Reptilian State: Florida at the American Museum of Natural History One Hundred Years Ago

IN THE SUMMER OF 1918, just over a year after the United States entered the First World War, a new exhibit opened at the American Museum of Natural History (amnh) in New York City. Yet, despite having been a major display for several decades, the Florida Group has been overlooked by historians. [...]the diorama coincided (and, in its fixed nature, contrasted) with a period of rapid change in South Florida, which was transformed From a lightly populated, semitropical frontier of the United States, home to the Everglades, the remaining Seminole population, and fledgling coastal towns such as Miami (officially founded in 1896), to a site of massive real estate, tourism, and population booms, including the reclamation of the waterlogged environs that inspired the exhibit.2 Visitor perceptions of the display are unfortunately absent from the historical record. During the Seminole Wars of the midnineteenth century-brutal, guerilla-style conflicts between the US military and Native Americans - these menacing environmental images cohered with Indigenous resistance to removal (under the leadership, among others, of a man called Alligator) to further create Florida's popular reputation among white Americans as a fearsome, and all too feral, swamp.3 After the Civil War, however, American settlers, tourists, and health-seekers began to find an appeal in the apparently primeval landscape. "Crowds of Northern men flock to Enterprise [Florida] during the winter, and many of them employ their time in hunting alligators," a Vermont newspaper noted in 1873, describing a gruesome spectacle and ritual that defined the triumph of man over reptile: after killing an alligator, the male tourists - "eminent bankers, ministers, judges, and others" - chained the carcass to the stern of their boat and towed it to the beach in front of the hotel.