What’s this?

BY JAMES WILLIFORD

Tanned retirees, debauched spring-breakers, and oversized talking mice were probably the farthest things from Ponce de León’s mind when on April 2, 1513, he first caught sight of the land mass he would dub “La Florida.” But as the Spanish explorer gazed out from his ship to the lush stretch of newly discovered terra firma beyond, he may very well have thought: “vaqueros!” Cowboys! When he returned to the peninsula eight years later, he brought men, horses, and livestock—the beginnings of the oldest cattle herding culture in North America.

Over the next four centuries, however, the American cowboy became firmly entrenched in the western regions of our collective imagination, belonging more to the frontier landscapes of Texas, California, and Montana than to the sub-tropics of Florida. It is an error of omission that Floridian Hank Mattson, a working cattleman and cowboy poet, has made it his business to correct. For almost twenty years, Mattson has written and performed carefully crafted lyrics to charm and educate, reminding his audiences that there are indeed cowboys in Florida, and that those cowboys are the heirs to a particularly deep and rich tradition.

Mattson points out that Floridian cowboys are not their western counterparts. In fact, in Florida, cowboys prefer not to be called cowboys at all; rather, they are “cowhunters” or “crackers.” The latter epithet, according to one of Mattson’s poems, is unfairly used as a modern racial slur: It first came from Shakespeare, who used it in King John to mean “windbag” or “braggart,” before the facile processes of folk etymology reinterpreted the word as a reference to the cracking sound made by the ten- to twelve-foot bullwhips Florida cowhunters use to guide their herds.

Mattson traces his love for cowboy poetry back to his grade school days when he first came across “The Ballad of Bone Mizell” in a popular history textbook called Fabulous Florida. The poem, penned by Ruby Leach Carson, recounts a humorous, if somewhat morbid, episode from the life of Morgan Bonaparte “Bone” Mizell, one of Florida’s most famous cowhunters. In it, Bone swaps the corpse of a dead “Yank,” whose family has paid for it to be shipped “up north,” with that of a recently deceased cracker named Bill Redd, because, Bone wryly remarks at the end of the ballad, “ole Bill hadn’t traveled ’round none.”

	Young Florida cowhunter astride a marshtackie pony, 1902. —Florida State Archives

Like Carson, Mattson endeavors to fuse poetry with a sense of Florida’s past. He writes about “hardships, birth, dying, things that affect every single person,” he says, but at the same time sneaks in bits of local color or even a few technical terms from the cowhunting biz. Before reciting the Civil War-era poem “Whisperin’ Bill,” for example, Mattson sets the scene with this prologue in rhyme: “In 1863, the Federals won a battle, cutting Texas off from the Confederacy along with all her cattle. And so it fell to Florida, the duty then was ours, to feed the starving soldiers of the southern stars and bars.”

“There are so many new people here in Florida who know next to nothing about agriculture, let alone Florida history,” says Mattson. “They get to know Florida history through my stories, whether they want to or not, whether they realize it or not.”

An itinerant performer dealing principally with folk material, Mattson is often approached by audience members who want to share their personal or family histories with him. “Old timers,” he describes them, “who can tell their stories now that all of the people who could have gotten in trouble are dead.” Mattson harks these generous muses, working their rough tales into poetic works of cowhunter lore, ready to be performed and passed on to the next generation.

Hank Mattson will perform his poetry and discuss the history of Florida cowhunting on December 3, at the Emerson Center in Vero Beach.