Think of Gladesmen as Florida's Cajuns, a somewhat foreign and colorful culture tucked away in tiny neighborhoods and wilderness.

Written by Chad Gillis, This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. | Visuals by Andrew West, This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

GLADESMEN:Click here for part TWO of this TWO part series

"Mr. Bojangles" blasts from a rusty Shasta camper just before dawn. Inside, Frank Denninger whips up a cup of instant coffee while planning a day of deer scouting.

"In worn out shoes, with silver hair, a ragged shirt and baggy pants," the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band sings, giving a spot-on description of the 67-year-old Gladesman.

After breakfast, Denninger drives his old black Ford F250 pickup from his camp at the Skunk Ape Research Headquarters in Ochopee to the dusty roads of Big Cypress National Preserve. A faded sticker on the rear window reads: "Life is short, Hunt hard."

"It's miserable out here; I can't say it's not," he says while unbuttoning his sweat-stained shirt and combing his thick platinum hair. "Right now I wish I wasn't even out here, but you have to earn it. That's why it feels like I belong out here."

It may seem odd for someone to revel in things most consider torturous, but Denninger is not alone. Thousands of people across South Florida participate in some type of Gladesmen activity, from hunting and fishing to riding swamp buggies to driving airboats and bird watching. For some, it's a full-time job.

Think of Gladesmen as Florida's Cajuns, a somewhat foreign and colorful culture mostly tucked away in tiny neighborhoods and the wilderness.

UP NEXT

03

The News-Press environmental reporter, Chad Gillis describes the Gladesman culture. Video by Andrew West/The News-Press

History barely knows them, but Gladesmen culture has flourished here for about 150 years. Shriveled but still blooming, the lifestyle today is a ghost of past ways, a faded and sometimes fleeting image of yesteryear's pioneer glory. But the culture is here to stay – certain activities and historic places are protected through the Everglades restoration plan and a 286-page study conducted by the Army Corps of Engineers.

"This emerging southern Cracker culture closely resembled Celtic culture, characterized by expert herdsmenship and close kinship ties," the 2011 report reads. "The Cracker economy was one of open-range herding; their rural values have been said to include wasteful hospitality, reckless indulgence in food and drink, a touchy and romantic sense of honor, and a strong tendency toward lawlessness."

The News-Press traveled, hunted and ate with some of today's Gladesmen to document this little-known but important cluster of Floridians. We found humble, hardworking people who still think of and refer to everyone but themselves as "outsiders."

Solitary but rarely sedentary, they like sugar in their tea, salt and pepper in their grits. Sausage gravy is practically a birthright, as is hot sauce, which is heaped on anything from eggs to potatoes to gravy and biscuits.

“It’s miserable out here; I can’t say it’s not. Right now I wish I wasn’t even out here, but you have to earn it. That’s why it feels like I belong out here.”

Frank Denninger

Most are Christian, but they don't often go to church. They like to drink but rarely seem drunk. Most live and work in various towns and cities, but their hearts and minds are usually focused on the Everglades.

Typical dress for a man is camouflage, boots and a hat. White boots are for fishing, truck rides and mowing the yard because the light color absorbs less heat from the sun. Green boots are worn on hunting trips and during the cooler winter months. Same for jeans – light blue on the Fourth of July and dark purple by Thanksgiving.

Marjory Stoneman Douglas, author of The Everglades: River of Grass, wrote this description in 1967:

"Lank whiskered men, tobacco stained, with the marks of malaria on them; thin bony wives, and sallow, white-headed children. They had retreated after the war into deeper wilderness, in the immemorial rugged frontier life of log cabin and clearing, hunting, and fishing. They were seen driving rickety oxcarts along pine woods roads, or coming in barefooted to boat landing stores to trade skins or deer meat for chewing tobacco, snuff, bacon, calico, powder. Sometimes they worked at logging or sawmilling. They had taken the place of the almost vanished Indian in the remote country where they kept alive the legends, the ballads, the tunes, the customs of their Georgian, Carolinian, Scotch-Irish, Irish, English, or even German ancestry. They were, as they had been, proud, secretive, unlettered, suspicious, enduring as time. They had taken the land for their own and had held it, making it American."

The sun rises over the eastern Everglades as Frank Denninger takes a drag off a morning cigarette while preparing for day of deer scouting. Denninger has a camp at Skunk Ape Research Headquarters.

(Photo: Andrew West/The News-Press)

Franklin Adams creeps along a dew-covered trail just before the sun rises on a warm spring morning. Dressed head to toe in camouflage, Adams, 77, carries a shotgun in one hand and a wooden turkey call in the other.

Eclectic oddities are some highlights of visiting camps like the Bear’s Den.
(Photo: Andrew West/The News-Press)

"Keetch, keetch, keetch," the box squawks and squeaks as Adams rubs the two pieces of wood against each other.

No turkeys respond, so he shouts in an owl-like bark.

The goal is to bag a turkey, but the real reason Adams roams these lands is not to secure food but to nourish his soul. That's why he "goes into camp," a term that can mean anything from a short hike to a 14-mile swamp buggy trip. Gladesmens' lives revolve around their camps – they are either working, going into camp, coming out of camp or are at camp."You never know what they'll respond to," he whispers while rotating his head as though it were a satellite dish searching for a signal. "One day I got out of my truck and shut the door and a turkey called to that."

For Adams, these lands are where he first learned to hunt as a child, where he learned the value of self-sufficiency and where he's spent countless nights talking to friends by a campfire.

UP NEXT

03

Gladesman- Franklin Adams describes the Gladesman culture. Video by Andrew West/The News-Press

A Florida master naturalist, this is where he sees and hears the birds of his childhood and ponders the meaning of life.

He's not shy, either, and is willing to pass on the most embarrassing of lessons.

The News-Press: What's the best toilet paper you can find in the woods? You know, if you really have to go?

Adams: Well, I don't know. But when I was young, me and a friend were out in the woods and we really had to go. But we didn't have toilet paper. So we walked and walked, in pain. Finally we came up on this old refrigerator in the woods, and it was filled with this soft, white, fluffy material. We were happy, but come to find out I'd wiped my ass with fiberglass. I couldn't even walk for three days.

South Florida was once home to hardworking, blue-collar families but in recent decades has become a retirement haven for people from the North.

Those old homes are now mostly gone, swept away by the federal government to make way for Everglades National Park, and, later, Big Cypress National Preserve.

The removal of many Everglades families and camps through eminent domain laws has left a nasty taste in many a Gladesmen's mouth, and the socioeconomic change that's occurred here over the past 50 years or so is a regular topic at camp.

"It's a shame they didn't let those families stay there," Adams says while driving his green swamp buggy, nicknamed The Snail, along the limestone and muck road to camp. "There was history to a lot of those old places. The preserve destroyed the old buildings because they didn't fit into the federal plan."

Federal land management plans revolve mostly around habitat and wildlife protection, not necessarily historic preservation, although the Gladesmen culture is protected.

Hundreds of families sold their homes and land under eminent domain, and most moved away from the Everglades. But traces of the Gladesmen and their way of life can still be found from Lake Okeechobee south to Florida Bay.

Names like Nesbitt, Wilson, Bergeron, Shealy and Waggoner are prevalent. They were among the first white people to live in the Everglades, moving here from the Deep South after the Civil War. Scots-Irish blood is common, so is a love for country music, bragging and drinking.

Modern Gladesmen abide by a hierarchy of sorts: Time spent in the woods, social connections, and knowledge of the history of Everglades and the plants and animals that live here is a major life priority for upcoming and established Gladesmen.

Being a great storyteller around a campfire is often more important than being a tremendous hunter or fisherman.

Yesteryear's survival lifestyle may have passed with the likes of famous Gladesmen like Glen Simmons, a maker of glades skiffs who died in 2009, and Totch Brown, who smuggled marijuana in the late 1970s. But many of the traditions, values and hobbies survive.

About 30 miles south of Bear's Den, in the old logging town of Pinecrest, Carol Balman shuts off her gas-powered weedeater and wipes the sweat and dirt from her brow.

"There's a lot of history here," Carol, 67, says while squinting her cobalt blue eyes, gathering her long blond hair and strapping on a cotton sweatband. "A lot of people don't know about it."Small blades of grass and flecks of dirt clinging to her skin, cut-off jean shorts and T-shirt, a petite but rugged Balman sits on a rusty baby blue lawn chair for a morning cigarette break. She mows and maintains a couple of large lots along Loop Road in Big Cypress National Preserve, where her family has lived since the 1960s.

Outtakes from Big Cypress National Park while working on the Gladesman project. Photos include landscapes, News Reporter Chad Gillis, a swallow tail kite perching, long exposures, bluebirds, sunrises, sunsets and a water moccasin.
(Photo: Andrew West/news-press.com, Andrew West/news-press.com)

The vast majority of folks roaming the Everglades are men, but some of the toughest, roughest people here are women.

Carol runs a hunting check-in station in Pinecrest and lived for years under the strong arm of the Balman matriarch known to the family as the Ox Woman of Fort Myers, her mother-in-law.

Grandmother Balman rode from Michigan to Pinecrest around the turn of the 20th century by ox and cart and shot dead three men on the way, the story goes. She liked to sit on the front porch, near the old gas station, with a shotgun on each side and a few pit bull dogs.

"She had a stand-off with the Dade County Sheriff's Office for three days," Carol's husband, Dave Balman, 69, says. Apparently she didn't want to mow her yard "because men driving by would look up her skirt" when she was working in the yard.

Grandmother Balman also liked her possums freshly fattened, as Balman learned one day after he killed one and brought it home for supper.

"She whipped my ass with that possum. 'Don't ever bring a (blankety-blank) possum in here dead,'" Balman says with a laugh. "She'd put them in a cage and feed them table scraps for about a month and then eat them."

People were just plain meaner during those times, at least here, and everyone seemed to hate each other for unknown reasons.

Carol isn't shy about the debauchery and Wild West-like setting. She cusses and smokes with the men. She can catch fish, dress deer, drive buggies, shoot guns and, most importantly, tolerate the sometimes excruciating conditions of the Everglades.

She remembers fondly some of the most infamous drinking holes in the area, such as Sullivan's BBQ, which provided Saturday night entertainment in the form of people watching and plenty of fisticuffs.

"On a Saturday night we'd come from the camp down south and pull in the back of Sullivan's, get off the airboat and have dinner and sit and wait for the wars to go on," Carol says while smoking a cigarette at Tippy's Outpost on Tamiami Trail. "The Indians and the white men would get drunk, and there'd be more fights than you could imagine. You couldn't call the cops, so that's where everybody would meet."

"High-class entertainment," Dave adds.

He claims to have shot four panthers in his life (before they were added to the Endangered Species Act).

"You don't go out here and just hunt, you go out and get something to eat," Dave Balman says with a nasal, Antebellum accent. "Simple as that."

Nowadays the Balmans spend much of their time reflecting on the glory days of the 1970s and '80s, when hundreds of airboats and swamp buggies would launch each weekend near their home.

One granddaughter may take up the lifestyle, the Balmans said, but the rest of their family has closed the door on the Everglades: they've stopped dreaming of long-gone campgrounds and their old way of life.

Just down the road, at the Skunk Ape Headquarters in Ochopee, Jack Shealy is shifting the focus of his family's business from odd roadside attraction to an ecotourism outfit that offers outsiders a chance to pole a canoe in the sawgrasses or paddle down Turner River like the Gladesmen of old.

"Some of the gator hunters would come out and spend 30, 40 days in a skiff," Shealy says while poling an old wooden skiff he built. "It's kind of a pastime now with alligator farms and ecotourism. I don't know what my grandfather made hunting alligators illegally, but I'm sure it's a far cry from what we do using these pole boats to carry tourists."

The Shealy family is one of the most prominent in Ochopee, father Dave Shealy pushed the skunk ape myth for decades but has now retired to live in Fort Myers. Skunk apes are the Everglades' version of Bigfoot, a large, man-like ape that's neither wild nor civilized.

Shealy is part of a generation of Gladesmen families that have learned to make a living in and around the Everglades without poaching, making moonshine or delivering drugs.

Some of the folks who were commercial net fishermen years ago are now fishing guides, taking mostly tourists boating on their home waters. Some hunters have become wilderness guides, while others have opened alligator farms.

"It kind of gives you a chance to interpret yourself to other people," Shealy says of being a Gladesman and his life as a guide and owner of Everglades Adventure Tours, an extension of the Skunk Ape Headquarters. "People that may not understand the way of life down here, but when you get them out there and they understand you've done this for generations it's different."

Shealy's kids, the youngest of which was born this summer, will be exposed to the lifestyle while growing up in Ochopee and watching their father carry the Gladesmen torch.

At Bear's Den, about 14 miles north, Franklin Adams is finishing another weekend of hunting and hanging out with some of his dearest friends. He knows a few younger folks who are getting into the Gladesmen culture, but Adams knows he's the last of a generation that saw both the old Everglades and the new one.

He talks about his time in the Everglades, how each trip may be his last and how he'd be perfectly fine if he died in the woods and his body became part of the landscape.

Sitting by another camp fire, he reflects on his life and where he fits into the Gladesmen story.

"We're spiritually tied to the land," Adams says while fire light reflects off his glasses. "Some people say we're just Florida Crackers or just a native-born person who likes the woods, but I think we are probably the last of this generation."

It's impossible to trace the Gladesmen culture to its first moment, when folk culture from Europe was introduced, isolated and then reborn as its own in the vast Everglades.

After following around Gladesmen and their families and friends for about a year, we do know that people here were tough, rough and ready to handle nearly anything the wilderness threw at them. They shot, caught or grew their food and worked long days in the blistering Florida sun.

Many still hunt and keep small gardens at their homes, but there is no more living completely off the land.

The ecological conditions are part of what shaped Gladesmen culture, a little-known but important slice of Floridians who have some guaranteed rights in the $10 billion Everglades restoration plan.

Being in the Everglades, some say, is akin to their church, the woods a second home. Only the Seminole and Miccosukee cultures have been here longer.

Gladesmen came mostly from British Isles, moving first to the Deep South and then, after the Civil War, to the Everglades.

The Everglades is not a place of leisure and luxury: The most common snake here is the infamous cottonmouth, and the Burmese python may not be that far behind in sheer numbers. Then there are panthers, black bears, diamondbacks, snapping turtles, alligators, crocodiles and sharks.

But bugs were often the least of their concerns as there was no appreciable law enforcement in the Everglades until the 1970s. You got a problem? You better figure out a way to remedy it before it turns into a gunfight, or worse.

Deer hunting is a cultural focus point for many Gladesman. This buck was taken by Franklin Adams, a member of the BearÕs Den.
(Photo: Andrew West/news-press.com)

Others say Gladesmen are simply swamp Crackers, poor Southern whites who just happened to grow up in the menacing Everglades.Some descriptions say Gladesmen are racist, and some surely are. The News-Press, however, encountered only one racist statement during this project, and that person wasn't used as a source in any of the stories -- not because of the statement.

If this school of hard-knocks had a name it would be Smash Mouth High, and the mascot would surely be the Sataniacs.

The manchineel, the most dangerous tree on the planet, can kill you in your sleep if you happen to pitch camp under one. Even the caterpillars here are venomous.

But those dangers are part of the lure, a way of getting into, instead of being on top of the food chain -- and that makes life exciting. Plus, there are only so many people who are willing waltz off into these thick woods, so solitude is easy to find even among a state with 20 million.

It's difficult to say how long Gladesmen culture will flourish.

These lands have been claimed, at some point, by indigenous people, the French, Spanish invaders, run-away slaves, Gladesmen and the federal government.

Activities like driving swamp buggies and airboats are protected, to some degree, so the recreational aspect may go on for generations.

But it's unlikely Southwest Florida will return to its Wild West roots, that the federal government will shut down Everglades National Park and Big Cypress National Preserve and give those lands back to pioneer families.

What's left today is a ghostly version of Gladesmen, but it's better than no soul at all.

Connect with this reporter: ChadGillisNP on Twitter.

Voices and Views: The Everglades

Join us for a discussion about the Everglades from those that live off of it to those who live their lives trying to protect it.

WHO:

• The News-Press reporter Chad Gills and photographer Andrew West who documented the lives of those living off the Everglades in a series called Voices of the Everglades
• ​​Franklin Adams, who grew up in Miami and spent most of his adult life as a fishing guide in Everglades City. He's the elder Gladesman at the Bear's Den camp and now lives in Golden Gate.
• LeRoy Osceola, a Miccosukee leader who lives in a traditional village in the historic Everglades. He's one of about 100 Miccosukee and Seminole who maintain their ancient culture and practices, refusing to enroll in a recognized tribe.
• Jennifer Hecker, Director of Natural Resource Policy at the Conservancy of Southwest Florida whose worked on Everglades policy issues for 11 years, as well as serves as a current board member and prior co-chair of the 58-organization Everglades Coalition.

WHEN: 4 p.m. Sunday, Oct. 4

WHERE: Bass Pro Shops at Gulf Coast Town Center, 10040 Gulf Center Drive, San Carlos Park

COST: Free

REGISTER: Go to tickets.news-press.com and reserve your seat

Brought to you by: The News-Press, Bass Pro Shops and The Conservancy of Southwest Florida.

Think of Gladesmen as Florida's Cajuns, a somewhat foreign and colorful culture tucked away in tiny neighborhoods and wilderness.

Written by Chad Gillis, This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. | Visuals by Andrew West, This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

GLADESMEN:Click here for part TWO of this TWO part series

"Mr. Bojangles" blasts from a rusty Shasta camper just before dawn. Inside, Frank Denninger whips up a cup of instant coffee while planning a day of deer scouting.

"In worn out shoes, with silver hair, a ragged shirt and baggy pants," the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band sings, giving a spot-on description of the 67-year-old Gladesman.

After breakfast, Denninger drives his old black Ford F250 pickup from his camp at the Skunk Ape Research Headquarters in Ochopee to the dusty roads of Big Cypress National Preserve. A faded sticker on the rear window reads: "Life is short, Hunt hard."

"It's miserable out here; I can't say it's not," he says while unbuttoning his sweat-stained shirt and combing his thick platinum hair. "Right now I wish I wasn't even out here, but you have to earn it. That's why it feels like I belong out here."

It may seem odd for someone to revel in things most consider torturous, but Denninger is not alone. Thousands of people across South Florida participate in some type of Gladesmen activity, from hunting and fishing to riding swamp buggies to driving airboats and bird watching. For some, it's a full-time job.

Think of Gladesmen as Florida's Cajuns, a somewhat foreign and colorful culture mostly tucked away in tiny neighborhoods and the wilderness.

UP NEXT

03

The News-Press environmental reporter, Chad Gillis describes the Gladesman culture. Video by Andrew West/The News-Press

History barely knows them, but Gladesmen culture has flourished here for about 150 years. Shriveled but still blooming, the lifestyle today is a ghost of past ways, a faded and sometimes fleeting image of yesteryear's pioneer glory. But the culture is here to stay – certain activities and historic places are protected through the Everglades restoration plan and a 286-page study conducted by the Army Corps of Engineers.

"This emerging southern Cracker culture closely resembled Celtic culture, characterized by expert herdsmenship and close kinship ties," the 2011 report reads. "The Cracker economy was one of open-range herding; their rural values have been said to include wasteful hospitality, reckless indulgence in food and drink, a touchy and romantic sense of honor, and a strong tendency toward lawlessness."

The News-Press traveled, hunted and ate with some of today's Gladesmen to document this little-known but important cluster of Floridians. We found humble, hardworking people who still think of and refer to everyone but themselves as "outsiders."

Solitary but rarely sedentary, they like sugar in their tea, salt and pepper in their grits. Sausage gravy is practically a birthright, as is hot sauce, which is heaped on anything from eggs to potatoes to gravy and biscuits.

“It’s miserable out here; I can’t say it’s not. Right now I wish I wasn’t even out here, but you have to earn it. That’s why it feels like I belong out here.”

Frank Denninger

Most are Christian, but they don't often go to church. They like to drink but rarely seem drunk. Most live and work in various towns and cities, but their hearts and minds are usually focused on the Everglades.

Typical dress for a man is camouflage, boots and a hat. White boots are for fishing, truck rides and mowing the yard because the light color absorbs less heat from the sun. Green boots are worn on hunting trips and during the cooler winter months. Same for jeans – light blue on the Fourth of July and dark purple by Thanksgiving.

Marjory Stoneman Douglas, author of The Everglades: River of Grass, wrote this description in 1967:

"Lank whiskered men, tobacco stained, with the marks of malaria on them; thin bony wives, and sallow, white-headed children. They had retreated after the war into deeper wilderness, in the immemorial rugged frontier life of log cabin and clearing, hunting, and fishing. They were seen driving rickety oxcarts along pine woods roads, or coming in barefooted to boat landing stores to trade skins or deer meat for chewing tobacco, snuff, bacon, calico, powder. Sometimes they worked at logging or sawmilling. They had taken the place of the almost vanished Indian in the remote country where they kept alive the legends, the ballads, the tunes, the customs of their Georgian, Carolinian, Scotch-Irish, Irish, English, or even German ancestry. They were, as they had been, proud, secretive, unlettered, suspicious, enduring as time. They had taken the land for their own and had held it, making it American."

The sun rises over the eastern Everglades as Frank Denninger takes a drag off a morning cigarette while preparing for day of deer scouting. Denninger has a camp at Skunk Ape Research Headquarters.

(Photo: Andrew West/The News-Press)

Franklin Adams creeps along a dew-covered trail just before the sun rises on a warm spring morning. Dressed head to toe in camouflage, Adams, 77, carries a shotgun in one hand and a wooden turkey call in the other.

Eclectic oddities are some highlights of visiting camps like the Bear’s Den.
(Photo: Andrew West/The News-Press)

"Keetch, keetch, keetch," the box squawks and squeaks as Adams rubs the two pieces of wood against each other.

No turkeys respond, so he shouts in an owl-like bark.

The goal is to bag a turkey, but the real reason Adams roams these lands is not to secure food but to nourish his soul. That's why he "goes into camp," a term that can mean anything from a short hike to a 14-mile swamp buggy trip. Gladesmens' lives revolve around their camps – they are either working, going into camp, coming out of camp or are at camp."You never know what they'll respond to," he whispers while rotating his head as though it were a satellite dish searching for a signal. "One day I got out of my truck and shut the door and a turkey called to that."

For Adams, these lands are where he first learned to hunt as a child, where he learned the value of self-sufficiency and where he's spent countless nights talking to friends by a campfire.

UP NEXT

03

Gladesman- Franklin Adams describes the Gladesman culture. Video by Andrew West/The News-Press

A Florida master naturalist, this is where he sees and hears the birds of his childhood and ponders the meaning of life.

He's not shy, either, and is willing to pass on the most embarrassing of lessons.

The News-Press: What's the best toilet paper you can find in the woods? You know, if you really have to go?

Adams: Well, I don't know. But when I was young, me and a friend were out in the woods and we really had to go. But we didn't have toilet paper. So we walked and walked, in pain. Finally we came up on this old refrigerator in the woods, and it was filled with this soft, white, fluffy material. We were happy, but come to find out I'd wiped my ass with fiberglass. I couldn't even walk for three days.

South Florida was once home to hardworking, blue-collar families but in recent decades has become a retirement haven for people from the North.

Those old homes are now mostly gone, swept away by the federal government to make way for Everglades National Park, and, later, Big Cypress National Preserve.

The removal of many Everglades families and camps through eminent domain laws has left a nasty taste in many a Gladesmen's mouth, and the socioeconomic change that's occurred here over the past 50 years or so is a regular topic at camp.

"It's a shame they didn't let those families stay there," Adams says while driving his green swamp buggy, nicknamed The Snail, along the limestone and muck road to camp. "There was history to a lot of those old places. The preserve destroyed the old buildings because they didn't fit into the federal plan."

Federal land management plans revolve mostly around habitat and wildlife protection, not necessarily historic preservation, although the Gladesmen culture is protected.

Hundreds of families sold their homes and land under eminent domain, and most moved away from the Everglades. But traces of the Gladesmen and their way of life can still be found from Lake Okeechobee south to Florida Bay.

Names like Nesbitt, Wilson, Bergeron, Shealy and Waggoner are prevalent. They were among the first white people to live in the Everglades, moving here from the Deep South after the Civil War. Scots-Irish blood is common, so is a love for country music, bragging and drinking.

Modern Gladesmen abide by a hierarchy of sorts: Time spent in the woods, social connections, and knowledge of the history of Everglades and the plants and animals that live here is a major life priority for upcoming and established Gladesmen.

Being a great storyteller around a campfire is often more important than being a tremendous hunter or fisherman.

Yesteryear's survival lifestyle may have passed with the likes of famous Gladesmen like Glen Simmons, a maker of glades skiffs who died in 2009, and Totch Brown, who smuggled marijuana in the late 1970s. But many of the traditions, values and hobbies survive.

About 30 miles south of Bear's Den, in the old logging town of Pinecrest, Carol Balman shuts off her gas-powered weedeater and wipes the sweat and dirt from her brow.

"There's a lot of history here," Carol, 67, says while squinting her cobalt blue eyes, gathering her long blond hair and strapping on a cotton sweatband. "A lot of people don't know about it."Small blades of grass and flecks of dirt clinging to her skin, cut-off jean shorts and T-shirt, a petite but rugged Balman sits on a rusty baby blue lawn chair for a morning cigarette break. She mows and maintains a couple of large lots along Loop Road in Big Cypress National Preserve, where her family has lived since the 1960s.

Outtakes from Big Cypress National Park while working on the Gladesman project. Photos include landscapes, News Reporter Chad Gillis, a swallow tail kite perching, long exposures, bluebirds, sunrises, sunsets and a water moccasin.
(Photo: Andrew West/news-press.com, Andrew West/news-press.com)

The vast majority of folks roaming the Everglades are men, but some of the toughest, roughest people here are women.

Carol runs a hunting check-in station in Pinecrest and lived for years under the strong arm of the Balman matriarch known to the family as the Ox Woman of Fort Myers, her mother-in-law.

Grandmother Balman rode from Michigan to Pinecrest around the turn of the 20th century by ox and cart and shot dead three men on the way, the story goes. She liked to sit on the front porch, near the old gas station, with a shotgun on each side and a few pit bull dogs.

"She had a stand-off with the Dade County Sheriff's Office for three days," Carol's husband, Dave Balman, 69, says. Apparently she didn't want to mow her yard "because men driving by would look up her skirt" when she was working in the yard.

Grandmother Balman also liked her possums freshly fattened, as Balman learned one day after he killed one and brought it home for supper.

"She whipped my ass with that possum. 'Don't ever bring a (blankety-blank) possum in here dead,'" Balman says with a laugh. "She'd put them in a cage and feed them table scraps for about a month and then eat them."

People were just plain meaner during those times, at least here, and everyone seemed to hate each other for unknown reasons.

Carol isn't shy about the debauchery and Wild West-like setting. She cusses and smokes with the men. She can catch fish, dress deer, drive buggies, shoot guns and, most importantly, tolerate the sometimes excruciating conditions of the Everglades.

She remembers fondly some of the most infamous drinking holes in the area, such as Sullivan's BBQ, which provided Saturday night entertainment in the form of people watching and plenty of fisticuffs.

"On a Saturday night we'd come from the camp down south and pull in the back of Sullivan's, get off the airboat and have dinner and sit and wait for the wars to go on," Carol says while smoking a cigarette at Tippy's Outpost on Tamiami Trail. "The Indians and the white men would get drunk, and there'd be more fights than you could imagine. You couldn't call the cops, so that's where everybody would meet."

"High-class entertainment," Dave adds.

He claims to have shot four panthers in his life (before they were added to the Endangered Species Act).

"You don't go out here and just hunt, you go out and get something to eat," Dave Balman says with a nasal, Antebellum accent. "Simple as that."

Nowadays the Balmans spend much of their time reflecting on the glory days of the 1970s and '80s, when hundreds of airboats and swamp buggies would launch each weekend near their home.

One granddaughter may take up the lifestyle, the Balmans said, but the rest of their family has closed the door on the Everglades: they've stopped dreaming of long-gone campgrounds and their old way of life.

Just down the road, at the Skunk Ape Headquarters in Ochopee, Jack Shealy is shifting the focus of his family's business from odd roadside attraction to an ecotourism outfit that offers outsiders a chance to pole a canoe in the sawgrasses or paddle down Turner River like the Gladesmen of old.

"Some of the gator hunters would come out and spend 30, 40 days in a skiff," Shealy says while poling an old wooden skiff he built. "It's kind of a pastime now with alligator farms and ecotourism. I don't know what my grandfather made hunting alligators illegally, but I'm sure it's a far cry from what we do using these pole boats to carry tourists."

The Shealy family is one of the most prominent in Ochopee, father Dave Shealy pushed the skunk ape myth for decades but has now retired to live in Fort Myers. Skunk apes are the Everglades' version of Bigfoot, a large, man-like ape that's neither wild nor civilized.

Shealy is part of a generation of Gladesmen families that have learned to make a living in and around the Everglades without poaching, making moonshine or delivering drugs.

Some of the folks who were commercial net fishermen years ago are now fishing guides, taking mostly tourists boating on their home waters. Some hunters have become wilderness guides, while others have opened alligator farms.

"It kind of gives you a chance to interpret yourself to other people," Shealy says of being a Gladesman and his life as a guide and owner of Everglades Adventure Tours, an extension of the Skunk Ape Headquarters. "People that may not understand the way of life down here, but when you get them out there and they understand you've done this for generations it's different."

Shealy's kids, the youngest of which was born this summer, will be exposed to the lifestyle while growing up in Ochopee and watching their father carry the Gladesmen torch.

At Bear's Den, about 14 miles north, Franklin Adams is finishing another weekend of hunting and hanging out with some of his dearest friends. He knows a few younger folks who are getting into the Gladesmen culture, but Adams knows he's the last of a generation that saw both the old Everglades and the new one.

He talks about his time in the Everglades, how each trip may be his last and how he'd be perfectly fine if he died in the woods and his body became part of the landscape.

Sitting by another camp fire, he reflects on his life and where he fits into the Gladesmen story.

"We're spiritually tied to the land," Adams says while fire light reflects off his glasses. "Some people say we're just Florida Crackers or just a native-born person who likes the woods, but I think we are probably the last of this generation."

It's impossible to trace the Gladesmen culture to its first moment, when folk culture from Europe was introduced, isolated and then reborn as its own in the vast Everglades.

After following around Gladesmen and their families and friends for about a year, we do know that people here were tough, rough and ready to handle nearly anything the wilderness threw at them. They shot, caught or grew their food and worked long days in the blistering Florida sun.

Many still hunt and keep small gardens at their homes, but there is no more living completely off the land.

The ecological conditions are part of what shaped Gladesmen culture, a little-known but important slice of Floridians who have some guaranteed rights in the $10 billion Everglades restoration plan.

Being in the Everglades, some say, is akin to their church, the woods a second home. Only the Seminole and Miccosukee cultures have been here longer.

Gladesmen came mostly from British Isles, moving first to the Deep South and then, after the Civil War, to the Everglades.

The Everglades is not a place of leisure and luxury: The most common snake here is the infamous cottonmouth, and the Burmese python may not be that far behind in sheer numbers. Then there are panthers, black bears, diamondbacks, snapping turtles, alligators, crocodiles and sharks.

But bugs were often the least of their concerns as there was no appreciable law enforcement in the Everglades until the 1970s. You got a problem? You better figure out a way to remedy it before it turns into a gunfight, or worse.

Deer hunting is a cultural focus point for many Gladesman. This buck was taken by Franklin Adams, a member of the BearÕs Den.
(Photo: Andrew West/news-press.com)

Others say Gladesmen are simply swamp Crackers, poor Southern whites who just happened to grow up in the menacing Everglades.Some descriptions say Gladesmen are racist, and some surely are. The News-Press, however, encountered only one racist statement during this project, and that person wasn't used as a source in any of the stories -- not because of the statement.

If this school of hard-knocks had a name it would be Smash Mouth High, and the mascot would surely be the Sataniacs.

The manchineel, the most dangerous tree on the planet, can kill you in your sleep if you happen to pitch camp under one. Even the caterpillars here are venomous.

But those dangers are part of the lure, a way of getting into, instead of being on top of the food chain -- and that makes life exciting. Plus, there are only so many people who are willing waltz off into these thick woods, so solitude is easy to find even among a state with 20 million.

It's difficult to say how long Gladesmen culture will flourish.

These lands have been claimed, at some point, by indigenous people, the French, Spanish invaders, run-away slaves, Gladesmen and the federal government.

Activities like driving swamp buggies and airboats are protected, to some degree, so the recreational aspect may go on for generations.

But it's unlikely Southwest Florida will return to its Wild West roots, that the federal government will shut down Everglades National Park and Big Cypress National Preserve and give those lands back to pioneer families.

What's left today is a ghostly version of Gladesmen, but it's better than no soul at all.

Connect with this reporter: ChadGillisNP on Twitter.

Voices and Views: The Everglades

Join us for a discussion about the Everglades from those that live off of it to those who live their lives trying to protect it.

WHO:

• The News-Press reporter Chad Gills and photographer Andrew West who documented the lives of those living off the Everglades in a series called Voices of the Everglades
• ​​Franklin Adams, who grew up in Miami and spent most of his adult life as a fishing guide in Everglades City. He's the elder Gladesman at the Bear's Den camp and now lives in Golden Gate.
• LeRoy Osceola, a Miccosukee leader who lives in a traditional village in the historic Everglades. He's one of about 100 Miccosukee and Seminole who maintain their ancient culture and practices, refusing to enroll in a recognized tribe.
• Jennifer Hecker, Director of Natural Resource Policy at the Conservancy of Southwest Florida whose worked on Everglades policy issues for 11 years, as well as serves as a current board member and prior co-chair of the 58-organization Everglades Coalition.

WHEN: 4 p.m. Sunday, Oct. 4

WHERE: Bass Pro Shops at Gulf Coast Town Center, 10040 Gulf Center Drive, San Carlos Park

COST: Free

REGISTER: Go to tickets.news-press.com and reserve your seat

Brought to you by: The News-Press, Bass Pro Shops and The Conservancy of Southwest Florida.