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The Life and Times of Gordie Peer

Gathering Up Cattle

By WARREN RESEN

In his own words:
"It used to be that ranchers would gather up old range cattle to get them off their places. The cattle had been in there for years and years; they'd reproduced and inbred. And so to get a better breed of cattle, the ranchers had to get rid of all those old range cows to be able to breed gentler cattle that they could pen better. And there was only one way to get 'em and that was ride 'em down, rope 'em, tie them to a tree and then go back and pick 'em up with a trailer or try to get 'em into a pen someplace.

"I drove a cow truck. We would go down below Clewiston back into the Big Cypress. There wasn't many gas stations then so I always had to carry some extra gas to get all the way in there and get back out. There was some guys that was workin' down there that were gathering cattle. They'd work all week long ropin' and draggin' 'em and haulin' 'em into pens and then I'd haul 'em out Monday's to get 'em to the market Tuesday mornin'. I'd leave Monday mornin' early and I wouldn't get back until Tuesday sometime. These men were called cow hunters. Ropin' the cows was about the only ways you could get the cows out. They was that wild. You had to be careful not to get your horse hooked. A lot of 'em got horses hurt and killed from those cows.

"Today with all the improved lands, pens, you can do the work with fewer people. It's easier to gather the cows because you're working a smaller pasture. And you got fence lines to use to move your cows along rather than drive them across an open area where you gotta be all the way around 'em. So you bunch 'em and trail 'em down a fence line to your cow pen. You were lucky some times to even get 100 or maybe 200 done in the old days. With the hydraulic shoots and the layouts they have today, you can work maybe 400 cows in a day.

THE RAILROADS
"When the cattle business in Florida started years ago there was no trucks. The cattle that were shipped out of Florida were shipped by barges or boats going towards the Bahamas or Cuba and places like that. You couldn't carry too many head in those boats in those days. They mention a lot of times about the thousands of head they shipped. Well if you check back to see how big your ships were, they couldn't carry too many. But when they started puttin' the railroads in, that's the way the cattle was shipped out.

Some time in the early 1900's Zack Miller, who was one of the owners of the 101 Ranch in Oklahoma, came here to the State of Florida for more stock. The cattle business had been depleted in the State of Texas. They were to the point where they had to restock. So the Florida ranchers had to stop catching the wild cattle for a while and give them a chance to reproduce. When the westerners came into Florida and started buying cattle, the cattle was real thin. It was hard to feed 'em here so they shipped 'em out West, fed 'em out, and then sold 'em. Long about 1917, '18, or '19, one of them years, one man bought 26,000 head of cattle in one year and shipped 'em west out of the State of Florida by railroad. And that's where the cattle business really started to flourish in the State of Florida.

"When they went by train, the cattle could only go as far as Louisiana then they had to unload 'em for 24 hours and then feed 'em, and water 'em, and then reload 'em. That's when trucks was comin' in more and more. They could leave here with trucks and get there in less time. They couldn't carry as many cows as they could in one train but they could use several trucks and then it was easier because you didn't have to unload 'em at the railroad, and then reload 'em in trucks to haul 'em to where you were taking 'em. So with the regulations and everythin' they gradually quit shippin' 'em by rail. And they had quit for several years. Then we had a guy who wanted to ship 'em by rail. The chutes were still there but we had to redo 'em there at the Okeechobee market. And after that we tore all them railroad chutes down at the loadin' docks.
"I worked at the Okeechobee Auction for about 19 years off and on. The last load of cattle shipped out of Okeechobee was around '64 or '65 near as I remember. I helped load the cattle on the railroad cars here in Okeechobee and we shipped like 300 or 400 head out of here to Texas. Those were the last ones as we shipped by rail. They found out it was not feasible because of the government regulations."