W. Luther Koon’s ranch foreman and rode the
range making a living for his two children,
James Edward and Florence. The little boy
and his sister trudged through the fields to
school carrying their lunch. During recess
they played games with names like Dare Base,
Pop the Whip and Prison Base. James was
“nicknamed ‘Snake’ ‘cause I was so silly”.
After school, Snake’s job was to see that
all the calves were in the cowpen awaiting
their mothers’ daily visit. Every cow has
her own special spot of grazing land, her
own home on the range. She would come to
the pen to tend to her offspring, to be
milked and then returned to pasture.
Snake’s first home burned to the ground
about 1906 when he was too young to remember
it. He does remember the second fire. His
dad had rebuilt, this time a two-story house
on higher ground. One day Snake, his sister
and their father were away from home working
a sweet potato patch in a distant field.
“Suddenly, looking homeward, Dad saw smoke,
ripped the harness off the horse, loosened
him from the plow, jumped on him bareback
and took off for home”. Unfortunately it
was too late to save the house. Some men
had been clearing brush (under his father’s
orders), burning palmetto growth around the
homestead and a live ash must have blown
through an open window. “We were the only
ones living out there and there was no such
thing as a fire department. There was
nothing we could do about it.” Nothing
daunted, his father cleared the land and
built a third home on the same site.
When Snake was eight years old, his dad gave
him ten head of cattle and the boy herded
them on one of his father’s horses, a white
mare blind in one eye. She was a woods
horse, one that knew how to herd cattle. At
nine years of age, Snake went to work on his
first cattle drive. “I weighed 40 pounds
soaking wet. Dad was delivering a bunch of
steers to Tampa and we were seven days on
the road driving cattle, three of us and a
big old shepherd dog. I rode dad’s white
mare and my saddle was a McClellan, an old
cavalry favorite. On the return trip my dad
carried me to the zoo in Sulfur Springs for
the first half a day and then we spent the
other two and a half days riding our horses
home.”
Snake remembers how long that trip was. He
also recalls how long it took to go from his
home in Charlotte Harbor to Punta
Gorda--nine hours! There was no bridge
across the river and he and his dad had to
ride their horses by way of Fort Ogden.
However, Snake enjoyed these trips, in fact
he enjoyed everything that took him away
from school. When he was 16, the law said
he could quit school and that he did. “I
put my hat on my head and went whistling
down the road”.
“First thing I did when I left school was to
go down in the bay, fishing for John
Strickland”. This job lasted for about
three months when Snake found out that, not
only was he not making money, he was $2.50
in the hole! Then he hit the cow trail,
driving cattle for the Hollingsworth
Brothers out of Arcadia. His first drive
with this outfit was an unnerving
experience.”
“There were two separate herds of cattle:
older steers (over two years old) in a herd
driven by one group of cowboys and the two
year olds in another--that was the one I was
in. At night when we penned the cattle, we
put the two-year olds in a separate pen. On
the drive to LaBelle we were near Hog Island
when the stampede happened, not quite a
day’s drive out of LaBelle. The steers
spooked, stampeded and tore down the fences,
bolting in all directions Next day we picked
up strays right up to late in the
afternoon. Most of em had stopped in a
bunch when they had pretty well run
themselves out, but some of the steers had
run a real long distance before we caught up
with them.”
“After we got them all together, we had to
drive them onto a one-way narrow bridge over
the Caloosahatchee River. It was not easy
driving wild cattle through that skinny
opening, water on both sides. Cattle can
spook real easy.”
Being a cowboy was not always Gene Autry and
Roy Rogers singing down the trail. Another
misconception is that cowboys ate lots of
beef. Snake remembers his father fattening
a hog in the wintertime and pickling the
meat in five gallon crocks. “There was
always white bacon, the side of the hog away
from the bone. And we ate lots of chicken.”
Round-up time meant an even more limited
menu. The chuck wagon, pulled by two yokes
of oxen, followed the cowboys from one set
of cowpens to another as the men herded the
cattle scattered over a vast expanse of
unfenced grazing land. The wagon carried
staples and salt pork, pots and pans. Even
today Snake remembers the names of those
long ago oxen teams: Blue and Brandy, Moses
and Aaron.
The cowhands camped out in the open and the
cooking was done over an open fire. As a
special treat, on extended roundups, a steer
would be slaughtered and the cook would
smoke it. “He would cut down a myrtle bush,
trim it, cut the small limbs off and hone
the rest to sharp points. Then he would
slice the beef into strips, skewer them on
this improvised spit, build a roaring fire
and smoke them over the embers.” This
didn’t always work out but when it did it
was a rare delicacy out there in the wilds.
“Back in those days before there was any
improved pasture land, the cows didn’t have
calves year round like they do now. They
would mostly calve in the spring of the
year. We’d start out about July for the
first roundup, mark and brand the babies and
dip them. While doing this we would also
‘gather the beef’, which means the steers.
In the beginning we’d pick out the
choicest-looking bulls and save them for
breeding purposes; the other bull calves we
would castrate and make steers out of them.”
“There was a time-honored way of branding
the calves. One man wrestled the calf to
the ground catching him by the right hind
leg, because the branding was done on the
right-hand side. The cowboy working with
you picked up the front leg as soon as you
had the hind leg and would flip him to the
ground on his left side. Calves also were
“ear-marked” because brands could be taken
off or removed by rustlers. The special
cuts on the ear were permanent and
completely identifiable.”
Chapter Eleven
The year was 1920 and people were the
endangered species, not alligators! There
had been a long hot dry spell in Charlotte
County that fall, perfect weather for gator
hunting and Snake’s father knew every gator
pond from Charlotte Harbor to the Myakka
River and all over Sarasota County.
Early one morning R.J. and his son set out
for four or five days of hunting the
dangerous critters. They took two horses,
bedrolls and a wagon with groceries, a box
of salt to cure the hides and R.J’s special
gator pole made to order by the local
blacksmith. The custom-made pole was an 18
foot pine sapling with an iron hook on the
end.
“Alligators dig burrows in ponds; we called
them caves. A gator usually fans out a
basin in front of his cave to sun himself
and during a dry spell his tracks show up in
the mud. You could look at the tracks and
tell pretty much the size of the gator,
mostly from 7 foot up to a whopping 14
foot. Dad would run that pole down into the
gator’s cave and try to get him to bite it.
Once hooked (inside his mouth so as not to
damage the hide) Dad would drag him out,
flailing wildly. As soon as his head
cleared the water, I was ready with the ax
and smashed him between the eyes.”
Snake Whidden described all this in a
matter-of-fact manner, but it was an
undertaking obviously fraught with danger.
The alligator always put up a good fight,
bracing its feet against the top of its
cave. It didn’t emerge serenely out of the
murky depths, but thrashed and swung its
tail around, thrashing out at its adversary;
their strength is phenomenal. Add to this
the fact that venomous cottonmouth moccasins
also do not like to be disturbed. They
would coil themselves on the bank or lie in
the water just waiting. Snake and his dad
quite often were knee-deep in the water
hole, yanking on the alligator and “those
cottonmouths would just coil there with an
open mouth (looked like Mammoth Cave to me)
and wait for you to get close enough so he
could get you.”
Once the gator was killed, Snake and his dad
would skin it, leaving as little meat as
possible, spread out the hide and salt it
down so it wouldn’t sour. “Then we’d roll
the hides as tight as we could get them so
the salt wouldn’t roll out. We put them in
a wooden box in the back of the wagon and
covered them with damp burlap sacks. We
couldn’t let the sun shine on ‘em because
that made the scales slip off and ruined the
hide.” After days of hunting, the Whiddens
would take the hides across the river to
Punta Gorda and sell them to A.J. Kinsel who
operated a tannery there.
Mary Ellen Glover Manning remembers the
tannery vividly. There was a narrow gauge
ice-car track that ran parallel to King
Street (Route 41N) from the ice plant on
Virginia down to the docks. The ice-car was
powered by a gasoline engine which delivered
it to a chute at the fish houses down on the
dock. Sometimes Mary Ellen and her close
friend, Wanda Bassett, would hitch a ride to
Wanda’s house or the Glover store on this
car; it was fun and saved them a lot of
walking.
In this same location along the ice-car
tracks, Mr. Kinsell lived in a two-story
all-tin house. He cured alligator hides and
made them into pocketbooks and belts, etc.
The odor of formaldehyde was overpowering to
anyone walking down that part of the street. 
|
to be
continued in the September Edition of Punta Gorda
Life..... |
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