Frolicking Bears, Wet Vultures, and Other Oddities: A New York City Journalist in Nineteenth-Century Florida

Milanich, Jerald T. Frolicking Bears, Wet Vultures, and Other Oddities: A New York City Journalist in Nineteenth-Century Florida. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2005. 285 pp. $24.95

Amos Jay Cummings, the author of the twenty pieces collected in this volume, roamed the nation and the newspaper world of the late nineteenth century. His name and reputation faded with his passing until a Florida archeologist was sent a copy of a clipping of one of his stories. The topic was Turtle Mound, a monster collection of shells that takes on near mountain status in the Florida flatness, written by Cummings for the New York Weekly Sun in 1873. The mound is still south of New Smyrna Beach.

Jerald Milanich, a staff member at the Florida Museum of Natural History and author of several books on Florida's native American culture, was hooked. The author of the piece was not named, and Milanch was intrigued enough to track him down and resurrect...