298 
FOREST AND STREAM 
Deep in the Okefinokee Swamp 
The Stirring Adventure of Two Young Men, Armed Only with Bow and Arrows, into 
One of the Wildest Regions of the Old South 
N their interesting and valuable 
“Biological Reconnaissance of 
Okefinokee Swamp,” (i) 
Messrs. Wright and Harper 
refer in the most kindly man¬ 
ner to certain notes upon the 
Okefinokee region made by my 
brother, Maurice Thompson, 
in “A Red-Headed Family,” (2), and in “An 
Archer’s Sojourn in the Okefinokee,” (3) and 
say: 
“In <My 'Winter Garden,’ (4) Thompson 
•speaks casually of having been ‘deep in the Okefi¬ 
nokee.’ And yet it is almost inconceivable that 
he could have seen for himself the marvels of 
the swamp’s interior without treating them ex¬ 
tensively with his gifted pen.” 
This suggested doubt may have been born of 
the fact that the scene locus of “A Red-Headed 
Family” was laid in “one of those shallow 
cypress lakes of which the larger part of the 
Okefinokee region is formed,” and further based 
upon some expressions in “An Archer’s Sojourn 
in the Okefinokee,” which refer to the great 
swamp as a region rather than to the more con¬ 
tracted area now accepted as Okefinokee Swamp. 
Indeed, the real Okefinokee is so largely typical 
•of the surrounding region that the “American 
Military Atlas of 1776” covered the whole more 
or less inundated territory of southeastern Geor¬ 
gia and northeastern Florida with the map of the 
■“Great Swamp, Owaquaphenoga.” 
In the year 1866, when my brother and I vis¬ 
ited that part of southeastern Georgia for the 
first time, the whole country from the Satilla 
and St. Mary’s Rivers to the Suwannoochee was 
commonly called “Okefinokee Swamp.” Yet, 
when Maurice spoke of being “deep in the Okefi¬ 
nokee,” he, without doubt, referred to the hard 
and never-to-be-forgotten trip into the very 
heart of the great swamp, of which I now write. 
It was his first acquaintance with the region, 
and the cause of his later visits. Why he did 
not write of his experiences one cannot now 
know, but only surmise. He was at the time 
only twenty-one years of age, and had hardly 
yet begun his nature studies, and his literary 
work had been limited to occasional poetic con¬ 
tributions to southern magazines. His health had 
been wrecked by more than four years’ severe 
service in the Confederate armies, and a wound 
in the right lung, still unhealed, caused him so 
much distress that his hope of life was clouded. 
And I think he did not then contemplate a future 
literary use of the pictures and statuary found 
in the green galleries of Okefinokee. 
His courage was devoted to the struggle for 
life, and mine to selfishly helping the soft air, 
1. “The Auk,” Volume XXX, Oct., 1913. 
2. By Ways and Bird iNotes, New York, 1885. 
3. Atlantic Monthly, Volume LXXVII, April, 1896. 
4. Century Magazine, Volume LXI, Nov., 1900. 
By Will H. Thompson 
sunlight and balsam of the pines to give him 
back to me. 
He was even then a bird lover, and the wood¬ 
pecker family interested him even more than 
the singers. The great Pileated woodpecker 
(Phloeotomus Pilcatus) and the greater, shyer 
and far more beautiful Ivory-Billed woodpecker 
(Campephilus Principialus ) were his favorites 
among the feathered folk, and he was never hap¬ 
pier than when watching them. 
Early in the month of July, 1866, we found 
ourselves at the little town of Magnolia, in 
Clinch County, Georgia, about fifteen miles from 
the western border of the great swamp. We 
had not come with any thought of entering it, 
but its presence was constantly felt as a gloomy 
mystery. The stories, true and fabulous, told by 
the people of the bordering barrens, especially 
those told by the negroes, appealed to the ro¬ 
mantic spirit of my brother, and were not with 
out their influence upon me. 
How the “Daughters of the Sun,” the most 
beautiful of all the children of men, had glori¬ 
fied it with their presence in ages gone, tradi¬ 
tion had already told us. How the indomitable 
Seminoles had retired to its shrouded deeps and 
held them against the power of the United 
States through years of desperate battle, was his¬ 
tory. How the deserters from the Confederate 
armies had crept into its twilight to be seen no 
more, and how the runaway negro slaves during 
the last two years of the Civil War had sought 
its sanctuary to wait for liberty, was fresh in 
the memory of the inhabitants of the borders. 
All these, with many romantic legends, stirred 
us to raise the dense curtain of green foliage and 
gray moss, and for a month to share with the 
wild things this domain of gloom and silence. 
At that time, there was no permanent inhabi¬ 
tant of the swamp. The Civil War had ended 
a year before, and the deserters were free to 
issue fom their hiding places, and had gladly 
abandoned the life of skulking with its privations. 
The runaway negroes had heard the news of 
their emancipation and surrendered their black 
fortress without- a sigh. The timber-hunger 
had not then gnawed its way into the cypress 
ranks, and under these, and through the lily- 
strangled leagues of marsh slept nearly seven 
hundred square miles of shallow water, set with 
pine-clad islands and teeming with wild life. 
For years, the white men of the vicinity had 
been away from their homes in the ranks of the 
Southern armies. The negroes had not been 
permitted to hunt with firearms, and, since the 
collapse of the. Confederacy, the white people 
had been, by order of the occupying Federal 
forces, likewise forbidden to have firearms in 
their possession, and the game had multiplied in 
the swamp and had become as tame as it was 
plentiful. 
We were poorly equipped for such an inva¬ 
sion of the Okefinokee as we essayed. We had 
only lately begun the use of bows and arrows as 
weapons, and were far from that proficiency in 
archery that we afterward acquired, and had 
it not been for the abundance and comparative 
tameness of certain varieties of game, our life 
in the swamp would have been far less pleasant 
in retrospect. 
We found only two white men who had pene¬ 
trated the swamp at all, and these had seen only 
a few miles of the interior, but we were directed 
to a negro by the name of Jordan Wilson, who, 
we were told, knew the swamp better than any 
other man in Clinch County. “Jord,” as he was 
familiarly called, had, as a slave, belonged to 
Mr. Joseph Wilson of northern Georgia, who, 
with his slaves had “refugeed” before the armies 
of Sherman in 1864^0 the vicinity of Troupville, 
Georgia, where Jordan bartered the fetters of 
slavery for those of the Okefinokee. There he 
had lived for more than a year in this self exile, 
without once venturing out. His description of 
his year of privation, if given in his own words, 
would be a masterpiece. 
The poverty of the Southern people at that 
time is well exemplified by the fact that we hired 
Jordan to go with us as a guide and man of all 
work for the price of 50 cents per day, and his 
food, the latter being the important part of his 
compensation. 
He secured for us very cheaply at east fork 
of the Suwannoochee Creek two dugout canoes, 
the smaller of which proved to be a constant 
source of doubt and anxiety. It was about ten feet 
long, not more than twelve inches wide, made of 
tulip wood, dressed to almost the thinness of 
pasteboard, and was perfectly round and smooth 
on the bottom. It sat beautifully on the water, 
but was so “tipsy” that it was almost impossible 
to get into it or out of it without being thrown 
into the water. We named it “Fate,” on account 
of the lugubrious prophecies of Maurice, and 1 
was consigned to it. The larger canoe was 
about sixteen foot long, quite twenty inches 
wide, deep, flat-bottomed, and very steady. One 
could stand erect in it when shooting with the 
bow, or while fishing, without danger of capsiz¬ 
ing. Jordan sat in the stern of this craft, and 
guided it with a cypress paddle or a strong cane 
pole, while Maurice sat forward of the middle 
and cleared brush and vines from the narrow 
waterways. 
Before loading these boats upon the “running 
gear” of an ox wagon, Jordan and I had given 
nearly two days to the improvement of the large 
canoe by building fires in it and then dressing 
out the charred wood until we had reduced its 
weight more than one-half. Then we hauled the 
boats and our outfit to the Suwannee Creek at 
the northwesterly margin of the swamp, and car¬ 
ried and dragged them into the creek. 
•Our arrows, about three hundred in number, 
