Existing comment:
SEMINOLE STEER
24" X 36" Oil Painting
Family Cattle Camp at Brighton Reservation in South Florida, 1950.
From the early sixteenth century, when the Spanish first unloaded their livestock from wooden boats onto the prairies of Florida, the Native tribes of this land demonstrated their expertise in handling cattle. In the early settlements, local Indians, working as indentured laborers on the sprawling Spanish ranches, tended to the herds. Later, the Lower Creek Nation and the Seminoles raised their own cattle and traded the beef to the Spanish and British settlements and even to Cuba as well as the American colonies to the north.
When the Second Seminole War began in 1835, the outcome of many campaigns against the Indians was determined by the amount of cattle that were destroyed or captured by the military. At the end of the war in 1842, the Seminoles were reduced to a fugitive band near starvation, evading the Army. Their land, crops, and vast cattle herds were gone. For many years after the war, violent disputes were reported between the Indians and Florida pioneers over the ownership of cattle, even bringing a return of the Army to uphold order in the 1850s.
It would be almost one hundred years before the Seminoles would again tend the large herds of cattle over the prairies of Florida. It was during the Great Depression of the 1930s that a WPA program imported livestock from the west to Florida, thus giving the Seminoles a new breed to cultivate into the hearty livestock that became the pride of our state.
This painting portrays the noon camp of a Seminole family during a modern day cattle drive. |