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A Columbia County Boy's Recollections and Memories of Columbia County Florida (2012) Lenvil H. Dicks

ANOTHER ALLIGATOR

The house where I was raised, on the Price Creek Highway, has a small lake about 200 yards behind the
house, just west of our property, known as the Hagan Lake. The back side and the north side of that lake
is adjoined by an area of dense swamp land, comprising about 80 acres total swamp, and is known as the
Hagan Bay.

On the east side of\our house, and across the road which runs in front of the house, there is another
swamp about 300 yards away from the house, which we always referred to as the “Prairie”. On the back
side, or east side, of the prairie is a small stream which runs into it from another swamp of about 100
acres which lies east of the prairie, and is known as Douberly Bay.

Thus, our house is situated on a high ridge of land in between two swamps, and it is across this ridge of
land that alligators choose to travel when they desire to change from one swamp to another. When I was
a very small boy, perhaps three years of age, my daddy was planting a pecan tree about 80 yards west of
the house, and came upon a large alligator, which was apparently traveling from one swamp to another.
I heard in later years, in looking back in memory of that gator, that the particular alligator found that day
was 14 feet long.

Daddy sent someone down to our share cropper’s house, a little over a quarter of a mile south of where
we lived, to where Mr. Sid Williams and his family lived. Mr. Williams farmed for my daddy, and was
known as quite a hunter and fisherman also, since he had a large family to feed and that was one of the
ways that he managed to accomplish it.

Mr. Williams came up to the house with his rifle and shot that extremely large alligator, and 1 recall that
my daddy had to lend him one of our mules to drag the alligator back down to his house, where he
skinned him and butchered him.

1 have no way of knowing how much meat they got from that gator, nor what the skin might have
brought into the Williams’ household when Mr. Williams sold the hide, but I am sure that a gator hide
that big would have brought some good money. There is another thing that has occurred to my mind
while sitting down at this story about the 14 foot alligator, and that is that near the same location where
the gator was found my daddy had been planting another pecan tree and dug down into what was
apparently an Indian grave. In olden times the Indians probably spent a good deal of time on that high
ridge of land between the two swamps, as those areas were full of fish, alligators, and other game, not to
mention that they had a ready source of water.

In digging the hole to plant the tree my daddy started digging up something that he found puzzling, and
when he finished digging all of the remains out the grave, he discovered a complete skeleton, a bow
with some arrows, and a spear. There was also a coconut shell dipper in the grave with the corpse, and
my dad simply put in all back in the ground and covered it up and moved his pecan tree location to some
other spot. That was the only Indian grave that we ever encountered, to my knowledge, but it is quite
possible that there would be other Indian graves nearby. We have always just left that area alone.

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