Be grateful for OSHA

Next time you grumble about work, remember: At least you're not guarding the dead of the Tocobagan Indians.

By Christina Rexrode, Times Staff Writer
Published October 7, 2007

Next time you grumble about work, remember: At least you're not guarding the dead of the Tocobagan Indians.

You may be underpaid, understimulated or overstressed, but workers in ye olden days of Tampa Bay had it so much worse.

We asked local scholars to name the most misery-inducing jobs in bay area history. And we came up with such a long list, it was hard to choose just three.

The graveyard shift - seriously

In the early 1500s, Juan Ortiz was a young explorer from Spain who suffered a serious career setback when he was captured by unfriendly Tocobagan Indians. The Tocobagas, who lived on what is now Weedon Island, assigned Ortiz to fight off the wild animals that came each night to sniff around their cemetery, where bodies were placed in boxes above the ground.

The Tocobagas killed Ortiz's companions. Then their chief, ever the motivational employer, told Ortiz that if he lost any bodies, he'd be roasted alive.

"His only alternative was to be put to death," said Tim Reeser, owner of Ghost Tour in St. Petersburg. "So I guess he would take that job."

Soldiers of misfortune

In 1824, a few years after the United States acquired Florida from Spain, the U.S. military established Fort Brooke in what is now Tampa.

The fort was meant to pave the way for surveyors and settlers to come to the new Florida frontier.

It was an especially wretched assignment for many reasons, utter boredom among them. Except for a few distractions, like the Dade Massacre in 1835, the soldiers had almost nothing to do but practice marching. There were few settlers in the surrounding area, even fewer women, and no real entertainment.

Add heat, bugs and deadly diseases like yellow fever, typhoid and malaria, and it's easy to understand why lots of Fort Brooke soldiers went AWOL, said Alex de Quesada, a Tampa resident and the author of numerous books on Florida history.

The soldiers' heavy wool uniforms didn't help matters. "The people up in Washington," observed de Quesada, "didn't know exactly what life down here was like."

Prison might have been better

A day's work at a turpentine camp was long, dirty and backbreaking: Workers slashed trees to drain their sap, climbed the trees to scrape off the sap and then gathered wood to build fires to boil down the sap.

Plenty of contemporary jobs were equally excruciating, points out Gary Mormino, a professor of Florida studies at the University of South Florida St. Petersburg. The real problem about turpentine camps, he said, was that a lot of the workers were worked to death.

The camps were isolated in rural areas, workers were separated from their families and beholden to the company store, and the food was terrible and the sleeping quarters primitive.

Turpentine camps were such horrible places to work, they had to lease convicts from the state prisons in order to find enough laborers. Even the workers who weren't convicts probably felt like they were in prison: The camps routinely posted guards to make sure that no one tried to skip out of work early.

The best of the worst: the runners-up

This list was compiled with help from Alex de Quesada, a Tampa resident and historian; Gary Mormino, a professor of Florida studies at USF St. Petersburg and James M. Denham, director of the Center for Florida History at Florida Southern College. Having one of these jobs was probably better than being worked to death in a turpentine mill. But that's not really saying much.

Prostitute

Street cleaner

Tobacco worker

Butcher

Chimney sweep

Railroad worker

Sugar mill worker

Sawmill worker

Phosphate mines worker

Merchant seaman

Commercial fisherman

Taxidermist

Slave

Charcoal burner

Sanitation worker

[Last modified October 5, 2007, 23:06:14]