The Orchid Thief (25 page)

A few weeks later, on one of those thick Florida days when the sun looks as smooth and silver as a nickel and the sky is white, Circuit Judge Brenda Wilson announced that she had reached a decision in the ghost orchid case. Earlier in the month, Laroche and the three Seminole men—Russell Bowers, Dennis Osceola, and Vinson Osceola—had entered pleas of no contest to charges of illegally removing plants from state property. Judge Wilson declared that she would withhold adjudication on the Seminoles and would fine them only one hundred dollars each, but that she found Laroche guilty as charged, would fine him five times as much as she had fined the Seminoles, and had decided to extend his exile from the Fakahatchee for six more months. The next day an article in
The Miami Herald
said:

The day after the judge’s announcement I met with the state’s attorney, Randy Merrill, who had prosecuted the case. Merrill had been a police officer before he became a lawyer and was planning to run for state office sometime after he finished the orchid case. When the men were first indicted,
Merrill told me he was determined to convict all of them. He was especially eager to get Laroche, because he found Laroche so maddening. The case itself was maddening. It stretched over a messy patch of laws—two of which may contradict each other. One of the laws is a criminal statute. In Florida it is illegal for anyone to collect endangered wild plants, and there are criminal penalties attached. The only exception is for people the statute refers to as “Florida Indians,” who are exempt from this law out of respect for their traditional hunting and fishing practices. This means that under Florida criminal law Seminoles cannot be prosecuted for collecting endangered orchids. On the other hand, all state-owned parks and preserves and other lands, including the Fakahatchee, are governed by a rule that forbids the removal of any and all animals and plants, endangered or not. That means that on a state preserve like the Fakahatchee, anyone who collects anything—an ordinary blade of grass, a worm, a ghost orchid—can be arrested and prosecuted. Considering the contradiction between the criminal statute and the state-park rule, can the Seminoles collect ghost orchids out of the Fakahatchee or not? Does the “Florida Indian” exemption from the endangered species law extend to state lands or does the park rule supersede the Seminoles’ exemption?

This ambiguity was exactly what Laroche had been looking for in the law library. He recognized that the criminal endangered-species statute and the park rule were inconsistent, and he bet that if he and the crew were caught, a judge would uphold a criminal statute over an administrative park rule—in other words, that a judge would rule that the Seminoles’ exemption from the criminal statute does extend to state park land even though nothing in the statute specifically says that it does, so that collecting ghost orchids in the Fakahatchee was within their rights. He was also betting that
most judges in Florida would not want to make a ruling that abrogated Seminole rights and certainly would have created controversy.

Merrill decided that the best way to beat Laroche’s plan was to avoid it. First, he dropped the charges against the Seminoles for taking the endangered orchids so that the question of Indian exemption from the law would never arise. But the men had been caught not just with endangered orchids and bromeliads but also with the tree branches the plants had been growing on—Laroche had insisted on taking the plants by leaving them attached to the branches rather than merely prying them off because they would be more likely to survive. The endangered-plant statute does not apply to ordinary trees, so the “Florida Indian” exemption from endangered-plant laws does not apply to ordinary trees, either. Ordinary trees are covered by the park rule that makes it illegal for anyone to take anything out of places like the Fakahatchee State Preserve. If the Seminoles had only taken endangered plants, the judge would have had to decide how to interpret the conflict between the endangered-species laws and the park rules. Taking tree limbs out of a park is a simple legal matter—no one at all, no exceptions, is allowed to take living things out of a state park. Merrill realized he would beat Laroche by pursuing the part of the case that would be indisputable—he would leave reconciling the criminal statute with the state rule to some other judge in some other case. The Seminoles would have to concede that they are not exempt in any way from park rules regarding live oak and pond apple trees and ordinary Florida weeds. They had no choice but to plead no contest to taking trees out of a state park, and they finally did.

Laroche’s own personal situation was more convoluted than the Seminoles’. Since he was an employee of the tribe,
he thought he would be covered by any exemptions the law made for the Seminoles. Just in case the exemption concept didn’t work, he had deliberately avoided touching any plants on the day of the poaching: the Seminoles did the actual collecting—wading close to the trees, cutting the limbs, bagging them, dragging them out—not just because Laroche was lazy, but because he wanted to be able to maintain that he was a hands-off consultant and not a perpetrator, just in case they got caught. Judge Wilson was underwhelmed by both of Laroche’s arguments. In her opinion, he was an employee of the tribe but not a member and didn’t qualify for any special consideration given to the Seminoles. Furthermore, she felt he was guilty of everything—he was guilty of taking the tree limbs and the orchids and the bromeliads, he was guilty of advising the three other men to do the same, and he was morally guilty of having concocted the whole scheme.

—

“Florida Indians” are the descendants of the Yuchi, Creek, and Cherokee Indians who lived in Georgia and Alabama until the eighteenth century, when white settlers forced them off their fertile land. Once the Indians relocated to Florida they began calling themselves Seminole or Miccosukee, which means “wild wanderers” or “outlanders” or “runaways.” After the United States took possession of Florida from Spain in 1821, white settlers made their way south to Florida and soon coveted that Indian land, too, and the federal government responded by spending more than $40 million in three Seminole “subjugation and removal efforts.” The last of the three Seminole Wars, the Billy Bowlegs War, ended in 1848; by then the U.S. Army had “subjugated and removed” more than 90 percent of the Seminoles to Oklahoma. The remaining 10 percent—about three hundred members—fled to the Everglades and the Big Cypress
Swamp and set up chikee-hut camps on the edge of the wetlands. The government persisted in the removal efforts, at one point offering Chief Billy Bowlegs $215,000 to lead the remaining tribe members to Oklahoma. He refused. He was later persuaded to come to Washington for negotiations. Along with another Seminole chief and a team of government “removal specialists,” Chief Billy Bowlegs traveled to the capital on horseback. The group stopped along the way in Tampa, Palatka, Orange City, and in Savannah, Georgia. At hotels Chief Billy registered as “Mr. William B. Legs.” The summit was unsuccessful in persuading the Seminoles to leave, as was a law passed in 1853 that made it illegal for them to live in Florida, as were further incursions by government soldiers. In 1858 Secretary of War Jefferson Davis admitted that the Seminoles had “baffled the energetic efforts of our army to effect their subjugation and removal.” Because they never surrendered, the Florida Seminoles came to refer to themselves as the Unconquered. To this day their descendants have never signed a peace treaty with the United States.

One of the leaders of the Unconquered was a young fighter named Osceola, the son of a white British trader and a woman who was part Creek Indian, part black, and part Scottish. Osceola was born in northern Alabama. In 1818 he and his mother were captured by Andrew Jackson’s soldiers. When they were released they moved to Silver Springs, Florida, where they lived with his mother’s Creek relatives. Osceola’s given name was Billy Powell. “Osceola” probably derives from his Creek ceremonial title, “asi yahola,” which means Black Drink Crier. Black drink was a strong, bitter purgative brewed from holly leaves. A “yahola,” a sort of altar boy, would pass out the black drink at religious ceremonies and sing. Osceola was tall and slender and nice-looking, and
had a taste for fine jewelry, red leggings, and feathered turbans. He had no hereditary claim to leadership and therefore was not technically a chief, but he won supreme respect from the tribe because of his passion for the tribe, his skill at the popular Indian game of stickball, and his personal confidence. As a young man, Osceola quickly built a distinguished reputation as an Indian warrior. Nonetheless, he also had many white associates and admirers. He was close friends with a white lieutenant stationed at Fort King in Florida whom he had met during the Second Seminole War, and was very friendly with Frederick Weedon, the white physician who attended him after he was captured and put in a military prison. Osceola also had many supporters among white abolitionists who believed the Seminole Wars were unjust and were being waged only to benefit plantation owners and to punish the Indians for giving sanctuary to escaped slaves. Coincidentally, the Seminoles owned a large number of slaves themselves, although the relationship between the Seminole master and black slave was unusual—slaves commingled and intermarried with tribe members, and both groups lived equally humbly. One of Osceola’s wives was a descendant of a fugitive slave who was later recaptured, rousing Osceola’s commitment to his war against the white man. Nonetheless, when the Civil War broke out, the tribe entered into a treaty with the Confederacy, probably because they were living in the South, but at least partly because, like the Confederate states, they permitted slavery.

Osceola was esteemed by his tribe for being a clever attacker and a ruthless avenger, and yet he was also admired by both Indians and whites for his fairness and gentlemanly conduct and his disdain for petty terrorism. It is said he never stole a single possession from a white settler or soldier—not even a horse, which was a customary war trophy.
He loathed disloyalty and corruption and lack of principle in anyone, white or Indian. The act of which Osceola was proudest and for which he was most famous was his assassination of Charley Emanthla, the Seminole chief who had caved in to the government and agreed to move the tribe to Oklahoma. Emanthla had accepted bribes in exchange for his cooperation. After Osceola killed Emanthla, he took the bribe money out of Emanthla’s purse and scattered it over his dead body.

In 1837 Osceola and another Seminole leader, Coa Hadjo, agreed to attend peace talks at Fort Peyton, Florida, with General Thomas Jesup. Osceola may have decided to negotiate because he was hoping to buy time for the tribe or perhaps because he felt he could not endure another year of fighting. He and Coa Hadjo traveled to Fort Peyton with a delegation of seventy-one warriors, six women, and four black Seminole tribe members. Osceola had made the arrangements in good faith, but Jesup had not: he had secretly ordered Joseph Hernandez, the Florida delegate to Congress and a general in the Florida militia, to seize the Seminoles when they arrived. As soon as Osceola’s delegation reached the fort, they were all hit on the head, bound, and imprisoned. Osceola was put on board the SS
Poinsett
, a steamer, and arrived at the military prison at Fort Moultrie, South Carolina, on New Year’s Day. He was removed from Florida because Jesup feared his influence on other Seminoles, even from behind bars. Osceola was a strong figure. Even as a prisoner he was charismatic, and he quickly became a celebrity at the fort. He was permitted to walk freely around the grounds and was always well dressed, especially when the many artists who admired him came to paint his portrait. Two of his wives lived with him in prison. He often visited with Dr. Weedon, chief physician at the fort. According
to historical reports, Osceola and the other Seminole warriors were sometimes even allowed to travel outside Fort Moultrie; once they were escorted to Charleston to see a play called either
Halfmoon
or
Honeymoon
. Osceola was only in his early thirties at the time of his arrest, but he was already worn-out and sickly, suffering from a number of grave diseases, including malaria. He developed quinsy, a kind of abscessed tonsillitis, in 1838 and asked for a medicine man to treat him rather than Dr. Weedon. When his illness was at its peak Osceola roused himself from his sickbed and dressed himself in his favorite outfit of large silver earrings, a feathered turban, red war paint, ostrich plumes, silver spurs, a decorated powder horn, a fancy bullet pouch, a striped blanket, and a whalebone cane. As soon as he finished dressing he died. Dr. Weedon prepared Osceola’s body for burial in the ordinary fashion, but then when no one was looking he cut off Osceola’s head. For the funeral, Weedon put the head back into the casket with the body, concealing the severance with a colorful scarf. The body and detached head were buried at the fort in South Carolina, in spite of Osceola’s wish to be buried in Florida.