A swampy wilderness awaited two familes near the big lake in South Florida. Their lives came together, carving a livelihood on its shores, and in these pages you can relive the kindness, brutality, and swamp-clearing adventures involving steamboats, huge tractors, secret places, catfishing, and undying devotion to a land--muckland--whose soil would grow winter vegetables and sugarcane crops to feed a world far beyond those wetlands near Lake Okeechobee.