Theodore Roosevelt, blasting away at Amazonian fauna from a big, comfort-
able river cruiser.) As early as the s, alligators had become rare on the
St. Johns north of Lake George. Trophy hunters traveled a bit farther, then.
In George Herman ‘‘Babe’’ Ruth descended to Florida and ‘‘bagged a
gator’’ for himself. ANew York Timesphotographer recorded the triumphal
coda: It is daytime, and Ruth, his shoes and lower trouser legs muddy
from the hunt, cradles his rifle in his right arm and stands beside his tro-
phy, an eight-and-a-half-footer, perhaps, which is hooked and roped from
its snout and suspended from a tree limb. Another man, probably Ruth’s
guide, stands on the other side, and he and Ruth hold the dead ’gator’s hind
feet outward, spread-eagle style.^13 Sad business.
It was market hunting, however, more than potshotting and the getting
of trophies that drove alligator populations nearly out of sight through-
out the South Atlantic and Gulf states by about . Tail meat is edible
by humans as well as dogs, when properly prepared, but alligator hides
were the prize commodity, for shoes and boots, belts, luggage, and hand-
bags. One December in the s, Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings’s second hus-
band, a St. Augustine hotelier, begged Marjorie for suggestions of a Christ-
mas present. She offered only one, a bag, and related later to a friend that
her husband went to ‘‘the Alligator Farm’’ (presumably the same Anastasia
Island attraction that persists today) and purchased an enormous alliga-
tor case for her gift. Rawlings, who early in her writing career in effect paid
tribute to alligators in aSaturday Evening Poststory titled ‘‘Alligators,’’ was
complicit, then, in a world market, as were millions of others. Florida at
last protected alligators by law in , and their population recovered to
an estimated million by . Some of these are bred in captivity and dis-
played as tourist attractions in such institutions as the venerable ‘‘Farm’’ in
St. Augustine, yet others are bred for meat and hides in a market that has
revived with the amphibian population.
Most of Florida’s alligators live not in captivity yet not quite in the wild,
either. The federal census recorded more than million people in
the state, and demographers predicted at least another million by .
Nearly everyone alive, it seems, Florida natives and newcomers alike, cov-
ets a home by the water. The ocean and gulf strands are more-or-less taken,
so the shores and banks of rivers, creeks, lakes, and canals—alligator habi-
tat—grow crowded. Alligators have become the problem with paradise,
and the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission, which takes
complaint calls, is the stalwart mediator. Between and , the com-