In 1919 John Kunkel Small, curator of the New York Botanical Garden, traveled to Florida on a cactus-hunting expedition. It was not the first time he had ventured to this state; he had come here as early as 1901 and then several times thereafter. On his 1919 journey, he was able to note changes to the natural environment that had occurred since his previous trips.

On a journey from Jupiter to Okeechobee City via the Seminole War era "Fort Bassinger Trail," he arrived at the shore of the Big Lake and was surprised at the changes:

. . . . When part way through the timber we could look beyond the cut into space, and a little further on a vast sheet of water appeared. It was Lake Okeechobee! We drove out onto a beach which only a few years ago was the bottom of the lake. More than that, we were soon actually driving over the very course we had sailed over five years previously, in a forty-five foot cruiser!

How much everything had changed since that time! Instead of a natural beach close to a primeval hammock, we found several hundred yards of exposed new weed-clothed lake bottom, down from the old beach line; and as for the hammock, it was wrecked. Fire had been in it, perhaps more than once; and, in many places, instead of the once magnificance verdure, one saw only dead giant cypress trees, standing desolate, or prone in the wholly or partly burned humus where once had thrived an almost impenetrable mass of ferns and other herbaceous plants.

Small later wrote a book, From Eden to Sahara - Florida's Tragedy, that would document the destruction of Florida's natural environment.

(excerpt from John K. Small, Old Trails and New Discoveries, pp.31-32.)