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Chapter I The Melding of Traditions AlthOuyJ.hiswians do not know when cattle first stepped onto the soil of present-dayAlabama, several clues allow us to speculate on the bovine's arrival. Over a century and a half before the French settled Dauphin Island and Mobile Bay, Spanish explorers and missionaries began bringing cattle to the North American mainland . One of the earliest means of livestock introduction was the Spanish exploration party. Ponce de Leon brought cattle and swine on his second trip to Florida in 1521. The livestock were meant to sustain the explorers, and most likely few survived to establish a permanent herd. Though the surviving records of Hernando de Soto's expedition through the southeastern United States in 1539 list hogs and horses but no cattle, subsequent expeditions did travel with herds ofcattle. In 1540, Don Diego Maldonado • I • .2. THE MELDING OF TRADITIONS transported a number of cattle to the Pensacola area, as did Don Tristan de Luna in 1559.1 By the time ofde Luna's expedition the Spanish had realized the potential for large-scale cattle raising in Florida. In late 1559 Luis de Velasco attempted to organize a drive of 5,000 head of cattle from northern Mexico to de Luna's province of Pensacola Bay. The demands of mere subsistence in the untamed land soon dashed such dreams, but de Luna continued to request the animals by sea if not by land. In the spring of 1560 de Luna referred to horses and cattle as the colonists' "two most essential" needs. Though Velasco continued to promise to send cattle from Mexico or Havana to de Luna's struggling party, the occupants of Pensacola Bay "were reduced to eating the hides of cattle which they had brought from New Spain and all the Horses that they had brought."2 In spite of the difficulties experienced by early explorers and settlers, their outposts provided convenient centers from which to spread their culture and agriculture into the surrounding areas occupied by native Americans . In the late sixteenth century Spanish missionaries traveled up rivers into Alabama and Georgia to establish mission villages; these missionaries took livestock with them and likely introduced the practice of cattle herding to natives of the region. These native Americans quickly found the white man's animals good for some uses. In the late 1500S Spanish colonists found cowhides and beef among their American neighbors.3 Despite the existence of a small number of tame cattle among the Spanish colonists and a few native American groups and an unknown number of feral cattle in the southern piney woods, no substantial herding took place in Spanish Florida until the mid-seventeenth century. The last two decades of the seventeenth century witnessed a cattle boom in Florida, a boom that likely exercised tremendous influence on the living habits of neighboring native American tribes as well as tribes in southern Alabama and Georgia. According to geographer Terry G. Jordan, cattle ranching in Florida closely resembled the Spanish style of the West Indies. This method of ranching, descended from the Andalusian and Antillean regions of Spain, was taken on in a modified form by the Seminoles and Creeks in the first half of the eighteenth century.4 Though feral and tame cattle undoubtedly roamed the Alabama countryside by 170I, the French made the first documented introduction ofcat- • 3 • THE MELDING OF TRADITIONS tle onto Alabama soil in that year. A French Canadian expedition, headed by brothers Pierre Le Moyne d'Iberville and Jean-Baptiste Le Moyne d'Bienville, had begun colonization efforts on Biloxi Bay and Dauphin Island in 1699. Within the next two years Iberville transported more than twenty Spanish longhorns with several hogs and horses from the West Indian port of Santo Domingo to the Mobile area, probably Dauphin Island. By 1709 there were over 100 head of cattle in French Lower Louisiana, which included the Mobile area. One early settler, Jean-Baptiste Boudreau de Graveline, recognized the possibilities for cattle raising on Dauphin Island . Graveline stopped in Havana to purchase cattle on his first two trips to the young colony before finally settling on the island and building a good herd. By 1713 some 300 cattle ranged on Dauphin Island and at Fort St. Louis (Mobile) on the mainland.5 Once firmly established on Mobile Bay, many French settlers turned their attentiortS toward establishing a profitable cattle industry. In 1713 two men trave!ed from Mobile to Vera Cruz, Mexico, for the purpose...

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