Preston Sawyer – The Original Caxambas Kid: Part Two

When Preston Sawyer decided to move his home from Marco to Naples, he simply closed the doors and had it shipped to Naples. What could go wrong? Unfortunately for Sawyer, plenty went wrong with his move to Naples.

Sawyer hired Pappy Turner to move his home from Marco to Naples by barge. They anticipated an uneventful trip.

“My wife Euvie and I left everything in the house just as it was,” said Preston Sawyer, “the pictures on the walls and the curtains and all our clothes and everything.”

The Coastal Breeze News has received permission to share quotes from the book about Sawyer’s life story, The Caxambas Kid, by Maria Stone, 1987. Sawyer was born at the Caxambas settlement on Marco Island on August 31, 1901, and passed in Naples in 1990 at 88. Sawyer had spent his life fishing and clamming the waters around Marco Island.

A crew of four manned the barge on moving day. Preston and his son Carson followed the barge in a boat.

“Dad, the house is moving,” Carson Sawyer warned his father. The house tumbled into the water. One of the workers went overboard, too.

“He evidently got hit in the head,” Preston Sawyer said. “He jumped or fell overboard. He went under. His head was under water. It was dark and all we could see was him kicking his feet and the water splashing.”

Sawyer tried to throw the drowning man a rope. I said, 'Grab ahold of this,” Sawyer said. “He went on by. It was too late. The next morning we fished him out of the canal with big fish hooks. We put him in a coffin and took him to his family. It was bad.”

The boat mover hired a gentleman named Cadenhead to raise the sunken barge with Sawyer’s home aboard. He was unsuccessful.

“My house was at the bottom of the canal,” Sawyer said, "I got Pappy Turner to help me. We went down in there and jacked up that house. We straightened it up on the dollies. I got two timbers, 12' x 12’, enough to go under the house and on the decks of the two boats. I put one boat on one side of the house and one on the other side. Then I lowered my house back on them timbers. I taked off the dollies and just laid them back on the timbers. That’s how I brought my house up to Naples.”

This time the move went smoothly.

“Naples was just a shoreline then,” Sawyer said. “We didn’t have no houses along the bank of the river then. I had to jack up the house again and get the timbers out. The house mover then moved it over to the corner of Eighth Street and Tenth Avenue in downtown Naples. I bought that lot way back in 1925.”

Being submerged in salt water did no favors to Sawyer’s house.

“Everything was gone,” Sawyer said, “All our pictures, all my records went in the water with that house. Every belonging we had was gone. All we had left was our clothes on our back. I said, ‘Well, I guess this kid from Caxambas can start over again.”

The move to Naples in the mid-1940s is when Sawyer earned legendary status as a charter fishing captain.

“I was carrying the people out fishing every day,” Sawyer said. "There was only the old hotel and Dan House’s place on Fifth Avenue. I told Mayor Roy Smith to get us a fish board at Crayton Cove at the docks so the people can get pictures taken. People like to have pictures made with their fish.”

“In 1948,” Sawyer said, “I got a huge whip-a-ray right off the shore of the Old Naples Pier in 1948. That picture was circulated around in magazines. It made good advertising for Naples back then.”

Sawyer had many regular parties that he took fishing out of Naples, teaching the families’ children and grandchildren how to fish. One of those grandchildren was Simon Dunkle. Dunkle recalls fishing with Sawyer when he was a child in Naples in the 1960s on his family’s boat, the Swinger.

“He was my first Hemingway character,” Simon Dunkle recalls fondly. Dunkle met Sawyer when he was an eight-year-old. “He was a captain’s captain. I caught my first saltwater fish, a bonita, with him. Preston was the Man." 

Charter fishing began to boom in Naples.

“There weren’t enough charter boats to carry all the people that started coming down on the dock to fish,” Sawyer said. 

Sawyer said Naples boomed in 1960 following Hurricane Donna.

“The real estate builders came here,” Sawyer said, “Before that there were no high rises or motels on the beach. Every hurricane that I know of since I been born has brought water knee deep or waist deep. Down there where I was living when Donna come along, you know, it was four foot of water. I lost everything I had again, like I did after getting that house out of the bay.”

Sawyer lived in downtown Naples from 1947-1972. He said people appreciated his cooking as much as his fishing skills.

“People used to come over from Miami, Ft. Lauderdale,” Sawyer said, “I always carried a stove along. That stove brought as many people as my fishing did. I took that little old camp stove and a frying pan and a chowder pot. I made ‘em a chowder or cooked fish for ‘em with hush puppies. Everybody I ever carried out had to have some fish cooked. They went back and told all their friends, and that made more and more parties. We caught a grouper and they wanted chowder. We got fish chowder. Then I had to fry snook or whatever I had - snappers and everything. That was my specialty.

“I carried parties from the Naples Hotel back then. They would meet me at Ship Ahoy at the foot of the Goodland Bridge. Before 1948 I got $15 a day. Then I raised it to $20 a day. After that I got $35 a day for two to four people and they furnished the groceries. They all wanted my food as well as fishing. I couldn’t handle the business.”

One of Sawyer’s favorite memories involved John Gomez, who lived on Panther Key, outside of Everglades National Park in the Ten Thousand Island National Wildlife Refuge.

“He was a cabin boy on old man Gasparilla’s pirate ship,” Sawyer said, “He come down about the same time that my grandmother and them come down here. He was supposed to of been 120 years old. He drowned. That’s the reason Gomez Point is called Gomez Point.”

Sawyer knew Gomez from his clam dredging and fishing days on Marco.

“I’d rather spend an hour with him,” Sawyer said, "than I would to go see the best show in New York.”

Gomez worked in Ted Smallwood’s store in Chokoloskee. The famous Smallwood Store, established in 1906, operates today as a tourist destination. Pains have been taken to keep it as close to original as possible.

“I’d go in there after I’d fish all night,” Sawyer said. “Sometimes when I could stay awake I went in there to old man Smallwood’s store for a treat. It was just like out West. It had an old board counter where people wrote their name chiseled out all over it, just like in the old West. It is built on them stills, and in the corner there was a little Post Office.

Smallwood dealt in animal hides.

“Old man Smallwood, he used to buy these ‘coon hides and such from us hunters. We’d go out and shoot ‘coon ‘round them islands. We’d get 10, 15, 20, 30 hides in a night. Smallwood paid us according to how big and how good the hides was—anywhere from .50 cents to $4 a piece for the hides. He’d buy these from the hunters, Indians, anybody that brought him any. First you had to skin and dry them. I’ve seen as high as 3,000 hides hung up in that store."

Sawyer said Smallwood was skilled at doing business with the local Native Americans.

“He could talk to them Indians in their language as good as they could. The Indians used to come and camp around his building.”

Smallwood would sell the hides to buyers from Philadelphia, St. Louis, and New York, according to Sawyer.

Sawyer said a man named Rothchild, a fur buyer, wondered if Smallwood could break a $1,000 bill for him.

"I don’t think you got to worry,” a fisherman told him, “I think he’s got a thousand dollars.”

“Old man Smallwood looked at him and said, ‘Hmmmm, you’re a mighty little man to be carrying that kind of money around in your pocket,” Sawyer said. “somebody in this here old Chokoloskee is going to knock you in the head. That’s a lot of money.”

Sawyer said Ted Smallwood reached into the pocket of his jeans and pulled out a money pouch.

“He didn’t have no billfold,” Sawyer said. "He started counting it off. He counted off a thousand dollars. Rothchild said, ‘Kin you break another one?’ Smallwood reached into the other pocket and pulled out another roll and counted out another thousand dollars.”

Smallwood Store was also where the despised Edgar Watkins was killed on the dock in front of the store. Sawyer remembers Watkins killing two men.

“I can vision it now, just like it was yesterday,” Sawyer said, “and that there has been over 70 years ago. On this one day old man Watson and his son E.J. went down to Tucker’s place. What this feud was about was when Watson said he had a land claim and Tucker said it was his. When Watson and his son arrived at Tucker’s, old man Watson killed Tucker right there at the foot of his stairs. Tucker’s son tried to run and get away. Old man Watson made his son run Tucker’s son down and cut his throat. Them Watsons killed both them Tuckers that day. It is still plain in my mind.”

Sawyer recalled the day Watson was killed.

“All those fellers in Chokoloskee were gettin’ fed up with all this killin.’ They told old Watson, ‘You got to stop this killing.’ Those men in Chokoloskee give Watson an ultimatum. ’Next time you come up here we’re gonna get you.’

"In a few days he come back for more rations at Smallwood’s store. That’s when they killed Watson. Those men all saw him comin’ up the channel. Them days you had to come up in a shallow draft boat. You had to circle all those oyster bars back then. There was about 15-20 of them men waitin’ there at Smallwood’s store. When Watson got out of his boat that day he raised his pistol, but something happened. It never went off. He snapped his gun at Dan House and all the men there shot him. But Henry Short’s bullet hit him first. That’s when they tied his hands and feet and put him in a boat and carried him to Rabbit Key, dug a hole and put him in it."

Sawyer said Bill Collier of Marco wanted Watson to have a proper burial.

“Old Bill Collier hired my dad to take him out to dig Watson up. They made a wooden coffin and put him in it and carried Watson to Ft. Myers’ cemetery. They carried him by boat, of course. That was the only way then. They buried him by that big tree just inside the gate. Watson musta been about 40. That was the end of Watson.”

Sawyer knew much of Watson’s dirty dealing.

“When he ran short of laborers he’d go up around Lakeland, Arcadia, and other places to hire people. People was glad to get any kind of work. Watson would work these people and when they asked for pay he killed them. He had killed several people like this. That’s what caused them fellers at Chokoloskee to get riled up. Watson was about 5’10” tall. He weighed about 150. He was a nice-looking man. You’d never think he was a killer, but he musta been a blood-thirsty man with a temper."

During WWII Sawyer became a Coast Guard Reservist and was sent to Marco Island.

“I got $60 base pay and subsistence which was $2.75 a day, and a uniform. In 1944-1945 I was put in command of Marco Base. The government confiscated my new boat. They also confiscated all the other boats in the area. There were five other patrol boats under my command. My territory was Naples to Shark River and inland 25 miles.”

Sawyer said the Japanese knew the coast as well as he did.

“We had to send out day and night patrols at the passes,” Sawyer said, “we had to board all barges and check cargo. The Coast Guard ordered all fishermen to stay in port at night. They had to fish sunup to sundown. Them fishermen didn’t realize we were at war.”

He said he got resistance from the local fishermen

“I would tell them, ‘If you don’t listen and obey rules we will confiscate your boat and you can’t fish then.' I put up notices all over, No Fishing at Night.

Sawyer often had to report his friends on Marco.

“It was hard on them and hard on me,” he said, “but it had to be done for the sake of our country.”

He said his boat was eventually returned to him.

When Preston Sawyer decided to move his home from Marco to Naples, he simply closed the doors and had it shipped to Naples. What could go wrong? Unfortunately for Sawyer, plenty went wrong with his move to Naples.

Sawyer hired Pappy Turner to move his home from Marco to Naples by barge. They anticipated an uneventful trip.

“My wife Euvie and I left everything in the house just as it was,” said Preston Sawyer, “the pictures on the walls and the curtains and all our clothes and everything.”

The Coastal Breeze News has received permission to share quotes from the book about Sawyer’s life story, The Caxambas Kid, by Maria Stone, 1987. Sawyer was born at the Caxambas settlement on Marco Island on August 31, 1901, and passed in Naples in 1990 at 88. Sawyer had spent his life fishing and clamming the waters around Marco Island.

A crew of four manned the barge on moving day. Preston and his son Carson followed the barge in a boat.

“Dad, the house is moving,” Carson Sawyer warned his father. The house tumbled into the water. One of the workers went overboard, too.

“He evidently got hit in the head,” Preston Sawyer said. “He jumped or fell overboard. He went under. His head was under water. It was dark and all we could see was him kicking his feet and the water splashing.”

Sawyer tried to throw the drowning man a rope. I said, 'Grab ahold of this,” Sawyer said. “He went on by. It was too late. The next morning we fished him out of the canal with big fish hooks. We put him in a coffin and took him to his family. It was bad.”

The boat mover hired a gentleman named Cadenhead to raise the sunken barge with Sawyer’s home aboard. He was unsuccessful.

“My house was at the bottom of the canal,” Sawyer said, "I got Pappy Turner to help me. We went down in there and jacked up that house. We straightened it up on the dollies. I got two timbers, 12' x 12’, enough to go under the house and on the decks of the two boats. I put one boat on one side of the house and one on the other side. Then I lowered my house back on them timbers. I taked off the dollies and just laid them back on the timbers. That’s how I brought my house up to Naples.”

This time the move went smoothly.

“Naples was just a shoreline then,” Sawyer said. “We didn’t have no houses along the bank of the river then. I had to jack up the house again and get the timbers out. The house mover then moved it over to the corner of Eighth Street and Tenth Avenue in downtown Naples. I bought that lot way back in 1925.”

Being submerged in salt water did no favors to Sawyer’s house.

“Everything was gone,” Sawyer said, “All our pictures, all my records went in the water with that house. Every belonging we had was gone. All we had left was our clothes on our back. I said, ‘Well, I guess this kid from Caxambas can start over again.”

The move to Naples in the mid-1940s is when Sawyer earned legendary status as a charter fishing captain.

“I was carrying the people out fishing every day,” Sawyer said. "There was only the old hotel and Dan House’s place on Fifth Avenue. I told Mayor Roy Smith to get us a fish board at Crayton Cove at the docks so the people can get pictures taken. People like to have pictures made with their fish.”

“In 1948,” Sawyer said, “I got a huge whip-a-ray right off the shore of the Old Naples Pier in 1948. That picture was circulated around in magazines. It made good advertising for Naples back then.”

Sawyer had many regular parties that he took fishing out of Naples, teaching the families’ children and grandchildren how to fish. One of those grandchildren was Simon Dunkle. Dunkle recalls fishing with Sawyer when he was a child in Naples in the 1960s on his family’s boat, the Swinger.

“He was my first Hemingway character,” Simon Dunkle recalls fondly. Dunkle met Sawyer when he was an eight-year-old. “He was a captain’s captain. I caught my first saltwater fish, a bonita, with him. Preston was the Man." 

Charter fishing began to boom in Naples.

“There weren’t enough charter boats to carry all the people that started coming down on the dock to fish,” Sawyer said. 

Sawyer said Naples boomed in 1960 following Hurricane Donna.

“The real estate builders came here,” Sawyer said, “Before that there were no high rises or motels on the beach. Every hurricane that I know of since I been born has brought water knee deep or waist deep. Down there where I was living when Donna come along, you know, it was four foot of water. I lost everything I had again, like I did after getting that house out of the bay.”

Sawyer lived in downtown Naples from 1947-1972. He said people appreciated his cooking as much as his fishing skills.

“People used to come over from Miami, Ft. Lauderdale,” Sawyer said, “I always carried a stove along. That stove brought as many people as my fishing did. I took that little old camp stove and a frying pan and a chowder pot. I made ‘em a chowder or cooked fish for ‘em with hush puppies. Everybody I ever carried out had to have some fish cooked. They went back and told all their friends, and that made more and more parties. We caught a grouper and they wanted chowder. We got fish chowder. Then I had to fry snook or whatever I had - snappers and everything. That was my specialty.

“I carried parties from the Naples Hotel back then. They would meet me at Ship Ahoy at the foot of the Goodland Bridge. Before 1948 I got $15 a day. Then I raised it to $20 a day. After that I got $35 a day for two to four people and they furnished the groceries. They all wanted my food as well as fishing. I couldn’t handle the business.”

One of Sawyer’s favorite memories involved John Gomez, who lived on Panther Key, outside of Everglades National Park in the Ten Thousand Island National Wildlife Refuge.

“He was a cabin boy on old man Gasparilla’s pirate ship,” Sawyer said, “He come down about the same time that my grandmother and them come down here. He was supposed to of been 120 years old. He drowned. That’s the reason Gomez Point is called Gomez Point.”

Sawyer knew Gomez from his clam dredging and fishing days on Marco.

“I’d rather spend an hour with him,” Sawyer said, "than I would to go see the best show in New York.”

Gomez worked in Ted Smallwood’s store in Chokoloskee. The famous Smallwood Store, established in 1906, operates today as a tourist destination. Pains have been taken to keep it as close to original as possible.

“I’d go in there after I’d fish all night,” Sawyer said. “Sometimes when I could stay awake I went in there to old man Smallwood’s store for a treat. It was just like out West. It had an old board counter where people wrote their name chiseled out all over it, just like in the old West. It is built on them stills, and in the corner there was a little Post Office.

Smallwood dealt in animal hides.

“Old man Smallwood, he used to buy these ‘coon hides and such from us hunters. We’d go out and shoot ‘coon ‘round them islands. We’d get 10, 15, 20, 30 hides in a night. Smallwood paid us according to how big and how good the hides was—anywhere from .50 cents to $4 a piece for the hides. He’d buy these from the hunters, Indians, anybody that brought him any. First you had to skin and dry them. I’ve seen as high as 3,000 hides hung up in that store."

Sawyer said Smallwood was skilled at doing business with the local Native Americans.

“He could talk to them Indians in their language as good as they could. The Indians used to come and camp around his building.”

Smallwood would sell the hides to buyers from Philadelphia, St. Louis, and New York, according to Sawyer.

Sawyer said a man named Rothchild, a fur buyer, wondered if Smallwood could break a $1,000 bill for him.

"I don’t think you got to worry,” a fisherman told him, “I think he’s got a thousand dollars.”

“Old man Smallwood looked at him and said, ‘Hmmmm, you’re a mighty little man to be carrying that kind of money around in your pocket,” Sawyer said. “somebody in this here old Chokoloskee is going to knock you in the head. That’s a lot of money.”

Sawyer said Ted Smallwood reached into the pocket of his jeans and pulled out a money pouch.

“He didn’t have no billfold,” Sawyer said. "He started counting it off. He counted off a thousand dollars. Rothchild said, ‘Kin you break another one?’ Smallwood reached into the other pocket and pulled out another roll and counted out another thousand dollars.”

Smallwood Store was also where the despised Edgar Watkins was killed on the dock in front of the store. Sawyer remembers Watkins killing two men.

“I can vision it now, just like it was yesterday,” Sawyer said, “and that there has been over 70 years ago. On this one day old man Watson and his son E.J. went down to Tucker’s place. What this feud was about was when Watson said he had a land claim and Tucker said it was his. When Watson and his son arrived at Tucker’s, old man Watson killed Tucker right there at the foot of his stairs. Tucker’s son tried to run and get away. Old man Watson made his son run Tucker’s son down and cut his throat. Them Watsons killed both them Tuckers that day. It is still plain in my mind.”

Sawyer recalled the day Watson was killed.

“All those fellers in Chokoloskee were gettin’ fed up with all this killin.’ They told old Watson, ‘You got to stop this killing.’ Those men in Chokoloskee give Watson an ultimatum. ’Next time you come up here we’re gonna get you.’

"In a few days he come back for more rations at Smallwood’s store. That’s when they killed Watson. Those men all saw him comin’ up the channel. Them days you had to come up in a shallow draft boat. You had to circle all those oyster bars back then. There was about 15-20 of them men waitin’ there at Smallwood’s store. When Watson got out of his boat that day he raised his pistol, but something happened. It never went off. He snapped his gun at Dan House and all the men there shot him. But Henry Short’s bullet hit him first. That’s when they tied his hands and feet and put him in a boat and carried him to Rabbit Key, dug a hole and put him in it."

Sawyer said Bill Collier of Marco wanted Watson to have a proper burial.

“Old Bill Collier hired my dad to take him out to dig Watson up. They made a wooden coffin and put him in it and carried Watson to Ft. Myers’ cemetery. They carried him by boat, of course. That was the only way then. They buried him by that big tree just inside the gate. Watson musta been about 40. That was the end of Watson.”

Sawyer knew much of Watson’s dirty dealing.

“When he ran short of laborers he’d go up around Lakeland, Arcadia, and other places to hire people. People was glad to get any kind of work. Watson would work these people and when they asked for pay he killed them. He had killed several people like this. That’s what caused them fellers at Chokoloskee to get riled up. Watson was about 5’10” tall. He weighed about 150. He was a nice-looking man. You’d never think he was a killer, but he musta been a blood-thirsty man with a temper."

During WWII Sawyer became a Coast Guard Reservist and was sent to Marco Island.

“I got $60 base pay and subsistence which was $2.75 a day, and a uniform. In 1944-1945 I was put in command of Marco Base. The government confiscated my new boat. They also confiscated all the other boats in the area. There were five other patrol boats under my command. My territory was Naples to Shark River and inland 25 miles.”

Sawyer said the Japanese knew the coast as well as he did.

“We had to send out day and night patrols at the passes,” Sawyer said, “we had to board all barges and check cargo. The Coast Guard ordered all fishermen to stay in port at night. They had to fish sunup to sundown. Them fishermen didn’t realize we were at war.”

He said he got resistance from the local fishermen

“I would tell them, ‘If you don’t listen and obey rules we will confiscate your boat and you can’t fish then.' I put up notices all over, No Fishing at Night.

Sawyer often had to report his friends on Marco.

“It was hard on them and hard on me,” he said, “but it had to be done for the sake of our country.”

He said his boat was eventually returned to him.