Taming the Swamp: Famous Expeditions into the Florida Everglades

By Joe Marzo

Common questions we will address: What made the Everglades such a dangerous and difficult place to explore? What kinds of wildlife and environmental hazards threatened explorers in the Everglades? What was the greatest danger in traveling through the “river of grass”? How did early Everglades expeditions influence Florida’s development and drainage projects?

Why was navigation through the Everglades so difficult for 19th-century explorers?

For centuries, the Florida Everglades have stood as both a wonder and a warning. Stretching from Lake Okeechobee to Florida Bay, this vast wetland is a labyrinth of grass, water, and sky. To the Seminole people it was home, a place of refuge and resilience. To outsiders, it was an impenetrable wilderness that defied maps and logic. Long before highways or airboats, a few determined explorers set out to cross this watery world. Their journeys tested the limits of human endurance and revealed the raw, untamed nature of Florida’s interior.

The Ingraham Expedition of 1892: A Railroad Man’s Ordeal

In 1892, James E. Ingraham, president of the South Florida Railroad, decided to lead a daring expedition across the Everglades. He wanted to know whether the region could be drained, surveyed, and perhaps turned into farmland or railroad land. Ingraham assembled a team of eleven men, including a Seminole guide, and set out from Fort Myers with four canoes and twelve days’ worth of provisions.

They expected an adventure. What they found was a nightmare.

The water was far lower than they had anticipated, forcing the men to wade through thick mud and razor-edged sawgrass. Each day became a struggle of lifting heavy canoes through waist-deep muck under the blazing sun. The sharp grass tore at their skin and clothes until their legs were raw and bleeding. Mosquitoes filled the air so thickly that it was difficult to breathe without inhaling them.

Food supplies ran out. The men caught turtles, birds, and whatever they could find to stay alive. Drinking water came from stagnant pools that had to be filtered through handkerchiefs and boiled. By night they slept in their canoes or on small mounds of grass that barely kept them above the swamp.

After twenty-one days they finally stumbled out near Miami, half-starved and half-delirious. Ingraham described the ordeal as “every hardship that the tropics could inflict.” Yet his notes provided the first serious data on the interior of the Everglades and gave momentum to the idea that the swamp could one day be drained and settled. The expedition was both a triumph of endurance and a prelude to the environmental struggles that would follow.

The Gonzalez Expedition of 1893: Fifteen Days of Desperation

A year after Ingraham’s crossing, Alfonso Fernando Gonzalez set out to prove that it could be done faster and more efficiently. A civil engineer and adventurer, Gonzalez brought along three companions—William Rew, L. C. Stewart, and Joe Henley—and planned a four-day trip from Fort Myers to Palm Beach.

They were confident and well prepared, but within a few days the swamp swallowed their optimism. The open waterways they expected quickly disappeared into endless walls of sawgrass. The men were forced to drag their canoes over drying mudflats where every step sank them knee-deep. Navigation became impossible. Compass readings were unreliable, and the horizon offered no landmarks.

Their supplies dwindled, then ran out completely. For over a week they survived on whatever they could scavenge—palmetto cabbage, fish caught by hand, and the occasional bird. Exhaustion and sun exposure took their toll. At night they huddled together in silence, unsure whether they were moving in the right direction.

By the fourteenth day they were starving and disoriented when they spotted smoke in the distance. It came from a small camp of timber workers. When the workers saw the mud-caked, skeletal figures staggering toward them, they ran in fear, thinking they had seen ghosts. Gonzalez and his men followed and were finally rescued after fifteen brutal days. Their survival was remarkable, but their story served as another warning. The Everglades was not a land to be tamed or rushed. It punished arrogance and rewarded only perseverance.

The Willoughby Expedition of 1897: Science and Survival

Hugh de Laussat Willoughby was not a developer or a fortune seeker. He was a scientist, a naval officer, and a man of curiosity. In 1897 he launched the most famous crossing of the Everglades, traveling from the Gulf of Mexico to Biscayne Bay to study the ecosystem in its natural state.

With his Seminole guide, Charlie “Tiger” Tommy, Willoughby set out in a small canoe with limited supplies and a determination to document everything he encountered. His goal was not conquest but understanding. Along the way he measured water depth and flow, collected plant and water samples, and mapped the terrain with remarkable precision.

The journey was difficult from the start. Mosquitoes swarmed so thickly that Willoughby lit fires to smoke them out each night. Sawgrass shredded his clothes and skin. Dehydration and fatigue were constant threats, but he pressed on, guided by both Tommy’s knowledge and his own discipline as a sailor and scientist.

After weeks of travel, Willoughby emerged from the Everglades near Biscayne Bay, exhausted but triumphant. His journals and maps became the first accurate scientific record of the Everglades’ hydrology and ecology. His 1898 book, Across the Everglades, helped Americans see the swamp not as a wasteland but as a living, intricate system. More than a century later, scientists rediscovered his preserved water samples and used them to study how pollution and development had altered the Everglades since his day.

Modern Journeys into the River of Grass

In the modern era, new explorers have returned to the Everglades, not to conquer it but to understand how much it has changed.

In 2012, photographer and conservationist Carlton Ward Jr. led the Florida Wildlife Corridor Expedition. His team traveled more than a thousand miles in one hundred days, from the Everglades to the Okefenokee Swamp in Georgia. They hiked, paddled, and cycled through what remains of Florida’s wild interior to show how disconnected the state’s natural landscapes have become. Their journey drew attention to the need for wildlife corridors that could reconnect fragmented ecosystems and preserve what little wilderness remains.

A decade later, scientists from the University of Florida retraced Willoughby’s route. They compared his 1897 water samples to modern ones, revealing how fertilizers, pesticides, and altered water flows have changed the Everglades forever. What Willoughby once called a “boundless sea of grass” is now a network of canals and reservoirs, its health dependent on human management.

These expeditions may not face the same physical dangers as Ingraham or Gonzalez, but the stakes are no less serious. Where earlier explorers battled hunger and exhaustion, today’s researchers fight to protect what’s left of the ecosystem they once risked their lives to cross.

Conclusion: The Price of Discovery

The early expeditions into the Everglades revealed both the resilience of nature and the limits of human ambition. Ingraham and Gonzalez sought to open the swamp to development. Willoughby sought to study it. Modern explorers seek to save it. Each generation has viewed the Everglades through its own lens, but all have been humbled by it in one way or another.

What those early travelers found was more than mud and mosquitoes. They discovered a living wilderness that refuses to yield easily to human control. Their struggles remind us that the Everglades, despite centuries of change, still holds its mysteries—and still demands our respect.

Sources

• University of Florida Libraries – The Ingraham Everglades Expedition Collection

• Across the Everglades by Hugh de Laussat Willoughby (1898)

• WLRN Public Media – Retracing the Willoughby Expedition (2022)

• Florida Memory Project Archives

• National Parks Conservation Association – Florida Wildlife Corridor Expedition

• Smithsonian Institution – Everglades Wilderness on the Edge