Bone Mizell: Cracker Cowboy of the Palmetto Prairies

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If famed Western cowboy artist Frederic Remington didn’t actually coin the title, he certainly perpetuated it by conferring it on Bone Mizell in 1895. The urbane Remington traveled from New York City to Florida that year to paint the scruffy-looking Mizell astride his horse. Remington called the painting A Cracker Cowboy. Other paintings of Bone and his cowboy colleagues appeared in the August 1895 issue of Harper’s New Monthly Magazine. The appellation stuck. Eventually it evolved into Florida Cracker, the title now reserved for the Sunshine State’s native-born sons and daughters.

It may seem uncharitable to describe Bone as unprepossessing in looks, but no one ever accused him of being handsome. He was rawboned with sharp features. Under wide-set eyes, the thin-lipped Bone had a hawklike nose that nearly matched his protruding chin in length. He was tanned to the color of saddle leather from endless years in the saddle. His lispy drawl was almost a speech impediment. In his youth, it invited ridicule from boyhood companions. Some say this is why he developed ‘a quick and cutting wit to overcome the barbs and mockery’ of others.

Bone never married, but was a sure-fire favorite in the bordellos of the Florida cow towns that flourished after the Civil War. Since he never owned a home, he rarely slept in a bed–unless it was in a bordello.

It was not by accident that Remington immortalized Bone. The artist recognized that cracker cowboys lacked the glamour associated with the Western variety he’d helped popularize. He also recognized that Bone had a charisma all his own, that Bone’s fame as a rangeland raconteur and prairie prankster was widespread and well deserved.

‘Ornery, tough and an incurable joker,’ wrote Jabbo Gordon, a noted Florida historian and newspaperman, in the 1970s. ‘Bone Mizell left his mark, however dubious, on the pages of Florida history. In time, he may prove to be Florida’s best known, if not most typical cowboy.’

That never happened because Bone just wasn’t your ‘typical cowboy.’ Florida’s typical cowboy was lean, mean and laconic. Bone was lean, mean and loquacious–faulted at times for being too funny, too frolicsome, too fractious.

This was particularly true when he was drinking, which was most of the time. Tales of his drinking were as legendary as those of his pranks. Jim Bob Tinsley noted in his excellent biography of Bone, Florida Cow Hunter: The Life and Times of Bone Mizell, that some facts have become obscured with time, but the legends left behind by Bone are ‘consistent with what is known of Bone’s life and character.’

So it’s not surprising there are a couple versions of the following episode, this one being the best:

One night after Bone had passed out, a group of cowboys carried his inert form to a graveyard in Arcadia. They placed him on top of a grave. When he awakened groggily, he looked around and was heard to say: ‘Well, by God! Here it is Judgment Day and I’m the first one up.’ Another version has it that when Bone awoke, he announced: ‘Dead and gone to hell. No more’n I expected.’

‘Bone well deserved his reputation as the cracker wag of the Florida cow country,’ Tinsley continued. ‘He [was] a man who used his sense of humor and a bottle of booze to survive in the Florida cowman’s world…a world of cattle wars, vigilante actions, hangings, lynchings, fence cuttings and cowtown duels.’

All his life Bone worked with cattle on Florida’s vast palmetto rangelands. The watery prairies and palmetto scrub became his natural kingdom. His skills as a topnotch cowboy were legendary. He was variously described as being ‘an expert horseman,’ ‘crack shot with rifle and six gun,’ ‘lighting fast with a bullwhip, rope and branding iron.’ Contemporaries bragged that Bone was ‘able to tackle and master [the] biggest, meanest four-legged brute in the herd.’

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