The Ashley Gang - Untold Heroes or Villains ?
John was not the type of Folk Hero that they wanted inspiring people. He fully believed that all people were important, in fact so much that he went to war against the KKK for it.
Introduction : When you think of the word “Hero” the idea of a Pirate, or a Moonshiner is not exactly the first thing that pops into your mind, am I right? The story you are about to read will do more than just change your mind about that, it might also inspire you. He started out humble and unassuming, he was literally a just a small time construction worker doing labor for his father's construction company and living in a shack. Trapping, and trading furs also for a bit of extra money. After his family felt attacked by the local Sheriff, he changed things and quickly became one of the wealthiest, and most influential figures of his time, and he started doing it all trying to topple the KKK and their loyal self appointed local Sheriffs.
Chapter 1 : Building “Them” Homes
The Ashley families construction company was growing. John and his brother were going to keep it going and had intent on growing their dad's business, they already had a good reputation in the town. Their names had begun to become respected amongst the people, and to John that felt great. He knew better than anyone what it felt like to be poor and unknown as a kid, but as he became a young man he got to see his father's hard work paying off. When he and his brother pitched in and started working, the company really began to take off. John was a big dreamer though, and had a fur trapping gig going on the side. Things went great for them for the next few years. They had eventually even gotten to the point where the single, all family, work crew they were running needed to grow even more, so they hired on a few more workers. After one of the new guys had been working with them for a while, the Ashley Family would try to help them by building a new home for them. They built several small communities after a year or so of doing this.
It was the kind act of helping his best employees build their homes that actually started a war with the local Sheriff. You see, some of the workers were black folks, and when the sheriff found out he let them know exactly how he felt about it. He came through their neighborhood one day with the entire Sheriffs department just to let John’s dad know that he was made aware that Joe Ashley had been creating permanent homes for colored folks in his county, and he wanted it to stop right now. So, because of this John’s father decided to do something brave. He didn't like being threatened, especially by the racist Sheriff. So just to send him a message that he understood, John’s dad helped build 8 more homes, and then a church for the hard working guys on his crew. This is when the Sheriff stepped way outside of the law, and he decided to get his point across in a much different way, with a cold blooded murder.
He had just about enough of the Ashley family, and their sympathetic antics. This wasn't going to continue in Palm Beach, not in his watch. His donors and supporters were powerful local business men, farmers, and land owners, and the sheriff knew that if he didn't make them happy, he was certainly not going to be reelected. Hell if he had decided to side with the Ashley family, after “they” had put him in the sheriffs office, they would have certainly tortured and killed him. One night later he went and gathered up a few of the guys, they put their pointy hoods on and decided to burn down a few of those new houses, but they did it with the residents still sleeping inside of them. Then he also had them burn down the church, just in case burning a few families alive wasn't a strong enough message. The Ashley’s woke up the next morning to the surviving families from that little community knocking on their doors. They were bloody, sweaty and covered in ashes, and some of them were severely burned. Being so far outside of the city, and all of the little surrounding towns they would have never seen the flames, or heard the screams of the people being burned alive. The news paper didn’t exactly have great coverage for Klan lynching. This meant that the majority of the people in town would not even know that all of this happened. The next day it struck them as odd when so many of the town folk rode there on their horse buggies, and carriages. They rode miles out of their way, and down a rough road into the woods to get to this village just to see what happened, just to turn around and ride away. They heard him loud and clear, and his goons, but the response that the Sheriff and his sheep got, was not the one that they expected.
The Ashley family needed more money if they were going to start a war with the corrupt sheriff. This is when they branched out into the highly profitable moonshining business. That may have been enough for the Ashley's funding a few small battles, at first. John knew however that the Sheriff was being financially backed by several of the local business owners. They couldn't exactly take the taxpayer funds to use against the Ashley's. So John figured he could use that to his advantage and decided to knock out two birds with one stone. He started robbing all of the banks that these guys kept their money in. This caused the sheriff's backers some huge losses, and made them take another bold step.
They were going to try to steal their money back.
Chapter 2: The Game Changes.
The Sheriff knew that rumors were getting spread among the members of the community, his financial backers and friends may be Klan members, but most of the general citizens did not exactly approve of them. The Sheriff was in a pickle, if they found out for sure that he was affiliated, his career would be shortened drastically. Plus he had to make sure this didn’t get any more bloody because he really couldn’t afford for the National Press rags to get ahold of this. He could see the headlines now “New York Times : Klan member Sheriff Burns four families alive” His life would be over, this had to be settled in a different way. He had to operate with the badge from here forward, and not the hood. He would have to use the publics opinion. To do this he would use the local media to his advantage, he had made plenty of radio and newspaper connections since coming into office.
He had the perfect idea to start the ball rolling, John Ashley had just been investigated before this Klan violence had all blown up for the death of Desoto Tiger. He was a Native American that had worked with John fur trapping and trading. They still weren’t sure what really happened, but they knew it was a dispute over money, they had decided at that time however that John had done it in self defense. The Sheriff was going to have the prosecutor change his mind, and it should be fairly easy to do considering he caught the prosecutor screwing his kid’s Nanny while his wife was out of town a few months back. He had leverage over quite a few people, and it was about time that he finally used some of it. So he got a warrant, and started a media campaign.
The Ashley’s were just getting their plan together to hit the Sheriff where it really hurt, in his bank account and support base. What they didn’t see coming was John getting picked up on a warrant for the murder of Desoto Tiger. He had already been shown to have done it in self defense, but that didn’t matter. The really messed up part was that the Ashley family still had to pay off the deputies at the time regardless of them knowing that Desoto attacked John. They were just 24 hours from kicking off a plan to expose the sheriff’s extortion, corruption, and his racist support base all at once. Now they had to stop and put that off, they had to figure out some type of plan on breaking John out of jail instead. Once they get him broken out they can pick that other plan right back up, in fact they had to now even more. Who knows what kind of dirty tricks the damned sheriff would try next. .
To Be Continued………..
Being involved in Boot legging operations, Robbing Banks, and Piracy, gave the press plenty to show the public, but he was doing it all just to steal power from the Sheriff, and the KKK. This was not how John Ashley wanted to live his life. At the current moment however, it appeared that the rotten racist Sheriff was leaving him no choice.
Stay Tuned…
This Is simply Part 1 of A Very Large Future Project That I am Working On. The Ashley Gang had a lot of History on the Treasure Coast of Florida, and inland toward Okeechobee, and Palm City. There is 14 years worth of story to tell here, and this first portion hardly covers the first year.
John Ashley was a Real Life Robin Hood style Folk Hero in a more modern day, in more ways than one. He battled a Tyrannical figure that was also a Sheriff, and the money he stole was primarily from Klan affiliated banks. The money that he gained from banks was a minor fraction of the vast fortune he had acquired by the time of his death. Though that was mostly made from profit made Moonshining, and eventually even Piracy. Like Robin Hood he also gave large sums of money to multiple impoverished communities in the area.
There is still approx. $100,000,000.⁰⁰ in Gold and Silver coins missing throughout the area, allegedly buried. Only a handful of coins have ever been found because people are clearly looking in all the wrong places.