WATER & COAST
Peace River
DeSoto County · Central Florida
A slow, tea-colored river that runs 76 miles down the middle of DeSoto County, known for its fossils.
ABOUT THIS PLACE
The Peace River begins near Bartow in Polk County, where Saddle Creek meets the Peace Creek Drainage Canal, and runs 76 miles southwest to Charlotte Harbor at Punta Gorda. Its drainage basin covers about 2,300 square miles and takes in nearly all of DeSoto and Hardee counties. Sixteenth-century Spanish maps called it Rio de la Paz, the river of peace. The Creek and Seminole name was Talakchopcohatchee, the river of long peas, which English speakers turned into Peas Creek and then Pease Creek. The water is dark with tannin and the current is gentle, so it is an easy river to paddle and a hard one to get lost on. Fresh water coming down it keeps the salinity of Charlotte Harbor in balance, which matters to the fishery there, and it supplies more than six million gallons of drinking water a day to the region. What draws most visitors is what lies in the gravel on the bottom. The river cuts through Miocene, Pliocene and Pleistocene deposits, and shark teeth, ray plates, turtle shell, dugong and whale bone, horse teeth and mastodon and mammoth fragments all wash into the same beds. Shark and ray teeth can be kept without a permit; other vertebrate fossils from state land need a Florida fossil permit. The dry months from October to April are when the water is low enough to work
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