Each week, American Routes Shortcuts gives you a sneak peak into the upcoming American Routes episodes. This week, it's Horsepower, a look at the life of the modern cowboy. Host Nick Spitzer introduces us to two Florida Cowboys.
NS: Buddy Mills and Billy Davis from Florida’s Cracker Country, keeping alive the practices of working cattlemen in tangled thickets since Ponce de Leon brought the first cows to Florida in 1521. We talked about how cowboying continues, even under pressure from development and a tough economy.
BM: My name is Buddy Mills, and I’m from Okeechobee. I guess I was brought up here as a whip builder, and that was a trade that my father Junior Mills, he built whips for 74 years before he hung it up and his hands wouldn’t let him anymore. I’m just carrying on the tradition. The modern bean counter would call me stupid for doing it for the price I do, but it’s more the traditional value than it is the financial value. I’m gonna make a whip as long as somebody wants to pop one.
You know, my whips, I like to say they speak for themselves. People order them and they say, “well my grandpa had one, and I want one like his, I just want to hang it up.” Well my theory on that is, get a picture of one and hang it up. I want you to use mine. If I build a whip, I want it on a saddle, I don’t want it on the wall.
NS: So if the whip business is what you love, and the heritage, what do you do to make a living?
BM: I’m an agriculture teacher. In the summers, I build a lot of fence and I try to day-work on as many ranches as’ll let me on ‘em. And ride my horse all I can.
NS: How are Cracker Cowboys different in the way they are cowboys?
BD: Oh, we tougher. My name’s Billy Davis, I’m from Kenansville, Florida. None of us cowboys anywhere that cowboy for a living got much money. But, what separates us is all of us boys tie hard and fast.
Our daddy told us, you know, that a man’s paying us to do a job and if you go rope something, if your horse gets jerked down or whatever, when you did get your senses you’re stilled tied off to him and you’re getting paid for doing the job one time instead of twice. With most dally ropers if you get in a bind, you can always turn your animal loose. Well, us boys that tie hard and fast don’t have that much sense.
BM: You’re hunting cows, you’re not herding them. You gotta hunt and ‘em and find ‘em before you can herd em.
NS: It’s a jungle, not like a desert, huh?
BM: You’ll come out of a jungle into a grass patch, but when you cross that block, you’re back into your buddy can be 100 yards over there and you can’t see him or hear him. There may be 10 or 12 cows squatted between the two of ya. And some of those palmetto patches, you can’t even ride your horse in, those ol’ cows’ll go in there and draw. So you huntin’ 'em, you ain’t drivin’ 'em. You huntin’ ‘em.
BD: You can put 100 head in the lanes and be driving them to the pens and they’ll walk up to a palmetto patch and just stick their head in there with their whole body sticking out.
NS What do you think the future of the Cracker Cowboy culture is, economically and culturally?
BD: Now the economics of cow huntin' or cowboyin’ in the state of Florida, really us boys don’t pay it no mind cause it’s in our blood and we love it so much. The economics for people like me that run ranches, you gonna take that ranch and make it produce, you just have to watch it with a pencil.
BM: When the older generations die, it falls into the hands of the younger kids who are not Cracker Cowboys. They tend to want to sell that ranch, but I believe that as long as there’s cattle down there and good green grass, there’s gonna be a buyer out West that has some appreciation for ‘em.
BD: There’ll always be us Cracker Cow hunters, as long as they’s a cow in Florida and they’s gonna be boys that’ll go find em.
NS: Thanks to Billy Davis and Buddy Mills, two Cracker Cowboys. Some say “cracker” comes from eating the cracked corn of the Deep South, and others associate it with cracking the cattle hunter’s whip, which both Billy and Buddy are master of.