In Strickland’s truck, we slipped through a hollow of pine and palmetto as he explained to me how things had changed in Myakka. In the halcyon days of ranching, a million head of cattle grazed throughout the state, and then, as land boom after land boom subsumed the peninsula, people came to outnumber the herd. Today, more than 20 million people live in what is the fastest growing state in America. That growth has led to the decline of rural lands — and to the ranching lifestyle associated with them.
As rumor has it, Americans of European descent came from other Southern states to this stretch of the river circa 1850, and by 1885, a hundred folks were recorded as living in the area known as Old Miakka. It’s said that the bones of this place were made by a “party of cowmen.” And at that point when county lines were being drawn and redrawn, the towns we know today were mere synapses in some settlers’ minds. The county seat is now a ghost town, marked by a sign deep down a country road. And between what was and what is no longer, a string of towns with names like Pine Level, Angola, Bethany, and Sandy seemed more like stories fit for campfires than part of the historical record.
In the late 19th century, a sportsman named G.E. Shields heard “praises of this mystic region,” and made his way south to see. He wrote that his time there was “one of the brightest most romantic and exciting episodes” of his life. In 1895, Frederic Remington arrived to document the inimitable cracker cowboys for Harper’s magazine. The early, white, and poor pioneers of Florida garnered the name “cracker,” and a culture grew, one particular to people who sustained themselves in a place before believed uninhabitable.
The root of the word that came to define them remains as difficult to pin down as Myakka. Some ascribe it to a diet of crackers, others to the sound of a cow whip, and it’s understood today as a derogatory term but also worn as a badge of honor among contemporary cowboys. For Remington, who immortalized the cowboys of the American West, the crackers must have appeared exotic, rough-shod, and unlike any people he’d come across. And among them, one cowboy became synonymous with frontier Florida and remains a topic of conversation to this day. His name was Bone Mizell, and he grew up here in the Valley, just off Horse Creek.