The Everglades — America's Last Frontier
To this day, the Florida Everglades remains the last true American frontier. Its lore is no recent invention. Long before the outlaws came, Native Americans farmed, hunted, and fished there for survival, meeting and conquering a harsh existence on a daily basis. The spirits of those who came before still seem to linger in that sawgrass, satisfied they'd accomplished the impossible.
The Ashley Gang understood what those first peoples understood: that one of the harshest environments on Earth could offer refuge to anyone determined to live outside a system that wanted to dictate the terms of his existence. The swamp protected its own. It was the same wilderness into which the Seminole and Miccosukee escaped the onslaught of Andrew Jackson's troops — the same wilderness local lawmen were loath to enter.
The Ashleys were not the only family to seek that kind of refuge. Ma Barker and her boys famously holed up in the Ocala National Forest. But the Ashleys chose Earth's harshest ground, and they did it for a reason. To the poor Florida "crackers" who knew them, John Ashley was no mere bandit. He was a folk hero — a man striking back at the bankers, the lawmen, and the wealthy landowners who seemed to hold every card. The newspapers of the day compared him to Jesse James.
It was an era when ordinary people watched the levers of money drift further and further from their reach. The Federal Reserve was signed into law on December 23, 1913, consolidating the nation's monetary machinery in ways the common farmer would never see or touch. Decades later, men like John Dillinger would be cheered through the Depression for robbing the very banks foreclosing on family farms. The instinct ran the same across the generations: a quiet sympathy for the man who struck back at concentrated power, however he could.
Reign of Terror, or Strikes Against the Powerful?
I will never discount the taking of a human life. In December 1911, the body of Seminole trapper Desoto Tiger was found near Lake Okeechobee, and John Ashley soon stood accused of his murder. The details remain disputed to this day, though it is likely Tiger died by Ashley's hand.
While awaiting trial, Ashley slipped from custody and vanished into the Everglades, declaring himself King of the Everglades — into the very environment law enforcement feared to follow. Perhaps it was that first accusation, the brand of "criminal" stamped on him by a society he didn't trust, that propelled him to strike at the leviathan in the only way he knew: robbing those who held the nation's wealth.
February 1915 brought the family's first foray. Their target was a Florida East Coast Railway train — the railroad famously built by Henry Flagler, the partner of Rockefeller who broke away to lay track all the way to Key West. The robbery failed that day, thwarted by a porter brave enough to simply lock the men out.
Their next attempt to "eat the rich" succeeded, though not without cost. The gang robbed the Bank of Stuart in broad daylight; the haul is disputed, but the figure of $45,000 has long been bandied about. The price was John Ashley's own: during the getaway, gang member Kid Lowe accidentally shot him in the jaw, costing him the sight in one eye. Crime paid that day, but it took something it would never give back.
After more crimes, captures, and a third escape, the gang robbed the Bank of Stuart a second time — this go-round, John's teenaged nephew Hanford Mobley walked in disguised as a woman, eight years after the first job.
By January 1924, the authorities had had enough of being made to look like fools. A posse surrounded the gang's cabin in the scrub. In the gunfight that followed, John's father, Joe Ashley, was killed, and so was one of the sheriff's own deputies, Fred Baker. John escaped fate one more time, slipping out through a hidden exit. In the manhunt that followed, lawmen burned the Ashley homes to the ground.
Then, in November of that same year, John Ashley was ambushed at the bridge over the St. Sebastian River. Four men died there: John Ashley, Hanford Mobley, Ray Lynn, and Clarence Middleton. The official story said Ashley reached for a hidden gun. But the poor folk of the Glades never believed it — they were certain the men had been executed, frontier justice, plain and simple. Years later, a deputy's deathbed confession seemed to bear them out: he claimed all four had been handcuffed, and that a single sudden move by Ashley triggered the killing. Once again, society would be spared the inconvenience of a public trial.
Could desperation have been their motivation? Did they see no other way out from under the label society had pinned on them — a self-fulfilling prophecy? Those are the very questions that thrust the men and women of my novels into untenable corners, forced to fight for their own existence.
Stories Like These Move My Own
I've surmised more than once, in the pages of my novels, that the reason our government eventually forbade the common man from converting his dollars into gold was that he could no longer be trusted to hold real wealth in his own hands. When Franklin Roosevelt's Executive Order 6102 called in the people's gold in 1933, the lever moved one more notch away from the ordinary citizen. Reach back further, to the Coinage Act of 1873 — the "Crime of '73," as the populists bitterly named it — and you find the moment silver was struck from the bedrock of American money, the very metal in which working families had kept their savings. Stretch these acts across the generations and hindsight makes the pattern plain: the slow, steady creep of control.
It's taken me the better part of sixty years to understand how power truly arranges itself. The novels I write are born of the same stubborn love for the common man that folk heroes like Ashley and Dillinger carried — the conviction that the little man, the overlooked woman, deserves a fighting chance against the machinery aligned against them. I'll never know what truly drove John Ashley. But through fiction, I can build compelling stories of how ordinary people fight back with whatever they have. As dark as my themes run, they reflect a reality I can't look away from.