Everglades Fishing – Captain Ned Small

This is not just a midden, it’s a vast Calusa Mound complex I found while searching for tarpon, this photo we made to try and show proportion, but it’s deceiving, this is just one mound amoung fifty on this site, there are ridges too and it doesn’t appear to have been excavated. There’s virtually no sign of the white man. I’m over six feet tall and this mound easily reached twenty feet over sea level. I’ll estimate the size of this site tonight, at between forty and sixty acres. You can’t tell because a lot is overgrown, it might be bigger, then again there’s at least fifteen acres where nothing but thorns and thistles grow on the bald shell mounds. Chief Carlos has passed a curse on this mound, that nothing will grow, our fully charged camera batteries were dying with each touch of the shutter, as Karen said, ‘the Ju-Ju is taking the juice.’ We were lucky to escape with this one. Photo by Karen Flanagan.