Meet 'A Land Remembered's Nonfiction Cousin
- Vero Minute
- 2 hours ago
- 2 min read
If you love A Land Remembered, the MacIveys and their sweep from cracker poverty to Florida fortune that's become required reading for crackers and transplants alike, you need to read Gregory Enns' Cow Creek Chronicles: The Rise and Fall of an Early Florida Cattle Ranch, recently published by the University Press of Florida.
It's the same sweep, the same century of Florida clawing itself out of the muck, told true. Real names on real gravestones, with real family still around to feel it, a few miles from where you're reading this. Pure frontier opera, and it's ours.
Enns' mother knew the ranch's longtime owner, Jo Ann Raulerson Sloan, and spent 20 years lobbying her son to capture this story before it disappeared. What he came back with is part romance, part reckoning: how a Florida ranch actually got built, the open range and the roundups and the cowboy life before fences carved the state into what it is now, all of it rendered with the pacing of a novelist and the research of a journalist, with a healthy dose of nostalgia for a world that barely exists anymore.
And it is ours. The ranch at the center of it all sat between Fort Pierce and Okeechobee, and its footprint runs through land we drive past every week without a clue what it used to be. Some of it is Adams Ranch today. Some of it became the McCarty Ranch Preserve. This is our region's own myth, minus the myth part, and it has been sitting there this whole time waiting for someone to chronicle.
Pick up a copy at indianriverstore.com or on Amazon, $28, and see for yourself. A great gift!
