THE MIAMI MOON SHONE DOWN ON THE little Indian village nestled beneath stately royal palms on the south bank of the Miami River. Some 20 Miccosukees from the families of Jack Tigertail, Charlie Billie and John Osceola were sleeping in chickees at Coppinger’s Tropical Gardens, a popular attraction that exhibited the “Indian way of life” to the tourists of 1922.
Assistant manager Phil James, a swimming instructor from Kansas City, slept in a small building on the same property. A sharp sound broke through his sleep. Could it have been gunfire? Half-awake, he heard someone at the door, calling his name. James dressed quickly. Just outside, in the darkness, stood Charlie Billie.
“Tigertail, him on long sleep.”
James had trouble figuring out what Billie was telling him. But it was clear that something had happened to Jack Tigertail, the head man at the village, so James asked Billie to show him.
“No, you go,” said the Indian and gave the manager a shove.
James found Tigertail lying on the dock of the Tropical Gardens’ alligator farm. He had been shot. James knelt down to check for signs of life. There were none.
James left for the jail in nearby Miami, where he gave details about the killing to M.H. Rolfe, who served Dade County both as jailer and as a deputy sheriff. Rolfe immediately sent deputies to the scene to launch the search for the killer of Miami’s most popular Indian, the man the white community called “chief.”
The quest would lead into the folkways of Florida’s unconquered Indians, into the strange world of the illegal egret plume trade, and into the nighttime forays of Prohibition’s dangerous rum-runners. Fanned by the city’s biggest newspaper, the case would become a cause celebre. And in the end the search would leave the murder unsolved.
At the time of his death, on March 8, 1922, Jack Tigertail was 50 years old. He had been born in the Big Cypress Swamp, where the Indians took refuge after the Third Seminole War ended in 1858.
Drainage of the Everglades in the early 1900s had devastated the Indians’ world. Canals destroyed traditional canoe trails to familiar camps and to hunting grounds. Income plunged from the sale of otter and wildcat pelts, gator hides and egret plumes at trading posts in Miami and Fort Lauderdale.
Then, in 1914, Irish-born Henry Coppinger opened Coppinger’s Tropical Gardens, Alligator Farm & Seminole Indian Village on the south bank of the Miami River at 19th Avenue.
The Irishman offered tourists lush tropical foliage, a menagerie of gators, crocodiles and monkeys, tropical fruit drinks and an “Indian village” where several Miccosukee families went about their lives as well as they could with intruders from the white man’s world walking into their homes. A curio shop sold “authentic” Indian souvenirs — many of them from Mexico. In time the Indians at the camp produced more and more arts and crafts for sale.
To the Miccosukees a tour of duty at Tropical Gardens meant a decent living at a time when their traditional sources of income were literally drying up.
In 1918 Jack Tigertail, who had been living in an Everglades camp 25 miles west of Homestead, moved his family into Tropical Gardens for the winter tourist season. A large, handsome Indian who was the tribe’s business agent, he communicated easily with his own people and the white world that surrounded them.
At Coppinger’s he became so popular that in 1921 he was picked as the symbol of Hialeah, a new city being developed on the Miami River Canal. A photograph of the chief, arm extended, was transformed into an outsized figure pointing the way to Hialeah, a Seminole-Creek word meaning “pretty prairie.” His picture was also used by the developers in real-estate ads.
JAILER ROLFE AND HIS DEPUTIES HAD only a short time to wait before getting their first break in the investigation of Jack Tigertail’s murder. The chief’s cousin, Charlie Billie, a man of few words earlier in the day, came to the jail, ready to talk.
“White Man Charlie come to landing in skiff. He had whiskey and we all drank. White man tried to buy plumes. Chief Tigertail he say, ‘White man too cheap.’ White man grab gun. Charlie Billie leave and go behind bush and wait. White man open gun two times. ‘Bang!’ Chief fall. White man sculled boat away. I go to Jack Tigertail. He say, ‘Me going on long sleep. White man in boat, he shoot me.”‘
An examination of Tigertail’s fatal wound revealed that he had been shot in the back by a rifle. There was no sign of the murder weapon.
To check out Billie’s story, Rolfe returned to the scene of the crime. Upstream a short way on the opposite side of the river, he found the skiff Billie had described. Lying in the bottom of the boat were a whiskey bottle and a 30-30 caliber steel-nosed Winchester cartridge.
The skiff was tied up next to a cabin cruiser. Rolfe went aboard and found a man packing his clothes into a tomato crate. The man was White Man Charlie — Charlie Veber.
Veber was arrested and taken to jail. Charlie Billie identified him emphatically as the man who had shot Jack Tigertail: “Me sure, sure.”
The accused, 35, was a former game warden noted for his marksmanship. He was also a gator hunter, a trapper, a plume hunter, a trader with the Indians and a player in Prohibition’s major growth industry, rum-running. Within 48 hours of the murder a coroner’s jury had indicted Veber, who engaged the Miami law firm of G.A. Worley & Son to defend him.
THE ROARING TWENTIES WERE ROARING loudly in South Florida in 1922. Winter tourists flocking to Miami drank in its sunshine and its moonshine. Regular runs by smugglers to Cuba and the Bahamas kept the natives and the visitors well lubricated despite the best efforts of the U.S. Coast Guard.
But just up the river from the automobiles and the beat of the Jazz Age all was quiet in the Indian village at Coppinger’s Tropical Gardens. Few words were spoken, not even by the children. Fires were started in the village, using green wood to create clouds of smoke that would keep the troubled spirit of the murdered man from returning to the village.
Tigertail’s widow moved to another chickee. There she removed her beads and let her hair, usually worn up, drop down around her shoulders. Wearing a black and blue dress, she would remain in total silence for four days and not pin her hair back up for at least three days.
Burying the chief presented a problem. By custom, he could not be buried at the place of his death, Tropical Gardens. And developer James Bright was denied permission to bury him with a monument in Hialeah, the town for which Tigertail had become a symbol.
The Indians, however, accepted the request of an admiring white community that the chief become the first Indian ever to be buried in the Miami City Cemetery.
Arrayed in his finest garments, Jack Tigertail was laid to rest in an Indian ceremony, almost totally surrounded by Miami’s whites. Only one Indian, Charlie Billie, was present and he carefully avoided looking at Tigertail as the murdered man was buried with his rifle, cooking utensils, an old flashlight, pieces of leather, knives and other items.
ONE DAY BEFORE CHARLIE VEBER’S trial was to begin, an alligator hunt gave the prosecution an unexpected break. A number of small gators, due to be shipped north, had escaped from a sack at Tropical Gardens. Jack Coppinger, Henry’s son, crawled under a hibiscus bush looking for the gators, then called out, “There’s a gun in here.”
Jack handed the badly rusted rifle to assistant manager Phil James, who discovered an empty shell in the barrel. Could this have been the murder weapon?
On March 23, 1922, just two weeks after the murder, the trial of Charles Veber began in the Miami courtroom of Judge H. Pierre Branning. The courtroom was packed as the state presented evidence concerning the chief’s fatal wound and testimony from Henry Coppinger, Jr., placing Veber at the Gardens early on the evening of the shooting.
It looked like an open-and-shut case. But on the second day the court got caught up in a maze of convoluted testimony. Although Charlie Billie could speak English, the state chose to use an interpreter for him. The reason? His inconsistent accounts of the murder convinced the prosecution that he did not always understand the question.
The problem was that testimony was also needed from another Indian named Cory Osceola. The court was told Cory spoke a dialect different from Billie’s, although both knew Miccosukee. So the court agreed to the hiring of a second interpreter.
The result was chaotic. Questions and answers would bring on long exchanges, only to have the end product emerge as a simple “Yes” — often followed by laughter in the courtroom.
Osceola’s testimony, mercifully brief, revealed that he had sold a .30-.30 Winchester to Veber a week before the murder. Cory was asked to examine the gun found by Jack Coppinger under the hibiscus bush, but to everyone’s surprise the Indian testified that the rifle was not the one he sold to Veber.
When Charlie Billie took the stand he told the court that Veber had arrived at the dock at 11 p.m. on March 8 with a bottle of whiskey, which he shared with Billie and Jack Tigertail. Veber then told Tigertail he wanted to buy some egret plumes, which were used to decorate women’s hats. Billie testified that the white man offered $8 for the plumes, then lowered his bid to $5. Tigertail replied that “they were good feathers, worth $11.”
Billie said: “I told Jack Tigertail I would give $16 for the feathers. Veber told me to shut up. So I went back to the camp.”
Half asleep in the Indian village, he thought he heard a shot. He hurried to the dock and saw Veber leaving in a skiff.
CHARLIE VEBER TOOK THE stand on Monday, March 27. He admitted visiting the alligator farm on the afternoon of March 8 but denied he had returned later to buy egret plumes from Jack Tigertail. He also insisted he had paddled the skiff back to a larger boat where he had been sleeping at the time of the murder. He had loaned the skiff to three men.
The defendant admitted buying the rifle from Cory Osceola but said he had given it to a friend who in turn loaned it to a man who was going to Bimini, a major port in the booze trade. Both men gave depositions backing Veber’s testimony.
In arguments to the jury, Worley Jr., son of the senior defending counsel, charged that the state had not proved whether the chief was shot from land or water or with what gun. He contended that Charlie Billie was drunk the night of the murder and challenged the veracity of the interpreters.
Then he tossed a new thought at the jury: “The finger that pulled the trigger and killed Jack Tigertail was not that of a white man but of an Indian.”
The senior partner of Worley & Son began his defense in late morning and rambled on insultingly about the history, religion and superstitions of the Indians. “The state is relying altogether on public sentiment and not on the facts in the evidence,” he concluded.
The following morning prosecutor John Gramling gave a strong summation of the state’s case, contending that the murder grew out of a quarrel over egret plumes, then turned ugly as the men continued to pass the whiskey bottle around.
Later that morning the jurors began their deliberations. At 8:15 p.m., some eight hours and 45 minutes after they started, they returned with their verdict:
“We, the jury, find the defendant guilty, as charged, and recommend him to the mercy of the court.”
Charlie Veber listened calmly to the verdict which promised him life in prison.
Fortunately for him, his attorneys were listening even more closely. The next day they filed an appeal based on the wording of the verdict. The Worleys contended that the jury had found Veber “guilty as charged,” not “guilty of murder.” It was a technicality but it was enough to give Veber a second trial.
At Coppinger’s Tropical Gardens the Indians left it to the white man’s law to settle the murder of Jack Tigertail. Several of them believed that Charlie Veber hadn’t killed Tigertail, but they saw no reason to get involved in such a complicated judicial system. Better to mind their own business.
So Charlie Veber sat in jail for another eight months while the Miccosukee cycle of life moved on. Corn and vegetables were planted, fish were caught, game was killed and camps were moved to better locations in the Everglades.
WHEN VEBER’S SECOND TRIAL began on Nov. 20, the delay proved to be in his favor. Miami had quieted down since that feverish “rush to judgment” in March.
Once again the state’s case rested almost totally on the testimony of Charlie Billie. This time the defense worked hard to discredit him. They built a strong case that Billie was drunk the night of the murder.
Worley Sr. raised other doubts, hinting at friction between Tigertail and the Indians living at Musa Isle, a rival Indian village.
“Don’t you know one of the Indians in Musa Isle was found in a tree with a gun ready to kill Jack Tigertail?” he asked Charlie Billie.
“There was no such thing happened,” replied Billie.
On Saturday, Nov. 25, Veber took the stand for a full day of testimony. He openly admitted that he had cruised out to Gun Key the night before the murder to pick up a cargo of bootleg whiskey from Bimini. But he denied visiting Tropical Gardens at midnight to buy plumes.
In his summation for the defense Worley Sr. declared that Veber’s arrest was due to “public sentiment running wild — to wild, unreasonable, brutal excitement.” Charlie Billie’s testimony, he said, was “a suspicion rather than evidence, and actuated by some secret motive.”
The Indians, said Worley, thought Veber had done the terrible deed “because they knew Veber was supposed to possess a rifle over which the evil spirits hovered.”
It took the jury two hours and 45 minutes to bring back a new verdict: “We ‘the jury’ find the defendant not guilty.”
Charlie Veber walked out of the courtroom with his mother and went home a free man. Four months later he would be arrested again on a whiskey charge.
But if Veber didn’t kill Tigertail, who did?
Worley believed it was probably another Indian, maybe one from Musa Isle. But he presented no evidence, just a few phrases to raise “reasonable doubt” in the minds of the jurors.
With the trial over, most Miamians forgot about the murder. But at Coppinger’s Tropical Gardens, the Indians began to argue among themselves. Taboos and customs had been violated. Jack Tigertail, it was suspected, had become much too friendly with the wife of another Indian. Could the cuckolded husband have been his killer?
Some Indians felt it was a matter for investigation by the tribal council. Others argued against such action. We’re a band of less than two dozen Miccosukees surrounded by the white man’s city, they said. Better just to let the cycle of life go on.
So, who did the Indians think was the murderer of Jack Tigertail?
For years to come, in Miccosukee camps and villages, one name would be whispered softly:
“Charlie Billie.”
—- STUART McIVER is a historian and a regular contributor to Sunshine.
