Trapper Nelson: Life, Death, Myth, Legacy

I want to welcome all of you and I am so grateful that you came out tonight the newsletters are lost probably ending a world somewhere they showed up in Melbourne my cousin came today he got his but none of us is sure God ours so this is a great crowd with no notice I appreciate all of you coming out uh you're always beginning your newsletters in the next couple of days we have a few things to go over and then we're going to turn you over to Josh I want to take the time before we start to thank my Lord all of them that are here please stand up I see you tonight Melinda some

of the rest of you have to be here thank you and Alice is out in the hallway I think is there anybody else here allergy man okay this is a wonderful path and they work very very hard we have a lot of volunteers and we keep the museum so clean that we have people ask us how do you eat this so clean who does all of this and I have to point at them and say say thank you because they you know but it has been a pleasant year last year we got a lot of accomplishments and we're looking forward going on this year with a lot of new we have a lot of new

programs planned and they will all be coming out in the newsletter too well so plan on attending the second Tuesday of everyone from Pennsylvania who is what is what is your title job a historian and Collective manager look and I don't know if you watch it does so we'll ask him yeah it's not hard part about the collection man here's Jocelyn thank you good evening everybody so to answer the first question of the night uh historian collections manager means I get to do the research about our history come out and do talks like this to share the history and as selections manager when people donate things to us I get a catalog recorded and stored

and figured out and someone says oh I need some information or some photos or so and so I have to go find it where that box is and pull that stuff out but it means I get to make some neat discoveries that way too so if you have nerves before most people have heard of Jupiter in the White House and Museum because uh down there in Jupiter we've got a museum of local history there uh Pioneer House Solutions in the lighthouse but we're that's actually our we call it doing business anime where the Los Angeles struggle Society since 1971. we are at the Historical Society for the Jupiter Tequesta area you may not realize Loxahatchee

River the size of the Watershed down there it is all the way out toward Pratt Whitney all the way up into Western Hobe Sound so there's a lot of history there from early Native Americans through the present day and like Stewart I grew up in the Stuart area uh it's changed a lot up here and it's changed a lot down there even the recent history addition to the older history so we're talking tonight about adverbs traveled oh he was born in Trenton New Jersey visiting the tallest polish Lithuanian immigrant family this is the earliest soil doing you can pick out the Hall of the Paul Lane fellow there in the end uh these this is

what we think his um uncle or brother-in-law he had a large family he was one of the younger kids his main older brother was seven or eight years older than he was his dad was mistreated and treated as an immigrant who didn't speak very good English Trapper was a bright young man did not have a great deal of formal schooling but uh was good with English did with math he would follow his dad out when he would go shopping and make sure that storekeepers didn't try to Swindle him his dad uh was a Mason and a Potter uh founding member of a church in treading his dad the family information is a little fuzzy there's

indication that his mom died when Trapper was a young child and he his dad remarried and he didn't get along with the Stepmom but the Census records don't entirely substantiate this and it's difficult with a last name like that trying to find Census records and having the Census records record things correctly it's a bit dicey so the information is is just unfortunately not real clear this isn't that us here uh his nephew uh Phil Selmer he was particularly close to several of his sisters and my own sister in particular who married a guy named Phil silver uh they would be the most frequent visitors to him in Florida although he moved away from New Jersey

down to Florida to stay he did go back and visit on occasion and his family siblings cousins that would come down and visit as well in Florida we think his dad was there at least once from a photo we have up there this is one of the few photos from up in New Jersey uh probably in the beach there in the Jersey Shore pepper doesn't smile a lot of photos so as a young adult he decided to strike out west to do some trapping and get away from the city life uh win with his older brother Charlie I was about seven or eight years older than him uh they went all over the west Arizona

Trapping Coyotes raccoons Bob casters whatever they could get a hold of out there in the desert he did some manual labor out California to earn some money there's a lot of stories of you know hard to substantiate details about his time out west he's supposedly supposedly was arrested in Mexico he had gone down there to just do some trapping over the border and got arrested on suspicion of gun running and then tried to eat the jail out of house and home so they just said you know you're too much trouble getting lost who knows like a guild down there have really great record uh supposedly played cards and travels a hobo and so forth it's

a very vague period of his life other than the collection of photos we have from a photo album of his tracking out west some more shots Wes Ley got on here rear Kansas option of uh pepper smiling we can waist deep in a lake here getting uh probably a muskrat or a beaver foreign 1930 uh people's memories of it seem to vary affiliate hearing is coming out of the boys start back hopefully they feel like some stuff up more trapping um they were camping on the beach Jupiter 1930 was a small Hamlet of a few hundred people an agricultural area asparagusa ferneries dairy farms some pineapple Farms here's another shot of the summer camps and

friends when he came down here to Florida in 1931 he came with his brother Charlie again with traffic him out west and then also a friend from Trenton that was about the same age as crap her name John Dicus that might be Charlie in the end there where we're sold I'm sure tracker had a personal scrapbook that he kept the photos but unfortunately a lot of the photos weren't labeled real well and so it was some deduction going on about who's who traveler and uh Charlie and John were living on the beach between what's now Carlin Park and Jupiter Beach Park and at some point there was some disagreement between them and they had a

falling out and Charlie told John to get law you know hand over his share of the Charlie share of the money and get lost and if John just tried to blow the whole thing off uh thinking Charlie was just kind of being temperamental and Charlie threatened to shoot him if he didn't come up with his money in five minutes and the five minutes passed and so Charlie walked out there shot him dead Trapper was off tracking you know checking traps Charlie the sides no I just shot a guy I'm gonna go turn myself into the police of course there was no Jupiter Police Department back then so we had to drive down to West Palm

Beach he was arrested uh put on trial Trapper testified against his brother Trevor and trailer by the way had uh it was Vincent and Charlie uh had changed their last name from natalkowitz to Nelson as had several of their cousins uh something a little more easy to spell and pronounce for people they met so Charlie is convicted of murder sent to jail there's a story as he was you know being alone in the way in handcuffs to be sent to Rayford he you know threatened to come back and kill the judge and and trap her if he ever got out I haven't found any newspapers from the time period that actually verify that Trapper didn't

testify against his brother um that his brother was temperamental that some people who knew Trapper said that Trapper's side of the story beyond that was that he basically liked John a bit better than his brother and thought his brother was kind of bossy and was kind of tired of it all and it was sort of a mutual departure I had things not turned ugly like they did so Trapper goes back to New Jersey for a short time and by 1933 is back in the Jupiter area to stay I try and Jupiter properticulate slightly over the Martin County Line um he goes up the Loxahatchee River as far as you can reasonably get by a boat

uh you can canoe farther but not really on anything with a motor he sets up camp there and is an issue living in some Palmetto shafts still trappy but he becomes a tourists can't quickly becomes a tourist attraction here's some early shots with some Gators he did not he quit trapping Gators early on he was told by John and best of the boys that those gators in the river were going to be a much bigger tourist attraction than he could ever make money from selling their main skins and he took that advice John and Bessie lived in what's now the boys park in Jupiter was originally a privately owned Park uh John and Bessie ran

it I uh hand over your hand over a coin on the weekends to get into you know picnic and use the beach uh Bessie had a little restaurant there uh John and Bessie were pioneers of Jupiter and uh would be instrumental in preserving some of the local history if you're not familiar with them here's all the other shots foreign things to tourists for example even people kind of growth or tortoise and you could buy a gopher tortoises from other one as a pet horse cracker was hungry he could go out there and have dinner suck on Fresh on the hill power as they called it the 1930s Hoover chickens there's a lot of early he's

been well fed tracker's appetite quickly became legendary uh not just from that but possibly a Pocketful jail story uh another time he went down to besties and restaurants to get to dinner and after dinner Bessie brings out a pie and there's another person there for dinner and nice cuts a little slice for the gentleman who's there and Trapper takes the entire rest of the pie later on there's a story of the newspaper when tractors in the Army and they said uh Corporal Nelson clearly wasn't today he people who would visit Scrappers can't who were well advised to bring a little extra for him it became a popular thing out not just for visitors locally uh

people coming up from both from Palm Beach or Jupiter Island but also just local kids with nothing better than doing there was Noble model to hang out on so you come up spend the day at Travel take a mixed with both with the alligators uh so Senior Skip days from Jupiter School were sometimes sent out here nice old-fashioned partner in the background tracker forces a big hulking fellow as we can I think there's nothing okay so tracker of course is very imposing figure someone would quickly had the idea that this guy would probably be the great boss amateur boss or perhaps but it was uh to Boston circuit in West Palm Beach Japan so some

people scheduled an image about him and tractor training beating up sandbags and running through the woods and Trapper had a amateur fight was it was this a start of the card it was just on the undercard and it was knocked out in the first round fluke we found out of this guy he faced while he was an amateur he had a lot of amateur fights he just clearly far too experiences for Trappers first fight let's let's find you know a true and a true no of no fighting experience whatsoever grab this guy from Cody have another undercard match a few weeks later traffic gets knocked down the first round as as you can save track

of him last job there's a particular story that is his opponent was a guy named uh tiger law which looking in the newspaper which turns out the microphone did not was not a boxer who faced Trapper he was a contemporary of trappers who was actually an early professional wrestler I have a relative uh as well all right some more shots he was particularly fond of carrying around a big indigo snake on his shoulders and he he was a bit of a crasher he would like to very quietly walk up behind unsuspecting people special ladies pick up the snake put it on the shoulders uh more than one young man in Jupiter uh took a date

to Trappers and did not get a second date now some of it might think was they would they were losing the competition tracker for the ladies he was certainly popular with the ladies who who swooned over his uh for Marvel Z but uh according to a lot of people he was such a shy with the ladies of fairly low manners not he was talking about the ladies but not quite the ladies man that some people might imagine one of the things after his popularity this is the time period when Johnny Weissmuller was Starling starring in all the early Tarzan movies and traffic his rugged looks uh was a spitting image of Tarzan and so even

early on he was wearing animal synthes at the camp to really play it up tracker as I mentioned it was a smart guy not a lot of Selena but bright he was not a pumpkin he was very annoyed and if anybody treated him like a savage or a bumpkin he knew it was an act he knew it was pretty had no problem playing into that from the animals in a Direction and the Palmetto tractor someone who works some more plans targets anymore popular again like I said we got a little loggerhead turtle sold out here some of the popular you know ladies and it's a secret menu just to hang out somewhere in fun alligators

sometimes than the people were in the alligators foreign foreign burned down did not make it out so half the town including all the family is in going to the funeral and to spare these young kids having to go to their first funeral and that they take the kids up the river the Trappers so they have a happy memory of the day instead of a saddle tracker I haven't had a complicated relationship with his uh a lot of people thought he didn't really like them but he was friendly toward them uh he the kids never felt they were unwelcome he could be certain with people but I remember people said he was not the type of

person that ever yelled at anyone of course he was also kind of person that he didn't need to yell he sort of getting a certain look and I think you could understand you've done something wrong weren't going to do it again don't quite know why it was his wrist Advantage up there there is a story uh that God knows the Telly including by tracking himself I in 1937 a film crew from some documentary series or newspaper or news or something came and interviewed Trapper at his camp and he was demonstrating something with rattlesnakes and while this rattlesnake bit it in the thumb and Trapper tried to you know suck out the Venom shrug it off

but he became a little woozy and they ended up taking him to the hospital there was no no big deal um like to embellish the repellent of it that he you know the manly shop off at the end of the sun with an ax and just continued on other things that happened uh he also turned it into the video again I put up his sense of humor he would use this story as an instructional tool for uh talk you talk to like a group of Boy Scouts I need to explain about you know safety handling of animals and then we tell the story about you know getting bit in the thumb and having to chop

it off anything safe and so if a snake somewhere down low you know what to do this is a guy named Joe Farrell he was a runaway from Brooklyn New York a couple of times there we go Joker was an early leader from Brooklyn who somehow ended up in South Florida probably because at the time it was certainly the awesome of everything growing and he ended up living up the Trappers for the better part of the year uh felt he had cried within my brothers who helped him with all the the camp Shores and the tracking and just kind of enjoyed living in the wild um he would come back frequently to Jupiter to visit

trap room visit some of the local families that he felt had sort of adopted him as a part of their family there this of course the theater temperature if you went to Trappers you said I'd like to have a raccoon as a pet with blood cellular now unfortunately Joe is also a little Gateway into the end of the the negative side of traffic um no nobody in history is a saint so Joe later in the 50s after he's had a career in the Navy he gets out he comes back to visit Trapper and he mentions that his brother got married and all the Trapper's like oh booty Mary oh he married a Japanese woman oh

oh you you own that property next to me your brother dies and you if you if you die your murder inherits the property and he dies and his wife inherits the property and they come Japanese neighbor and I wouldn't want that and so according to Joe that's when the Trapper basically broke off their friendship over that there's a little bit you'll notice zombies photos while the photos are all in black and white the faces are only in white uh a lot of people and residence of the limestone Creek community and Jupiter will tell you that if you were not white you were not all the crackers um I had some chat with his Fab with

some of the surviving family members I've got children but uh nephews nieces and nephews and so forth uh my cousins the some of the changes we didn't like in the world were along racial lines it's kind of sad and ironic and it's someone who saw his little father being mistreated as an immigrant would then himself be racist but you know at the same time it's not something unusual for the time water Trapper's good buddies was uh everyone called him Captain Frank in fact have you ever read the Loxahatchee woman you'll be very confused because half a dozen people will mention Captain Frank and no one will take the time to explain who the heck he

was his full name is Frank whiteleiner he was a bachelor uh owner he smoked despite on the regular race I have a question he was one of the first people to start taking people up every weekend to see Trapper as a tourist attraction and they were buddies they were both Bachelors other loved the outdoors um Captain Frank uh in the 50s or 60s got one cancer from his near constant smoking habit and uh it was a big emotional loss for traffic for one thing but also thought to be one of the things that sort of put tracker and a real negative mindset about cancer which will will come back in a little bit another one

of the shanties here going through the middle of the roofs instead of entirely being made out of Palmettos foreign right on the side here uh rope swing it was quite popular Trappers Boathouse which is still there today with his what became his several professor's pit helmet uh he started wearing the pit helmet sometime in the 1930s and it became just his preferred headgear that he was in more photos than not he had that thing on his head some more visitors again with the Fifth Element rolled around he was up to 215 uh later in life he would uh pack on a little bit more weight and go up to 240 but at this point it

was pretty much all muscle uh he would run and swim and just you know walk up and catch his tracks on a daily basis for exercise he chopped a cord of wood every day as exercise he had no shortage of firewood some of which is made from sold every day I think one of the policies was he would always go out he would check he would set his traps and he would always go out and check him every day he was not someone who wanted to leave animals suffering and crap bartender was a Humanity he just didn't just didn't want animals to suffer a needlessly uh also some of it was pragmatic if he's trying

to sell something for the the fur if the animal's stuck in the trash for a while his struggles it damages the first so it's better business as well uh powder was fond of going around Barefoot at Camp when he was going out to check the traps he usually did wear snake boots although he sliced he made a big slash on one side of the snakewood goose and so in one of his nephew was helping out one time it's like Trevor why are you waiting a big hole in the side of your boots he's like trust me you'll understand in a little while and so they're out there and their snake boots checking traps and after

a little while they're just you know it's the summer so they are just drenched in sweat and the the nephew realizes the slashes in the side of the snake boots all the sweat towards out otherwise you'd be walking around in a couple gallons of euros g Nelson um Trapper's only wife uh not a sexually a little happier loyalted marriage the story that's uncirculated for a long time is the Trapper married her thinking he could get out of being drafted for World War II looking at the recent a little more into the records it reveals that the story has actually been backwards what we always thought tracker was drafted on May 1st 1942 he married four

days later so probably what it was is he was like oh I could take care of your Camp while you're gone or something to that effect the Trapper was worried about stamp and uh that effective decision when they couldn't avoid any draft if he did try war on getting drafted he wasn't really a team uh ongoing Lucille uh besides she worked out at a place called the 19th Hole in Lake Parker was listed at number two out of three and a half I said three and a half not he's just numbered her last husband um she tried her tracker were divorced in 44. she remarried us to a third guy they divorced when she tried

to get remarried please she tried to marry the fourth guy it was in Florida and they said oh no you don't have a claim divorce uh and then she later tried to come back and when Trapper died and said oh uh I I should be getting some money as the wife like well you either married someone else because you thought you were divorced or you were committee you were committee or we have a problem here so the it was it was all those things that uh she was good at raising trouble we really don't know too much about Powers uh if they might say personal love life he had some girlfriends none of which as

far as we know got too close to being married married um someone actually just told me recent Hill they said that I think it was their their mother their grandmother uh Trapper was very sweet on but she wasn't willing to get married and come live at the camp so it never went too far this is some kind of the early 1940s we've built into cabins here that people associate with this Camp because they're still there today this was really at the point when he had enough money and uh enough confidence that he was going to be there long term to build one for himself and one as a guest cabinet uh this was right after

the Depression and Trapper had a steady source of income from the tourists coming in and selling selling animals to zoos selling skins and fur so you started buying up Delinquent Tax sale land if when during the Depression you couldn't pay your taxes after certain number of years the government would auction off your property and you could someone could buy that property if they would pay off all the bill input taxes that were owed and then met the tax sale taxes due for the next I think three years and then if that after that point you basically got land for dirt relatively dirt cheap so Trapper bought a lot of land around his Camp ended up

being hundreds of Acres by the end of the depression of World War II started upgrading against some of the buildings the Paul Palmetto Shacks were going away served in World War II he got as I mentioned he got drafted I went to the basis training and Camp Blanding up near Jacksonville then got sent to Keesler Air Force Base in Mississippi to be trained of all things as 88 Aviation somehow got some kind of leg injury there and somebody knew from Jupiter Island a guy named Joseph Reed Matt Marie's father he was in he was getting involved with the military uh on the civilian side and pulled some strings and got Trappers sent down to this

new place called Camp Murphy we know what today's job it was the southern signal core school where they're training people on the radar audience and uh Joseph Reed became a captain in the Army and it was in charge of kind of providing the the lifestyle stuff for the people stationed there made arranging from Jupiter Island the officers could live on homes on the island that they could use the Jupiter Island Club as an Officers Club they could bring at a ferry going to bring men back and forth from the island to use the beach like that so traffic gets assigned into Camp really it's a place you could do them those are good you know

it was a squishy job for him but it was also the place he could do the most good you're sticking with thousands of people in temporary buildings in the scrub of Florida you need to deal with all the snakes that are getting in there and the spiders and goodness knows what other problems they might have as well as doing just some basic security controls so pretty pretty good job for traffic for a couple years we don't know what they did during the last about nine months he was in the service after the camp closed down he was discharged from another single core Camp up in Missouri called Camp Crowder in 1945 and then came back

bought a couple Surplus army jeeps I think is one of those Jeeps will live enough coconuts always looking for good business opportunity he was traveling his garage and you build again with one of the Jeeps uh his brother-in-law here's another shot of Travis Scott football team wasn't so long again always for sure I I for the Lord we also operated the annual planes going through the Old Log sock page to the chain link which was also better for visitors they could come up and look in there and see the Bobcats and the alligators and sort of work also decrease the chances that somebody maybe you know brought up a few too many beers and they're

cooking at lunch and then you know he didn't want someone to fall in there with the alligators back for business we're visiting us some wobbles apparently so apparently like your final days make a dangerous provided us how to polish he had a little uh Little Penny soup he also had these things these are something called getting foul uh there are African relatives with chicken but they're bigger and noisier and me temper uh pepper kept a little flock of them around uh they doubled his security system it was hard to show up with his Camp unannounced without uh triggering the guinea fowl to just completely raised a rabbit later this is a lot of accessories on

a visit here's the inside of the cabinets out there he had a generator he had some uh Creature Comforts of hollow in the inside he did have some problems over the years renting them out uh over sometimes he knows laid back he has the most poker games with people from Palm Beach uh always play in the house good way to make money uh over time though people got a little more Rowdy sometimes partying a little too hard had some trouble uh became reluctant to rent things out rather than the close friends and family guiding Bruce Collier he and his mother started running a ferry service in the 40s between Palm Beach Island and West Palm

Beach and they also soon came up right earlier that we'd run a vegetable groups every weekend from Palm Beach up to Traverse and so that was a regular visitors all the way up there until traffic closed this camping nice boat yeah another shot of goddess of the book they use the Towery Cypress in the area if you've never been out there uh it's a nice trip up the river now uh but if you go up there or bed there think of how much how many mangroves line the way up there and then imagine if those were all cypresses instead because that's what it used to be because himself had his own business card anything you

could possibly want from Louis even kept the PO box so in 1960 Trapper has decided he decides to close his Camp uh he's had some issues with uh the facilities and people code compliance issues he built some bathrooms which are still in use today there were some issues with that there's some issues with the animal pins and what happened to the the waste when he puts them out a variety of problems just more more people coming up there being a little too difficult for him and he just decided you know it's not a little bit of trouble anymore I'm just going to close the camp and so one day he said that's it nobody's walking

on here anymore uh cutting down some logs across the Loxahatchee River to block anything but a really small canoe now it wasn't completely cut off from the outside world his family would still visit uh you could still go into town sometimes talk to some people he knew uh he wanted to see him you could make arrangements like you'd send him a postcard he'd agree to meet you but he started going around he had a never present double barrel shotgun with him if you showed up with his gate unannounced Trapper would show up very shortly thereafter with a shotgun at the ready um no evidence that he ever actually shot any Intruders with it but I'm

certainly pointed at quite a few of them a couple of people he became kind of rough and unfriendly poor people that were just merely acquaintances or complete strangers it was so you know decently friendly with the people he'd known for a long time that he was still close to they still like River's Edge subdivision up off of Waxahachie River Road this is the little bridge that used to be able to drive up the block side to River Road all the way to Trapper's Camp uh it was a dirt road some of the locals with the trucks got the bright idea that people got stuck in that sand quite a bit when they go up there

on the weekend so if you had a good truck you just hang out there for on Saturday or Sunday but eventually someone gets stuck and then they pay you to throw them out flowers there's a scrapper in his later years he's put on some weight quite not quite the Tarzan anymore very very excited with a beard he was almost always some shade the sword I have enough on this photo in 1959 Jupiter celebrated a centennial not a centennial of the Town itself but of the White House that were off by a year and then stop everyone was all the men in town are required to throw beers and if you didn't grow beard you would

be sort of punished by a mop kangaroo court they do various things like you know putting in the putting in the stocks uh they did that at Perry Cove in the colony he of course was cleaning for his TV show he comes home uh they show up at his house to arrest him uh Perry was just warned about the whole thing and closed for photos they let them take a minute to get punished everyone I had very little when I was uh this is the last known photo of cracker Nelson alive this is his niece or rings I guess he's reclining on a bench here under his uh big camping people call it it she

was more like a large corrugated roof uh picnic shelter the scouts would stay up there in the Loft for example a lot of open shading space underneath this is taking about six or eight months uh before he died in the summer of 1968 but July Late July look at the exact date Trapper was had an appointment to meet with an old friend who was it was on the way he was down visiting in Florida went to see Trapper had made an appointment with him and then Trapper doesn't show up in town to pick the guy up and John Dubois goes well that's very odd you know Trapper's Prodigy these days but he never misses appointments

with anybody so John being one of the only people that was still on really close with traffic besides his family and we actually had a key to his gate drives up to check on Trapper especially because he knew you know I wasn't feeling too well hopefully nothing's wrong goes up there and well something's very wrong crapper is face down dead underneath this picnic shelter uh genre has to drive you half the time rapper doesn't have a phone call from the boys Park Trapper lived over the county line so he's got to call the Martin County Sheriff's Department Martin County Sheriff's Department comes back and go investigate the scene here you're recording when I first did

this presentation on request back in July I read among my research was reading the entire 90 page foreigners report on this whole thing so a lot of interesting reading tracker was found they sound on the ground arms underneath of them is ever press's double barrel shotgun was lying behind him with the butt of the gun either just under his ankle or just behind his ankle the uh depending on who you hear they'll remember quite the same uh he had one bullet right about here and the chest we did um almost straight in did it come out uh Nick the lone Nick the rib uh more importantly Nick clipped his heart and so probably killed him

pretty quickly the ruling was suicide uh there was people there are people with this data dispute.org uh let me lay out sort of the the different evidence of of possibilities number one is people that are able to a lot of people want to believe that it was murdered uh her I think it's just because you don't want to imagine someone like trapper dying of anything other than some he was a grand Larger than Life figure probably you know the the largest living legend figure literally and figuratively in Jupiter history you don't want to imagine someone like that dying you know quietly in a bed or or offing themselves do you want to imagine you know

a grand person like that going on in a grand wedding um obvious choices people want to latch on to was his brother Charlie Charlie is out of prison and back for Revenge Charlie's been out of prison for 17 years nobody knew his whereabouts we still don't know him to this day what happened to Charlie Nelson it's not a name that's easy to track down if you Charlie no middle name Nelson um somewhere out there if you want if you want to be an energy detective that's a great lead to pursue but he's been out of prison for 17 years there was Trapper was not a hard person to find there's no reason to wait more

importantly Charlie was about 70 at the time when the spamming had last seen as they described him as a broken down old man who had been beaten in prison the Florida State Penitentiary back then was not a place you wanted to be that was often pretty brutal so Charlie has a motive but the other than that is not really things seem to add up um another example people want to connect it to uh the murder of Judge chilemore for those of you who don't know the story judge schillingworth was a judge of Palm Beach County and he found out that another one of the judges of Palm Beach County Judge Peel was just completely corrupt

he was going to have Judd appeal of this bar but he made the mistake to tell the judge Keel he was going to be this far well Joe the people was such a perfect guy who said I'm going to hire two guys to kill just chilling worth and then I won't get this Barn so chilling where he disappears uh and some years later someone gets drunk in a bar and blabs a little too much they were the guy who off judge Kelly North and it turns out that peel hired two guys who could not judge schillingworth and his wife took him out of the boat and uh let them take a long swim with cement

shoes the connection of Trapper is the Trapper and Chillingworth knew each other they sometimes played poker together and they both were involved in acquiring land in the 30s up along the Loxahatchee River that's about it uh they died 13 years apart uh there's no evidence that tracker knew peel or had was any way involved in the case that didn't stop someone recently from writing a fiction book in which tracker appears as a character and having that to be involved in the story but uh it's a good story that doesn't work that out uh some people once it was it was a jealous lover someone found out that a lady was cheating on her husband with

Trapper and nods oh again it's you know we saw a photo of the crap it looked like in the later years if someone was gonna cheat up with Trapper uh and and make some of their husband very jealous it would have happened I think probably about a decade or two prior um so I can't rule out completely but it's not a real strong argument uh Trapper had problems with various local Hooligans there's a few families who had very unruly all their children were very unruly uh and vicious and Bullies uh in the Jupiter area at the time and some of them harassed Trapper and influences of people giving a hard time but that's the kind

of thing where you don't if you're trying if you go and you murder Trapper Nelson to prove you're a tough guy what what good does this do if nobody knows it nobody nobody's ever at all Johnny boy that guy was always he told me over 12 Beers that he was the guy off to everyone else there's I haven't heard any any kind of story like that so again it's it's a it's a fine Theory but there's no meat behind it um the best if you want to watch one kind of conspiracy theory about the murder uh real estate is probably the best option tracker had a bunch of real estate uh he'd had some Financial

issues that led him to get a he ended up with a predatory load on some money that he had to sell off real estate he had it but later became part of Tequesta was developed for a couple subdivisions there really didn't much care for the bankers after that one and you know there's people who various Whisperers about people who coveted Trapper's land uh or they were involved eventually happen with Trapper's plan being swapped for another development that I'll explain in a moment uh there's some kind of realisticulated conspiracy that you know they didn't want to track his land to become part of the state park or they wanted to be swapped some other land uh

again it's a fine Theory I've heard a few people name names uh like who they think done it um but again it's all circumstantial uh without any real evidence to back it up rather than well they had a motive um the other thing is even though Trapper wasn't too well these days uh at the time of his death he had he had been in um he'd been using a catheter for a couple months he'd been very sick he told people he was concerned he had cancer which because of people he knew who like Captain Frank would die from cancer he was very uh negative about that he didn't want people to cut it he didn't

want doctors to cut into him uh didn't trust doctors very much so you know not doing well so that you know obviously that brings us to the suicide option the explanation that they was put forward by the deputies Trapper took put the butt of the gun on the ground lean forward a bit we need to get against them and reach down and pull the trigger he was shot definitely by his own gun it was not uh shocked it was a slug that was he was used in the gun it was a slug that the Trapper had purchased himself so they you know it fit for that uh someone said oh this is this is an

odd way to shoot yourself but uh the deputy said you know I'm 5 11 in in the way I described it I could off myself with this gun Trapper was six two and had one arms he could definitely have you know physically done it uh there's the argument that uh some people once they travel was not the kind of person to offer themselves on the other hand there's other people who will give the exact opposite of saying Trapper did not want to be a burden on anybody Trapper lived by himself Trapper was had said that if he couldn't take care of himself and live the way he wanted that he would in his life um

what the his grand niece this picture in this photo as as she put it when we heard about Trapper's death we were sad but we weren't surprised uh it's an unfortunate thing and but it's not a reasonable uh there's also it's one of our kind of arguments have been put forward is while Trapper was almost worked out this deal with the state uh to have his land taken become as far as the state park and get some money uh he would be set for life he'd have a home estate uh you know why would someone who's about to be set kill themselves well sometimes just the the stress of the changes um you know even

if it seems to be changes for good is what does seem to push some people over the edge uh there's also a matter that regardless of what Trapper might be set financially for life with any deal he worked out with the state which had not been finalized at the time of his death uh the problem is the world had changed a lot about travel and I don't just mean the wider World technology or things like that I'm in Jupiter itself oh we're taking a nap here so Jupiter has changed a lot from time travel we've been there a few decades earlier uh By the time by the 1960s when they roll around you have Patton

with me out west you have instead of a one-lane gravel road to get to uh Indian Townsend Jupiter you have a paved Road and you have the Beeline Highway you have Jupiter is a suddenly growing Town they're they're closing up all these agricultural lands and building subdivisions there a lot of things are changing in the world around Trapper as Jupiter's growing and you know it wasn't really you know his family said that sometimes he just wanted to maybe sell off everything and go out west somewhere that was still remote and you know go back the way the way it used to the world it used to be for him um I think he wasn't real

happy with how some of the things had changed so that factors into it one of the uh of course there's the the third Theory which has been put forth by several people who knew Trapper uh several Rangers who worked in the park and that is simply it was his accident Trapper is feel is not feeling well he's medicated he's paranoid he's sleeping out in the in the Summer where it's a little cooler than in his cabin with a gun uh something happens in the night he hears a noise at startles him awake he you know stumbles out of the the hammock he was sleeping in fumbles for his gun gun goes off accidentally could be

uh fits a lot of the things and Dennis I'm a lot more upbeat notes there are a ranger didn't want to put forth a horse Theory which I think is an interesting theory in its own right after all these years one of those raccoons finally had his revenge uh the problem was is so he had three at three uh none of whom were really in the states to live on it uh none of them could really afford to pay taxes on it uh with a growing real estate in the area but there were some people who uh ironically Developers they were surprising they were not interested in traffic property nowadays people would give up a

chance to develop waterfront property in the Loxahatchee River but instead of that they wanted no no we want the south east corner Jonathan Dickinson State Park we think it would be a great place for a golf course so the state could not legally sell off part of a state park but the state could illegally do a land swap so how it worked out these developers bought Trappers 800 some Acres from on the south side of the Loxahatchee River from this heiress they then swapped 800 acres there for about 350 Acres that's now Jupiter Hills Country Club which is originally part of the State Park uh which at the time was valued the same amount of

money uh by by the property appraiser and that money that they swapped that for the state park and that's how the state park got the South Bank in the Loxahatchee River and can preserve it from being developed and by acquiring that land to the state park uh it helped persuade John D MacArthur to later sell the rest of the upriver part of the Northwest Fork to the South Florida Water Management District instead of developing like he'd originally wanted to and as a result we now have in 1985 the wild National wild designation for the Waxahachie river which wouldn't have happened if it had been sold off and developed all right so I mentioned Trapper had

a large flock of not only shootings and getting foul and I'm not kidding about a large floor here uh here's how close in the camp could be found if you've visited you see it's much more open today one of the problems of the crime scene uh there's some of the stories that circulate you might read an articles oh traffic only been thought to be dead for a couple days according to the coroner's uh the quarter support as much as two weeks they could narrow it down to five or seven days simply because someone had seen them alive at recently uh the body was in such a terrible state from being you know in the summer

heat uh out there in the open that they had to do the autopsy and Martin Memorial Hospital Outdoors because of the smell it was it was really nasty uh to make matters worse all these pens pad they didn't know what it is but when the magic showed up they knew much to served and so the guinea foul the chickens have been all over the body just completely ruined the crime scene by the time the police were there so that's one of the reasons it's hard to tell really what happened some some people have great suspicions oh they couldn't get any prints off the Trapper's gun again with all the disturbance from the birds and lying

out in the in the summer in Florida for five days I asked a friend of mine who worked in crime scene investigation for a number of years it's not that surprising so Trevor's Champion was found that cabins were locked he did have some loaded guns inside it uh but things were not initially we were initially in good shape but as we're got out the Trapper was dead the poachers moved in the vandals moved in uh people showed up going I bet Trapper's got a hairy treasure around here so they dug off the camp uh they did have a section of this pineapple patch we had a Simon says warning landmines uh he wasn't entirely kidding

he didn't have actual land mines but he just have a few conveniently placed bear traps next episode uh a lot of sudden we just you know we don't know you know our destruction we read a lot of those magazines and newspapers so you know it's lifetime subscription to the Wall Street Journal the Seattle play as soon as soon as we lost in there probably a lot of his personal correspondence that would have been really helpful to have um he had three roles that were all sold or sunk uh one of his Jeeps was destroyed the garage was burned down I could go to trash today there was one of the Jeeps on display it's only

there because it was in the garage and in Jupiter getting worked on him to death fortunately the cabinet survived on the safe was able to get in there and start doing law enforcement and save anything else for me sorry so this is a rough this is what happens when you draw a massive tank this is a practically tracker property here probably hold it up here as well this is what added substantially to Jonathan Dickinson State Park uh you can get on the property over here that has sold in the 60s and then Jupiter Hills Country Club is over here between the railroad and US-1 uh that that's the last Community there before you get to

the state park if you're driving north from Questa and then this red line is the Loxahatchee River you can have if you're if you're uh up work it's a bit of a long look where you're seeing paddle down in Washington River here and the river still to say widens other Preppers uh alternatively you can put in your own boat with kayak work like the tide and the water levels wire you can go to the state park and they have a fairly they'll pick you up a little river cruise sausage Ranger will give you a tour of the site if you've never done it here's a modern photo of tracker scam of the cabinets under the

sword uh it's water his water pump back in the 1980s they were doing some repairs on one of his fireplaces and lo and behold they found a little soft spot in the some of the putty and they found a box of points that it was Trapper's little piggy bank hundreds of coins were thousands of dollars these accumulated over a very long period of time collecting is a little Mission fee to go to a sandwich family who have done a lot over the years to share tracker's memory both their experiences at the camp and him as a person and quite a lot of photos Jim Snyder wrote life and death in the Loxahatchee the revised Edition

is good reading uh really the best thing in print on Trapper's life Billard Frank one uh Franklin from his personal reminiscency shared Bill one was the leading advocate for the preservation of the Loxahatchee River there goes that foreign I'm up here uh thanks to the Historical Society there's some information in the back about our Historical Society membership things like that also a handout with my presentations coming up there'll be 10 of them this is the only one up here in Stuart but if you're willing to travel a little farther south uh to more of them between now and April uh like the Stuart Heritage Museum we do have volunteers down there that help us with

events and the museum and the daily visitors to the lighthouse if interested in that sort of thing but I'm happy here at the end to open up to questions people who if anybody is alive that met that's here tonight the Met Trapper and any questions you might have oh why this what about other 56 I think and he was wearing a pith helmet and khaki shorts that was it though oh we we went in my car from Jupiter it was a dirt road in there saying Trail and um he was just standing around there nothing nothing exciting sort of like Tarzan or something about it movies one of one of the My Favorite Things I

ever had someone tell me what they're impression of Scrapper uh guy said Trapper had the largest hands of any man I've ever met in my life report did they ever say what he physically was wrong with him that he was sick they did not according to his report they said they did not find any evidence of the widespread cancer although given the state of some of his organs it would have been hard to tell it's one of those things that will he may not have had cancer quite possibly but uh the fact that he thought he had cancer was the most important thing that's that's the important thing to remember with history you have you

have two lines of thought in history there's what happened and what people thought happened and how that shaped their decision making sometimes people made very important decisions some unfortunately sometimes fatal decisions based on incorrect beliefs or bad information they were working off of I did have more than a few interactions with traffic Nelson I was a teenager at the time and our swimming coach to take us up there by car on weekends from West Palm and uh I think what I would describe him as he was a recluse that didn't like to be alone he didn't interact with us a lot but he'd like to watch what we were doing and uh I noticed you

didn't have a picture of one of the things that stood out in my mind when you pulled in the area there where you could park at his place he had an eight by four sheet of plywood and painted on the plywood very succinctly it said I'm not responsible for anything that happens to you and I could understand why he loves you pretty well running around all over the place but he hadn't cleaned out any of the poison ivy or poison oak it was where it was supposed to be and if you were dumb enough to get into it it's baby it's it lets you get up on the roof of The Boathouse slide down right

down into the river uh the swing of course was there and I mean he pre-rolled that kids just go big kids but he didn't pursue any responsibility thank you I definitely the impression of the Trapper who around there needs something wrong yeah you should have done that I I knew of people you talk about someone who didn't white people but didn't want to be alone I know some people like that who you might describe it they're introverts but they like people watching so maybe Trapper was one of those out in his cabins because it was such a room have you saw any evidence of that in any thing that you've read or seen about him

any evidence of Mafia connections or Mafia at the same through this Camp uh I think this is the first I've heard of it and usually when I hear about the mafia in Jupiter it's people claiming that uh Al Capone hid out in Jupiter Farms in the 20s during prohibition um it's certainly the kind of story that gets a lot of legs and runs uh but I've never seen anything to substantiate a connection with Al Capone and the Jupiter Farms or with the Chicago Mafia and Trappers so I'm I'm not saying it didn't happen I'm saying I have never seen any evidence one way or the other anybody else all right well thank you everybody for

coming foreign