"Few people think of Florida as cowboy country, but one might say this was where the West began. It was here four centuries ago that Spanish settlers founded the first ranches in the future United States and introduced cattle and horses to lush prairies where buffalo roamed. As recently as 1895, there was still enough of the Wild West in Florida to attract artist Frederic Remington, famed for his portraits of frontier life. “With me cowboys are what gems and porcelains are to some others,” he wrote. The chance to add to his collection by capturing cowboys at work in the swamplands of the Deep South was not to be missed.
Florida’s pioneering Spanish rancheros and vaqueros (cowboys) were long gone when Remington arrived, but sturdy scrub cattle descended from animals they introduced still roamed the back country north of the Everglades, a setting he evoked in prose nearly as vivid as his pictures: “Flat and sandy, with miles of straight pine timber, each tree an exact duplicate of its neighbor tree, and underneath the scrub palmettoes, the twisted brakes and hammocks, and the gnarled water-oaks festooned with the sad gray Spanish moss—truly not a country for a high-spirited race or moral giants.”
Proud to be ‘Crackers’
Remington was referring here to the much-maligned
white Southerners called Crackers, who inherited this country from Spanish settlers and from the Seminole and other Florida Indians. The label Cracker, which originally meant “boaster” or “braggart,” may have been applied to them because of the cracking of their whips as they herded cattle or the cracking of corn that produced grits and other down-home fare they favored.
In any case, the word came to define them. More than a few people in Florida and neighboring Georgia, where many of Florida’s first Anglo-American settlers emigrated from, now gladly call themselves Crackers and scoff at the notion purveyed by Yankees like Remington that Crackers are somehow morally deficient or lacking in spirit....."
Florida Crackers: America