Look out across these prairies and palm scrubs and picture cattle — because long before it was a park, this was ranch country, and it tells you something true about Florida that most folks never learn: Florida was cattle country before Texas ever was. Way back in the fifteen-hundreds, the Spanish brought the first cows and horses to this continent right here in Florida, and by the seventeen and eighteen-hundreds, a tough breed of Florida frontier cowboy was running scrawny, half-wild cattle through this exact kind of palmetto-and-prairie country.
They called them Crackers — and there are two stories why, both to do with the sound of the long braided whips they cracked like rifle-shots to move the cattle through the brush and scrub, where a rope was useless. No wide-open ranges and roundups like out West; these cowmen worked their cattle through thick palmetto and swamp and pine, on scruffy little marsh ponies, with whip and dog and grit. It was a hard, hot, buggy, dangerous life, and it built a whole Florida culture that most tourists never hear a word about. So when you look at this wild grassland, know that for a couple of centuries, Cracker cowboys and their cattle moved across country just like it — and Bertha Palmer, whom Boone will tell you about, ran one of the biggest cattle operations of them all right around here. Roll on through the old range.
Photo: anoldent from Asheville, NC, USA · CC BY-SA 2.0
