Cracker Cattle Country, The Florida Cowman Before the Mouse

Before the theme parks and the subdivisions, before the highway interchanges stacked three levels high, Central Florida was cattle country. The men who worked it were called Florida crackers, a name that likely came from the sound of the long whips they cracked to drive their herds through the palmetto scrub. These were not the romantic cowboys of the western dime novels.

They were lean, practical men working a subtropical landscape that had its own rules: heat that pressed down like a hand on your chest, afternoon thunderstorms that came up out of nothing, and biting flies that drove cattle half-mad in summer. Florida cattle were descended from Andalusian stock the Spanish had brought in the fifteen hundreds, small animals with hard hooves suited to the sandy soil. They ranged free across the open prairie, branded and sometimes half-wild, fattened on wiregrass and saw palmetto berries.

The cracker cowmen of Orange County and Osceola County drove herds to the railhead at Kissimmee, or south overland to the gulf coast ports, where the beef was shipped to Cuba. During the Civil War, Florida beef kept Confederate armies fed when the deeper South was cut off. The cattle culture persisted well into the twentieth century.

You can see its remnant in the place names around Orlando: Cow Camp Road, Bull Creek, the town of Kissimmee, whose Native American name has a debated meaning. The flatlands south of Orlando, around Lake Tohopekaliga, were working ranch country through the nineteen sixties, and some cattle operations still survive in the corridors that Disney's land assembly left untouched. The cracker cowman didn't vanish.

He just got pushed to the margins of a landscape he had shaped for a hundred years.