular wedge is chopped out on each side immediately over the top. This is called "cornering," and is usually done by two men, one of whom strikes a right-handed and one a left-handed blow. The object is to expose a fresh surface of the trunk from which the sap may flow, running down into the concavity of the box. The sap is of a pearly color, thick and viscid, and the cornering usually fills the box for the first time. It is then dipped into buckets with a large lance-pointed tool known as a "spoon," and almost a fac-simile, on a magnified scale, of a steel ink-eraser. The buckets are emptied into barrels which are collected by teamsters who range the woods with their wagons and deliver the products to the stills.

After the first flow is dipped a new incision is made by slicing out two slanting lines at the top ol the cornering. A short tool called a hack, weighted at one end and armed with a crooked blade at the other, is used, and the operation is termed "chipping." The fresh flow refills the box, after which the chipping is repeated, alternating with dipping until the face of the box is so high from successive slicing that it cannot readily be reached. "Pulling" is then resorted to. This is identical with chipping, except that a very long-handled tool with a

THE AMERICAN SIBERIA 3Q

double blade at the end is used to cut the streaks, the workman reaching up and sometimes raising the face as high as twelve feet.

About the first of October the faces of the boxes are thickly coated with coagulated sap, and other work is suspended while this is removed, chopped off with implements something like gardeners' trowels. This occupies three or four months, and the routine is commenced over again. The entire product is distilled as gathered, heated in retorts and the vapor condensed through worms into the commercial spirits of turpentine. The residue left in the vats is rosin.