I planned on telling you all about the Everglades National Park, so I am going to share a short piece about the park as told by the Author Charlton W. Tebeau, in his book "They Lived In The Park," published in 1963. If you wish to know more about the Park and the history of south Florida, I highly recommand this book, as he talks about the first Indians, as well as, hunters and trappers, and the thiefs, and the vast area of the Park. There are nice b/w pictures of the land areas as in the early days and stories of those who lived in the Park area, at that time.
The Everglades is chiefly a great flat, mostly treeless, complex of marshes and wet prairie with a scattering of islands and hammocks which stands out in it somewhat as the islands do in the offshore waters of the west coast. It is covered over everywhere with saw grass dotted with small islands. Though it may appear to be part of a great level plain nearly thirty miles wide where it enters the Park, it is in reality a great drainage basin aptly designated a "River of Grass." The fall is so slight, being from twenty feet at Lake Okeechobee to sea level at its end 150 miles south, that the flow of the water is almost imperceptible.
The waters of the Kissimmee River and other streams of the Lake Okeechobee watershed once flowed into the lake, and from the lake down through more than a hundred miles of the Everglades and evenually found their way into the Gulf of Mexico. But drainage of the lake and the upper Everglades has greatly reduced this source of water and every gallon of water diverted from this great area by use or drainage is also diverted from the Everglades National Park and alters the natural setting.
On the eastern side of the Everglades is separated from the Altantic Ocean by a coastal ridge. Occasional rivers such as at Miami and Fort Lauderdale cut through the ridge. These rivers now widened and deepened for drainage purposes also carried Everglades waters in large volume before the water table in the interior was lowered. This ridge in some measure extends all the way to the end of the Florida peninsula and turns most of the water of the Everglades southwestwardly into the Gulf of Mexico.
On the western side north and west of the Park, the Everglades merges into the Big Cypress country, roughly where the Collier-Dade-Monroe county lines intersect near the "forty-mile bend" on the Tamiami Trail west of Miami.
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If you ever get the chance to visit Florida, take a road trip into south Florida, to Route 41, better known as the Tamiami Trail, and take a airboat ride. It is the most amazing feeling to be zipping along over top of the sawgrass, and seeing the vast amounts of water birds and fish, and alligators. Lots of folks go to Florida, just for Disney World, but you will miss the beauty of the State, if you don't visit a part of the Everglades National Park.
