A broad path cuts like a gash through once pristine land. A year ago, bulldozers carved this "road" to haul valuable logs out of Newnan's Lake near Gainesville.
At the same time, a group of archeologists, local high school students and their teachers carefully excavated a cache of ancient Indian canoes. The extended drought had made them partially visible. In all, some 138 vessels were unearthed, probed, wood-sampled, photographed, videotaped, measured and, ultimately, left where they were.
It turned out to be the largest discovery of such aboriginal vessels ever. Carbon-dating tests determined that the boats ranged from 500 to 5,000 years old. The oldest boat was built a few centuries before Noah launched his ark.
Yes, this was truly a landmark archeological find. Yet while the canoe excavators shoveled and documented, a man from Santa Rosa Beach named L.C. "Chuck" Pinson — a good ol' boy armed with a permit from the Florida Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) — ran his 'dozers and winches within a stone's throw, dragging long-leaf pine logs from the lake.
Known as deadhead logs, they sank several decades ago, when pines throughout the Southeast were chopped down for lumber. Perfectly preserved underwater, they produce some of the finest wood in the world. Deadheads can fetch as much as $3,000 per log, some say. Dense, as hard as stone and heavy, the wood was earmarked to decorate some of North Florida's finest homes. A stair rail made of wood from a deadhead log is a vanity item, perhaps good for a spread in Southern Homes magazine.
Before the logging was halted by Gov. Jeb Bush's office last August, Pinson's operation was alleged to have damaged or destroyed at least seven of the fragile canoes, according to Melissa Memory, at the time an archeologist for the state Department of Historical Resources, as well as others from the dig. They found pieces of canoe, pottery and other artifacts in the tracks of the bulldozers. They also maintain that he recklessly damaged bird and fish habitats. Pinson denies it. A DEP investigation cleared him of wrongdoing.
Most of this happened in what Dale Crider thought was his back yard. He has paid taxes on 30 acres of Newnan's Lake for decades, only to be told that the state owns the bottom of all navigable water in Florida up to the normal high-water mark, whether the body of water is dry or not.
On a blustery day in March, the folksinger and environmentalist surveyed the area with a wistful look. A youthful 60, tall and lean, he has lived here since the early '70s, in a rustic cabin made of deadhead logs he pulled from the lake himself (which caused some of his detractors to make bogus allegations that he too was a deadhead logger).
In the last year, Crider has been the point man in the fight to stop deadhead logging on the lake. And he's been a watchdog, helping protect this burial ground of prehistoric watercraft. Crider's the one who alerted the Seminole Indian Tribe, whose newspaper, the Seminole Tribune, wrote a series of scathing articles last year that proved instrumental in bringing the logging to an end. Crider gazes out over what was essentially a battleground — a war zone of opposing priorities and differing cultures. Greed vs. the environment. History vs. material gratification. Seminole Indians vs. a tangled bureaucracy. Inept government agencies with different agendas that ended up pointing fingers. The canoes sparked renewed debate over how long the Seminoles have inhabited Florida.
Ultimately, this is a war zone in which the environment can claim at least a tenuous victory. On March 27, the canoe site was named to the National Register of Historic Places. While such a designation doesn't completely protect the area, it would certainly make it more difficult to crank up the bulldozers again. No shots were fired on this battleground. There were word skirmishes between the loggers and the canoe excavators. When Crider heard bulldozers crunching away in his back yard, he ran to the site with his deed and other documents, trying to reason with the loggers. Pinson had the machines throttle down and hollered, "You better get back to your house."
"I didn't have a gun," Crider recounts. "I had on sandals and a T-shirt. I realized one man can't stop this guy with his bulldozers. I couldn't physically do anything. I backed off."
There is a tinge of regret in his voice.
As the wind shoots across the marshy lakebed in March, the canoes are again submerged, evidence of the drought's fickle nature. The road that Pinson's 'dozers carved has begun to grow in with coarse grass and bushes — a gash turned into a scar.
Last spring, the northeast corner of Newnan's Lake was so parched that people described it as a beach. Steve Everett, teaching an advanced placement environmental science class at Eastside High School in Gainesville, had his students working on a project in and around Newnan's dry lakebed. During an outing in early May, one of his students yelled out, "I think I found a canoe." They could see the perfect outline in the sand. They got down on their knees and started digging with their hands.
The state sent in a team of archeologists. The digging continued urgently, for fear that summer rains would again submerge the canoes. Although a few of the canoes were in pretty good shape, most were the skeletal remains of the ancient boats. Archeologists advised the state of the historical treasures 10 days before Pinson geared up his operation. The logging began with no public notice, even though Florida statutes say that projects of this nature on environmentally sensitive land require it.
Further, Pinson's permit did not authorize the use of heavy equipment and required him to notify the state about the discovery of any archeological artifacts — including, specifically, "Indian canoes." During his logging job, Pinson arrogantly told anyone who challenged him that he had "God in my pocket" — a DEP permit for which he paid $6,000.
Crider and others have wondered about the DEP's actions: It was an odd thing to do in the name of environmental protection. The agency is sorely understaffed. Last year, four people processed 10,000 permit applications. The Seminole Tribune and environmentalists strongly maintain that the DEP and Department of Historical Resources (DHR) allowed the logging to continue even after being notified of the problems at the site. Ultimately, it was the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission (FWCC) that stepped in and stopped the logging when it discovered that Pinson had breached parts of his permit.
Critics have alleged the DEP issued a whitewash report once the carnage at Newnan's Lake came under scrutiny. A handful of officials surveyed the area and determined that the environment was minimally harmed, and that there was no evidence that canoes had been damaged.
The FWCC's investigation halted the logging on June 16 — for three weeks. State archeologist Jim Miller (of the DHR) then allowed Pinson's operation to resume. "It was my opinion that we knew enough about the canoes so that the activity could continue without destroying the canoes," he told the Seminole Tribune last year. "In hindsight, I guess we made a mistake."
Indeed. Five canoes were crushed after the logging resumed in July.
On July 25, Miller wrote a letter to the DEP requesting that no further logging be permitted on the lake, the same day Pinson submitted a proposal to return to extract a hundred logs he had been unable to harvest earlier. When Gov. Bush's office learned of Pinson's plans, it asked the DEP to cease issuing permits for all deadhead logging on Florida lakes. The ban remains in place.
At first, the state did not want to spend the money to carbon date the canoes. When Chief Jim Billie, then chairman of the Seminole Tribe, stepped forward and offered to pay the requisite $15,000, he shamed state officials into ponying up.
One of most powerful advocates of the Newnan's Lake find has been Secretary of State Katherine Harris. Her interest was piqued early on, and she scheduled a visit to the lake in November, but the fallout surrounding the presidential election forced a postponement. She joined Chief Jim Billie on his private plane for a tour of the site in January.
One of the great ironies about Newnan's Lake is that it's named after Col. Dan Newnan, a Georgia Indian fighter who lost a battle against the Seminoles in 1812. The Seminole people have long referred to the area as Pithlachocco, which roughly means "where boats are made." The tribe and its allies have begun a campaign to rename the lake for its Native American heritage.
Beyond the obvious richness of such an archeological find, the Newnan's Lake canoes lend further credence to the Seminoles' claim that they have been in Florida for a very, very long time. Conventional Eurocentric history says that the various native tribes who would come to be known as Seminoles arrived in the state during the 18th and 19th centuries, having been chased out of areas now called Georgia and Alabama by the Spaniards. These natives, tied together by a common language, supposedly arrived in a virtually unpopulated Florida.
When it comes to environmentally sensitive areas or archeological finds, European-Americans with long ties to Florida have characterized the Seminoles as relative newcomers, thus diminishing the tribe's power.
That's not so easy now, says Dr. Patricia Wickman, historic preservation officer for the Seminole Tribe of Florida. The canoes make the strongest case yet that ancestors of the Seminoles lived in Florida for up to 12,000 years. "It gives the lie to one of the great social stereotypes that's been created about the Seminole people," Wickman says. "It's been to the cultural advantage of non-natives to image the Seminole people as johnny-come-latelys, people who have no connection to what is classified as prehistoric. That never made a lot of sense to me. If you didn't have prehistoric peoples, how would you have historic peoples. They had to come from somewhere … The core of the people we know as Seminoles today are descendants of people here from time immemorial, the same people that made those canoes."
Just as important as the 5,000-year-old boats are the 500-year-old vessels. "It shows us a physical proof of continuity of occupation," Wickman says.
Why, ultimately, does it matter whether the Seminoles' ancestors lived in Florida three millennia before the birth of Christ or the tribe showed up a couple of centuries ago? "It's valuable," Wickman says. "It reminds non-natives in their dealings with Indians that they have a 12- or 15-thousand-year equity in Florida. It debunks the European version that separated them from their past. It's an important reminder to non-natives that people have lived here for thousands of years who have a different way of seeing the world. … And when you look at those canoes, it's proof that these were not pitiful little Indians sitting around campfires waiting for the first Europeans to show up. They had already built vibrant societies."
After the deadhead logging was banned, another threat to the Newnan's Lake canoes cropped up last fall. The Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission requested a permit from the DEP to remove 120,000 cubic yards of muck on 34 acres in the Southwest quadrant of the lake. The process, commonly called "muck scraping," was to have involved moving the earth into the middle of the lake and creating three wildlife habitats.
Besides sparking immediate ecological concerns, the muck scraping threatened to damage remaining Indian canoes and artifacts in Newnan's Lake.
Why did the FWCC want to undertake the project? During the drought, they said, the muck had become a seed bed for undesirable plant life. When the water level eventually rose, large clumps of grass would sprout up and impede sports fishing on the lake; diminish the oxygen supply for fish; and break off, float downstream and potentially destroy a newly constructed bridge.
Initially, the Department of Historical Resources found no legal reason to deny the permit, which was submitted in October, shortly after the deadhead logging imbroglio.
This set Wickman into action. She wrote a letter to DEP ombudsman Benjamin Brumberg on Jan. 17. Wickman first established that Newnan's Lake is deep enough to be classified as a navigable waterway. Consequently, activities there fall within the purview of the Army Corps of Engineers. Thus, a federal permit would be required along with state permission. She further cited the National Historic Preservation Act, which required agencies to consult with "Indian tribes that attach religious or cultural significance to a property" eligible for the National Register of Historic Places.
The muck raking application was pulled.
And so it would seem that the remaining Pithlachocco canoes have been saved. Perhaps because she's been wading through bureaucratic sludge for so long, because she's watched government agencies drop the ball repeatedly, Wickman will not allow herself a deep breath.
"I don't see the area as protected," she says. "The National Register is culturally significant, but it has very little in the area of enforceability. The state has not been proactive in protecting the site. It goes back to the whole mindset that Indian history is below the ground and not a cause for concern. The preservation concern is based in the Euro-American idea of things that are built, things that we see."
While the collective laws would seem to create a solid buffer for the canoes against further danger, those who value the site are not ready to relax their vigilance — as long as state government is involved.
"It's like trying to train 12 small dogs," Wickman says. "You can't keep an eye on all of them. There's not enough rolled-up newspapers to keep them in line."
Eric Snider can be reached at snider@weeklyplanet.com.
This article appears in Jun 14-20, 2001.