ABSTRACT
Between the Gulf of Mexico and the Atlantic Ocean, the peninsula of Florida juts like a pointer from the North American continent to the edge of the Caribbean tropics (Figure 1.1). Lying in the peninsula’s lower half is the nearly circular Lake Okeechobee. At 700 square miles, it is by far the largest lake of the southeastern United States. Below the lake, and intimately related by origin, is a huge wetland, originally 100 miles long and 40 miles wide-the Everglades. Legendary author and environmentalist Marjory Stoneman Douglas described the Everglades as the “River of Grass,” and before her, the Miccosukee Indians called it Pa-hay-okee, meaning “grassy water.” Why have people given special names to, written whole books about, and risked political careers on the Everglades?*
The Everglades is unique in two ways: as the vast expanse of freshwater marsh below Lake Okeechobee, and as a word having an obscure and apparently accidental origin. Marjory Stoneman Douglas traced the word’s origin in her famous book, The Everglades: River of Grass, published in 1947 (its 60th anniversary edition still in print).195 She identified the first published appearance of “Everglades” on an 1823 map.† But “Ever” may have come from “river,” as first seen on an English map from the 1770s, which showed the area as “River Glades.” The English word “glades,” which denotes openings in a forest where grasses cover the ground, would seem appropriate for early explorers gazing over the vast Everglades marshes sprinkled with “islands” of trees.
