Today we visited Indian Key Historic State Park, a tiny island accessible only by boat. (“More of the Real Florida”!)
In the 1830s Indian Key was the county seat for Dade County, home to as many as 50 residents as well as a tropical plant nursery. But in 1840 the island was attacked by a band of Seminole Indians; many structures were burned to the ground and most of the residents fled. Today it’s a ghost town. We walked around for about an hour to look at the remaining stone foundations of what were once homes and warehouses, surrounded by both native and non-native tropical plants including a peaceful cool grove of tamarind trees.
The end of civilizations has been on my mind since we visited St. Louis back in October. In part that’s because we went to a Pompeii exhibition at the science museum there. It was an interesting set-up: we first walked through several rooms of artifacts and reconstructions of daily life in pre-eruption Pompeii. Then we entered a screening room to experience a movie reenactment of eruption day, complete with shaking floors and a smoke machine. Exiting the screening room, we were confronted with molds of human bodies (and a few dogs) as they had been preserved in ash. What stuck with me most was that some people took the warning signs seriously and fled, while others went on with their day until it was far too late to get away.
Outside of St. Louis, though, we contemplated a much slower and more mysterious civilizational end at the Cahokia Mounds State Historic Site, once the largest urban settlement north of Mexico. It’s possible that as many as 40,000 people lived there. And then… they left. Nobody really knows why – maybe flooding, being so close to the Mississippi River. Maybe some other environmental factor, like over-hunting or deforestation. Or maybe they were attacked, or maybe they succumbed to disease. Whatever it was, the Cahokia Indians presumably had more time to understand what was happening to them than the residents of Pompeii did. Did they see it coming? Might they have survived longer if they had made different choices? We just don’t know.
These days, I’m not the only one thinking about global apocalypse. Nobody down here in the Keys seems at all concerned about Covid-19, though; as far as we can tell most information comes through via Fox News, so that may explain it. For our part, we’re trying to avoid freaking out while also not being those people who prepared for a dinner party while Vesuvius spewed smoke. Boats don’t have extra storage, but we’ve filled up a few cubbies with canned goods and boxes of wine (I mean, if not now…). We’re gently preparing Felix for the possibility that Universal Studios won’t be open when we get close by.
We’re also thinking about what comes next. Because as with any disruptive event, there will be winners and losers. Indian Key has lessons here as well: its brief rise was due to its proximity to an offshore reef, where Spanish ships loaded with treasure looted from Latin America often capsized and sank. The Keys in general and Indian Key in particular were hubs for an occupation called “wrecking,” meaning salvaging the goods that had previously been stolen from other people, then sunk, and getting a cut as a reward. All that treasure was temporarily stored in the island’s large warehouses, which is why the Seminoles in turn attacked and robbed the settlers. And the reason it was a band of Seminoles, rather than the Calusas who inhabited the Keys for centuries, is because Calusa communities were destroyed by enslavement and disease (smallpox, measles) brought by European explorers.
At the end of the day, though, the Seminoles got the loot. They now own the Hard Rock Café. Winners? Who knows.
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