Interview with Gregory Enns, author of “Cow Creek Chronicles: The Rise and Fall of an Early Florida Cattle Ranch”
Gregory Enns is a fifth-generation Floridian who has been a reporter and editor in Florida and Alabama for decades. He is the founder and owner of Indian River Media Group, which includes Indian River Magazine. He has a new book out with the University Press of Florida: Cow Creek Chronicles: The Rise and Fall of an Early Florida Cattle Ranch. We interviewed Enns about that book and Florida history.
I’ll start with a basic question, how do you explain what this book is about to someone you just met?
It's a story of Florida's history told through one place: a tiny waterway known as Cow Creek. The narrative follows the early Seminoles who lived there and the settlers, Frank Raulerson and his family, who later turned the area into a ranch.
You’ve written a lot of other things, what made you write on this topic now? Was it just on the list of things you wanted to get to, or was there something about “this topic, right now?”
I first wrote Cow Creek Chronicles as a series for Indian River Magazine in 2022 after the deaths of my mother and her friend, Jo Ann Raulerson Sloan, a month apart in late 2020 and early 2021. Jo Ann, Frank Raulerson’s granddaughter and sole heir, was the central character in both the series and the book. My mother and Jo Ann were born on the same day and year, July 22, 1930, and called themselves the "birthday twins.” As a child, I visited Cow Creek Ranch quite often with my family, and we eventually had a camp out there. Since I started the magazine in 2006, my mom had urged me to write about Jo Ann, but I always told her it was too complicated a story to tell. Maybe I was finally motivated to write Jo Ann’s story to fulfill one of my mother’s last wishes.
One thing that really came through to me in your book is the centrality of cattle in Florida history. How would you explain to someone the importance of cattle in shaping Florida?
Our nation’s cattle culture began in Florida, though most of America doesn’t know it. It started in 1521, when Ponce de Leon brought cattle to Florida at or near Charlotte Harbor. Cattle arrived in Mexico around the same time, but it’s unlikely they would have made their way to what is now Texas. The cattle brought to Florida were longhorns from Andalusia, Spain, and the escapees from the Spanish evolved to become Florida’s cracker or scrub cow, the peninsula’s foundation herd for the next 400 years. Because the Spanish were the first to work with cattle in Florida, they also introduced the techniques of branding and marking. They also brought the Andalusian horse to Florida, which became the cracker horse. Cattle helped sustain the lives of the early settlers. The book also explains that the Seminoles had their own cattle culture and ran their own cattle herds, which were drastically reduced during the Second Seminole War when the Army targeted their food supplies and life on the run made cattle herding impossible.
Your book involves “an early Florida cattle ranch.” How would you explain what is different about a ranch versus a farm or some other rural/agricultural way of organizing life? What is special and distinctive about a ranch?
Farms typically raise produce, while ranches focus on livestock. Until the 1940s, Florida cattle roamed mostly in the open range, with one owner's cattle mixing with those of several others. Once or twice a year, the owners would round up their cattle, identify which steers to take to market, and brand and castrate the calves that would remain on the open range. Brands, usually applied on the hind quarter, and distinctive cuts on the ears, known as marks, allowed owners to identify their livestock. Grazing on the open range continued in Florida until 1949, when the Legislature required livestock owners to construct fences. Some owners, like Frank Raulerson, had erected fences much earlier, having realized the land's future value. Interior Florida land was viewed as nearly worthless at the time, so it was cheap, $2 an acre or less, while a single cow could command more than 10 times that. My premise is that a ranch is created simply when a fence goes up.
I think many people think of Florida and they think of leisure. Your book is all about Florida but it is also about work in many ways. What is the difference when we do not have leisure at the center of a narrative about Florida?
Florida’s tourist industry didn’t really get started until Henry Flagler brought his railway down the east coast. The railway also helped accelerate the growth of the state’s early citrus industry. Until then, the state’s cattle industry pretty much reigned supreme. When you drive across the state in central and south Florida today, you see cattle grazing on cleared pastures. But when the early settlers arrived, those pastures were either hard Florida scrub or swampland. Think of all the work it took to clear those pastures of scrub—especially before gas-powered tools—or to dig canals to drain the swamps. Handling cattle is no walk in the park either, and OSHA would rank cowboying as one of the most dangerous occupations if it had such a ranking system. There’s always the threat of a charge from a bull, a fall off a horse, or being kicked or trampled by either, to name just a few of the hazards.
Your book involves a lot of people, but you also trace one family very closely. What do we gain when we look at history through the lens of biography or through the story of a particular family?
I think I lucked out here. I was able to follow one family, the Raulersons, and it was pretty easy because the name only came into use in 1813, when Georgia Gov. David B. Mitchell incorrectly commissioned Jacob Rawlinson (also spelled Rollison or Rolleson) as Jacob Raulerson. Shortly afterward, Jacob and his four siblings began using the name Raulerson instead of the others. That made it easy to trace the entire line of the family for the last two centuries. The Raulerson family’s southern migration was typical of EuroAmerican settlers of the time. They began in Maryland and came down the Great Philadelphia Wagon Road and settled near present-day Columbia, South Carolina, where King George II had given John Rawlinson a land grant to encourage white settlement of the colony. Then his son, Jacob, received a land grant in southern Georgia, likely from a state lottery awarding the lands of the Creek natives to settlers. Then Jacob’s son, Wade, received land grants in Florida for lands once controlled by the Seminoles. The early generations undoubtedly raised cattle, and the migrations were prompted by younger brothers who didn’t get the family homestead under primogeniture or, as populations grew, simply seeking out more and better land on which to graze cattle. At each migratory step along the way, the settlers either displaced natives living on the land or took over land that had once belonged to them.
I also lucked out in my research because the Raulersons are one of Florida’s largest agricultural families. The Seminoles were far harder to follow, but I was able to place Polly Parker at Cow Creek through the 1920 Census and her descendants there in the 1930 Census. By coincidence, I was a local newspaper reporter and covered the story when her great grandchildren were evicted from their chickee camp near Fort Pierce in 1984. During two of the Seminole Wars, Raulersons and Seminoles had been killed at the hands of each other. But by the time Frank Raulerson began assembling Cow Creek Ranch in the 1910s, they were coexisting peacefully, and Seminoles continued to live on the land until the 1940s. Most left after Brighton Reservation opened in 1938 and others likely left when fences reduced their hunting grounds and their ability to subsist on the land.
A funny thing about Florida is that it sometimes feels like a place without history. I think because there are so many transplants in Florida and so many people say “no one is from here,” we forget that some people are from here and that Florida does have a very real and interesting history. How do you think people would see Florida differently if they were more familiar with its history?
What a great question. When I grew up in Florida, I was led to believe the state had little or no early history. A lot of my teachers were from up north and would share the history of their states, but we rarely learned anything about the history of Florida. You might see a passing mention of the settlement of St. Augustine in 1565, but all the focus was paid to the much later settlements of Jamestown in 1607 or Plymouth Colony in 1620. I think a lot of this was due to Plymouth and Jamestown being English colonies while Florida was a Spanish one. Also, because Florida has such heavy transplant population there’s a tendency to ignore Florida’s history, which is as rich and interesting as any other state along the eastern seaboard. Yes, Florida history began before Disney World’s opening in 1971. In the book, I make reference to many of the peninsula’s historical events. This includes the days when mastodons, mammoths and bison roamed the peninsula, the arrival of the first humans 14,600 years ago, the creation of elaborate villages by indigenous tribes such the Ais and the Mayaimi, the arrival of the Spanish in the 1500s, and the three Seminole Wars that occurred from 1816 to 1858.
This question is a little out there. There are a lot of narratives that it seems Florida could be part of, but somehow isn’t. For example, you’ve got ranches and cowboys and Indian wars in this book, but we don’t think of Florida when we think of the “Wild West” time period or way of life. I know it’s not West, but maybe if Florida was a bigger part of the cowboy narrative, we wouldn’t only imagine those things in “the West.” I also wouldn’t say that outside of Florida people are as aware of Seminole figures as they are of, say, Crazy Horse or Sitting Bull. I’ve also recently learned that Jacksonville, Florida, was important in early film-making, but we mostly think of Hollywood for early movies. Why do you think that some places get all the attention for historical moments and other places get written out of the narrative? And what are the consequences of that?
I think there are a lot of reasons Florida’s history is overlooked and left out of the national narrative. I mentioned one factor previously: that it developed as a Spanish colony instead of one of the 13 original English colonies. Two other factors are railroads and newspapers. In terms of the state’s cattle history being eclipsed, the joining of the Union and Pacific railroads in 1869 and expansion of other railway systems made travel across the continent a national focus and made it easier to transport cattle to stockyards in places such as Kansas City and Chicago. The western cattle grazing on natural open prairies were much bigger and more desirable than Florida’s scrawny scrub cattle, which were raised mostly for local markets. Also, newspaper reporters were writing about the cowboy culture of the Old West and many of their stories turned into dime store novels that captured the public’s imagination. Later, publicity over Theodore Roosevelt’s trips to the Old West magnified the focus. While the west had sweeping open prairies and majestic mountains, Florida had swamps, sand pits, and hard scrub that conjured up far less romantic images.
I think one of the biggest oversights has been the virtual exclusion of Florida Seminoles from the national narrative about indigenous tribes. The Seminoles say they are the only tribe not to sign a formal peace treaty. The life of their greatest heroine, Polly Parker (Emateloye), who lived along Cow Creek, is one of the most underplayed stories about native Americans. She ranks right up there with Sacagawea and the heavily mythologized Pocahontas. Yet nobody has heard of her daring escape from the steamship Grey Cloud, at a stop in St. Marks, Florida, during her forced relocation to Indian Territory in 1858. After escaping with a handful of other Seminole women, she led them back by foot on a 350-mile trek to Cow Creek territory. Because the number of Seminoles in Florida was less than 200 at the time, and many of them were men, the women were credited with helping to repopulate the tribe, which numbers more than 4,000 today. I believe my chapter on her in Cow Creek Chronicles is one of the most comprehensive profiles of her to date.
If someone wanted to learn more about Florida history, where would you recommend they start?
Visit your local history museum or read books on a Florida topic that interests you. Books about Florida history are a specialty for my publisher, University Press of Florida. The Florida Classics Library’s selection is also online and has a large selection of Florida books. That first book you read will give you a foundation on a topic of Florida history and get you interested in something related to it. Also get involved in your local historical society. My local group, the St. Lucie Historical Society, has a very inexpensive dinner meeting every month in which a speaker addresses a historical topic of local interest.
You’ve written a lot about Florida and Alabama… who is your college football team?
Even though I’m a fifth-generation Floridian and my family’s roots go back to the 1850s, I spent 15 years in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, drinking Nick Saban’s Kool-Aid. Roll Tide!
You can pick up a copy of Cow Creek Chronicles, or learn more about the book, at cowcreekchronicles.com. It is also available at Amazon and Barnes and Noble.
Interview conducted by Elizabeth Stice
