Gamble's Run is based on a short story I wrote years ago called The Slave Canal, which in turn is based on a real placed called, surprisingly, the Slave Canal.  Hidden away in central Florida, the canal was the brain child of a wealthy plantation owner named John Gamble.  Gamble was a part of a loose consortium of landowners and businessmen who needed a faster way to get their cotton to the Gulf of Mexico.  Poor roads made transportation difficult and often impossible.  The Wacissia, the nearest river, had a bad habit of disappearing underground for several miles at a stretch.  It ended in a maze like swamp that the locals called, charmingly enough, The Warriors.

     Gamble commissioned the canal in 1831.  The plan was to link the Wacissia with the Aucilla River, which flowed unobstructed to the Gulf.  The canal would be about two and a half miles long and deep enough to allow the barges to pass.  They could then make the run to the gulf in record time.

     It was a devastating failure.  The canal had to be dug by hand, and that meant that it had to be dug by slaves.  From the beginning, the canal did not work, mainly because it was not deep enough.  During the dry season, the water level sank so low that it was next to impossible to get the barges through.  They kept getting hung up on the canal bed, not to mention the constantly falling branches from the trees that lined both banks.  

     Not long after the canal was finished, the railroad appeared and took over the transportation duties from the barges.  A few decades later, the Civil War broke out, after which Gamble was finished.  The canal is still there today, a silent indictment to his folly.
     Gamble's Run uses the Slave Canal as a setting for a tale of horror, loyalty, hatred, redemption and above all, unconditional love.