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Best-hated prisoner at Fort Jefferson among the Northern officers in command was Dr. Mudd. Made a hospital orderly, he endured for a few weeks the knowledge of his innocence, of his family's ruin and disgrace, the contempt of his Negro guards. Then he tried to escape. After that he put in twelve hours per day at hard labor under a broiling sun, his legs weighted with heavy irons. The other twelve hours he spent chained hand & foot in a small, solitary dungeon, wet, hot, swarming with mosquitoes and vermin. His legs and arms swelled up and his hair fell out.
In August 1867 a soldier came down with yellow fever. In a few days the fort was a raging pesthouse, isolated from the world. Gunboats were ordered away, ships were afraid to stop. When the fort physician died Dr. Mudd volunteered his services. Day & night in a hospital where the thermometer stood at 104 he worked heroically among delirious, vomiting patients. Men died by the score and were hastily dumped on nearby Bird Key. "No more respect is shown the dead," wrote Dr. Mudd, "than to the putrid remains of a dead dog."
When the epidemic was over, grateful survivors addressed to President Andrew Johnson a fervent petition for Dr. Mudd's release. It never reached the White House. A new commanding officer sent the physician back to his dungeon, chains and labor. There he stayed until the spring of 1869 when President Johnson finally released him. Health broken and still suspect among his neighbors, Dr. Mudd tried for 14 years without success to win back his old life. In 1883, aged 50, he went out on a stormy night to attend a patient, caught pneumonia, quickly died.
On the Dry Tortugas there now lives permanently only the lighthouse crew at Loggerhead Key. The Carnegie Marine Biological Station on Loggerhead is occupied about three months of the year. During bird-breeding season a keeper or two go out to Bird Key. Fort Jefferson is a deserted ruin. The Navy took it over during the Spanish-American War, spent $800,000 on a coaling station and other improvements, abandoned it. Since then Cuban and U. S. fishermen have carried away everything of value. The moat and some of the brickwork are intact but the rest is a shambles of stripped roofs, crumbled walls, tangled beams and ironwork, Carved and scribbled everywhere are visitors' names, initials, wisecracks. This appalling ruin, a fortress which never traded shots with a single enemy, President Roosevelt last week declared a National Monument.* It was at once suggested that the monument might appropriately be left in its present state, renamed Fort Mudd.
* The National Park Service employs 93 persons to attend 67 National monuments from California's Death Valley to Washington's birthplace in Virginia.