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SEMINOLE STEER
24" X 36" Oil Painting
Video
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 have proven 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 and 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 had been reduced to a fugitive band near starvation, evading
the Army. Their land, crops and vast cattle herds now 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.
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