Bone Mizell: Cracker Cowboy of the Palmetto Prairies

 | Wild West  | 0 comments  | Print This Post  | Email This Post

A last attempt was made to dry him out. Shortly before Bone’s death, the family of his old friend and employer, Ziba King, sent Bone to a sanitarium in Hot Springs, Ark. H. Logan King, Jr., Ziba’s grandson, recounted what happened when interviewed by Tinsley: ‘He stayed off liquor for a while: then some one slipped him a bottle just before he boarded a train for home. In a short time he finished off the bottle and began running naked up and down the aisles of the passenger cars. Officials were forced to stop the train at a small town and have him locked up.’

On July 14, 1921, Morgan Bonaparte Mizell, 58, died with his boots on. When death came, he was waiting for a telegraphic money order from Ziba King in the Fort Ogden, Fla., depot house. A fill-in agent in Fort Ogden for the Atlantic Coast Line said Bone looked like death warmed up when he saw him stretched out on a bench in the depot’s ticket office. The agent, Robert Morgan, asked Bone to sit up. ‘I thought it might make him feel better,’ recounted Morgan. ‘Yeah I’d better not lay down. I might die,’ replied Bone. Those prophetic words were the last the worn-out old wrangler ever spoke.

When the agent returned from lunch, he found Bone lying dead on the floor. The signature of L.L. Morgan, brother of the depot agent and the local undertaker, was the only one on Bone’s death certificate. Where it asked the ’cause of death,’ the certificate read: ‘Moonshine–went to sleep and did not wake up.’

The good life, the bad life, the hard life of a Cracker cowboy had finally caught up to Bone Mizell. It was only fitting that Bone’s funeral be held in Arcadia, the scene of so many of his antics. He was buried just a stone’s throw away in Joshua Creek Cemetery. Appropriately, perhaps, Bone’s legend seemed to grow larger than life after his death. When all the other tales of his wit and pranks are told, the consensus of his peers was that his greatest and most capricious caper was his ‘corpse swapping’ escapade.

Several versions surfaced during Bone’s lifetime of how one corpse went into a lonely prairie grave in central Florida, the other to a fancy New Orleans cemetery. Bone being Bone, he validated as many of them as he could.

All credible accounts, however, always begin with the death of John Underhill, another cow hunter. Underhill was one of Bone’s best friends. Together, they’d ridden a lot of trails, drunk a lot of whisky and drove a lot of cattle. When Underhill died in a Florida cow camp near what is now Kissimmee, Bone was with the herd. When he rode in, he found the other cowboys preparing to wash Underhill’s body before dressing him in some funeral finery.

‘Hellfire, no,’ Bone upbraided his cronies. ‘Y’all ain’t gonna wash ol’ John. He’d never allow it if he was livin’, and y’all ain’t gonna take advantage of him now he’s dead.’

So, unwashed and wearing his grimy old cowboy duds, John Underhill went to a desolate grave amid southwest Florida’s prickly palmettos.

That was that, or so every one thought until a short time later when a young man came to Florida’s cow country. He was described as being in ill health and world weary. For whatever reason, it was Bone who took a shine to the youth. Some cynics snickered he kept Bone supplied with whiskey. Others say Bone honestly tried to turn his young friend into a healthy cow hunter.

Before he could, however, this disillusioned dilettante up and died on Bone while they were in the bush. Intense heat prevented Bone from hauling the youth’s body back to town. Instead, Bone intoned a cowboy eulogy over the body and lowered it into a grave next to John Underhill’s remains.

That, too, should have been the end of it, but a few years later, the youth’s family learned of their son’s death in Florida. They wanted his body exhumed and returned to New Orleans for reinterment in the family plot–and sent money to an Arcadia undertaker for just that purpose.

Help HistoryNet by bookmarking to

Tags: Historical Figures, People, The Wild West, Wild West