Paynes Prairie and William Bartram's Vision

In the spring of seventeen seventy-four, a Philadelphia naturalist named William Bartram walked south from the Saint Johns River and came out onto a plain so vast and alive that he struggled to find words for it. He called it the Great Alachua Savanna. He described herds of wild horses and cattle so thick they darkened the horizon, flocks of cranes moving in slow white arcs, squadrons of what he called the beautiful fleet Siminole horse. It was one of the most celebrated passages in American natural writing, and it was written about the land right below you.

Paynes Prairie is a thirty-two-square-mile wet prairie and basin, the largest freshwater marsh in Florida. It takes its name from King Payne, the Alachua Seminole chief who led this nation into the early eighteen hundreds and was killed during the Patriot War of eighteen twelve. His people had made the prairie their heartland, raising cattle on its edges and building the town of Cuscowilla near present-day Micanopy, where Bartram himself had stayed.

The prairie has flooded and drained dramatically over centuries, driven by the behavior of the Alachua Sink, a natural drain at its east end. Between eighteen seventy-one and eighteen ninety-one, the sink blocked and the prairie became a shallow lake. Steamboats operated on it. Then the sink opened again and the boats vanished into mud.

Florida made Paynes Prairie its first state preserve in nineteen seventy-one. Bison were reintroduced in the mid-nineteen seventies, the first wild bison in Florida since the Ice Age. The wild horses you might see from the observation platform today are believed to be descendants of Spanish horses, the same lineage Bartram watched two hundred and fifty years ago. Not much has changed on the prairie, which is exactly the point.