Cattle Roundup and Shipping Days Exemplify Extraordinary Tradition

By Susan Etxebarria

BRIGHTON — This is the end of a long and successful year for the cowboys and cattle managers of the Seminole Tribe of Florida, Inc. Finally, the calves born last fall have gone to market and everyone involved can breathe a sigh of relief, and enjoy the rewards.

For five grueling weeks starting July 18, the annual cattle round up to ship the calves that were sold this past April took place at five different locations–Brighton, Big Cypress, St. Thomas Ranch, Parker Ranch and the Miccosukee leased lands.

It is akin to the cattle drive of yore when Seminole cattle owners and their cowboys camped for days and weeks at a time driving cattle across land to the markets. Only now, five or six herds a day are driven into shipping pens and loaded on to trucks with gooseneck horse trailers. Instead of sleeping under the stars it may be a bed in a cabin as the cowboys move from place to place during the round up.

This round up is the culmination of a year of hard work, when their long hours and dedication really show what Seminole cowboys are made of–that rare quality called “true grit.” The cowboys, or cow hunters, whichever name they prefer, are the unseen heroes of the cattle range, they are the fence fixers, the cow keepers, the men on horse who guard the animals day in and day out from disease and predators.

The cattle round up does not get the kind of hoopla and attention that other events get. But, there are literally hundreds of people involved and there is little doubt that ranching is one of the Tribe’s historic traditions and way of life. Almost all the Brighton and Big Cypress cattle owners participate in some way as well as their spouses, and children just as they have always done through the generations.

A round up requires a lot of people doing a lot of different jobs to get the calves safely shipped out of Seminole Country to places like Montana, Oklahoma, Texas, and Kansas. Extra crews are hired to help with the counts and weigh-ins. The women cattle owners, different ones every day, serve the lunches bringing massive amounts of home cooked casseroles, breads, and meat platters that make the Golden Corral look pathetic. The management staff is on their feet for long hours sweating it out at the shipping pens as they collect information about weights and control the sorting and trucking operations.

But it’s the cowboys who take the brunt of the toil as the work under the searing Florida sun. They are up at 5 a.m., horses saddled by 6 a.m., and they consider them selves lucky if they can finish each day’s work by 8 p.m.

This year there are approximately 2,600 head of cows loaded into 55 trucks with 24 of them coming from Brighton, eight from Big Cypress and 23 from the other three ranches. Besides the Board cattle there are more than 70 individually owned pastures – all the entities that comprise the Cattle Program. What it takes to get that many sold calves out of the pastures each day onto the trucks is amazingly more difficult than anyone realizes – except the cattlemen.

The cowboys bring their horses to a ranch before daylight and when the fog lifts they head out to find the cattle owner’s herd of cows and bring them in to the owner’s pens. Some calves split from the herd and cow dogs are used to rein them in but often a couple of the cowboys will have to become cow hunters looking for a lost calf. The job is one to two hours herding depending on the size of the pasture.

The cowboys are sometimes joined in the hunt by a cattle owner, some of them women who carry on the family tradition the same as men do.

At the pens they tie up their horses and get into the pens with all the cows–up to 100 or more in some cases. They find and separate the calves utilizing a complex gating system calling for a sharp eye and quick reflexes. The mama heifers are sent back to the pastures. Remaining are the restless and complaining calves who are loaded onto the trucks and driven a distance to the shipping pens where they are then unloaded.

As they race down a chute into the shipping pens they are counted as they file past. The cowboys have already arrived in pickups at the shipping pens where they will again start sorting and separating. Meanwhile, their horses have also been loaded on trucks and taken to the next pasture on the list to wait for the next cow hunt.

The sorting at the shipping pens begins with separating the heifers from the steers and then separating them by weight into lots of small, medium and large steers and small and medium heifers. The cows are sold in lots by average weights and must be loaded as such. A truck can hold up to 48,000 pounds of cattle on the hoof. That means 80 steers weighing 600 pounds can be loaded onto one truck.

Again the clever gating system designed to assist with the sorting and separating process is the means by which the cowboys control the flow. By now the cows are getting a little agitated. Only a cowboy can be in the pens during this stage. They know from years of experience, in many cases from their childhood, how to control the animals. It doesn’t look dangerous but put a greenhorn in the pens and it is a recipe for disaster.

The shipping pens are a busy place.

The cows are eventually pushed through several gates to finally cross through a weighing chute to the loading ramp. At this platform the pay weights are not only tabulated but the electronic ID (EID) registers the information on a reader. It is like scanning a bar code so the specific cow being shipped can always be identified anywhere along the food chain.

Office Manager and Executive Assistant for the Cattle Program Leoma Simmons is also working t the shipping pen platform day in and day out during the shipping operations. She is the software specialist who downloads the EID information and will be generating the reports at the Cattle and Land Operations.

You find the Director of Natural Resources, Don Robertson, in charge at the shipping pens. Nothing gets past the veteran cattleman who is legendary for being able to accurately quote the weight of a cow just by looking at it with his experienced eye.

Robertson says the calves were sold at record-breaking prices largely due to the Tribe’s new EID system. The EID is designed to trace back the cow’s origin in 48 hours in case of a disease like BSE, or Mad Cow Disease.

“One of the buyers was in Colorado and I believe they bought the cattle because of the EID and these cows will probably go to export,” says Don Robertson. By export, he means Japan whose ban on U.S. beef should be lifted in the next couple of months. However, a third case of mad cow discovered just last month in late-July causing uncertainty in the foreign trade market.

Weighing the cows with weight machines rests largely on the shoulders of Assistant Director Alex Johns. Alex also supervises the cowboys who are seasoned professional at their jobs. They have everything under control.

There are about 25–30 people working in the cow pens and according to Johns “a lot’s going on in there. A layman wouldn’t realize it to look at it but that’s why the cowboys are there. To avert a problem. They know how a cow thinks.” He says that most people at Big Cypress and Brighton have been around cattle all their lives and they instinctively know how to handle the cattle. “For the Tribe the cattle is our passion, it’s in our blood,” he says.

The cows need to be gently prodded back on to the truck and there are several day laborers to help out.

It’s hard work in the heat. Emma Urbina is working as a counter at the ramps. Observing the loads is Tommy Mann, a representative of Superior Livestock Video Auction. His job is to make sure that the cattle sold at the auction gets delivered to the buyers.

Often a cattle owner watches as his cows are loaded on the trucks. It is a day to be proud of the Tribe’s excellent reputation in the cattle industry.

The accomplishments of the Seminole Tribe’s cattle program are being noticed this year and there are numerous paparazzi hanging out. The Sun-Sentinel newspaper sends a reporter, photographer and videographer to do a big spread in the Sunday section; there’s a freelance photographer taking photos for a cattle book; Seminole Broadcasting and The Seminole Tribune are also at work. To the city slicker this may look like a movie set–but it is true life.

The round up is not all work. There’s a lot of story swapping going on during the breaks. One cattleman, Howard Micco, relates how he had a stubborn calf that wouldn’t come out of the woods and he had to spend a day with the help of a friend getting it out of the dense hammock.

Geneva Shore and her sisters, Molly Roberts and Nancy Shore, recall their childhood days when their family would live at the Marsh Pens at the Brighton Reservation for weeks at a time while their father, Frank Shore, round up cattle from several ranches and drove them to the markets. No electricity, no TV, no trucks to haul away the calves.

On July 27, Big Cypress Board Representative Paul Bowers hosts a barbecue for the cowboys and crews working on the round up. It was held at the Big Cypress KOA community center and swimming pool. He says he wanted to thank them for all their hard work.