In February, a group of Floridians will ride horses from the state’s west coast to the east coast in an annual event designed to keep history alive.

The 2025 Florida Cracker Trail ride is planned for Feb. 15-22. Participants will ride an average of 16-18 miles a day, from Bradenton to Fort Pierce.

The annual cross-the-state ride highlights and preserves the importance of Florida’s role in the introduction of horses and cattle into the New World as well as the birth and continuance of the cattle and horse industries by Florida’s future settlers and their descendants.  

The trip includes an overnight stop at the Bass Ranch in Okeechobee County on Feb. 20. Other stops include Falkner Farms, Bar Crescent S Ranch, Parker Place, Doug Smith Ranch, Smith Ranch and the Adams Ranch.

The Florida Cracker Trail website explains that the first cattle in the United States were brought here from Spain, more than 500 years ago. In the early 1500s, Spanish conquistador, Juan Ponce de León landed on the shores of Florida. When plans to establish a colony failed, the Spanish left behind horses, hogs and Andalusian cattle, the ancestors of the Texas Longhorns.

By the 1800s, the Seminole nation possessed extensive herds (5,000 to 50,000 head) of cattle. As Indian and white settlers moved south, so did the cattle, searching for new pastures.

As railroads reached into Florida, the state became a chief supplier of cattle. During the Civil War, Florida supplied cattle to the Confederacy for hides, tallow, leather and meat.

Following the Civil War, a rugged brand of individual settled along Florida’s east coast and central corridor. These early settlers became known by their Northern neighbors, as Florida Crackers, Cracker Cowmen or Cow Hunters, the website explains.

The early Crackers would hunt and round up cows over the wooded rangelands and miles and miles of open plains, in the hammocks, and by the rivers and streams, and had a unique way of herding cattle. The Crackers relied on bullwhips to flush cows out of the palmetto scrub and spur on oxen that pulled their carts and wagons. They used 10- to 12-foot-long whips made of braided leather. The snaps of these whips would break the sound barrier making a loud CRACK.

The sound earned the Cowmen the nickname of Crackers.

The crack could be heard for miles, so they also used them to communicate with each other, like a form of Morse code, and were able to identify each other by their whip cracks.

Many Crackers rode rugged, rather small horses known as cracker ponies and relied on herd dogs to help get a cow out of a marsh, work a hundred steers into a tidy group and move cattle along the trail. A good dog, a horse, and whip were all the tools a true Cracker needed.

The Crackers survived in difficult conditions. They fought off panthers, wolves, bears, and cattle rustlers and spent weeks or months on cattle drives across difficult marshes and dense scrub woods, often enduring burning heat, torrential thunderstorms, and hurricane winds.

Each year, the Crackers gathered west of Fort Pierce to drive their giant herd of scrub cattle west across the state toward Bradenton and then to Tampa, Punta Gorda, and Punta Rassa, to ship them to Cuba.

The Cracker Trail was the only dry route across Florida. To the north, the Kissimmee River and its floodplains blocked the way. To the south, Lake Okeechobee and the Everglades made passage impossible.

In 1987, a group of energetic individuals, with a love and respect for history, came together to form the Florida Cracker Trail Association, to recreate a part of Florida’s past that has become a traditional event.  Each year, the Florida Cracker Trail Cross-State Ride honors the Cracker cow hunters and their history, re-enacting drive participants’ return after selling the cattle.

To register for the ride, go online to floridacrackertrail.org.